turned abruptly and sat up. “Tracy. I didn’t hear you come in.” She twiddled her pen thoughtfully. “I’m still reeling in shock.” Her partner, Tracy Maxwell, stepped farther into the office. “As far as we know, Rowena never even met this guy. She seems to have made a conscious decision to exclude this supposed grandson from her life, but now has left him everything. I just don’t get it.”
Tracy shrugged, setting her coffee mug down on Meredith’s teak desk. “I know about as much as you do, Mer,” she replied, leaning back in the creaking leather chair. “But I guess it all boils down to this—blood’s thicker than water. By the way—” she grimaced as she glanced down doubtfully “—couldn’t we at least afford a new chair? This one’s going to collapse any day now, and probably with some valued client in it. We’ll be sued for negligence.” She crossed her well-shaped legs under her pencil-gray skirt and eyed Meredith. “So?” she queried. “What do you think made the old bird do it? Weird that she never asked you to look over her will or that she never disclosed the extent of her holdings.”
Meredith shrugged, shook her head. “I once asked her about it but she clammed up. Said she had it all sorted out years ago. I figured it was none of my business, that she’d used other counsel for her own reasons, but that doesn’t explain why she left her fortune to a stranger. Could it be out of remorse?”
“Perhaps.”
“Maybe she wanted to make up for the past. She obviously felt a duty to her bloodline despite the child being given up for adoption.” Meredith knew she was desperately seeking a rational motive for her late client’s actions, since she was now left to deal with the outcome. “It just seems totally unlike Ro to react like this. I mean, she was one tough cookie and not one given to sentiment, or to mishandling her affairs.”
“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.
