In Death's Shadow

CHAPTER TWELVE

It's gotta be a law. When you need a shoulder to cry on, all the shoulders you know and love are bound to be out of town. Paul was at sea, Daddy wouldn't be back from Arizona until Wednesday, and the shoulder I ached for most-my mother's-had been lost to me forever.

I was well into my forties, Raggedy Ann was, well, raggedy, and I hadn't worn footie pajamas for years, but I had a lot in common with Miranda.

Something else I shared with Miranda was an honorary grandmother. Mine was Nadine Smith Gray, a.k.a. L. K. Bromley.

I telephoned Mrs. Bromley and, like all perfect grandmothers, she was at home. I invited myself for lunch, which, being a perfect grandmother and a perfect friend, didn't ruffle her feathers a bit.

I hadn't been to Ginger Cove for several months, so the construction took me by surprise. A contractor had begun working on the new assisted living center; construction trailers and piles of lumber and bricks made it necessary for traffic to be temporarily rerouted. I wound right, then left, then right again, then drove in a big circle before slotting my car into a parking space in front of Mrs. Bromley's building. When I got in range, I'd given her a ring on my cell phone. I found her waiting for me on the ground floor nearest the stairway leading to her apartment, holding the security door open.

I gave her a hug. "I'm so glad to see you, Mrs. Bromley."

"For heaven's sake," she said for about the twentieth time since we'd met. "When are you going to start calling me Naddie?"

Our relationship had begun on a professional level: she the famous mystery writer, I a lowly temp. I wondered if I'd ever feel comfortable calling L.K. Bromley by her given name. "I'll work on that," I promised.

"Come up. I've decided we'll eat in my apartment today. You could use a bit of cheering up, so, no sick people, no wheelchairs."

I was enormously grateful.

"Besides," she said, "If we eat chez moi, I won't have to change."

I'd never seen Mrs. Bromley wearing blue jeans before, but they flattered her slim figure. A bright pink long-sleeve T-shirt was tucked into her waistband. An Indian silver belt set with turquoise stones and Easy Spirit sandals completed the ensemble.

"I like your shirt," I said.

"It matches my eyes," she chuckled as she preceded me up the stairs.

"What?"

Mrs. Bromley stopped on the top step, turned, and her eyebrows shot toward her hairline. Her eyes grew wide. "Bloodshot," she said. “Too many late nights for an old lady."

"You? I thought you never stayed up past the eleven o'clock news."

"Not lately," she said. "Check this out." She opened the door to her apartment and waved an arm. "Voila!”

Propped up on easels and lined up against the walls of her living room were dozens of paintings-still lifes, seascapes, and a few portraits, mostly of children. I recognized Annapolis Harbor and views of the Severn River and the Naval Academy. As for the still lifes, the fruit might be long gone, but the decorative plates and vases that had posed for their portraits had been returned to their places on Mrs. Bromley's built-in, Williamsburg-style bookshelves.

"This is lovely," I said, pausing in front of a portrait of a towheaded boy with his dog. The boy carried a fishing pole over one shoulder. A string of minnows dangled from his left hand. He stared out at the viewer, while the dog studied the minnows with large, luminous eyes.

"I worked from a photograph," she said, handing me one of two glasses of wine that were sitting ready on a side table. "But I always insist on taking the photo myself." She raised her glass. "Cheers!"

"Thanks," I said, taking a sip. The wine was cool, crisp, and slightly sweet. "I needed that."

I inched my way around the perimeter of the room, sipping wine and admiring Mrs. Bromley's work. "Everything's wonderful!" I enthused. "What's up? You having a sale?"

"As a matter of fact, I have a show in a couple of weeks at Markwood Gallery on Maryland Avenue. Do you know it?"

"I sure do. I live just around the corner, remember? Will I be invited to the opening?"

"Count on it." Mrs. Bromley had wandered from the living room into her pocket kitchen, where she pulled plates and glasses out of the cupboard. "Several of my students are exhibiting, too, so it should be quite interesting… if you have a taste for watercolors. Not everybody does."

I had planned to tell her after lunch, or wait until dessert, at least, before letting my hair down, but I blew it. Maybe it was Mrs. Bromley's Impressionistic portrait of a young mother and child that set me off, but whatever, the floodgates opened, and I told her about Valerie's untimely death, about my appointment with Jablonsky and everything I had learned to date about viaticals.

