Payback Read online

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Katie shoved the putative pillow into a giant plastic garbage bag, already half full of similar unidentified objects. The house should have been cleared out by the sellers, but pursuing them out of state to their retirement villa was more hassle than doing the cleanup themselves. “How much money have you set aside for hauling trash, Mom?”

  “Sorry? What was that?” Avery set the pail by the fireplace and pulled on rubber gloves.

  “I wondered if you’d budgeted enough money for hauling trash,” Kate repeated.

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure I have. I got several quotes, you know. It’s less expensive than you’d expect. Or less expensive than I expected, anyway.” Avery looked vaguely around the room, as if waiting for hard copy of the quotes to leap into her hand. “The men I contracted with are scheduled to come on Friday, and they’ve agreed to rip up the carpet, too.”

  “Good.” Kate reviewed her mental checklist. “The hardwood gets refinished next week, right?”

  “Hardwood?” Avery looked vague again. “Oh, yes, the floors. That’s right. They’ll take a day to sand everything down and then another day to apply the coating. They promised to be done by the middle of next week, so I decided to hold off on getting any more of my new furniture delivered until then. Thank goodness, everything I ordered seems to have arrived from the manufacturers.”

  “Sounds like you have a plan. You seem preoccupied today, Mom. What’s up?” Kate gingerly pulled out the sofa, afraid of what she might discover between the furniture and the wall. Dust bunnies frolicked in abundance, but there were no live critters, thank God.

  “I am a little distracted, I suppose. I’ve…had some surprising news.” The tension in her mother’s voice was palpable. Belatedly, Kate realized that Avery had been on edge the entire afternoon. She would have noticed earlier if they hadn’t mostly been working in separate rooms.

  “Surprising good news?” she asked, straightening. Searching her mother’s face, she shook her head. “No, it’s bad news, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure.” Avery’s laugh was harsh, an astonishing fact in and of itself. Kate was even more astonished when her mother covered her face with her grimy hands and burst into tears. “Oh, God, how can I possibly say I’m not sure? I loved him! I did. Once upon a time I loved him. So what’s the matter with me?”

  Loved who? Kate put her arm around her mother’s slender shoulders. “I could answer that better if you’d give me some clue as to what we’re talking about.”

  Avery wiped her tears with the backs of her hands, leaving a streak of dirt. Not only that, she didn’t immediately find a pure white tissue and remove the smudge. Kate wouldn’t have been shocked if the world had shuddered to an immediate halt at such a betrayal of the accepted order.

  “I saw Luke Savarini today,” Avery said.

  The name struck Kate like a blow. She stepped back, hoping her smile looked more natural than it felt. “Well, that would certainly be enough to reduce me to tears. I can’t imagine why he made you cry, though. He’s quite civilized in company.”

  Kate’s feeble attempt at humor flew right past her mother. Avery drew in a short, shaky breath. “Luke was in Washington, D.C., with his sister a couple of weeks ago. They were eating dinner in a restaurant there. Luke says he saw…your father…eating dinner there, too. Right in the restaurant. In D.C. Well, a suburb, actually. But basically in the D.C. area.”

  Kate knew she couldn’t have heard right. “Wait. I’m confused. Luke was in Washington, D.C., with one of his sisters and he claimed that he saw my father? He saw Ron Raven?”

  “So he says. He seems remarkably sure of his facts.”

  “Did he speak to my father?” Kate realized she was shaking. Despite that, her voice sounded oddly controlled.

  “No.”

  “Why not? Didn’t it occur to him that it might be helpful to find out what the hell my father was doing alive in Washington, D.C., when everyone thinks he’s dead in Miami?” She was still shaking and it was a lot easier to be sarcastic than to work out what she was actually feeling.

  “It seems that your father…that Ron ran away as soon as he realized that Luke had recognized him. Luke tried to catch up with him, but he couldn’t. Apparently, there was a woman with him.”

  Kate’s brow wrinkled. “With Luke?”

