Combining Riches (Riches to Rags Book 2) Read online

  Now, I start what is probably the last journey of my life, and my heart is filled with hope. Two young women, Melinda, who just turned twenty-seven, and Christine, who just turned twenty-six, had found each other in a most unique way, and now they had found it in their hearts to provide a home for me to live out my final days. My only child died while giving birth to her second child, and I never thought I would want children again. But I have taken these two girls into my heart as if they were from my own womb.

  And now that I have a reason to get up every morning, it was time to brush my gray hair back from my face, and picked up my kitten, Pluto, and go downstairs for breakfast. Together we rode the elevator down to the first floor and walked over to the breakfast nook beside the kitchen. I set the cat down in front of her food dish and opened a can of kitten food. Of course the sound of the lid popping open, brought Blackie, Chris’s kitten, running in meowing to be fed also. I made sure they were both taken care of before I put the coffee on to brew and the bread in the toaster. I’m an old-fashioned girl, who prefers plain white bread over muffins or bagels. As I set a few eggs on to boil, I think of my girls, and how they will be upset that I’m in the kitchen, which to them is work.

  Melinda, with a touch of the wild in her, is tall and slender, with short black hair, and dark eyes that sparkle like black diamonds when she laughs. For all her uninhibited ways, Melinda has a caring heart that she rarely shows others. I have seen it many times, like when she had that elevator specially built, just for me to use when I moved in. My old knees will be forever grateful to her for that.

  Christine, my introspective girl, with long sandy blond hair and cherub cheeks that almost hide her green eyes, also has a caring heart that she wears on her sleeves. She carries a terrible weight on her shoulders though, and I fear it may crush her someday if she doesn’t do something about it.

  Both girls come shuffling in, moaning and groaning, acting as if they were the zombies in one of my bad movies.

  “You girls look worn out. Didn’t you sleep well last night?” I asked, as I picked up a cup and pour some coffee into it for them.

  “Not really,” Chris said, after gulping a generous portion of her coffee down, as if that would help somehow. “We both had nightmares that woke us up. Unfortunately, I remember mine so clearly that I’m still shaken by it.”

  “Would you like to tell me, dear?” I was intrigued, and sat down beside her. “You might feel better about it if you spoke it out loud.”

  “Let Melinda go first, she woke up screaming from hers.”

  Melinda was opening a soft drink, and she came up to the table carrying it and a bowl of frosted flakes.

  “Well, so did you, Chris,” Melinda said. “But sure, I’ll tell you, Norma. Maybe you can decipher what it means. In my dream I saw a castle that had a drawbridge, a moat, and the whole nine yards. I thought it was kind of neat at first, until a storm rolled in behind it, turning everything dark and scary. Anyway, I went inside and eventually ended up in a throne room where my father, dressed in a robe, and wearing a crown, sat on his throne, and I’m not talking about a toilet either. Anyway, he tells me to follow him down to the dungeon where my mother, also wearing a robe and crown, was sitting on the floor, crying over a pile of gold coins. The odd part is that she would never sit on a floor, especially a dirty, damp, musty-smelling floor. And then my father pointed to a mark on the wall, as if something had been there, and I couldn’t figure out what he meant, and of course, he wouldn’t tell me.”

  I knew what it meant. “Perhaps he was showing you how high the gold had once been?”

  “Oh, yeah, that makes sense now,” Melinda replied. “Anyway, he took me outside and pulled his pockets out to show me they were empty, too. Okay, so, they were empty, but he uses credit cards, so again, I didn’t get what he was trying to say to me. Then suddenly we were in Vegas and all my cars and toys were there one minute and gone the next. The only thing left was that small pile of coins my mother had been crying over. That’s when I woke up screaming.”

  “And what do you think your dream meant, dear?” I asked her, wondering if we thought the same thing.

  Melinda looked apprehensive. “Well, I think it means I’m about to lose all my money.”

  “Perhaps. We never know truly what a nightmare is trying to tell us, but we do know that there is a grain of truth in all dreams, good and bad. Perhaps you were being shown what could happen if you don’t take care to intervene before it does.”

  “You mean take it as a sign?”

  “Of a fashion, yes. You were rich, then for a month you were poor by your own choice, and now you are rich again. For the first time in your life, you learned what it felt like to have nothing, and perhaps your dream is trying to tell you that it still could be a possibility.”

  “Norma, even during the Great Depression, my family held onto their riches, and even managed to increase them. What could possibly cause me to lose all that money they worked so hard to collect over the centuries?”

  Now it was my time to contemplate what that might be, and I could only think of one thing. “The one thing your ancestors had, that you do not, was children.”

  Melinda choked on her coffee and spit it out narrowly missing Chris. “Fuck that!” she shouted.

  I hid behind my coffee cup and chuckled. “Yes, I believe that would be how you would conceive a child, dear.”

  Chris laughed at Melinda, who was wiping the coffee off her face.

  “I would make a horrible mother and quite honestly, have no desire to become one,” Melinda said, and then looked at Chris.

  Chris shook her head. “Well don’t look at me, I’m not having it for you.”