"It turns the whole notion of life insurance on its head!" I ranted. "How can it be a good idea to have strangers wishing me dead? A beneficiary should have a vested interest in my well-being, for heaven's sake, not hovering about waiting for me to die."

"I'm not familiar with the term 'viatical,'" Mrs. Bromley said thoughtfully after I'd stopped sputtering. "But what you're describing sounds a lot like senior settlements.”

"Is that where a senior citizen sells the rights to his life insurance policy for some sort of percentage of its face value based on a sliding scale according to age?"

"Bingo." She twisted the cork out of the wine bottle and topped off my glass. I took another long swallow. If I didn't take it easy, I'd be too tipsy for the road, and I'd have to spend the afternoon sleeping it off on Mrs. Bromley's sofa.

While I continued sipping, observing through the pass-through, Mrs. Bromley bustled about her kitchen, hauling plastic deli containers out of the refrigerator and lining them up on the counter.

"Several months ago," she said, spooning some pasta salad onto a luncheon plate, "one of our residents invited me to a cocktail party. So I went." She put the lid back on the pasta container and opened one containing olives. "You know me," she chuckled. "Never turn down the chance for free hors d'oeuvres." She thrust the container in my direction. "Olive?"

I selected a fat green one stuffed with garlic and popped it into my mouth.

"Turns out," she continued, sliding an olive into her own mouth, "turns out to be like a glorified Tupperware party. There was an investment adviser who trotted out a little PowerPoint show and encouraged us to invest our money in blocks of used life insurance policies." She arranged some fresh fruit and sliced tomatoes on the plates. "I don't know about you, Hannah, but any time I feel like my arm's being twisted, I take a step back and say whoa! And this fellow was real hard-sell. Claimed it was a no-risk thing, better than CDs or stocks. As the young folks say: as if."

She handed me a plate. "A couple of the folks signed up right away. Let me tell you about Clark Gammel."

We carried our plates and the wine to a table in her breakfast room, a bright alcove with a bay window overlooking the woods. When we were settled, she handed me a red and yellow plaid napkin, spread one in her own lap, and continued with her story.

"As I was saying, my friend, Clark, told the adviser that it all sounded very good to him, but that he'd tied up most of his assets buying into Ginger Cove and just didn't have money lying around to invest."

"The guy probably had an answer for that, too," I commented around a mouthful of cantaloupe and pineapple chunks.

"Mais oui. He advised Clark that he could sell his own life insurance policy and use the proceeds from that sale to invest. He promised a return of twenty- to twenty-five percent."

"In other words, your friend Clark would be investing in secondhand life insurance policies of people who were older and/or sicker than he was."

She nodded. "Morbid, isn't it?"

I had to agree.

"And then do you know what happened?"

I shook my head.

"Clark up and died. He didn't even outlive his investments."

First Valerie, now Clark. Coincidence? I thought not. "What was this guy's name, do you remember?"

Mrs. Bromley squinted out the window. "Not offhand. But I think I saved the brochure he gave us." She laid down her fork. "Let me go look for it."

I raised a hand to stop her. "After lunch is fine."

"At my age, if I don't do something while I'm thinking about it, I'm sure to forget." She bustled off in the direction of the bedroom.

I was thinking that age had nothing to do with it-I had visited my office twice that morning before I remembered that I'd gone down there looking for a stapler-when from deep within the recesses of my purse, my cell phone began to ring.

At first warble I thought it might be Paul, but I'd set his ring tone to play the Monty Python theme song. I let it ring a few more seconds. It wasn't Emily, either. Her signature tune was the theme from Star Wars. I was going to ignore the call, but Mrs. Bromley was still in the bedroom, so I wrestled the cell phone from its pocket and pushed the talk button, silencing it in the middle of a spirited rendition of Beethoven's Ninth, the ring tone I'd assigned to unknown numbers.

"Mrs. Ives? This is Gail Parrish. Mr. Jablonsky's receptionist? We met when you came into the office the other day?"

"Oh, yes?"

"Mr. Jablonsky would like to speak with you? Is this a good time?"

It wasn't, really, but I was dying-so to speak-to hear what the man had to say.

When Jablonsky came on the line, his tone was casual and upbeat, as if I'd just won an all-expenses paid trip to Bermuda. "Mrs. Ives. Hannah. Well, I have some good news for you and some bad news."

I was glad to have visited his office, because I could picture him delivering this news: shirtsleeves rolled up, leaning back in his chair, size 10½B Johnston & Murphys propped up on his desktop. "The good news is that according to our experts, your life expectancy is at least five years."

