Lies Agreed Upon (2 page)

2 legacy

One afternoon in May of 2010,
a weighty envelope was delivered to an apartment building with a Beverly Hills postal address. It requested the attention of Ms. Therese Parnell, called Tess by her friends.

Despite the upscale address, Tess’s apartment
complex was a tired, three-story stucco box pocked by shallow balconies with wobbly iron railings. It had slipped into the higher-status zip code by a mere block and was really a member of the Los Angeles real estate proletariat. The building squatted in a scrub of one-story, sun-weathered bungalows and ranch homes, but its apartments were just close enough to the edge of fame and fortune to attract young strivers seeking proximity to a Southern California glamour they could not afford.

An hour after the envelope’s arrival, Tess drove her 10-year-old Camry into the cavern of the
apartment building’s below-street parking. She hurried from the shadowy garage to the neon-lit lobby with its wall of metallic mailboxes. Her goal was to snatch up her mail and escape before the building manager, Mrs. Obermeyer, could trap her in a conversation about her rental future.

The manager was a squat 60-something woman with a preference for loose s
weatshirts and rubber flip-flops. She characterized herself as a woman of motherly concern for the well-being of her tenants. This was another way of saying that she was nosy. From constant surveillance, Mrs. Obermeyer had deduced that Tess had recently lost her job, and she was beginning to pester about monthly payments and lease renewal.

Tess hurriedly emptied the scant contents of her mailbox. She was startled when a cream letter envelope slithered out and dropped atop the usual grocery flyers and junk-mail postcards. According to the gold-embossed return address, this missive came from a law firm in New Orleans, a place she had never visited and where she knew absolutely no one.

Tess inspected the envelope curiously as she pushed the single elevator’s button repeatedly in a futile attempt to summon the conveyance.

Suddenly
Mrs. Obermeyer’s gun-metal curls poked around the heavy door of the laundry room near the garage. Tess abruptly abandoned the elevator and darted up the stairs. She emerged on the balcony circling the interior courtyard and hurried toward her apartment. But the persistent manager scuttled into the court and squinted up at her, pursed mouth opening to call out. Tess gave an insouciant wave, quickly jammed her key into her door lock and dodged inside.

She
collapsed with a sigh on her sagging old couch and stared anxiously at the mystery letter for several heartbeats. The odds that this was good news seemed pretty slight. With another sigh, she resolutely tore open the envelope and pulled out a sheet of cream-colored stationery with gold embossed letterhead.

Her jaw dropped in astonishment as she read the first paragraph. The law firm of Gr
aham, Odom & Dreux, LLC, was pleased to contact her regarding 10 acres of Louisiana land that she had recently inherited. The firm represented a client who could offer $500,000 for immediate purchase, a price based on “current market valuations.” Partner Philip A. Dreux was willing to come to Los Angeles to discuss the purchase “at her convenience.”

Weeks later, Tess would have a different perspective on this financial windfall, but in the shocked moments of her first reading, she was certain that she had received manna from
Heaven.

At the start of the year, she had lost her first and only job as a librarian at a San Ferna
ndo Valley high school. She knew she was just one of many victims of a national economic downturn that continued to generate foreclosures, financial scandals and political upsets, but the crowded company of misery was no comfort as her savings and unemployment checks eroded. She had no “significant other” or family to bail her out. Her only relative, her widowed mother, had died six months ago.

Now she was rescued. She was sole heir to “land zoned for
industrial or agricultural use” near New Orleans. She was giddy with relief but incredulous. She’d never heard of any valuable property in Louisiana. She had never been to New Orleans and had no desire to go to a place noted for Mardi Gras-beaded drunks and a liking for okra. Between Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, it seemed a miserably unlucky place, and she had enough bad luck already.

S
he debated calling the law firm but found herself strangely loath to let go of her euphoria. As soon as she accepted her prize, there would be decisions, disappointments and paperwork. She would call tomorrow, she decided, and stretched out on the sofa with a book of crossword puzzles instead.

Lately she’d become addicted to crossword puzzles. They were better than novels or TV for distracting her mind from fruitless fretting over her jobless situation. As she rapidly filled in answers, Tess felt truly relaxed, rather than just idle, for the first time in weeks. Then her mot
her’s voice began to buzz in her ear. It was faint at first but soon became annoyingly insistent.

Her mother was six months in her grave, but she had decided to haunt Tess. She was a restless spirit who flitted in and out of her thoughts with unwanted commentary, by turns ster
nly critical and sarcastically amused. Perhaps her mother’s manner of death was to blame. She had suddenly and inexplicably committed suicide. Tess longed desperately to put the pain of that loss behind her, but her mother’s voice refused to rest.

“
Why are you wasting time like this? It’s time for action, for change. Don’t zone out with a crossword puzzle now. Get up and get going!”

Tess sighed. Escaping her mother had always proved futile. In her early childhood, Tess had tried, and failed, to please; by her teens, she simply focused on maternal avoidance. She had dis
covered that libraries and bookstores were safe havens. Her mother had a deep aversion to those places. “Something about the smell of old paper and binding glue nauseates me,” she used to say. “And there’s that damn funeral hush-hush. And then the ocean of useless words. I can barely put up with the follies of living people much less fictional ones. And why wade through pages of information for the one fact you need? Thank God for Internet searches.”

Tess’s friends often assumed that her career as a librarian was just
continued evasion from parental oversight, but she insisted that she really did enjoy her work. It may have begun as a defense, but it had become a calling, she told them. In the end, she had not escaped anyway. Some virus from constant exposure to her mother’s corrosive energy had apparently infected her own synapses, and her mother’s internalized voice was now more inexorable than the living woman.