  “In my day, you either had children or were shunned as unwomanly.” I smiled at their shocked faces. “I know because the housewives of my hometown would envy me my presumed celebrity status in one breath and condemn my empty womb in another. I can tell you this, when I finally did give birth to my daughter, it was the happiest day of my life. But if you don’t want to carry a tiny life inside of you for nine months, then there’s always adoption.”

  “That’s it!” Melinda had a wild look in her eyes. “I’ll have my eggs frozen and in twenty or thirty years, when I’m ready to have kids, I’ll pay a surrogate to pop them out for me, and a nanny to raise them. That should make my father happy.”

  Chris and I looked at each other, and Chris shook her head. I nodded in agreement. Melinda still had much to learn about buying her way out of trouble.

  While Melinda congratulated herself on her cleverness, I looked at Chris. “And what about you, Chris, what was your dream about?”

  Chris sat her cup down and looked at me with tired eyes. “I already know what my dream was trying to tell me, so there’s really no reason to bore everyone with it.”

  “I had to tell mine, so ‘fess up. What rattled you out of bed this morning, and why wasn’t it me?” Melinda teased.

  Chris looked at her. “Actually, it was you. Well, a small part of the dream was about you.”

  “Oh, do tell,” said Melinda.

  “I was dreaming that I was in a forest of sunflowers, and you were there, but as Blackie, the old Blackie, who drank too much. You tried to ply me with alcohol and pull me up the sunflower stairs. To where, I’m not sure.”

  I was curious. “Why didn’t you go with her, Chris?”

  “Because, she wasn’t Melinda, the sober, understanding woman sitting with us now. She was Blackie, the egg-snot hating billionairess who drank too much. I knew that where ever she was trying to take me couldn’t be good.”

  Melinda looked at Chris with apprehension in her eyes. “Does that mean that you still don’t trust me?”

  Chris patted her hand. “No. It means that I don’t trust Blackie, that over-inflated alter ego of yours. I trust you, Melinda, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

  I could see the relief wash across Melinda’s face, and that gave me a warm feeling inside.

  �
�And the other part of your dream, Chris?” I asked.

  Chris lowered her head as if to hide her shame.

  “I dreamed about the man I put in a wheelchair. I was in a room full of mirrors and every one of them showed a wheelchair and a whiskey bottle. And the sound of…” she looked down and wrapped her fingers around her coffee cup, “the sickening sound of my car hitting the man.”

  Her hands trembled, making the cup clank against the table. No one spoke for a moment, and I was afraid the silence would add to her guilt. But I could see the light of restitution that Chris could not.

  “Have you had this dream before, dear?”

  “Yes, many times,” she replied. “Especially in the beginning. Of course Melinda, I mean Blackie, wasn’t in them then. Just the mirrors.”

  “Blackie is an extension of your drinking. It’s trying to pull you back in, but you’re too smart for its tricks now. The mirrors are only a reflection of the guilt you carry, and I believe that until you face your victim and seek absolution, you will never have peace of mind.”

  “I’m guilty, I don’t deserve to have my guilt absolved,” Chris said dejectedly.

  “Everyone deserves a second chance to set things right and make them better. Your victim deserves a chance to help you do just that. Why wouldn’t you want to?” I challenged her, hoping she would want to find another way to live with her guilt.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to, Norma, it’s just that… I mean, it was always my plan to seek him out as soon as I had the money to, but now—”

  “What does money have to do with anything? Wasn’t he already paid off?”

  Chris flinched at my question, and I regretted asking it in that fashion.

  “Yes, he was, but my parents won’t tell me who he is, because they had an all-inclusive confidential clause added to the settlement. If I want to find him, I would have to do it on my own.”

  “No, you don’t. I’ll help you,” said Melinda.

  “As will I.” I wasn’t sure how I could help, but I was certainly willing to, if only to give support.

  “Thank you both, but I’m not sure what I should do now. At first, after I had sobered up and got a job as a waitress, my plan was to save enough money to hire a private detective to look for him.”

  Melinda asked, “Isn’t that still an option?”

  “I don’t know. It’s complicated now because of Meg. It would be cruel of me to ask her for help, and just as cruel to ask her competitor.”

  I had not met Meg Bumgartner, who was a private investigator, but I knew that Chris’s father had hired her to watch over Chris, after he had cast her out of his home. I can only imagine the kind of courage it must have taken, for both Chris and her father, during those trying times.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand. Meg is a private investigator. Why is it then that she can’t help?”

  Chris lowered her head again, and Melinda answered for her. “Meg’s younger sister, Bonnie, was Chris’s best childhood friend. Bonnie was killed by a drunk driver and to put it simply, Meg is adamant about hating the man, and I think rightly so. She knows about Chris’s drinking problem, of course, but it would be awkward to ask her for help considering the reason for it.”

  I saw another side to the outcome. “On the contrary. I believe it would be beneficial to Meg as well. That kind of animosity is bad for the soul. By helping you, Chris, she might find some solace.”

  “Do you really think she would be willing to help me find him?”

  I honestly didn’t know.

  “You know there’s no love lost between Meg and I,” Melinda answered before I could say anything. “But I believe she wants what’s best for you, and if that means putting her feelings aside to help you, I think she would do it.”