"Oh, goody," I said. "My husband will be glad to hear it. So, what's the bad news?"

"The bad news is that this cuts back considerably on the amount of money we're able to offer for your policy."

"How bad is it?" I said, expecting Johnny Carson to pop out from behind the curtain any second.

"With a life expectancy of five years and a face value of $250,000, the most we can get for you is sixty percent. That's $150,000."

"Better than a sharp stick in the eye, as my mother used to say.”

Jablonsky chuckled at my little joke. He even made it sound sincere. "Exactly."

"So, what do you think I should do, Gil?"

"Oh, I'd take it," he said. "Definitely. ViatiPro is an excellent company!"

ViatiPro. If I had had antennae, they would have shot straight up out of my head like My Favorite Martian.

That said, I was tempted, I really was. With $150,000, I could set aside $5,000 for my funeral. No, $6,000. Why be chintzy? I could put $50,000 each in college funds for Chloe and Jake and still have $44,000 left to blow on whatever I damn well pleased.

"Frankly, Gil," I said, pushing a little harder on the man's buttons, "I'll have to talk it over with my husband first. When I brought up the subject the other day, just to test the water, you know, I think it's fair to say he wasn't very enthusiastic."

"Not enthusiastic in what way, Hannah?"

"In point of fact," I said, embroidering as fast as I could, "he absolutely blew his top."

"I see," said Jablonsky. "Well, perhaps if you brought your husband in? What's his name, by the way?"

"Paul."

"Well, perhaps if you and Paul were to come in where I could lay out all the facts and figures in front of him, you and I could help him change his mind. I can be very persuasive."

"If it were for just a bit more money," I hinted broadly, "maybe he'd go for it."

"I'm afraid $150,000 is the best we can do for you, Hannah, under the circumstances." There was a long pause. I spent it filling in the blank. If your cancer recurs, of course, and it looks like you're going to croak, that 'd be a different matter entirely.

"You know," Jablonsky said after a few more ticks of the clock, "we have some other plans that may interest you. And it wouldn't involve selling policies you already have."

"That's sounds intriguing," I said. "Very intriguing."

"And if we set it up right," he continued, "you needn't even tell your husband about it."

"That's even better," I purred.

"Let's not go into it over the phone," he said. "Can you stop in sometime midweek?"

Like a good little sucker, I agreed. Jablonsky switched me back to Gail, who inked me in for 11:00 A.M. on Wednesday. She seemed in a much cheerier mood than when I'd met her the previous Saturday.

"Do you work six days a week, Gail?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Saturday's usually a half day, though."

"Slave driver," I quipped, referring to her boss, Jablonsky.

"I don't mind, actually," she said. "I can use the money."

"Can't we all?"

Just about the time Jablonsky was handing me back to Gail, Mrs. Bromley rejoined me in the breakfast room, waving a brochure. She waited for me to finish my conversation with Gail, then plopped the brochure down on the table next to my plate.

Smiling out at me from the front page of the full-color tri-fold, impeccably dressed, well-coiffed, gray-haired septuagenarian couples fished, swam, golfed, and otherwise were living large on the tragedies of others.

The brochure was sprinkled with mini-testimonials. Thanks for the wonderful service!!! You told me to expect 18 to 24 months for my investment to mature!!! Imagine my delight when my $50,000 investment turned into $62,000 in just five (5) weeks!!! That's a whopping 249.6% APR!!!

It wasn't just all the exclamation points that made me want to barf.

"It's from MBFSG," Mrs. Bromley said, pointing to the investment firm's logo printed on a little gold address label stuck to the bottom of the last panel. MBFSG, I read, was offering one to five year "programs," with six, eighteen, thirty, and forty-two month contracts available "upon request." It didn't take a mental giant to figure out what the months meant.

"Do you know them?" Mrs. Bromley asked.

"Oh, yes, I know them." I looked up. "Do you remember the name of the investment adviser you spoke to?"

"The name's on the tip of my tongue. Czech, I think. Or Polish. Hungarian, maybe."

I took a wild stab. "Jablonsky?"

"Yes! That's it. Jablonsky." Her eyes narrowed and she studied my face intently, as if searching it for clues. "Oh, dear. He's the one, isn't he? The snake oil salesman you talked to?"

I nodded. "Be afraid," I said. "Be very afraid."