Page 133 of Road Trip
“I think I did. I printed out all my emails to and from my bosses, before my last day of work,” Letha said. “I figured as soon as I was gone, they’d delete everything from the system.”
Therese felt her spirits rise. “You said you have a file folder full of that correspondence?”
“At home. Yeah, I do.”
“How about Hoot Wooten, the bank president,” Therese asked. “Did he see your emails about my mom?”
“Now that I don’t know,” Letha said. “To tell the truth, Mr. Wooten doesn’t really get into day-to-day bank business these days. I think he’s more like public relations.”
She looked from Therese to Scotty Childress. “Are y’all fixin’ to sue the bank over this mess?”
Scotty chose his words carefully. “Right now we’re looking to see what our options are. Ideally, we’d go see Wooten and let himknow that we believe the bank was negligent in allowing a woman with cognitive impairment to take out a three-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-dollar loan.”
“Those emails you sent to your supervisors, warning them about what Mama was doing, would you be willing to share those with us?” Therese asked.
Letha chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “That bank was my family for over forty years. And then they cut me loose with no warning. Not even a going-away lunch on my last day. Yeah, you can have copies of those emails. I would ask you to keep my name out of it, but now I think of it, go ahead on. Right is right, and they did Mary Helen Dunagin wrong. Just like they did me wrong.”
CHAPTER 56
Therese walked Arletha Carter out to her car. When she got back to the house, Scotty was packing up his briefcase.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Can you make the bank accept responsibility for letting Mama be bilked out of all her money?”
Scotty Childress was a cautious man. “I think it’s good that Letha has all those emails with her bosses, and that she’s willing to share them with us. Without reading them, I can’t say whether we’d have a case to go after the bank for negligence.”
“Oh.” Therese slumped down into the nearest chair.
“Hey, I’m not saying we give up,” he said. “I do think our best course of action is for us to have a sit-down with Hoot Wooten. Show him those emails, and point out that your family members have been loyal, lifetime customers at the bank. And then we point out that if we had to go to court, the publicity for the bank would be terrible, especially when they’re looking to get acquired by an out-of-town entity. Hometown loyalty is always a plus on a balance sheet and three hundred-twenty-five grand is not that big a write-off for them.”
“I hope you’re right,” Therese said.
Scotty gazed up at the portrait hanging over the fireplace, as though he was noticing it for the first time.
“So this is Lady Geraldine? And you think she’s worth more than a million dollars?”
“That other portrait, which was only a preliminary study, sold for one point two million. But Maeve says there’s no guarantee a second one will sell for that, plus the auction house will charge us a commission. And I’ve been doing some reading, and we’ll probably have to get the painting cleaned and reframed. My friend Wyllona, who’s an expert on this stuff, says this frame is definitely not original.”
“Still, that would be a nice windfall for you and your sister,” he pointed out. “I guess as soon as all this house and painting stuff is settled, you’ll be hitting the road again?”
Therese noted the wistful tone in his voice.
“I don’t exactly know what my plan is,” Therese admitted. “Call me crazy, but I’ve kind of started thinking of maybe hanging around Savannah. I’ve been a nomad since I was eighteen years old, always chasing auditions and acting gigs. Do you know, I’m almost forty years old, and I’ve never owned my own home? All this talk about my mom, and how proud she was that she paid off this house, all by herself, has me thinking.”
“About?”
“Don’t laugh,” she warned him. “I want to pick out my own paint colors, go to the hardware store, then put up a ladder and paint. I want to have a cookout in my backyard, maybe even plant a little garden and grow my own tomatoes.”
She looked up again at the portrait of Lady Geraldine. “You know how I told you about meeting Esme, who is the last of the Rossington line? Well, almost, except for her ne’er-do-well brother. She lives in what I’d call splendid squalor, in the gardener’s cottage on the family estate—which her father donated to the National Trust, or whatever they call it over there. She had this little dog, an English cocker, which is somehow different from a regular cocker spaniel. You never saw a dog with so much personality. And her name—Sinead.”
“Sinead?”
“Duh! Sinead O’Cocker?”
“Okay, that’s funny,” he admitted with a chuckle.
“I think I want a dog! It doesn’t have to be some fancy pedigreed pooch. I’ll get myself a bike with a basket on the front, and I’ll ride all over town with my dog in the basket, just like inThe Wizard of Oz, and people will say, ‘There goes that nutty Dunagin sister.’ And I won’t give a flying fuck what they think.”
She squeezed his hand.
