A Fortune to Die For (White Oak - Mafia Series Book 1) (6 page)

The old woman remained quiet as she showed Meg to her large and welcoming bedroom with a private bath. Meg set down her computer case and entered the bathroom, smiling at the Jacuzzi.

Nothing sounded better than taking a bath and crawling into bed wearing her favorite soft PJ’s…

“Oh, crap. My suitcase is in the car!”

Helen held out her hand. “Give me your keys. Tess and I will bring it in. You’re exhausted.”

“I can get it.”

Helen gripped her arm. “I have no doubt, but I need to make amends for hurting you.”

“You gave me a compliment. You had no way of knowing your words would make me cry.”

“True, but it hurt you all the same, and so I wish to save you the experience of walking in pitch blackness to retrieve your suitcase. I’m used to it. You’re not. It might give you nightmares.”

The set of the old woman’s shoulders left no doubt of her determination to have her way.

So Meg handed over the key. “It’s in the trunk, and it has wheelies.”

“What the hell are wheelies? Never mind, I’m sure Tess will know.” Helen hurried from the room as Meg pulled back the cheerful bedspread. She sat down and fingered the sheets. God, they felt fabulous. No doubt a count in the thousands.

She still bought cheap, course sheets. But why? Why did she continue to live like she was poor when everyone knew she wasn’t? Her self-imposed poverty didn’t make others like her better. It just got her scratchy sheets that kept her up all night.

She was still petting the soft sheets when Tess returned with her luggage. “Grams couldn’t believe how easy it was to roll this along. She’s going to order luggage with wheelies in the morning just in case she needs to run away one day.” Tess placed the case on the luggage rack and faced Meg. “You aren’t mad at Grams, are you?”

“No,” she stated with conviction. “Helen’s opening my eyes to many things. Like these sheets.”

Tess laughed and sat beside her, petting the sheets, too. “Grams doesn’t believe in wasting money, but she insists having high-count bedding is one of the best buys available. She gives everyone good sheets for their birthdays. My step-mother keeps telling Grams her boys want the latest expensive game, but every year they get high-count linen. So each year my dad and step-mother have a big fight over the matter, and the sheets end up in the trash. I rescue them, of course.” She smiled happily as she continued. “So, I end up with two new twins and one queen-size set each year. The twins will fit my bed at college.”

“What are you studying?”

“Forest management.” She snorted softly. “I probably have more practical experience than my teachers, but if I want proper credentials, I have to dance the dance.”

“How long do you expect to be in school?”

Tess pulled on her dark braid running down her left shoulder. “Six years to get my undergrad and Master’s degree. Hopefully, somewhere along the way, they’ll start teaching me stuff I don’t already know.”

“And then what?”

With a heavy sigh, she replied, “Not sure. I’ll probably have to teach. The forests are disappearing like crazy, and men are presumed better at chain-sawing, so it’s rare for a woman to get a shot at actual forest management.”

“How much does the top forest management guy make?”

“For the head guy, eighty to a hundred thousand dollars. But starting salary can be as low as twenty.”

“And how much will your schooling cost?”

Tess groaned. “Now you sound like my father.”

Meg suspected an alignment with Tess’s father was not a good thing. “Sorry, I’m in finance. I habitually evaluate all returns to their investment.”

“I’m going to Michigan Tech. With room and board, I’m borrowing thirty-five thousand a year. Crazy, huh?”

“You’re talking to an avid hiker. So this sounds like a great life. I just worry about you drowning in debt.”

“Father says I’ll regret this stupidity for the rest of my life.”

“How are your grades?”

“Straight A’s, but if you’re thinking of scholarships, forget it. Merit scholarships are only about four thousand dollars, and they all go to the guys.”

“You’re talking about the school’s money. But there are scholarships out there independent of schools. I’ll probe about and see what I can find.”

Tess smiled. “It would be great if you find one, but I seriously doubt you will. My guidance counselor warned me I was in for an upstream paddle.”

“You’ve been getting lots of encouragement, I gather,” she teased.

Tess snorted. “There is not a person on the face of this earth who thinks I’m doing the right thing.”

“Not even Helen?”

