Savannah Secrets. Fiona Hood-Stewart
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“All I can figure is that certain things come back to haunt you when you know the end is nigh,” Tracy answered. “And who would have thought Rowena could be worth so much? All those relatives will be positively nauseous when they realize exactly how much they’ve lost—and to whom. Which reminds me,” she added, a mischievous smile dawning on her dimpled cheeks, “I was talking to Uncle Fairfax this morning and guess what he told me?”
“What?” Meredith’s large gray eyes filled with new interest. Tracy was an expert at wheedling casual bits of information out of people.
“We had a most enlightening conversation.”
She rolled her eyes. “Tracy, spill it. I’m not in the mood to mess around. I have to take immediate action. I’m already dreading Joanna Carstairs’s face when she learns the news.”
“Rather you than me, babe,” Tracy admitted. “Anyway, Uncle Fairfax remembers Isabel, Rowena’s daughter, well. Said they hung out in the same crowd, and that she was very pretty and vivacious, always flirting and acting much older than her age. She also used to hang around with older men, some of them Rowena’s own friends.”
“That must have been almost forty years ago. And?”
“According to Uncle Fairfax, there was talk about whether she might have let things go a little too far.”
“Oh, you mean she had an affair?”
“Nobody seems to know and, as she’s dead, no one ever will.”
“I guess not. What else did he say?”
“Only that the summer after her sixteenth birthday, Isabel suddenly disappeared for a year or so—supposedly to a finishing school in Europe. She was a bright girl with career ambitions, so everyone was surprised. People naturally assumed she’d gotten pregnant, though it was never mentioned outright. Such things were never discussed in those days.”
“Had he heard that she’d given birth to a son?” Meredith asked, attentive.
“No. Like everyone else, he assumed that she’d had an abortion.”
“Ethics aside, that certainly would have been the easiest route,” Meredith said, brow furrowed, “but she didn’t take that course. Instead, she gave the baby up for adoption.”
“Right.”
“But why give the baby away? She could easily afford to keep it,” Meredith argued.
“You talk as if you don’t know Savannah, Mer.” Tracy laughed, a thin, ironic smile touching her full lips. “If things are bad now, imagine what it must have been like thirty-eight years ago! I doubt Rowena would have tolerated her daughter keeping an illegitimate baby. It just wasn’t done. Particularly if the father wasn’t suitable husband material, which I presume must have been the case.”
“How absurd,” Meredith exclaimed, disgusted by such hypocrisy and wondering what sort of woman would have let society and a strong-willed mother force her to give up a child if she’d wanted to keep it.
“Absurd maybe, but let’s face it, that’s the way it was. Young society ladies who found themselves in a fix went abroad, had an abortion somewhere discreet or gave the child up for adoption. They spent the year away and then returned home with no one the wiser.” Tracy raised an elegantly etched brow and reached for the coffee mug.
“Carrying the child for nine months, giving birth to it at this Swiss convent,” Meredith said, pointing to a file, “and then simply leaving it behind so she could head back home and party seems so cruel, so unfeeling.”
Tracy shrugged. “I doubt Rowena gave Isabel much choice. If it makes you feel any better, Uncle Fairfax did say that Isabel was different when she returned, much more subdued. Nobody talked about it. But obviously,” she added, gesturing to the paperwork lying on the desk between them, “there was a child. As for the father’s identity, well, presumably Isabel took that secret with her to the grave. And now Rowena—for whatever weird reason—has named the child her heir.”
“But doesn’t it all seem too simple? I mean, think about it, Trace.” Meredith tapped her fingers on the serviceable teak desk, then leaned back and swung in the sagging office chair, crumpling her suit jacket. “Rowena had a complex personality. We know she liked to control things. She didn’t leave anything to chance. So why fork over a fortune to a total stranger? And then there are the Carstairs relations to consider, not to mention Dallas. I can’t believe Rowena left her at nineteen without a dime when she knows all the problems the poor kid is going through with that property of hers up in Beaufort. The bank’s about to foreclose.”
“I didn’t realize it was that bad. Is there nothing we can do?” Tracy asked anxiously, horrified by the thought of Dallas Thornton, whom she’d known since she was a kid, being thrown out of Providence, the beautiful stud farm that for years had been in her family.
“I don’t know yet.” Meredith sat straighter. “I’ll take all this home tonight and dig my teeth into it once the boys are in bed.” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, Lord, it’s almost five. Mick’s ball game is this afternoon.” When she dragged her fingers through her hair and took off her glasses she suddenly looked much younger and more vulnerable and very pretty. She stared at her partner. “You realize what’s going to happen, right?”
“Yep. Pretty much. It seems a given that Rowena’s relatives will contest the will.”
“And guess who they’ll hire—if they haven’t already?”
The two women’s eyes locked. “Ross.”
“Right. You know I loved Ro dearly, but I wish she hadn’t left me with such a mess.” She groaned, “Even if it does make for a dramatic parting gesture. She never liked all her greedy Carstairs relatives, said they reminded her of buzzards at the roadside, waiting ravenously for the morsels her eventual death would bring.”
“Looks like she’s had the last word. We’ll miss her, you know,” Tracy said as she got up to leave.
“Yeah, we will. See you tomorrow,” Meredith said, a soft smile touching her lips as the door closed behind Tracy.
As she gathered the files she’d sort through later that evening, Meredith recalled that stormy afternoon twelve years earlier when she’d first met Rowena Carstairs. She had been a summer intern at Rollins, Hunter & Mills and Rowena had been holding court in the firm’s walnut-paneled lobby, dressed in a flowing purple caftan and a remarkable jeweled pink turban. Her legendary toy poodles—always dyed to match Rowena’s headdress of the day—were yapping hysterically at her heels and gnawing on the knotted fringe of the floor’s antique Oriental carpet.
The poodles, Meredith recalled, were noted for their ill humor. Neither of the junior partners hovering anxiously beside one of the firm’s most prestigious clients had dared to censure the dogs, which by this time were happily chewing their way through a delicately carved chair leg.
Raised to respect the value of things, and too new to the firm to know whom she was messing with, Meredith marched right up to Rowena’s dogs and told them firmly to heel. To everyone’s astonishment the dogs stopped their destructive activity and settled obediently at Meredith’s feet, giving her patent pumps a cautiously friendly lick.
And to everyone’s equally stunned amazement, Rowena had burst out laughing and grasped Meredith’s hand. “About time someone had the guts to stand up to these little pests,” she barked. “Beastly little dogs, aren’t they? Touched in the head, I think.”
“Must be all that hair dye,” Meredith noted wryly.
After an audible gasp, one of the junior partners, clearly bent on damage control, stepped forward and, muttering apologies, grabbed Meredith by the arm, intent on propelling her back to the copy room. But Rowena stayed his hand. “You know, I bet you’re right. That dye probably makes ’em antsy,” she said, addressing Meredith, her keen bright eyes narrowing. “Damn, why didn’t