Page 9 of The Beachside Cafe 6
Cheyenne sat back, staring at her mother. She said nothing.
“I called the man after I watched the DVD. In the letter, he said it was a will. But it wasn’t really a will.”
Cheyenne frowned. “If it wasn’t a will, what was it?” Her voice sounded alarmed.
“It wasn’t anything bad,” Jaymee hurried to say. “It was… more of a confession. I want you to watch it. And then I want to ask you what we should do with the money he took from his victims. He wants us to have it. John says it’s ours. Cameron says we could do a lot of good with that money. It is technically ours.”
“They don’t want it? The police I mean? For, like, investigatory purposes?”
Jaymee shook her head. “The money is ours. It was taken from criminals. My only thought was that we should give some to Carmine. Make him the rich man he would have been if IDL and Doug hadn’t tried to destroy his life.”
“Well, at least you and Cam rebuilt those apartment buildings he was living in. That was a real nice thing to do for this little California town of Grand Bay.”
Jaymee smiled at her. “Thank you, honey. Look, let’s take the laptop out on the veranda and you can watch the video out there. Then we can talk more about this, okay?”
Cheyenne nodded.
Jaymee had brought her laptop with the DVD already in it to the kitchen with her because she had planned to have Cheyenne see it as soon as she got there. She slipped off the bar stool and retrieved it from the counter.
Cheyenne followed her outside and they got comfortable in the long deck chairs sitting next to each other.
“You go ahead and watch it,” Jaymee said. “I’ll wait.”
Jaymee watched her daughter’s face change when she saw her father’s face on the computer screen. Tears came to her eyes as she listened to what he had to say. Jaymee wondered if it really was a good idea to let Cheyenne see it.
Just before the video ended, Jaymee felt like she’d done the right thing letting her daughter see it. It may have hurt her to see her dad when he was still alive but some of the things he said were things she needed to hear. Jaymee would be devastated if Cheyenne got a complex or felt abandoned or unloved because of what her father turned out to be like.
She wished he had shown them both love over the years. Then maybe she would believe his motives weren’t anything but evil. She didn’t particularly care that his other victims were perpetrators of crime themselves, hurting hundreds, if not thousands, of defenseless patients and test subjects. Most of those people were unaware they were being experimented on. People had died and been seriously injured.
Doug could have put a stop to it but he didn’t. His greed won out. Despite what he claimed in the video, Jaymee felt like he wasn’t really putting that money aside for his family, for her and Cheyenne. It wasn’t until he felt like he was either going to get caught or hurt that he made the video. If he’d really meant any of it, he would have tried to be more loving like he said he would.
But instead, he continued his practice of blackmail and was killed for it.
Greed is a terrible thing, Jaymee thought.
When the video was over, Cheyenne slowly closed the laptop. She sat there for a moment before leaning to the side to put the laptop on a small white iron table that sat between herself and her mother.
“I see why you wanted me to watch that, Mom. Even though he didn’t really want me to see it. I… I guess I did need to hear him say he loved me one more time. I think I can let him go after seeing that. I really appreciate you letting me watch it.”
“You are very important to me, honey,” Jaymee said. “I want you to be happy. And now that this has come up, I want your opinion on what we should do.” She didn’t believe Doug was truly repentant for his bad ways. If he had been, he would have stopped. He would have revealed what he knew about IDL and the experiments they were carrying out.
“What we should do with the money?” Cheyenne asked.
“If we should even take the money,” Jaymee replied.
Cheyenne gazed at her for a moment before moving her eyes out over the horizon. Jaymee felt a cool breeze blow over her arms and face. She smelled the ocean on the air. It was one of the best things about living on the coast of California. She was so close to the water, surf and sand. It was a beautiful place to live.
“I don’t know why we wouldn’t take the money, Mom,” Cheyenne said, her voice confident. “I think we can do a lot of good with it.”
“That’s what Cameron said,” Jaymee replied.
“I know. You told me. And I think he’s right. We don’t want this money in the hands of the government. They’ll just blow it. We could actually do something good with it. Right here in Grand Bay, probably. I know Cameron would have some good ideas for what to do. And yeah, giving Carmine some to set him up for the rest of his life is also a good idea. How much did you want to give him? How much is it in the first place?”
“It’s 17 and a half million dollars,” Jaymee said, dropping the number and gazing at her daughter to see the response. Stunned, Cheyenne stared at her mother.
“Seventeen and a half million dollars…” she said slowly. “Yeah. We can do a whole lot of good with that.”
SEVEN