  “No, sorry. I’m not being entirely coherent, am I? Your father was with another woman. Quite a young woman. Luke thought she might be in her thirties. Early forties at most. But he definitely said that your father recognized him.”

  She was going to kill Luke, Kate decided. She was going to find some long, slow, agonizing way of causing his death and then she was going to stand over him and watch it happen. In fact, she wouldn’t just stand passively and watch. She’d dance a celebratory jig as the lifeblood oozed out of him. For what conceivable reason had the stupid man found it necessary to share his delusions about seeing Ron Raven? Her father was dead, murdered in a Miami hotel room along with his companion, a still-unidentified woman. Luke must know how badly Avery had suffered from the media frenzy provoked by reports of Ron’s bigamy, not to mention the sinister security video of the body bags being wheeled onto the yacht, presumably by the murderer himself. Why would Luke choose to open a wound that had been closed only with great courage and slow, painful effort on her mother’s part?

  “Obviously Luke was mistaken.” Kate managed by some miracle to keep the rage out of her voice. Luke had no idea how lucky he was not to be anywhere within striking range of her supersharp chef’s knives or he’d be singing soprano from now on. “Heavens, Mom, you’re not paying any attention to his nonsense, are you? He must have sniffed a few too many of his own cognac fumes.”

  “Is that what you think? That Luke was imagining things?”

  “Yes, that’s what I think! Of course it is.” Contemplating the alternative possibility that her father might be alive and deliberately hiding from his wives and children left Kate feeling sick to her stomach. She had assumed nothing much worse could happen than losing her father before she had a chance to confront him about the lifetime of lies and deception that he’d perpetrated. Apparently she’d been wrong. The possibility that he might be alive and in hiding was even more difficult than accepting his death. Anger lodged as a hot pain in her chest, making it difficult to breathe.

  Avery turned and recommenced scrubbing the shelves built at the side of the brick fireplace. She spoke to the wall. “The thing is…Well, in an odd sort of way, what Luke said didn’t come as a total surprise to me.”

  Kate stared at her mother’s back. “I don’t understand.”

  “After the initial shock of Ron’s disappearance wore off, I was never as sure as everyone else that he was dead. I know his…other wife in Wyoming never doubted that he’d been murdered. But I…wondered.”

  “What are you telling me, Mom?” Kate forced herself not to shout as she struggled to keep her anger with Luke separate from the surprise caused by her mother’s admission. “Why aren’t you sure Dad was…is dead? The police seemed pretty certain of what happened that night in Miami.”

  “Yes, I know, but the penthouse was mortgaged, you see.”

  “You’re going to have to spell that out more clearly, Mom. What has a mortgage on the penthouse got to do with Dad’s death?”

  “What happened to the money?” Avery asked. “That’s what I kept asking myself after the initial shock wore off. Where is it?”

  “Where is what money, Mom?” Kate was beginning to worry that her mother was losing it. Normally the most precise of women, right now Avery was making no sense at all.

  “The money Ron raised with the mortgage,” Avery explained. “We owned the penthouse free and clear, I’m sure of it. It’s true that I never paid close attention to Ron’s business deals—there were so many of them—but I was quite well-informed about our personal finances.” Her voice flattened. “Or, to be more accurate, I was well informed about those parts of our pe
rsonal finances that Ron felt safe to share with me.”

  Which left out a hell of a lot, Kate reflected grimly, given that her father had been supporting another entire family in Wyoming that neither she nor her mother had known anything about until Ron Raven was officially declared missing.

  “There could be a dozen reasons why Dad needed cash,” she pointed out. “Hundreds, in fact, given that he lied to both of us all the time. We haven’t the faintest clue what was going on with his finances, or any other part of his life, if you get right down to it.” After months of coming to terms with her father’s betrayal, Kate managed to state the sordid truth without being overwhelmed by bitterness.

  “That’s true,” her mother conceded. “But Ron never expressed any need to mortgage the penthouse in the twenty years since we bought it. Why, two months before he disappeared, did he suddenly decide to take out a three-million-dollar loan? We weren’t facing any unexpected expenses, and it’s inconsistent with the way he’d handled our personal finances for the entire time we were together.”

