The Mourning Mail (final release candidate #7)

Chapter 18

We idly chatted while Emma poured coffee, and I teased through the warm bakery goodies in a woven basket on the kitchen's center island. After a few moments, we returned to the living room with our hot caffeine and an éclair that looked too good for me to pass up. Darrell had already returned, scanning the e-mail on his phone.

"Honey, would you like a cup of coffee?" Emma asked.

"No, sweetheart, I'm good. We've set the grand opening of the new restaurant for the tenth. Remind me to ask you, Debra Ann, what your schedule is like—it would be great if you could join us," Darrell said as he turned to me.

"I think you last asked what led to Theresa leaving the country the first time?"

I nodded. "Yes, that would be great; perhaps help me understand the context."

"Knowing now what I didn't know then, it began with Theresa's and James Seaver's affair right after her father died. The father was wealthy, and Seaver must have targeted her the minute his death hit the papers."

"I assume there were changes in your relationship...," I said, treading softly.

"In the beginning, I had no clue—I was busy adding new restaurants and a new club downtown. But I started noticing issues with our personal finances—credit card charges for things that didn't track. Theresa wasn't working or volunteering anywhere, yet she was always gone from the house. Terrence stayed with us, almost sixteen then, not driving yet. She'd forget to pick him up from school, or she'd be way late to his events, so I was fielding a lot more calls from him."

"At what point did you think she might be cheating?" I asked as I finished my éclair.

"I suspected for a while before I did anything about it. Little things, mostly. It came to a head when Theresa became desperate to get money from her father's estate. He had complicated business interests, and probate had gone on for almost three years. She insisted she needed a sizeable chunk of money for 'the opportunity of a lifetime.'"

"She wouldn't have been the primary breadwinner for the family, right?" I asked, wanting to understand their financial arrangement.

"Not at all. By then, I was providing us with a pretty good living. Theresa had no business training or experience, she wasn't returning to school, and we could get any real estate through my company. It seemed odd."

"Did she give you any idea what the opportunity was about?" I asked.

"She wouldn't tell me," Darrell said. "She played that 'if you truly loved me, you'd want me to grow my wings' card. So, I figured it was her inheritance; she could do with it what she wanted. I loaned her two million dollars through my business against her eventual probate settlement. She didn't completely take me in, though—my attorney wrote an ironclad agreement guaranteeing I'd get my money back, mainly to protect my business."

"But now Theresa's got two million dollars to do with as she wishes," I said. "What happened to the money?"

"My question, too, and a couple of other things. Once Theresa had the money, she was increasingly gone from the house for entire nights, showing up at 10:00 a.m. the next morning with horseshit excuses. So, I hired a private investigator, one of the best in town. That's when I learned about her cheating with James Seaver."

"And what did your detective tell you about Seaver?" I asked.

"That he's a one-person crime wave. Everything he does has a manipulative twist to it. He started as a straight-up con man and pimp, albeit brilliantly, if the standard is not getting caught. Seaver loaded up on student loan debt in college while partying and running a string of prostitutes out of the frat house. He ducked out of the pimping charges by joining the Navy and conned the recruiter into picking up his college loan obligations."