Native Affairs (61 page)

First Canadian Printing 1995

First German Printing 1995

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author.

Chapter 1

As soon as Ann stepped off the plane, she knew she was in Florida.

She had not been home for eleven years, but the combination of humid air, salt smell and intense, direct sunlight was still as familiar to her as her own hands. She did not need to see the palm trees or sapodillas, the hibiscus or jacaranda, to know that the Keys were once again exerting their spell, even though the last time she left she fully expected never to be back again.

She stopped off in a restroom at the airport before picking up her rental car, and the mirror showed her a pretty but tired woman with striking features and circles under her wide green eyes. She brushed out her long blonde hair, delicately dabbed powder on her nose and chin, and replenished her lipstick. No wonder she looked exhausted. She had been on the phone with her half brother’s lawyers until the wee hours for several days—since she’d been in Europe she’d had to accommodate the time difference—and once she had returned to New York, she’d booked a flight to Florida immediately.

The problem could not wait.

Her half brother was bankrupt and had run the family business into the ground. Ann’s family, the Talbots, had once been among the richest and most influential on Lime Island. Now the Talbot company, a computer software supplier called ScriptSoft, was on the ropes, filing for Chapter Eleven. Her half brother Tim owed money to casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, and Monte Carlo. He could no longer borrow from company funds to pay his debts, since there was nothing left. In desperation, the filing attorney had tracked Ann down in Italy, where she was doing research for a new book, to tell her what was happening.

And now she was in Florida to deal with the crisis.

Ann had wanted nothing to do with the family business. She had not spoken to her father since she’d left, and so when he’d died he had transferred the company to Tim. But Ann still held a large portion of the stock, even though it was now it was almost worthless, and as Tim’s sole sibling she had been consulted on the resolution of the problem.

Ann’s half brother had just been arrested in Miami on federal charges of stock manipulation. He was being prosecuted for misrepresenting the financial status of ScriptSoft by issuing falsified quarterly reports in previous years. As a result of these reports the company stock went up temporarily, allowing Tim to cash in his personal shares at a large profit. But when the company’s true status was later revealed, the reconciliation by the accounting team brought in by the board of directors drove the company into bankruptcy.

Ann knew that Tim had lost the money gambling; he had a long standing habit for which he had gone through rehabilitation several times to no avail. Now, apparently, there wasn’t even enough money left to pay his bail.

Ann put her comb back into her purse and sighed. She loved Tim for their shared childhood, for the memories she had of the shy, lonely little boy who would visit Florida from his mother’s home in New England for the summers. But since his college days she’d known he’d had a gambling habit. She had closed her eyes to his problem, never questioned him about the company or his handling of it, all to obliterate from her mind the painful connection with her father. Now both her parents were dead, Tim was in serious trouble, and she could not ignore the situation any longer.

Ann zipped her purse closed and went out into the busy corridor to claim her car.

* * * *

The breeze coming in through the car window was heavy with salt, sticky against her skin, but Ann left the window open, enjoying the change from November in New York. There the post-Thanksgiving shoppers had thronged the blustery streets and the roads were clogged, as usual, with noisy traffic. Here the streets were empty except for a few pedestrians, senior citizens walking dogs or younger people jogging lazily past the bursting shrubbery. The change in pace was jarring, especially since Ann had not experienced it for so long. But it brought back memories of still, lazy days and breathless starry nights, the endless summers on Lime Island when she was a girl.

But Ann had promised herself she wouldn’t think about that. She turned purposefully down a side street, away from the business district, heading toward the water.

She had some time before her business appointment and she wanted to see her old house again. It had been sold five years earlier when her mother had died, and at the time she had let Tim handle everything and never questioned what he’d done with the money. She hadn’t cared. Now she assumed that the profit from the house had gone into his gambling. She probably should have paid more attention to his dealings, but her grief had been such that she’d wanted nothing to do with the house, the company, or anything else that had issued from her father’s life. Perhaps she had been foolish because she’d always known that Tim was weak, but her emotional survival had dictated that she cut herself off from everything in the past and start fresh. After college she had carved out a career writing historical fiction. She had been content to support herself by living in the fictional past, until the summons from Tim’s lawyer had brought her rudely back to the present.

Ann glided to a stop at the curb and stared up at the house, a white stucco Colonial with dark blue shutters set back from a wide expanse of green lawn, no mean feat to maintain through the blistering heat of a south Florida summer. Her father had installed automatic sprinklers to keep his property a verdant emerald, and one of her most vivid memories was of being awakened in the simmering summer dawns by the hiss and rush of the sprinklers outside her window. Now they were silent. She studied the expertly cultivated lush foliage, the neat brick path leading to the front door, the clapboard boathouse to the left of the main dwelling, the blue waters of the canal running behind the rear patio and leading to the intracoastal waterway. A Miami millionaire owned the Talbot place now and used it only occasionally for a getaway.

Except for the ancient gardener snipping desultorily at a kudzu vine growing along the edge of the crushed stone driveway, it looked like nobody was home.

Ann put her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. She had met Heath in that boathouse, and that meeting had changed her life forever.

She gave the car gas and drove away, recalling how she had lived in that mansion with her father, Henry Talbot, and his second wife, her mother.
 

