thousand dollars. How deep in debt are you, Eli?”
He ran his thumb along the edge of our mother’s marker. “It’s not too good. I’m on the verge of bankruptcy.”
He spoke lightly, but I saw his throat constrict. It was probably worse than “on the verge,” but he wasn’t saying. I knew him too well. Still, he’d caught me off guard.
“Bankruptcy? How could you let it get this far?” I stared at him. “You’ll lose everything.”
He cleared his throat again. “Right now I just need enough to cover my August mortgage payment since today’s the first and it’s due soon. That’s all. I don’t want to lose my home, Luce. Brandi loves that house.”
Of course she did. He’d designed it for her, giving her everything she wanted. Now they lived in a nouveau riche palazzo that combined the most garish extravagances of Versailles with the Disney Castle, including a multitiered fountain in the front yard that looked like he’d borrowed it from Trafalgar Square in London.
“How much is your mortgage?”
“We refinanced a few times to consolidate our debt.” He paused and said, without looking at me, “It’s just under eight thousand.”
He needed that just for his mortgage? What about everything else? Groceries, car loan—all of it? Could he cover those expenses, or were they down to eating the labels off cans?
“Why don’t you sell something?” I said. “That antique Sarouk carpet you just bought for the great room. The gold faucets in the master bath. Anything.”
He looked pained. “I haven’t got that kind of time. It’s not the first payment I’ve missed, so they’re already knocking on the door.” He laughed, but it was the self-mocking laugh of someone pushed to the edge. “We’re barely answering the phone because most of the calls are collection agencies. Besides, Brandi would just die if I started dismantling her dream house. You know I can’t do that to her.”
“Brandi needs to go to credit card rehab, and I’m not joking. Cut up her cards, take away the checkbook, and give her a cookie jar with money in it. Tell her that’s it. You can’t go on like this. She’s as bad as Leland was, blowing money on junk she doesn’t even care about the next day,” I said. “That’s why you’re in so much debt.”
“You are being unfair.”
“I am being honest.”
“Aw, jeez. Give me a break. I come to you for help and what do I get? A lecture.” He started pacing in front of our parents’ graves. “You’re the one talking about family and being on the same side. You could help me out if you wanted to. I’m not asking for a handout. I’ll pay you back once I get on my feet. I just need some time.”
Sure. Like he’d paid his other creditors back. “You can’t repay me and you know it.”
He stopped pacing and looked at me with an odd glint in his eyes. “How can you turn your back on me when you’ve got a five-figure sum in the vineyard checking account right now?”
“How do you know that?” The hair prickled on the back of my neck.
“Aha! Knew I was right. You do, don’t you?”
I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book. “It’s not my personal piggy bank, Eli. It’s a business account and that money is there to pay bills.”
He spread his hands apart, palms up. “I’m tapped out, babe. Are you going to help me or are you going to throw your brother to the wolves?”
It was a low blow, and he knew it. I wasn’t responsible for his problems. He was.
“Giving you more money without doing something about the way Brandi spends it isn’t going to help anyone. You can’t pay me back the eight grand any more than you can pay your creditors back. Take the four hundred as a gift, okay? You don’t need to repay that.”
He looked like I’d slapped him. “I don’t need your charity. Forget it. I’ll go elsewhere.”
“Eli, wait!”
But he was already moving toward the gate, raising his hand in a backward salute, dismissing me.
“I gotta go. I’m late for something.”
He slammed the gate, as I expected he would. I sank down by my mother’s gravestone.
“Now what?” I asked her. “How did he do that? Why am I the one feeling bad?”
Giving my brother money would be like giving alcohol to a drunk. He didn’t have his spending under control— and his wife was dragging him down to the depths I remembered from when Leland was alive. When we lurched from feast to famine, either flush with cash or nearly flat broke. Eli’s story was just a downward spiral.
I paused at Leland’s marker as I left the cemetery. Years ago my mother hid a fabulous diamond necklace given to one of her relatives by Marie Antoinette because she knew if my father got his hands on it he’d sell it, just like he’d sold all her other jewelry to fund his business ventures. I’d found the necklace two years ago, hidden in a barrel in the wine cellar. Eli got a third of the money from its sale and had blown his share. I used mine to pay for our expansion and putting in new vines.
Right after Leland died, a French live-in boyfriend had sweet-talked my bank in the south of France into letting him withdraw all my funds, claiming I needed the money because I was moving back to the States. As soon as I got home, I planned to call Blue Ridge Federal and check on my account.
Not that I thought Eli could pull off the same scam, but I knew he was desperate enough to try anything. Including cleaning me out.
Chapter 6
I called Seth Hannah, the president of Blue Ridge Federal and an old family friend, the moment I walked through the front door. Like Leland, Seth was one of the Romeos and he used to play poker and hunt with my father. I’d long suspected Seth had a crush on my mother, as did so many men who were captivated by her beauty and indefinable French sense of style and allure.
“What can I do for you, darlin’?” he asked.
“Just checking my balance. I wasn’t sure if something cleared or not.” Or got cleared out.
I heard some clicks of a computer keyboard and he quoted a figure that matched the one I had.
“Happy to oblige, but you can do all this online, you know.”
“I know, but I wanted to ask you about something and I can’t get that from a computer.” I wondered if he heard the relief in my voice that we still had funds to talk about.
“What’s on your mind?”
“I just want to make sure that no one besides me has access to that account,” I said.
“Well, that’s how it’s set up, Lucie. Why’re you asking about this?”
I hesitated and Seth waited.
After a moment he said, “This wouldn’t be about your brother, would it?”
“Please don’t say anything to anyone, Seth. He came to me for a loan just now and I turned him down. He knows I’ve got a lot of cash in that account.”
There was a long pause. “It’s no secret your brother’s in a pretty deep financial hole, honey. You thinking he might try to cash a check of yours or something?”
“When we were growing up and Eli got a bad report card or a note about detention, he used to forge my parents’ signatures. He could copy either one of them and you couldn’t tell they weren’t genuine.”
“I see.” Seth cleared his throat. “Counterfeiting a check’s a serious crime, you know.”
I was sitting in the foyer in one of my mother’s toile-covered Queen Anne chairs staring at Leland’s bust of Thomas Jefferson. I leaned back and pinched the bridge of my nose. The house was even warmer than it had been this morning. Although the windows were open, I felt like I was suffocating.
“I know.”
“I will tell you this. We get our share of forged checks and I can’t tell you how many times the forger was a relative or someone who had access to the individual’s financial information,” he said. “If you don’t trust Eli, you’d do well to put things under lock and key.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust him—”
“Honey, you don’t have to beat around the bush with me. I know Eli’s a good man.” Seth made a sound that