“Oh, she thinks it’s a wonderful career, but she’s outraged at the debt I’m racking up.”

“It’ll be no more than a mortgage on a house. People survive those.”

“Thank you! It’s an excellent comparison, which I’m going to use from now on. Nobody calls you crazy when you buy a house.” She gave Meg an unexpected hug and then stood up. “We better get to sleep. Grams will be waking us up in the middle of the night so we can see the sunrise. It’ll seem cruel at the time, but it’ll be worth it.”

With her smiling assurance, the young lady left Meg’s room.

Never had Meg wanted to help anyone more than Tess, but how? Create a scholarship like she planned to do with Andy or tie it into her plans for Helen’s fabulous woods?

If Tess was so knowledgeable and competent, why didn’t Helen just leave the property to her? The girl was charming, but perhaps she was just playing Meg to perfection. Tess needed money for her tuition, and she knew Meg had money to spare.

Damn it! She hated thinking this way. Was thinking the worst about people a part of the Lottery Curse she’d be stuck with forever?

She sure as hell hoped not.

Tomorrow she’d know if the girl was as good as Meg thought. She’d committed to nothing, and Tess could still sink or swim on her ow
n
.

Tess was right about both the cruelty of being woken early
and
it being worthwhile. For a moment, the Mississippi river seemed to be on fire as a ball of white peeked over the horizon and spread its blazing rays across the water. The trees shifted from ominous black to vibrant greens, the water from black to red-orange. As the sun rose above the horizon, the muddy Mississippi waters transformed into a heavy copper brown.

After a healthy breakfast of oatmeal with walnuts and fruits, the three women returned to their rooms to ready for their hike. Since the Feds insisted Meg could take only one small suitcase on the plane, setting her priorities over what to pack had been paramount. Proper hiking gear was number one on her list.

Thus, she had sacrificed clothes space to carry her hip-pack, three RTE meals, a mosquito net, fishing string and hooks, a thermal blanket, an ace bandage, and her hiking boots. Which meant after she packed her hiking clothes, she only had room for one “wrinkle proof suit”, five pairs of undergarments and socks, and her favorite PJs.

Fortunately, yesterday, when she’d stopped for gas at the Indian Casino, she’d been able to replace many items she couldn’t carry on the plane. The “no fly” items included a Swiss army knife, matches in a waterproof tube, a compass, a small shovel, a hatchet, and two stainless steel water containers now filled with water. If something were to happen and she couldn’t make it out of the woods, she wanted to have everything she needed to survive.

Meg quickly donned her hiking clothes, then filled the hip-pack with her survival gear. Soon, she had everything fitted inside except for the shovel and ax, which she attached to external loops, one on each hip.

Satisfied with her gear, she sat down and laced up her water-resistant, toe-reinforced, mid-ankle hiking boots. After tucking in the legs of her bug-resistant pants into the top of the boots and zipping up the knee-high gaiters to protect her lower legs from whatever came her way, she was ready.

Excited to be hiking again, she grabbed her floppy hat and headed to the living room where both Tess and Helen waited, dressed much the same.

They both smiled and Helen softly whispered to Tess, “Told you.”

“Nice gear!” Tess said. “We can take on anything now.”

There was an exit from the lower part of the house that didn’t require going through the closet. A good thing, given Tess wore a full-size backpack. Helen had a hip-pack similar to hers.

The trail literally began at the door.

Meg breathed in with great pleasure as she followed the two women into the woods. It had been a long time—four years to be precise—since she’d been hiking without the stress of fearing some deranged person might take her out any second.

The forest seemed ancient compared to the woods she normally hiked. Almost all the trees had light gray bark, standing nearly one hundred and fifty feet with massive branches, creating a shaded canopy. “How old are these trees?”

“Most are a hundred and fifty to two hundred years old,” Helen replied. “Though a few may be hitting four hundred.” She pointed to a thick, straight trunk five or six feet in diameter. “This beauty’s pushing four.”

“The white oak’s heartwood is denser and thus less susceptible to fungal diseases,” Tess explained, “thus it’s a long-lived tree if it can avoid being cut down. It’s highly valued as lumber because it's closed cellular structure makes it rot-resistant. This tree would sell for three or four thousand dollars at final market.”

