For the next hour the room was quiet except for the sound of envelopes being opened.
At some point, Parrish walked into the reception area and came back with an adding machine. “Good idea,” Riley said. “I suck at math. There’s a calculator in that top desk drawer there. Hand it to me, will you?”
The women began tapping away at their respective keyboards, unconsciously setting up a cadence that made the room sound like a busy corporate office.
Riley yawned loudly and glanced at her watch. “Holy crap. It’s past midnight. I’m gonna make us some coffee.”
“Good idea,” Parrish said. “Otherwise we’ll never get through all this stuff.”
* * *
They worked their way through two pots of coffee, and at 2 a.m., split a slightly stale packet of cheese crackers Riley found in the long-gone-receptionist’s desk drawer.
“Gawd,” Riley moaned, sprawling backward onto the carpet. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’ve opened past-due bills from grading contractors, architects, civil engineers, surveyors, landscape designers. And that doesn’t even include the credit card charges. It looks to me like when Wendell got one card maxed out, he’d just get himself issued another card to another corporation. By my count he had six different Visa cards, two MasterCards, three Discover cards, and two Amexes.” She consulted the legal pad she’d used to keep tally. “Over eighty thousand in credit card debt.”
“Did you get a total for the bank loans for the three corporations you checked?” Parrish asked.
“Oh, yes. It’s at six million.”
“I’ve only got three point two million for the two I looked at,” Parrish reported.
Parrish tapped a pen on the desktop. “I think all these companies Wendell set up were dummy corporations. He probably knew he couldn’t get a bank as small as Coastal Carolina to underwrite all these loans to one individual.”
“So he created five different companies to spread out the risk, and listed me as CEO, but why did he need all that money?”
“For this,” Parrish said, holding up the file folder. “It looks like he went on a spending spree, buying land here on Belle Isle. What did he want with more land?”
“Beats me,” Riley said.
“I gotta take a potty break,” Parrish said. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“That doorway in the outer office,” Riley said, pointing. “The light’s on the wall, just to the right of the sink.”
A minute later, Parrish opened the bathroom door an inch. “Hey, there’s no toilet paper or paper towels in here.”
“That’s Wendell,” Riley groused, standing up. “He always assumed toilet paper just magically appeared in a bathroom. Hang on, I’ll get some from the supply closet.”
The closet was located in the back entrance hall. As a child, Riley and Billy had loved accompanying their father to the office on Saturdays and raiding it for pens, paper, staplers, and supplies they used to play “work” in the kneehole beneath the receptionist’s desk.
She swung the door open and groped around in the dark for the pull chain to turn on the light.
The wooden shelves inside were stocked as they’d been when Riley had “shopped” there decades ago. Reams of copy paper, ink cartridges, boxes of company stationery. Sitting on the bottom shelf were a pair of long-outdated IBM Selectric typewriters, and beside them were stacks of toilet paper and paper towels. She grabbed a roll of each and was about to close the door when she saw a large framed object pushed to the back of the closet.
Riley tucked the rolls under her arm and pulled the frame from its resting place, then delivered the supplies to Parrish, who was still in the bathroom.
* * *
“Look what I found in the storeroom,” she said, when Parrish walked back into the office.
“‘Belle Isle Master Plan Phase II,’” Parrish said, standing back to look at the frame. It was a large document, five feet by three feet. “I take it you’ve never seen this before?”
“It was shoved way in the back of the supply closet. I’ve never laid eyes on it before,” Riley said. She dragged the plan over to a bare space on the outer office wall and, with effort, managed to hang it from a nail protruding from the wallboard.
“Looks like you found its former home,” Parrish said. She perched on the edge of the desk and gazed at the plan.
It showed Belle Isle’s developed south end, with areas designated as home sites, the marina, village, golf course, and shopping area. But the most detailed and ambitious portions showed the island’s now largely undeveloped north end.
“Look at this,” Riley said, gesturing at the picture. “Hotels. A second marina. An eighteen-hole golf course. Two huge retail ‘villages,’ condos, apartments. An airstrip, for God’s sake! It looks like a mini Hilton Head Island.”
“Apartments?” Parrish stood closer to the plan, her finger tracing the color-coded designations. “We’ve never had apartments on the island before.”
“Or hotels. Or parking decks, or any of this crap,” Riley said, her voice dripping disgust.
“I take it Wendell never discussed any of this with you?”
“Never! We had a knock-down, drag-out fight about the fancy boutique hotel deal he’d lined up. He knew exactly how I felt about any kind of high-density development on the north end. And cars on the island! My grandfather deeded all that land into a nature conservancy for a wildlife preserve. After the last blowup Wendell and I had over it, I thought the idea was dead.”
“Doesn’t look like it from this,” Parrish said.
“This, this … thing is ten times worse than anything I knew about,” Riley said.
“I always thought your family owned all the undeveloped land on Belle Isle.”
“We did, originally. But when it looked like the whole project would go bust, back in the thirties, my great-uncle sold off some plots on that end of the island to a couple of unsuspecting rubes from up in the mountains. Back then, it was considered the equivalent of selling ‘beach-front swampland’ to tourists. Over the years, Granddad and my father managed to buy some of it back, but there were half a dozen holdouts. Some of them eventually built houses up there, others just passed it down in the family, or bought more desirable lots mid-island and on the south end. All of those holdouts lived up in the mountains in western Carolina, or had family from there. The Holtzclaws, the Funderburkes, and the Milbanks. They were pretty clannish. Dad used to refer to them as the Bug Tussle Mafia.”
“I recognize some of those names,” Parrish said.
“The Holtzclaws go all the way back to my great-grandfather’s time,” Riley told her. “Porter Holtzclaw was a dentist, but he’s been dead for ages. Mrs. Holtzclaw was a little older than my dad. Every year he’d drive up to the mountains with a whole case of Carolina roasted peanuts, which were her favorite. He’d take her out to dinner and wine her and dine her, then try to talk her into selling out. And every year, she’d just smile and say, ‘Not yet.’”
“You know, I think I saw a file folder labeled ‘Holtzclaw,’” Parrish said, opening the middle file drawer and riffling through it.