Chapter 6 - The Uninvited Storm
The humid July heat was shimmering off the limestone flags around my garden when Richard Sterling’s black town car rolled up the gravel path. It was only eleven in the morning, an hour when the cicadas in the live oaks were already droning like a buzz saw. I was clipping sprigs of sweet basil by the porch railings when Richard stepped out, his coat off, his shirtsleeves rolled neatly to his elbows. He didn't carry his usual calm smile; instead, his brows were knotted, and under his arm rested a manila legal envelope that looked heavy with trouble.
"Good morning, Margaret," Richard said, taking off his sunglasses. "I’m afraid our quiet spell didn't last as long as we hoped."
"Come up to the shade, Richard," I said, setting my pruning shears into a woven basket. "Clara just made sun tea with mint from the back bed. What's happened? Has Colin run through the cashier's check already?"
"Not Colin," Richard replied, settling into the cedar armchair with a heavy sigh. "Jessica. She filed a civil lawsuit in Travis County District Court early yesterday morning. The summons was served to my office at nine o’clock."
I sat across from him, wiping my hands on my canvas apron. "On what grounds could that woman possibly sue me? I never signed an agreement with her, and she certainly never loaned me a nickel."
"Constructive trust, unjust enrichment, and conversion," Richard read off the summary sheet with cold disgust. "She is claiming that the winning ticket was purchased using household marital funds. According to her filing, because she gave you the two-dollar scratch-off on your birthday while you were living under their roof and eating food purchased by Colin’s household budget, the ticket was legally acquired as joint marital property. Furthermore, she argues that you acted as a bailee or agent for the family, meaning the prize rightfully belongs to the family estate—which is currently subject to equitable division in her divorce proceedings with your son."
I let out a soft, dry laugh, though a cold ripple traveled down my ribs. "She gave me that ticket as a cruel joke, Richard. She literally tossed it across the grease on the laminate and told me maybe I'd win enough change to pay for bus fare and get out of their hair. Colin laughed with her."
"I know that, and you know that," Richard said gently, tapping the edge of the manila envelope against his knee. "The law, unfortunately, is a machine operated by human greed. Her divorce attorney is a real bottom-feeder named Bradley Vance—no relation to you or Colin, thank heaven—who specializes in high-asset extortion through nuisance litigation. They don't expect to win at trial, Margaret. They are aiming to freeze your accounts with a preliminary injunction. If the judge grants a lis pendens on your real estate and freezes your private banking trusts, you won't be able to disburse a dollar until the civil suit winds through discovery. That could take two or three years."
"She thinks she can choke me out," I whispered, looking toward the distant blue horizon of Lake Travis. "She thinks an old woman will panic, throw five or ten million dollars into her lap just to make the headache go away."
"Precisely," Richard agreed. "She wants an eight-figure settlement out of court so she can take off to Miami or Aspen, leaving Colin with the debt and taking full custody of Lucas. But she made one critical mistake."
"What mistake?"
Richard leaned forward, his steel-gray eyes gleaming with the predatory calm that made him one of the most feared estate attorneys in the Southwest. "She claimed the ticket was bought out of joint marital funds from Colin’s household account at the Shell station on Barton Springs Road on the morning of March twelfth. She submitted a bank statement showing a seventy-eight-dollar convenience store debit charge on Colin’s joint checking card from that exact morning."
I paused, turning my porcelain mug in my hands. Memories of that awful birthday morning flooded back into sharp focus—the dirty breakfast dishes, the casual dismissals, the sneers. "Richard... Jessica didn't buy that ticket on March twelfth. Colin didn't buy it either."
"Tell me," Richard said, pulling a yellow legal pad from his breast pocket.
"Two days before my birthday, on March tenth, I walked to the local corner grocer to buy yeast and flour for the bread Colin insisted on having every Thursday. A neighbor's teenage boy had dropped his bicycle and spilled a sack of groceries across the sidewalk. I helped him gather his cans and carried one of his bags to his porch. His grandmother was so grateful she handed me five crisp one-dollar bills. I didn't want to take them, but she insisted. On my way back, I stopped at the Shell station on the corner of Lamar and bought two scratch-offs with two of those five one-dollar bills. The change was three singles. Jessica didn't buy me a thing. When she handed me that scratch-off at the table, she pulled it out of her own purse—where it had been sitting for months from some promotional goodie bag she got at a legal seminar. But the ticket I actually scratched wasn't hers. I had swapped it with the one in my pocket because her ticket was expired."
Richard stopped writing. His pen hovered above the paper, and a slow, ferocious smile spread across his lips. "You swapped the ticket?"
May you like
"I did," I said softly. "Her expired card sat on the microwave until she threw it into the trash two days later without looking twice. The ticket that won forty-two million dollars was purchased with cash given to me by Mrs. Evelyn Gable on South Lamar."
Richard slapped his knee and let out a booming laugh that startled the bluebirds from the eaves. "Margaret, that isn't just a defense. That is perjury, fraud, and a malicious prosecution claim wrapped in a silver ribbon. Let her bring her subpoena. We are going to turn her little legal ambush into a slaughterhouse."