Helen huffed at Tess’s last comment.

Meg quickly did the math and frowned. Even if the average tree brought a price of $1000, assuming 200 trees per acre, they were sitting on four billion dollars’ worth of trees. No wonder Helen’s relatives wanted her to sell. They weren’t after her land; they wanted to harvest the trees.

Which explained why Helen searched for a person who loved hiking and had more money than she ever wanted. Anyone else would sacrifice the forest for wealth beyond their imagination.

After trekking for two hours through the forest, Meg was in love. The well-marked and maintained trails took them up and down hills, along ridges and into swamps where white oak timber was used to make long-lasting boardwalks.

Helen thumped her heel on the boardwalk. “When nature takes down a tree, I have a friend who flies in here with a helicopter, takes out the trunk once Tess removes the branches, and airlifts it out of the woods to his lumber mill in LaMotte. Then he flies the cut lumber back and drops it where Tess wants.”

“Costs a fortune,” Tess added.

Returning to her estimated value of the tree, Meg was about to drop the price significantly due to the difficulty of retrieving the wood but realized if land developers leveled the forest as they went, they would build roads to extract the trees. In fact, the most profitable way would be to raze this land into a level flat bed of dirt and replant grass and trees on planned subdivisions, destroying everything special about this place.

The cries of a large variety of birds filled the air in the meadow. “What types of animals live here?”

Tess tilted her head. “We’ve got the usual suspects—raccoon, deer, otters, and mink. Up in the hills, I’ve seen the prints of a mountain lion. It may have been passing through, or it may have decided to make this home. I always look for signs of it when I hike, but mountain lions are extremely cautious of humans and normally keep their distance.

“How about bears?” Meg asked.

“According to Wildlife officials, there are no bears in Iowa.”

“None?” she challenged, remembering Andy telling her about a bear.

Helen snorted. “We’ve got one giant bear in my woods. Must have come down from Minnesota.”

Helen picked up a stick and threw it off the path. “Bears and mountain lions aren’t legally recognized in Iowa, so they have no protection from hunters. I’ve plastered these woods with
no hunting
warnings, but they show up here anyway. Not much I can do to stop them.”

“If this were a state park, would it have better protection?” Meg asked.

“Couldn’t have worse,” Helen muttered. “What do you think, Tess?”

“If it became a popular place to hike, the rangers would have to crack down on hunters. Otherwise, they’d risk the lives of the hikers. Truth is, the state only takes care of the parks where they get heavy foot traffic. Which means this place would have to have better roads into the woods, parking lots, and restroom facilities.”

Meg was pretty sure the trees cut to make room for the parking lots and picnic areas would pay for the roads and port-o-johns.

And maybe even the advertising to encourage people to come. Otherwise, this place was ready. These trails were better maintained than any she’d ever walked.

For their lunch stop, Helen chose a flat-topped hill. On it were two odd-shaped mounds facing the Mississippi River. As Meg studied them closer, she began to see images. “Are these shaped like animals?”

Helen patted her arm. “Yes, they are.”

Tess explained. “I believe these were built by the same prehistoric Indians who built the Effigy Mounds in Harpers Ferry around 800 B.C. Their mound building is a regional culture not seen elsewhere. The two main symbols of the mound builders are the bear, which you can see here, and the bird, which appears to be a pelican.

Once Tess named the bird, Meg could see it clearly. “Have you ever invited archeologists up here?”

“No, I haven’t,” Helen snapped. “If I did, I’d have the state telling me I can’t walk on my own property. And they’d probably want to confiscate my land for another park.”

Her response worried Meg. What if Helen hated her plan for these woods?

***

It turned out a good percentage of the acreage was flood lands filled with swamp white oaks, which only grew to about seventy feet and three feet in diameter. Thus, the value of the trees might be just two billion, but still the trees were worth far more than the land.

When they returned to the cabin later in the evening, Helen cursed as she checked her phone. “Damn it! Jeffrey’s sitting on the front porch.” She eyed Meg. “Probably looking for you.” She shook her head. “Tess, you and Meg go inside. I’ll climb up the side and see to my son.”