“Well, are you going to keep lying there?”

“I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Can’t I relax for a bit?” Tess retorted.

“Unless you’re writing the next great American novel, you’re wasting time. Call that law office.”

Tess threw down her pen in defeat. She hauled herself up and dialed the offices of Gr
aham, Odom & Dreux. She did not reach the signatory of the letter, Philip Dreux, but she did speak with his coolly competent administrative assistant, who introduced herself by the odd name of “Miss Jinx.” Tess was able to arrange a meeting with Dreux at a high-rise hotel near the Los Angeles airport for later in the week, but when she began to ask for details about her surprise “inheritance,” Miss Jinx firmly deflected her inquiries.

“I’m not conversant with this matter. Mr. Dreux is not available
now but will be able to answer your questions when you meet,” the assistant responded and politely closed the conversation.

It was a frustratingly uninformative first step, but at least her maternal gadfly retreated in satisfied silence now that Tess had taken some action.

Tess returned to her puzzles, but her unquestioning acceptance of good luck had been spoiled by her mother’s interference. It reminded her that she was dealing with an inheritance, a consequence of her mother’s death.

Although they’d never discussed it, Tess realized that her mother had known about this property. The piece of Louisiana real estate had been a footnote in her mother’s complex affairs when Tess went over all the financial paperwork after her death. From the minuscule income generated, Tess just assumed it was some misguided investment. There was also a small annual sum, already paid out, to a New Orleans-based firm
called SB Land Management, which seemed related to her mother’s absentee management of the property.

It was a loose end that Tess had meant to clear up, but there was no urgency. Besides, everything associated with her mother’s sudden death caused Tess such pain that she put off all but essential actions.

Now Tess had to wonder if the same purchase offer had been made to her mother. She had not seen an offer letter in her mother’s carefully organized files. But she now recalled that her mother’s housekeeper-confidante, Gina Gomez, had said something about a property “offer” around the time of her mother’s death.

Tess forced herself to recall her conversations with Gina, which were ones she preferred to lock away with everything else that evoked her mother’s suicide. It was Gina who had found her mother’s body and called the police. At the morgue, Tess had dodged the woman’s attempt to console her by claiming herself emotionally overwhelmed. In all honesty, she had feared that the tears of a domestic helper, who was closer to her mother on a daily basis than Tess herself, would make her explode with an angry bitterness inappropriate to a grief-stricken daughter. And she did
not want to hear gory details.

She now remembered that Gina had been babbling something about “a property offer” and a visitor.

“I think a man visits your mama on the day she died. Should I tell the police, Mees Parnell?” Gina had asked anxiously in the grim morgue hallway. “She takes folders from her desk, and she asks me to put snacks and wine in the family room. I ask if I should stay, but she says, ‘No, I’ll deal with him in private.’ And she says something I remember, you know, because of the way she died. She says, ‘I’m so tired of this mess. I’m going to end it, Gina.’ Only when I find her like that, with so much blood, I forget. Do I tell the police now?”

Since the police had found no evidence of foul play, Tess, only half listening, had a
ssumed the story indicated her depressed mother was ending a financial or romantic relationship as she prepared her exit. She told Gina brusquely to forget about it. Now she wondered. A business negotiation made a lot more sense than a romantic tryst when it came to her mother.

What if the “property offer” had to do with this property? Was the mystery visitor the same Mr. Dreux? Yet what connection did a real estate deal have with her
secretive mother’s despair? The two events did not seem related, and Tess shoved the whole upsetting scenario back into a far corner of her mind.

Still, she felt a lingering anxiety when she arrived for her meeting with Philip A. Dreux. It was the end of the work day when Tess entered the airport hotel, and the lobby was at the tipping point between business bustle and evening cocktails.
She had been told she could identify Dreux as “a short elderly gentleman who will be waiting near the reception desk,” so she hesitantly approached a figure matching that description.

He was indeed a shrunken old man (ancient seemed a more apt adjective). He was dressed in a dapper gray suit and expensive burgundy silk tie, but this sartorial elegance was i
ncongruously topped by his shriveled, hairless, liver-spotted head.

As soon as he heard her questioning “Mr. Dreux?” the slight figure in the crisp suit smiled and extended a sleeve from which drooped small boneless fingers with manicured nails. He shook her hand very gently and gestured with a tremulous but courtly wave toward an adj
acent grouping of oversized armchairs. He spoke in a slow, soft voice, with an accent that seemed only vaguely Southern to Tess since it was without the drawl or twang she expected.

“Miss Therese Parnell, I presume. So nice to meet you. I apologize for asking you to take time at the end of your busy day, but I think you’ll find that it will be very profitable,” he murmured and trained on her
his intense blue eyes imbedded in papery folds. She judged him to be close to 80 years old and marveled that he still undertook travels for his firm.

“He’s practically mummified. Is this mission so important, or does he have a personal reason to rattle his old bones?”

“I must say I was very surprised to get this offer,” Tess said, firmly suppressing her mother’s sniping. She smiled and seated herself as indicated while the elderly man hovered in old-fashioned courtesy. Once she was safely ensconced, he slowly sank down and was swallowed by a neighboring armchair.

“Ah, yes, the proverbial thunderbolt from the blue, I suppose,” murmured Dreux,
and Tess smiled back politely. After she remained attentively quiet for a few seconds, he cleared his throat and asked, “You had no knowledge of this Louisiana inheritance?”

“Oh, I just didn’t know it was so valuable,” she answered with a falsely knowledgeable smile. “Mom never discussed its value, and I didn’t find much in her financial papers when she passed away last year. Is this purchase offer new?” she asked, trying to catch his eye.