Fiona Hood-Stewart - Savannah Secrets

As she sank back and allowed her mind to drift to the gentle sound of Miss Mabella’s voice, weariness overwhelmed her. Her eyes closed for the last time. She had only one final regret.

What a pity she wouldn’t be here to see who would walk with the winnings.

Meredith Hunter skimmed through the thick sheaf of legal documents and, for the second time that day, exclaimed, “This can’t be real. Surely Rowena must have been mad to leave such a will!”

She was bewildered. Rowena Carstairs, her favorite client, had been one of the savviest people she’d ever met—and also one of the most loyal. When more than a year ago, after some serious soul-searching, Meredith had decided to leave Rollins, Hunter & Mills, the famous Savannah law firm where she’d gotten her start, in order to launch her own firm, Rowena had insisted on transferring her business. Even when Meredith had advised against it, admitting that her firm would never be able to match the resources of the firm that had ably served Rowena’s interests for more than fifty years, the old lady hadn’t balked. “After all,” Meredith recalled her saying imperiously, “if you don’t trust those old windbags anymore, why the hell should I?”

She smiled at the memory, suspecting Rowena knew that her new firm, Hunter & Maxwell, would never have gotten off the ground without her support. Ro had always looked after those she cared about. And that, Meredith admitted with a sigh, is what made her will all the more incomprehensible.

Slipping her reading glasses down her small, straight nose, Meredith gazed at the piles of legal files strewn around the small office. The Carstairs relations would be furious—probably go straight over to Ross Rollins and hire him to contest. And there was Dallas Thornton, Rowena’s estranged granddaughter. The girl would not be a problem in that she’d already stated clearly she wanted nothing to do with her late grandmother’s estate. But telling these people that they would receive nothing of the inheritance they’d long expected and that everything—including Rowena’s dyed poodles—had been left to a complete stranger would be a daunting task indeed.

Until now Meredith had managed to avoid a confrontation with her old senior partner. But if the Carstairs hired Ross as they inevitably would, she was sure he would take pleasure in trying to bring her down to size. Oh, well. It had to happen some day, she figured. The hard part was she liked him. A lot. An old friend of her dad’s, he had written her a glowing recommendation for Yale, hired her and then had been implicated—even if it hadn’t been proved—in a political scandal that had brought down Congressman Harlan MacBride, the now former husband of her best friend, Elm Hathaway. Although Elm had never blamed her, and was now happily married to Johnny Graney, she’d felt ashamed to be a part of a firm that valued the old-boy network above its own ethics. And so, with Rowena’s help, she’d set out on her own.

Meredith laid the documents back on her desk and tweaked her thick pageboy-style chestnut hair behind her ears. She would first contact James G. Gallagher, Rowena’s presumptive heir, whom Rowena’s detectives had tracked to London. She’d never even heard of the man—and doubted any of the Carstairs had, either. Did he even know that he was adopted? “None of this makes any sense,” she murmured. “Why would Rowena settle a one-hundred-million-dollar estate on a complete stranger?”

“Because it appears he’s her grandson.”

Meredith 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.”