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“Yes. Details. If it’s easier, I can tell you what I learned when I was researching you.”
“Please don’t. I’d rather not know. Bottom line, without the family drama. My father left the winery to my mother on the condition I inherit on her death. She had no will, and she was apparently six months behind on a note my father took from the bank five years ago. Actually, she was behind on most things. Taxes, vendors, the bank.”
“Has the winery been losing money?”
“No. That’s just it. She didn’t run it. I did. All of it for most of the two years since my father died, and I had a tight rein on our profit and loss. We were—are—making a net of forty grand a month before her income.”
“But she wasn’t paying the bank note and obviously select vendors.”
“Several months before she died, I started getting collection calls. I confronted her, and she said she had it handled.”
“Define handled.”
“That’s exactly what I said, but she shut me out.”
“And you have no idea where the money is?”
“I’m locked out of her accounts because the bank keeps rejecting every executor we try to name with a conflict-of-interest claim.”
I tap the table, my mind working. If her mother needed money, blackmailing my father makes sense. But she clearly didn’t use it to pay the bills. Was Faith’s mother being blackmailed along with my father? Was her mother planning to leave the winery behind and run off with someone?
“It’s bad, right?” Faith asks when I don’t immediately respond.
“We’ll back the bank off,” I say. “And we’ll get you your executor and buy you some time. I can’t promise how long, but some time. Have you paid the taxes?”
“Yes. I used what I had left of my inheritance from my father. And I’m paying the vendors for current services and then some, which worked for some. Not all. I would have taken a loan on this house, but the note is too small, and I can’t sell it with a profit.”
“How much are you behind with the bank?”
“Sixty thousand dollars, and there’s another hundred thousand owed to vendors.”
And yet, my father wrote her mother a million dollars in checks. It just doesn’t add up. I glance at the loan papers she’s given me. “This note isn’t even close to what your property would be worth. Have you had the winery valued? Once I clear this probate issue, have you considered—”
“No,” she says, reading my mind. “I can’t sell it. I promised my father it would stay in the family, and I’d never sell it before the bank foreclosed anyway.”
“So your mother knew that if you didn’t take care of the place, you’d inherit a disaster.”
“Yes. She knew. But it wasn’t about the inheritance to me. This was never my life or my dream, but she knew that my father’s wishes were—and are—sacred to me.”
And so Faith gave up her art and her life—which to some would be a motive to kill her mother—grabbed the reins, and tried to end the hellish cycle of the past two years, but that just doesn’t ring true to me. The ways I could fit my father into the equation are many. However, that he found out about the murder doesn’t support a reason for the checks he wrote to her mother.
“My mother has to have money that I can get to and handle this,” she continues. “And even if she doesn’t, which is completely illogical, I have a great manager at the winery. We’re a great team. We’re making money. As long as I stay involved, I have the tools to keep succeeding. I just need time to catch things up.”
“You’re sure you’re making forty thousand a month?”
“Yes. Very. Forty thousand after expenses, which means with my mother’s love of men, Botox, and clothes, she had to have savings on top of the money she hadn’t spent on bills.”
“Men,” I repeat. “Was there some young thing she was spending the money on?”
“There was always some young thing, Nick, even when my father was alive. At least your father’s affairs were not when he was married to your mother.”
“The only difference between you and me, sweetheart, is that my mother left my father, and I wasn’t blind or young enough to not understand why.”
“At least she has self-respect. My father knew about my mother’s affairs, but he wouldn’t leave. He made excuses for her. That’s why I went to L.A. for school and stayed there. I loved my father, but it hurt me to watch him get hurt over and over again. And the behavior didn’t fit what I knew of him.”
In other words, her mother could have partnered with any number of men to blackmail my father, with an end game that might or might not have included a bigger plan. For instance, running off after draining the winery’s funds and leaving Faith to suffer, which ironically is what she did anyway.
“Nick,” Faith pleads. “You keep going silent, and it’s making me a little crazy. What are you thinking?”
