Page 55

“You can’t do that in here,” I told him. He hissed and raised his fingers like cat claws, the same thing he’d done the night before when I’d said my name. “That’s upsetting. Please don’t do that.”

“Kat? What do you think?” Oliver asked me. He was staring at Maël. “I would like you to come. You can also come over to my house right now, immediately.”

“Thank you. My mom and I need to talk first, but then I will.”

Now, he didn’t seem to want to leave, but my mom sure did. She made up a lot of excuses about why she couldn’t talk to me, like how the energy wasn’t right to answer any questions at the moment, but I finally got him to go and managed to pin her down.

It was bad news. All of it.

Chapter 11

“There’s the real estate. She owns several homes and also tracts of what appear to be vacant pieces of land. The locations are less than desirable…”

I thought of La Grieta and the crumbled commune there. “That’s true but it has to be worth something,” I said.

“Hm. The cars will go for minimal money due to their condition, and depreciation is always an issue. We’ll have the same problem with her private jet.”

“When did she get a plane?” I asked.

“Four years ago. That value will have held up better than the other vehicles but it obviously won’t go for the sticker price on a new one. Then, there’s her jewelry…”

I heard the sound of keyboard keys clicking and paper shuffling.

“She has an extensive collection but we’ll have to determine if it’s extant.”

“You mean, if she didn’t lose it,” I filled in.

“Hm. Some of these appraisals are several years old, most are more than a decade. They’ll have to be redone. Off-loading all these assets will take time and we’ll have to deal with the other issue.” The new attorney started talking about the debts and there were a lot. There was money owed on mortgages, on credit cards, on racehorses…

“Who was buying horses?” I asked, stunned. I hadn’t heard about those.

“Your mother, Journey Truman,” she answered. “I do have some documents for you to go over, regarding your own trust. You’re aware that it can’t be touched to satisfy her creditors.”

“That’s what you said.” I rubbed my temples, which had started aching again. It had been happening a lot since my mom and Maël had moved in.

They were here for the time being because of the spiritual blow she had said that they’d suffered, although it had taken a lot for me to tease out the details of what she’d meant by that. I’d had to ask, many, many questions before I got to the bottom line…and the bottom line was zero, because that was what left of my mother’s trust. She had spent it all. It was gone.

“I don’t understand what happened,” she had told me. Due to what she said was the bad energy of my apartment, she hadn’t been able to sit as we had talked, so she had kind of flitted around the room. I had seen her do that many times before when we’d faced tough decisions about shutting down businesses or leaving behind failing vehicles—it wasn’t my apartment’s energy causing her behavior. It was anxiety.

“I wasn’t really paying attention to what was left,” she’d explained. “And I had the credit cards to use!”

It was a problem with the way the trust had been set up, the new lawyer said. It should have been structured to distribute a predetermined amount to my mom, the money going out gradually instead of letting her have the whole enchilada. There could have been restrictions on what the funds were used for, too, so that she didn’t do things like buy a jet for herself. That was called a spendthrift trust, which made sense. My mother was exactly that.

The other problem was that the former trustee, the lawyer whom we had depended on, had quit on us. He had stopped paying attention to the assets held in the trust, so some of them had been stolen and misused, and he had stopped paying attention to the balance.

“He ignored the bottom line,” the new lawyer explained. I’d hired her after my mother and I had talked and I had wheedled out the information that she might have been broke. “He breached his fiduciary duties. Of course, the client is also responsible for her financial choices.”

Yes, of course she was. It would have been obvious to most people that, even though the trust had been large, it wasn’t a bottomless pit of money. You couldn’t run around the country for twenty-five years, buying anything you wanted and giving away large sums, and still expect to be rolling in cash.

That would have been obvious to most people, but not all. “I don’t understand it,” Mom had told me. “I don’t know what happened!”

I felt guilty about it, since I also should have told her to cut out the spending—I should have done it years ago, but it had been easier for me to ignore it and tell myself that this was just how she was and I couldn’t stop her. The guilt had made my next comment sound snappish. “Didn’t you ever look at the statements?” I’d asked her. “They’re autogenerated every month and they tell you exactly what’s happening with the money.” I always read mine diligently.

“What statements?”

It turned out that she’d made up an email address for the former lawyer, because she hated how she used to get so many messages from him. The statements had probably been sent to someone else, some stranger who got her financial information and was able to watch her balance drop steadily down to zero.

“The attorney didn’t only send me boring financial stuff,” my mom had explained to me. “He used to ask me out all the time and he would just beg for sex. I got tired of him and his porno emails.”