Ann had been the daughter of privilege, sent to the best private schools, coming home to the Keys to spend the summers with her half brother Tim, the child of her father’s brief first marriage. She had never given a thought to the servants, the nannies, the summer home in Maine, the condo in the Bahamas, until she had turned her back on it all when she was seventeen. Her life since then had been very different, but she hadn’t missed any of the niceties associated with her father’s success just as she hadn’t missed the man himself. When he’d died, she had attended his funeral in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, but had left without speaking to anybody. When her mother had died a few years later, Ann had brought the body north to bury her in New Jersey with the rest of her family. And except for occasional phone calls and visits from Tim, she had buried the past along with her mother.

If Tim had managed ScriptSoft profitably, she would never have come back home again.

Ann turned a corner and headed back to the business district, crossing the railroad tracks that bisected the island. To the south of them lay Hispaniola, the Cuban-Indian shanty town where Heath had lived when she’d first met him.

She had no idea where he lived now.

Downtown Port Lisbon had changed; there were new high-rises along the main street and a traffic light at the corner by Burdine’s department store. Ann parked in the lot behind the refurbished Acadian-style building that housed the law firm handling Tim’s bankruptcy. She glanced in the rearview mirror to tidy her hair, got out of the car and straightened the tailored jacket of the lightweight wool suit she was wearing.

She felt like she was about to face a firing squad. As she walked toward the entrance, she concentrated on the lunch she was to have with her old friend Amy later that day and forced herself through the lobby and into the elevator that led up to the lawyer’s office.

Harold Caldwell’s secretary ushered Ann right inside as soon as she announced her name. From Caldwell’s grave expression she knew that the situation had not improved since she’d last spoken to him.

“Mr. Caldwell,” Ann said, extending her hand.

“Miss Talbot. Have a seat.”

Ann sat in the leather chair in his comfortable office, glancing out the picture window at the bay below and around the room at the tasteful paintings, standing plants, inlaid oak desk and Oriental rug. Caldwell shuffled a stack of papers and cleared his throat. Ann met the eyes of the lawyer, a well groomed, graying man in his fifties wearing the traditional pin-striped suit and conservative tie.

“You know the purpose of this meeting, Miss Talbot,” he finally said. “I’ve already told you most of what you need to hear over the phone, but there are several documents that you must sign, and also the matter of your brother’s confinement. Where shall we begin?”

“I’d like to get my brother out of jail.”

“Do you have fifty thousand dollars?” Caldwell asked, raising his brows inquiringly.

“No, but I thought bail could be arranged through a bondsman. Isn’t that the usual practice?”

Caldwell frowned. “It’s been difficult to find a bondsman to put up the money. Your brother is regarded as a flight risk.”

“What?” Ann said indignantly. “That’s preposterous.”

Caldwell stared at her. “Apparently you aren’t aware that when Tim was arrested several months ago for writing bad checks to a casino, he fled the jurisdiction.”

Ann closed her eyes.

“You haven’t been in close touch with your brother, have you?” Caldwell asked gently.

“No. Not lately. He avoids talking to me when he’s having... difficulties.”

“Well, he’s having very severe difficulties now. Unless you can come up with the cash to foot his bail, he will probably remain where he is.”

“I live in an apartment in New York, Mr. Caldwell, so I don’t have equity in a home or other property to mortgage. I have a few thousand in savings and that’s it.”

“Your writing career is not lucrative?”

“I’ve just begun it, Mr. Caldwell. I was a researcher for a publishing house before I started writing. Now I’m working on my third book and my first one just came out late last year. Royalties take a long time to arrive and the advances from the publisher are just enough to live on in the meantime.”

“Excuse me for being so personal, Miss Talbot, but your father was a very wealthy man. He left you nothing at all?”

“I wanted nothing, and he knew that. He left everything, the business and his real estate holdings, and all of his investments, to Tim.”

“And you didn’t even supervise your brother’s actions?”

Ann looked away from the lawyer’s probing stare. “Tim is a grown man and, for personal reasons, I wanted to be divorced from ScriptSoft and anything else associated with my father. I’m sorry if you can’t understand that.”

“But you must have known about your brother’s problem,” the lawyer insisted.

“I felt that it was his business,” Ann replied shortly. “What else do we need to discuss?”

Caldwell shrugged. “I told you most of it on the phone, as I said. ScriptSoft is insolvent, the people on the board of directors are suing your brother for mismanagement, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing to prosecute him for stock fraud.”

“Is there any good news?”

Caldwell sighed. “Not much. A fresh infusion of several million dollars would save the day, allowing the present management to pay the company’s debts, trim the staff, sell off the stagnant real estate and reorganize. Short of that, the bankruptcy court will take over to portion out the meager assets to the creditors, most of whom won’t get very much because little is left.”

“What about Tim?”

“If he can’t make bail, he will remain in jail until his trial and then he will probably be convicted and do ten to fifteen years.”

“What happens if he pleads guilty to a lesser charge? Won’t that help?”

“He’s still likely to do time. The courts are cracking down on these manipulators. I’m afraid the eighties are catching up with us. I’m sorry.”

Ann shook her head. “How could this have happened to ScriptSoft? Didn’t anybody else at the company know what Tim was doing?”

“He was very clever, Miss Talbot. He inflated the stock, sold it off high and progressively drained the company. He owned the majority of the stock and as the controlling interest he had a free hand. By the time the board figured out what he was up to, it was too late. I assume from what you’ve just said that you were never informed or consulted about his management policies.”