I was about to gulp down the rest of my tea and bid Louisa good night when she abruptly stood up. “I need to show you something,” she said.
She turned on her heel and disappeared out the door. I put down my cup and followed her into her study. As she pulled a thin file folder out of a drawer, I felt a prickle of nervousness when I saw what was written on the tab.
“I’ve labeled it ‘Louisa’s Death Folder,’” she said, like she anticipated I wouldn’t believe my eyes, which I nearly didn’t. She thrust it into my hand and gestured for me to open it. Inside was a document entitled “Louisa’s Last Wishes” that laid out exactly how she wanted to die: no being kept alive by a machine, no wake, private funeral, and absolutely no one looking at her dead body. To make sure it would all go as planned, she had prepaid for everything: casket, funeral home, plot, the administration of her will by a fancy Beverly Hills lawyer. The lawyer’s card and all the receipts were stapled to the folder, and a handwritten letter addressed to her children was paperclipped to the side.
“Louisa,” I said, that nervous prickle spreading across my skin, “why are you showing me this?”
“I should have shown it to you a long time ago,” she said with a dismissive snort, then snatched the folder back. “It will be right here,” she said, filing it between her automotive service records and copies of her cable bills. Later I would kick myself for not grasping what had spurred all this talk of wills and last wishes, but at the moment I was too in shock.
We returned to the dining room to clear the table together, and then I shooed her out of the kitchen to clean the dishes. As I soaped and rinsed her prissy, antique dinner plates, I tried to process what had just happened. Why did Louisa just show me her death folder? What was the sudden impetus to change her will? Was she serious about wanting to make me her heir? Or was she just testing me? I found it contemptible that Charlie and Winnie had turned their backs on their mother, but there was no way I could steal their inheritance out from under them. Just because they’d behaved badly didn’t mean I should, too.
I thought about what I would say if she tried to force the issue. If she didn’t want her kids to get everything, the most logical solution would be to carve up her fortune—leave some to Winnie and Charlie, some to me and my siblings. But I knew she wouldn’t go for that; the goal clearly was not to compromise—it was to punish. I didn’t know what Louisa’s kids had done to deserve such a harsh punishment, but I intuited—correctly, as it turns out—that not coming to visit was just the tip of the iceberg.
Louisa managed her own finances, but I looked in on them from time to time to make sure the accounts were secure and that her investments were still working for her. So I knew just how much money was at stake here—over $10 million. Of course Louisa was very much alive, so all this talk of wills and dying wishes was just screaming into the wind. No one was getting rich anytime soon. Or so I thought.
Louisa didn’t talk about her illness, so I didn’t know how serious it was. She didn’t seem to be in pain, but she was so frail now, and never ventured too far from home anymore. I knew she had a nurse who came to the house twice a week because I saw the canceled checks: $300 to Silvia Hernandez, RN. I was curious about what went on during those nursing visits, but they were none of my business, so I never asked.
I dried the last of the dishes, hung the worn linen dish towel on the oven door, then stepped into the parlor to thank my hostess. My heart broke a little when I saw she had fallen asleep on that crazy uncomfortable high-back sofa. She was ornery, but who wouldn’t be in her situation? She used to be a mogul, a jet-setter, on top of the world. And now she was a sick old woman who couldn’t even stay awake long enough to say goodbye to her dinner guest. Warning sign? Or just a long week? I would come to regret I didn’t bother to find out.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
JORDAN
I knew it was trouble when Ashley came back from her dog walk without the dog.
“Ashley! What happened? Where’s Brando?”
“Oh, Jordan, I messed up bad!”
She tumbled into a chair, and I crouched down across from her. “Take a breath and tell me what happened,” I said, even though I knew exactly what had happened. She’d let Brando off the leash to run ahead—because “he needs his fun, too”—and this time he just kept running.
“I only took him off the leash for a minute!”
I had cautioned her not to let her dog run all willy-nilly in the dead of night—or anytime for that matter. We’d already had too many close calls: a near miss with a pickup truck, a headlong bolt across the Boulevard at rush hour, a tête-à-tête with a pit bull twice his size. And those were just the ones I’d witnessed. But I resisted the urge to I-told-you-so.