Fatal Deduction (29 page)

Talk about stubborn. Drew rubbed the back of his neck. “What I’m about to tell you is one of the main reasons I survived the guilt after Ruthie left.”
Lord, help me say this right
.

She looked at him with a passive curiosity.

“What you’re feeling right now is useless regret. Regret is what we feel when we make a mistake or have an accident or embarrass ourselves or commit a crime and get caught or when our conscience pricks. We feel it over things we wish we could change, big things and little things. Regret either eats you up little by little, like being nibbled to death by ducks, or it helps you not make the same mistake again.”

He could feel her polite passivity changing to active interest.

“It comes down to being nibbled to nothing or learning from it. You get to choose which.”

They sat quietly in the hot car while she thought and he prayed. Finally she turned to him.

“She calls him ‘Icky Eddie.’”

Drew gave a hoot of laughter at the unexpected comment. She was flexible steel to the core whether she realized it or not.

“So how do you undo regret?”

“Often you can’t undo it. Whatever caused it may be permanent. My divorce is permanent. I’m still dull and pedantic. Ruthie’s still ill. But I’m not getting nibbled to death. I’ve learned to give my regret to the Lord, to remember that Jesus is the great Burden Bearer.”

She nodded. “He is. I know He is. He has been for all the other heavy loads I’ve had to carry. I know He will be with this too. It just hurts a lot right now.”

“You wouldn’t be normal if it didn’t. But if you learn from it… He opened his door and got out.

She climbed out her side and walked into the lane at his side. He took her hand again as they approached the front door of Aunt Stella’s. With a little
tsking
sound, Libby reached out and deadheaded a couple of spent geraniums. She stood a moment, staring at the brown flowers.

“Life’s like a flower box, isn’t it?” She looked at him. “The brilliant blooms of joy and the past-their-prime moments of pain. You can’t have one without the other.”

He glanced at his house then and saw Ruthie’s silhouette in the window of his bedroom, staring down at them.
His
bedroom. “‘Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward,’ Job says. But the apostle Peter says, ‘Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.’”

Some days his casting abilities were required so often that he felt sure he’d be a prize winner in any heavenly bass fishing competition going.

D
REW FOLLOWED ME INSIDE
, where we immediately heard the girls shouting and laughing.

“They sound like they’re in Tori’s room.” I didn’t want to go up and check because I was unsure of how Chloe would react when she saw me, but I had to at least say hello even if they didn’t want to talk to me. There would be no days of tense silence in my home.

The girls were in front of the large television hidden in the satin-wood armoire. They were whipping their arms all over the place as on-screen little animated figures raced around a tennis court. Tori sat cross-legged on the bed laughing with them.

“Look, Mom!” Chloe yelled as she whipped an arm and just missed clipping Jenna in the ear. “Aunt Tori gave me a Wii!”

I was delighted to see her happy, but I was gripped by the fiercest wave of jealousy I’d ever felt, just what I needed to end a perfect day. I was certain the tears I was furiously blinking back were as vivid a
green as the Irish countryside. I’d messed up big-time this evening, and Tori had, as usual, found a way to shine.

I felt a comforting hand on my shoulder and a gentle squeeze. Drew had followed me upstairs and was standing right behind me. The poor man would probably never darken our door again after tonight. If regret did teach you not to make the same mistake again, he’d undoubtedly learned not to have anything to do with emotional women.

“That looks like lots of fun, Chlo,” I managed. She was so busy trying to beat Jenna that she didn’t even hear my words, much less their forced and false enthusiasm. “And great gift, Tori. Hard to beat.” Impossible to beat.

Tori smiled that complacent smile that drove me crazy.

God, I am so terrible! I’d rather see my kid unhappy than made happy by my sister. Forgive me!

“Got anything to drink?” Drew asked quietly in my ear.

I nodded and fled to the kitchen, grateful for the excuse to escape the site of another defeat. I pulled open the refrigerator door and stood staring at the contents without seeing a thing.

After a couple of minutes I became aware of Drew moving his hand repeatedly up my arm from my wrist to my elbow in little painless pinches.

“What are you doing?” I asked as I brushed his hand away.

“Nibbling.”

I shut my eyes and shook my head. He was driving me nuts with his desire to stop me from wallowing in my melancholy. Next thing I knew, he’d be quoting, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!”

He’d almost had me in the car with his little talk on regret, but
Tori’s smug smile and Chloe’s joy over something I could never afford to give her threw me right back into my black funk. If I wanted to be sad and hate myself and see all the possible negative ramifications of my errors, who was he to stop me? I had a right to be unhappy. I had reason. If I wanted my theme song to be, “Nobody likes me; everybody hates me. I think I’ll go eat worms,” I was entitled.

But deep down I knew he was right. I did have to choose. Nibbled to death by ducks. Or do as Saint Paul said: learn to be content whatever the circumstances. I groaned silently. Drew even had the Bible on his side.

“Have you got anything to eat?” He peered over my shoulder. “I never did get any food at your parents’.”

I reached for the mayo and an onion. Tuna salad sandwiches would be good for a hot evening. “Poor Drew, caught up in all our family dramas.”

He shrugged. “You’ve been caught in mine, so it’s only fair.”

I grabbed a can of tuna from the shelf and quickly mixed the salad. “Whole wheat or oatmeal bread? Toasted or not?”

“I really don’t care. Just having someone make me a sandwich feels too wonderful to be particular.”

I laughed at his open enjoyment and slipped four slices of oatmeal bread in Aunt Stella’s toaster. When they popped, I buttered them, then added the tuna mix, tomato slices, and some lettuce. “Let’s sit out back.”

We carried our paper plates to the table on the little patio. “What would you like to drink?”

