A few minutes later he called Tess to find out the details about Sara’s rights of ownership of the paintings he’d found. She turned the phone over to Ramsey, for him to explain.
Under the terms of her Aunt Lissie’s will, all the paintings were owned by Sara. “I leave all CAY’s paintings to my dear niece,” the will said. At the time the will was written, there’d been only one watercolor, the funny one with the purple ducks. But it was Ramsey’s father, Benjamin, who’d added the word “all” when he drew up the will. He’d said he wanted to be covered in case more showed up.
“Since you now own the house,” Rams said to Mike, “there might be a case for you to sue her for ownership.” When Mike didn’t bother to reply to that, Ramsey laughed in an approving way. “You didn’t ask, but legally, the rest of the things in the closet belong to you.”
“Everything will be given to the descendants of the owners,” Mike said quickly.
“Good,” Rams said softly. “Let me know when it’s safe for us to go home. Tess and I miss everyone. And, by the way, I heard you and Sara are staying together. Congratulations.”
Again, that old feeling of hating everyone knowing his business went through Mike, especially since he’d never met this man. “Thanks,” he managed to say.
“And I guess you won’t be needing any financial help with restoring Merlin’s Farm.”
Even though Rams said it in the to
ne of a joke, Mike frowned. He wouldn’t have accepted help, but he was now realizing that he’d married an heiress. And a rich woman could do better than a cop who hadn’t even gone to college. “No, I won’t need any help,” Mike said and clicked off.
Two hours later, he and Luke drove away with the back of his pickup and Mike’s car filled. They went to the storage place where Mike had a unit. It didn’t take long to push his meager belongings to the back—Tess had rented him a big place in the hope that he’d fill it. The men began unloading the vehicles, and when they’d finished, they were both sweaty and dirty.
“Cover for me with Sara, will you?” Mike asked. “She thinks I’m at her mother’s house. I have to make some calls so I can piece all this together.”
“What about Vandlo?” Luke asked.
“He won’t be here until tomorrow. I’m told every hour where he is, but when he does get here, he won’t find what he’s looking for.”
“Except for Sara. I’m concerned that he’ll be very angry to find his plans destroyed.”
“That’s an understatement, but I’m working to arrange it so he takes his rage out on me.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Luke asked.
“Sara doesn’t know this, but tomorrow after she makes contact with Vandlo and tells him she married someone else, she’ll be put in a van and taken away. If Vandlo wants revenge, I’ll be the only one there.” Luke still looked skeptical. “You have to trust me. I’ve been doing this for a while now and I can assure you that Sara is very valuable to me.”
“The whole town knows that. The gossip is that when you look at her—”
“Leave me some pride,” Mike said as he pulled the door to the storage unit down and locked it. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I think you should get to the fair as soon as you can. On opening night about five hundred people show up, and I don’t like Sara being unprotected.”
“She isn’t and she won’t be,” Mike said. After Luke drove away, Mike parked his car a mile from the storage place, stood under a tree, and started pushing buttons on his phone.
Mike had always believed that there was a connection between his grandmother, Merlin’s Farm, and the Vandlos, but he’d never been able to see what it was. By finding what Mitzi was after, Mike now had an idea of how the alliance could have been made.
He called the retirement home in Ohio where his grandmother had spent the last years of her life, where she’d died, and asked to speak to the head of nursing. He was put through right away. After he gave his credentials and told her some about the investigation, it didn’t take long to find the person he was seeking. The large nose made Mitzi easily identifiable. As Mike suspected, she’d worked there, using the assumed name of Hazel Smith, and the nurse was eager to talk about her.
“I don’t want to speak ill of anyone, but Hazel was a horrible woman,” the nurse said. “After she left, the employees started swapping tales, and we found out what she’d done. She’d tell one person one thing and someone else another. While she was here, we had nothing but chaos. The problem was that none of us knew who was causing it. On the surface, Hazel seemed to be the most caring person we’d ever had here, and I was caught like everyone else was. Hazel came to me one day and said she’d seen my best nurse stealing from a patient who’d just died. She cried while she told me and I’m ashamed to say that I believed every word. Because of her, I fired an excellent caretaker.”
“If it helps any,” Mike said, “the woman you know as Hazel Smith has made many people believe her. Would you tell me everything you can remember about the week or so just before my grandmother died?”
“I guess you want to know about the night Prudence went hysterical.”
“Yes.” Mike’s heart was beating hard. “Please tell me everything about that.” He couldn’t rush this, as he needed the woman to confide in him, so he had to let her talk at her own pace.
“Well, first of all, Prudence wasn’t … I’m sorry to say this, Mr. Newland, but she wasn’t liked.”
“Do you mean she cleared a room when she entered?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. She used to rather often tell us a story about having been raped. Perhaps you’ve heard it?”