Fix It Up - Mary Calmes Page 0,107
know about our father’s current legal situation, but we’re here to ask Nick to contribute to our father’s defense.”
“In what way?”
“Well, we have retained counsel, of course, but our lawyer has informed us that the sale of the horses will not be enough to clear the debt that’s owed. The land, as well as all our father’s personal assets, and anyone he was in business with––”
“Meaning you all,” I chimed in.
“Yes,” Beth told me. “But only that which was attached to the horse farm. My business as well as my sister’s, our husbands’…they’re not included.”
“Lucky,” I offered.
“The thing is,” Danielle explained, shooting her sister a pointed look, “if Nick would be able to cover the rest of what’s owed after the sale of the horses, then the farm and the personal assets could be left intact.”
“But isn’t your father still going to jail?”
“Yes,” she muttered, “but only for eighteen months or so, and this way––”
“Are you sure? Only eighteen months for child endangerment?” I knew better, because clearly, I was more up to date on what Sterling Madison was being charged with than his daughters were. Because yes, while the statute of limitations had, in fact, run out on child endangerment—which I found obscene to begin with—that wasn’t what the county prosecutor was charging Sterling Madison with. She was hitting the patriarch of the Madison clan with a hate crime, and that would, in fact, put him in jail for far longer than Nick’s sisters understood.
“The whole thing is sordid and regrettable,” Danielle assured me. “But our father is not being charged with any crime relating to Nick, only with fraud and animal cruelty.”
Someone had definitely missed a memo. “Are you sure?” I asked, trying not to sound snide, because her not caring about Nick was twisting my stomach into knots.
“Yes, of course,” she snapped at me.
Oh man, she was in for the shock of her life.
“But we’re not here to talk about that; we need to speak to Nick about the farm and––”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“I mean, if your father can’t own horses when he eventually gets out, what’s the point of owning a horse farm? That seems odd to me.”
Beth gestured at the man. “My husband, Alan, he’s going to run the horse farm, and my father will be a silent partner.”
There was a knock at the front door that kept me from replying to that, and moments later, another man appeared under the archway between the kitchen and living room.
“This is my husband, Gene,” Danielle told me as the man crossed the floor, and I stood up as he offered me his hand.
“Eugene Bechtel,” he told me. “And you are?”
“Locryn Barnes,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Pleasure,” he said before taking a seat in the club chair next to the recliner where Alan was sitting.
“You were saying about Alan?” I asked Danielle.
“Yes, he’s going to take over the running of––”
“Is he?”
“Of course,” she snapped at me. “And with Nick paying off the debts, and the ownership of the horse farm being transferred from our father to Alan, then the main assets are untouched, which works out best for everyone.”
“What does Nick get out of it?”
“What do you mean, what does Nick get out of it? Are you kidding?”
“No, please, enlighten me.”
“Why, he gets to put this whole wretched chapter behind him. If he doesn’t help our father, then his name will be dragged through the mud the same way—”
“Nick’s the injured party,” I apprised her. “He can’t get dragged through the mud. In the court of public opinion, he’s the hero.”
“I don’t think that’s—”
“You can check,” I told her. “Look him up on social media, in the news, and you’ll see.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. If Nick doesn’t help, our father will be ruined, utterly bankrupt. He’ll have to move in with one of us, and we’ll all be impacted.”
They wouldn’t be impacted for years from now, but again, she clearly had no idea about what charges her father was actually facing. “All of you?”
“Well, yes. Even our children.”
But I’d read everything Nick’s lawyer, the terribly capable and utterly frightening Mavis Barrington, had sent over to him, so I knew that Sterling Madison’s grandchildren would, in fact, be all right in the long term. In the short term it might suck, because they would be tied to their grandfather’s crimes, but kids were resilient. Their parents, not so much.
“My understanding is that your father set up trust funds for your kids that they can access