Annie's Rainbow - Fern Michaels [50]
“Mom’s fine. Tom is fine, too. The kids are getting big. Mona found herself some young hunk who wants to party like she does. Tom hasn’t heard from her. Tom’s a great father. I don’t want to talk about Parker Grayson, Jane. There’s nothing to tell. I hoped he would send a Christmas card, but he didn’t. I didn’t send one, either. I had lunch with Daniel Christmas week and he didn’t bring up Parker’s name. I didn’t either. We buy our coffee from him, though. Tom handles that end of it. He says I’m too emotional when it comes to Parker. I almost thought he was the one, Jane. I really did. Something didn’t, I don’t know, jell, I guess for want of a better word. Then I blew it out of the water, and now I’m going to be an old maid. I hear the baby. I have to hang up anyway. Take care, say hello to Bob for me. Bye, Jane.”
On March 1, the day after four bombs rocked Wall Street in New York City, Annie walked downstairs to the basement, where. she’d secured the Boston National Bank’s money, dressed in her plastic raincoat that zipped up the front, her hair wrapped in Saran wrap and her hands in latex gloves. No hairs or fibers were going to get anywhere near the money she was about to package up and return to the bank. All the money had gone through the washing machine not once, not -twice, but three times. She now sported a brand new General Electric washer and dryer and had switched her brand of soap just in case there was some residue left over in the machine from the money.
The box was huge, but then so was the pile of money in the three dark green trash bags. She’d worked diligently with her calculator trying to figure out, to the penny, the interest the bank lost while the money was in her possession. The biggest problem facing her now was how and where to mail the box of money once she packaged it up. If she was smart, which she wasn’t, she would drive to Boston and leave the box on the bank’s doorstep. She could leave now and drive through the night, turn around, and drive back. If she swilled coffee all day and night she could probably pull it off. Or she could drive to a distant city and take the box to the nearest post office or UPS with money taped to the box for shipping costs.
Postal authorities would probably think it was a bomb. That would call in the FBI. Damn, why was it so hard to return money? Maybe what she needed to do was make smaller boxes, boxes similar to shirt boxes that would fit into a mailbox on any street corner. If she had the right postage on each package, it would work.
Annie headed for the attic and the empty boxes she’d saved from Christmas. She panicked then. Everyone’s fingerprints were on the boxes. Tom’s, hers, the kids’, Elmo’s, her mother’s. Rosie’s pawprints were sure to be on some of them as she’d trampled through the papers and empty boxes. She was back to square one.
At ten-thirty, Annie loaded three green double-bagged lawn bags containing half of the bank’s money into the trunk of her car. She wanted to return all of it, but something perverse inside her warned her to keep the other half. For the time being. Her destination—Atlanta, Georgia. On a plain white envelope tied to the string on each bag was the message: PLEASE RETURN TO BOSTON NATIONAL BANK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. In smaller letters, she pasted the address of the bank.
It was a five-and-a-half-hour drive to Atlanta.