  Chris had a look of fear in her eyes, and I wondered if she had the courage to go through with it. I knew that she still had some uncertainties about Melinda and that’s to be expected. But if she can’t move forward, past her misgivings, both with Melinda and with Meg, then she will never have the mettle to face her victim, and that would cripple her already fragile spirit.

  Chapter Two

  The Price Is Right — Chris Livingston

  Over the holidays, I had challenged Melinda to leave her old life behind and live with me in a rundown apartment building on the bad side of town, where she would have to work for a living. It was a test to see if she could stop drinking and give up her arrogant ways. She has since stopped drinking, but we’re still working on her arrogance.

  The first time I met her, she was a spoiled rich brat, more so than I had ever been, and I wanted nothing to do with her. But she persisted, and I finally relented because I could see her heart behind her egotism. Two strangers living together for a month, in a tiny apartment where the bedroom was also the living room, leads to either falling in love, or strangling each other. We did both.

  Now we have a new challenge to see if we can find a balance between being dirt poor and filthy rich. I believed that to equalize both, we must give it away. Not all of the money, of course, but enough to make a difference in someone’s life. So we will combine our lives as a married couple would do, although I’m not ready to make that lifelong commitment yet, and work together to strengthen our resolve and change our reputations. We both have dreadful reputations as self-indulgent rich girls who drank too much and partied too hard, Melinda more so than me, in that she was known nationally for her lewdness, and we both needed to work at changing people’s perspectives about us. But first, we had to get ourselves settled into our new home.

  I remember the day we bought this house as if it were yesterday. Although I would have preferred getting a condo in the city, Melinda’s father owned a mansion just outside of Memphis that overlooked the Mississippi River. Melinda wasn’t even aware that he had a home in Memphis, but apparently he had bought it to use when he was in town on business. A week later, he decided it wasn’t close enough to town, so he put it up for sale, and now when he’s in town, he stays in a suite at his hotel. At first, I thought that we would rent the mansion from him, but when he offered it to Melinda at quite a bit less than it was worth, we decided to take a look at it. Melinda assured me that the only reason he would cut the price was for the tax write off. I’d like to think it was also because she was his daughter.

  The mansion, which was much larger than my parents’ house, was two stories with a wing on either side of the main house. And where my parent’s home was modern, this one was designed in more of a Victorian Queen Anne tradition. It reminded me of a gingerbread house because of its steeply pitched gable roof and bargeboard fixtures. The main house had a large porch that wrapped around the front half and looked quite charming with its turned posts and elaborate brackets under the eaves. I could easily imagine myself sitting on that porch, waving to the riverboat captain as he greeted me with a blare of his steam whistle.

  I remember that entering the main house was like entering another century. A large chandelier hung down from the ceiling, illuminating the mahogany spiraled staircase on the right, the vestibule, with a mahogany table in the center, and the portrait of Melinda’s great-great-grandfather hanging on the wall on the left. And though I would never voice my displeasure at the scary man in the hideous frame, I did already have an idea of what I wanted to replace it with, if we bought the house, and I was already hoping that we would.

  On the first floor of the main house, behind the vestibule, was the great room. On the front, right side of the vestibule, was the formal family room, with a guest bathroom. The overly large kitchen was in the far left back corner, with a butler’s pantry and a breakfast nook wedged in-between it. And then there was the formal dining room, which took up the front left side of the main house, and had a beautiful, oblong crystal chandelier centered over the cherry-wood table with leather-back chairs.

  The master bedroom was located on the second floor of the main house and had its own fireplace, master bathroom, two walk-in cl
osets and a floor-to-ceiling window that faced the river. And adjacent to the bedroom was the sauna and hot tub room. Very convenient. A study-office was also adjacent to the bedroom on the opposite side, and there was a guest room on that floor at the far end of the wing.

  The first floor of the west wing was where the grand ballroom was at. Opulence would be an understatement. The room reminded me a lot of the ballroom in Melinda’s parents’ home in San Francisco. She had taken me there last November, before we started our challenge. This ballroom was half the size and had an ornate chandelier hanging over a small mahogany table in the center of the room, much like the vestibule. There was plenty of room for dancing and eating, and I found myself fantasizing that Melinda was waltzing me across the shiny wooden floor.

  Above the ballroom, on the second level, were four bedrooms and a large foyer. Melinda had the brilliant idea that we could convert the foyer into a living room and move Norma up there. I think she would like that.

  The east wing first floor had been converted into an entertainment wing, with a theater, a game room, which Melinda assured me she would be moving her toys in first thing, and a health room, where I could start working out, like I always said I would, but never did. The second floor had two guest bedrooms, a large bathroom, and three rooms for the staff. The staff rooms were more like studio apartments in that they were small, but had a full bath, kitchenette, bedroom and living room.

  I wasn’t too keen on having staff underfoot, but then I certainly wasn’t too excited about having to clean that huge house by myself, either.

  Christening Our New Home — Melinda Blackstone and Chris Livingston

  “Chris, remember my brilliant idea on how to christen our new home?”