  “Because he didn’t consult you about the mortgage, you mean?”

  Avery nodded. “In retrospect, I understand he wasn’t really asking for my opinion when we discussed our personal finances, but he at least went through the motions. I had the illusion we were making decisions together, even if the reality was otherwise. But Ron never breathed a word about the mortgage on the penthouse. I only found out it existed after he’d disappeared. Why?”

  It seemed to Kate that her mother was placing too much emphasis on a relatively trivial part of the myriad deceptions Ron Raven had perpetrated on them both. The penthouse mortgage might be the only financial deception Avery had uncovered to this point. That didn’t mean it was the only deception Ron had engaged in, not by a long shot.

  “Perhaps Dad wanted to put extra capital into his business?” she suggested. “Have you talked to Uncle Paul about it? That must be the answer, Mom. Raven Enterprises needed an infusion of cash for some reason, and Dad raised the money by taking out a mortgage on the penthouse.”

  “I’ve talked to my brother about the mortgage several times and he insists there was no three-million-dollar infusion of cash into Raven Enterprises. Besides, he says the business was in great shape, although the legal difficulties since Ron’s disappearance have created problems for Paul going forward, which is why he hasn’t been able to give me any cash from the business while we’re waiting for the wills to be probated. The lawyers are controlling everything. However, according to Paul, at the time Ron disappeared there would have been no reason at all for your father to seek extra business capital.”

  “So how does Uncle Paul explain the mortgage on your home?”

  “Well, he doesn’t, of course. But you know my brother. He’s a Southern gentleman of the old school and he’s secretly convinced I’ll get brain fever and go into a decline if he discusses money and finance with me. Paul insists the penthouse was always mortgaged and Ron simply refinanced at a better rate. He claims the documents I found weren’t a new mortgage. They were refinancing papers that just happened to be signed a couple of months before your father disappeared.”

  “If Uncle Paul says there was no three-million-dollar payment into Raven Enterprises, then he must be right,” Kate said. “He was Dad’s business partner, after all. But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong about the mortgage on the penthouse. It just suggests Dad invested the three million elsewhere.”

  She needed to have a come-to-Jesus talk with her uncle, Kate reflected. Paul had been wise to protect his sister from unnecessary worries about finances in the immediate turmoil following Ron’s disappearance and the discovery of his bigamy. However, six months had passed and it wasn’t sensible for Paul to continue shielding her mother from every harsh reality. God knew, with all the details of their private lives that had been blazoned across the nation’s TV screens, it was almost comic for her uncle to adhere to the quaint, 1950s custom of protecting the womenfolk from a clear understanding of their own financial situation.

  “You’re right,” Avery said. “Ron must have invested the money elsewhere, because I’m sure there was no mortgage on the penthouse until very recently. But arguing with your uncle is so exhausting I just gave up.” She looked chagrined by the admission, as well as the implicit criticism of her elder brother, mild as it was. “I’d have to search through boxes and boxes of papers to confirm my belief, and there’s always seemed so many other, more useful ways to employ my time….”

  “You’re right. There were. There’s no reason to sound guilty, Mom. Dad’s financial affairs are one giant mess. Trying to pick apart one tiny thread of the muddle makes no sense. Between us and the family in Wyoming, we have what seems like a thousand lawyers and accountants already poking around in Dad’s finances. You’re smart to leave them to it and get on with your life.”

  “Maybe, except that once I’d talked with Luke this morning, it began to seem as if I might have been right to suspect the mortgage on the penthouse was significant.”

  “I’m not following, Mom. Why does it matter? Except that you’re potentially three million dollars worse off, of course. But even if the penthouse had been free of all mortgages, wouldn’t the proceeds from the sale have gone into probate, anyway?”

  “I expect so, since nobody can decide which of Ron’s wills is valid, if any. But if your father isn’t dead…if he’s alive…doesn’t it strike you that there might be a connection between the sudden three-million-dollar mortgage on our penthouse and his disappearance?”