“Coke?”

I went inside and returned with a couple of cans and a basket of
chips to find Tori sitting in my seat, eating my sandwich. With a sigh I handed her my Coke and went back to make another sandwich and get another drink.

While I worked, I tried to decide how I’d approach Tori about the diamond brooch she’d taken and about the new L
AST
W
ARNING
puzzle. I felt terrible about parading more family dysfunction in front of Drew, but if I didn’t catch Tori while she was here, I might not have another chance. After all, the missing pin and the missing shoebox didn’t affect only my finances. Madge would suffer by their loss too.

And wrong was wrong whether we suffered or not.

I grabbed all four puzzles, and with them and my dinner I went back to the patio. I sat and took three bites to fortify myself before I held the most recent puzzle out to Tori.

“Eddie asked me to give this to you.”

She looked at her name printed on it. She actually pushed back in her chair as if it was a serpent about to bite. “He said no more,” she whispered.

“Who said no more? Eddie?”

She wrapped her arms around herself as if she were suddenly cold. “Luke.”

“Who’s Luke?”

“A—a friend.”

Some friend
. “Is he the one you owe the money?”

“What makes you think I owe money?”

“I’ll admit it’s hard to believe the way you’re spending on stuff for Chloe, but we’ve got these.” I picked up the puzzles. “Y
OU
A
RE
O
VERDUE
and P
AY
U
P
O
R
E
LSE
. So I’ll ask again: is Luke the one you owe money?”

She nodded as she made little sweat circles on the table with her soda can.

“And is he a loan shark?”

She glanced at me, then back at the circles. “He’s a legitimate businessman. He has a string of four paycheck loan shops here in Philadelphia with numbers five and six about to open.”

“The kind where you ask for a short-term loan against your next pay?” Drew asked, his voice hard. “The kind that charge exorbitant interest?”

“They don’t charge interest,” Tori said defensively. “They ask fees for processing and lending. There’s nothing illegal in that.”

“No, there’s not, at least in Pennsylvania where there is no limit placed on the fees charged.”

I was unfamiliar with shops like this and looked at Drew for more explanation.

“I know all about them because Ruthie went to them when she first left. We had a joint account, so she borrowed against my pay two weeks in the offing. She went to several of these shops and wrote checks for the amount she wanted plus the ‘fees.’”

I could hear the quotes around the w
o
rd
fees
.

“None of the shops lend large sums. They don’t have to. The loan is short term. Three to five hundred dollars is typical, though some shops let you borrow as much as fifteen hundred. Ruthie took the highest loan available at each shop, postdated all the checks she wrote for when my pay was due. On that date she was supposed to either bring in cash and redeem the checks or let them get cashed. Guess which option she chose? Suddenly I found myself owing over fifty thousand dollars, a good portion of that ‘fees.’”

He took a swallow of his soda. “The whole scheme is great for
getting repeat customers. You have to borrow to get through to the next payday. You get your check, and now you have to pay back all the loan, plus fees, and still have enough to live on until another paycheck. Oops. If you couldn’t make it on your full pay, certainly you can’t make it on your diminished pay. You have to borrow again to meet your obligations. And again and again and again. And all the while the exorbitant fees mount. They can add up to well over four hundred percent APR! Who can ever pay that back? It’s just a good thing that the huge online paycheck loan industry wasn’t nearly as developed back then as it is today. I’d have been bankrupt.”

“You don’t have to make it sound so terrible,” Tori complained.

He looked at her like she had missed something in his story. “I lost fifty thousand dollars. It was terrible.”

“I mean the business itself. Not everyone has wild wives running around writing multiple checks.”

Drew held up a hand. “You’re right. There can be times of emergency that a loan is needed, and for some reason a licensed lending agency, like a bank or credit union, won’t help you. But it’s a system that’s just asking for abuse unless there are state laws limiting interest and fees.”

“Does this Luke have shops in New Jersey?” I asked. It seemed to me that such places would be a pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow type of facility for the disordered gambler and a source of unlimited income for the owner.

Tori hesitated. “Not exactly.”

“So he is a loan shark!” How terrible is it when you feel triumphant that your sister is involved with a loan shark just because she makes you crazy? “Is that how you met him? You got yourself in debt and needed bailing out? Or wanted quick cash to gamble more?”

Tori studied her perfectly manicured, probably false fingernails. “I haven’t gambled for several months. Luke won’t let me.”

I stared at her, momentarily speechless. She was actually letting someone tell her what to do—or in this case, what not to do? This Luke must be some man. “Does he threaten you about that too?”

Tori’s eyes went back to the puzzles, and she looked a bit lost. “But he said no more.”

I studied her face, half in light spilling from the kitchen, half in night shadows. “He’s more than a friend, isn’t he?”

“I-I thought.” Her voice wobbled a bit.

I tried to imagine a romantic relationship with a man to whom I owed a large sum of money, especially one who was threatening me, and failed.

“I don’t understand why he sends them,” Tori said, still transfixed by the sheets of paper. “He knows I’ll pay. It might take longer than he wants, but he knows I’m not going anywhere.”

“Are you certain he’s the one who sent them?” It seemed logical that if she didn’t know why he sent them, maybe he didn’t.

“What?” Clearly this was a new idea.

“Are you sure Luke sent you the threats?”

She sat back and frowned in thought. The lost Tori was gone, replaced by the Tori I knew, the one who didn’t let anyone push her around. “No, I’m not. I just assumed it since he’s who I owe. But who?”

“Does he have any business enemies?” Drew asked.

“He does.” Her face turned animated. “There’s this one guy trying to muscle in on his business in Atlantic City, maybe the loan shops too, for all I know.”