Once Tess and Meg were inside, the young woman chewed her bottom lip. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go up and referee those two.”

“Go on. I’ve got stuff to do. I gather you have internet here?”

Tess grinned. “Grams bought satellite internet when I came to live here so I could be homeschooled. It’s not secured, so you can tap right in.” She then went outside and followed the same steep path Tess took around the house.

Meg went to her room and booted up her computer. After making a few calls to firm up numbers, she made several changes to the proposal she planned to present to Helen.

She’d just finished reading the revised document when someone knocked softly on the door. Upon opening the door, a diminished version of the older woman she’d hiked with looked up at her with tired eyes. “Mind if I come in?”

Meg stepped back so Helen could enter.

The old woman bee-lined to the rocking chair and sat down. “Money can ruin people beyond recognition. When Jeffrey was a little boy…a sweeter more generous fellow you’d never meet. And he remained so until Sara got her claws in him. Now all he thinks about is money…specifically, how to get more of it.”

Meg suspected this was nothing new, but something was. Helen appeared devastated. “Has something happened?”

“Evidently, his wife has run them deep into debt, which he covered by selling to a land developer his rights to my land when I die.”

“Oh…”

“Don’t worry. It won’t hold up in court. He sold the fellow nothing. He has no rights to my land and, had the developer bothered to ask me, I would have told him so. I got my lawyer on the phone, and he laid it out to Jeffrey in black and white. Unfortunately, by claiming he had rights, Jeffrey has committed fraud and could go to jail when this all comes to light.”

“I understand. He’s your son, and you love him. Well, at least, I’ve had a great day and great company hiking your forest while—” Meg caught herself and stopped talking.

Helen finished her sentence. “While my beautiful woods still exist, you mean.”

Meg went to her and knelt before her, gripping her hand. “This has to be breaking your heart.”

“It is. I talk a tough story, but sometimes it’s hard to practice what I preach.”

Meg nodded in agreement, remembering the guilt she suffered when she refused to cover her relatives’ new million dollar mortgages they had foolishly signed.

“What can I do to help?”

The old woman stared at her a long moment. “You could buy these woods. Although I will need to charge a bit more than previously thought to cover Jeffrey’s foolishness.”

“How much?”

“A hundred and thirty million for all the land but not this house. Tess gets the house. With the extra money, I can clean up Jeffrey’s sixty million dollar mess and still have enough to give everyone else the amount I had planned to.”

“And what about you?”

Helen gripped her hand. “This is just between you and me…”

Meg nodded.

“I have cancer. As soon as I settle matters fairly and secure the future of my woods, I plan to return to the burial mounds I showed you today, put a gun to my head, and go to heaven.”

Helen’s response, spoken with such quiet determination and certainty, sent a shiver down Meg’s spine.

“Tess…” Meg couldn’t imagine how the young girl would survive it.

“She is the only one in my family who loves me more than my money. I’ve discussed this matter with her before. So she might be hurt I didn’t say goodbye, but she won’t be surprised by my exit. She even knows what I want done with my ashes.”

Helen gripped Meg’s arm. “So it comes down to you. Are you willing to buy my land and keep it safe, and then find someone to do the same when you die?”

“I will, if you want, but I think I’ve got a better idea.”

Helen’s brow furrowed. “I’m listening.”

Over the next hour, Meg went through her twenty-page presentation. When she ended, Helen’s brow remained furrowed. “Why on earth did you waste the time writing this thing up?”

Her question was like a javelin piercing Meg’s hopes. “Then you hate the idea.”

“No, I like it very much. But clearly you’ve spent a great deal of time and research putting this proposal together when all you had to do was talk to me.”

Relief burst from Meg’s lungs as she realized the old woman’s objection. “The proposal will be needed when I begin discussions with the state. They have to agree to my requirements before I’ll donate the land to them.”

Helen chuckled. “Then I take back my scold. You were very wise to create this document. Without clear instructions, they will muck it all up.” She then leaned back. “But you didn’t know Tess until yesterday. So how did she get into your proposal?”

“We talked about her desire to go into Forestry management, and honestly, not only do I think she’ll be great at it, given how much she already knows, but there is no one who I trust to care for your land more than her.”