  The meaning of Avery’s comment hit Kate with the force of a physical blow. “Are you suggesting…” She needed to swallow before she could finish her question. “Are you suggesting that Dad mortgaged the penthouse so that he would have money to finance his disappearance?”

  “Well, it certainly seems a possibility, wouldn’t you say? I’ve…wondered about that over the past few months.”

  “If he’s alive, I guess it’s a possibility.” Kate’s mouth felt dry and her stomach tightened in a sickly knot. “I just don’t see any reason to believe he’s alive.”

  “Luke saw him. Isn’t that a reason?”

  “Luke thinks he saw him,” Kate corrected.

  Avery’s scrubbing intensified as if she wanted to erase her own suspicions. She’d scrubbed so hard the shelves were beginning to show evidence of having once been white. “There’s another thing about the money. Do you remember that your father also took out a three-million-dollar loan with Adam’s bank, using Ellie’s ranch in Wyoming as collateral?”

  “Yes, I knew about that.” Kate nodded. “It was the need to find out what had happened to the missing money that brought Adam and Megan together in the first place, and then sent them chasing off to Mexico in pursuit of the missing millions. Adam and I have talked quite a bit about the way Dad double-crossed him, of course.”

  The pursuit of the money, and the complicated reasons behind its disappearance, had interested Kate less than the fact that her mother’s youngest brother had ended up marrying Megan Raven. Adam was her second favorite relative in the world after her mother and she’d wondered many times in the past few weeks how her father would react to the news that the daughter of his first wife had married the younger brother of his bigamous second wife. Kate saw a definite hint of ironic retribution tucked away in the fact of Adam and Megan’s marriage.

  Her mother turned around, her scrubbing brush dripping soapsuds. She spoke with careful lack of inflection. “Doesn’t it strike you as oddly symmetrical that both Ron’s so-called wives ended up three million dollars poorer than they might have expected? And in both cases because of loans that Ron took out using our homes as collateral?”

  Kate felt a tiny shiver run down her spine. “Mom, you’re seeing patterns that don’t exist.”

  “The pattern exists,” Avery said tartly, dumping her scrubbing brush into the pail of hot water with a decisive splash. “The only question for discussion is whether the patt
ern is a coincidence or deliberately planned.”

  Kate’s heart started to thump uncomfortably fast. “The loan on the ranch in Wyoming was taken out a couple of years before Dad disappeared, not a couple of months.”

  “I’m well aware of that. It makes you wonder how long your father was planning his disappearance, doesn’t it?”

  Her mother’s sarcasm was unprecedented. Kate pressed her hands against her stomach and drew in a long, deep breath. “Mom, let’s get back to the earlier question. The important one. Forget the mortgages on the penthouse and the Wyoming ranch for a moment. Are you telling me that you think Luke might be right? That Dad really was eating dinner in a Washington, D.C., restaurant, and Luke saw him?”

  Avery used a clean rag to mop up the soapy water pooled on the shelves. “All I can say is that Luke definitely believes he saw Ron. And Luke always struck me as a man with both feet planted firmly in the real world. You know him better than I do, of course. Does he strike you as a man given to fantasizing about dead people?”

  “No.” It was a measure of her turmoil that Kate didn’t even think something rude about Luke, much less say it out loud. “If Luke is right, shouldn’t somebody notify the police about what he saw?”

  “Luke tried calling the police in Miami and here in Chicago, too. That was before he contacted me. He said they had no interest in taking his report.”

  Kate felt a surge of relief. “Well, Mom, doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “Yes,” Avery said, the bite of uncharacteristic sarcasm still in her voice. “It tells me that police departments tend to be overworked and that since they have a suspect in Ron’s death who is a convicted felon, they have no interest whatsoever in spending a lot of time revising their theory of the case.”

  Kate hesitated for a moment, but the question needed to be asked. “Okay, given that the police aren’t likely to do much, if anything, do you want to reopen the case, Mom?”