Naked in School
The Vodou Physicist
Chapter 70 - Financial Revelations
Leblanc pulled several folders and packets out of the large envelope and looked at the two women who were still somewhat in shock.
“First, Mme Tamara David did execute a will; I have it here, and you, Dr Alexandre, are her beneficiary; you or your descendants. Having the will makes matters considerably easier when we will need to deal with tax and investment ownership issues. There’s also a letter here for you.”
He handed her a sealed envelope.
“As you can see, it’s unopened, so it must be a private message. You should read it when you’re alone. The will is simple; it conveys all of the holdings of the David family to you. They are currently managed in a trust which your grandparents had us establish; your mother drew her income from proceeds of that trust and my firm acts as the trustee. Here is a copy of the trust’s holdings as of its last general audit... ah, it’s five years ago now; no new acquisitions have been made subsequent to that and there haven’t been any liquidations either, but mergers of some of the businesses undoubtably have occurred. The information here should still be somewhat current but any valuations would need to be reassessed.”
Leblanc passed her another envelope packet.
“The trust holdings consist of investments in businesses in various locales in the Caribbean region and also include investments in various financial securities which the trust acquired using the proceeds of the business investments. Next, here’s a list of the financial institutions where the trust has maintained accounts, mainly as certificates of deposit, and this list is current as of last December; it’s updated annually since the trust’s fiscal year runs from January to December.”
He handed her another packet.
Nadine interrupted. “How is all of this paid for? I mean...”
Leblanc raised his hand. “As the trust’s managers, as the second page of that contract reads, we assess an annual management fee. Because of the amount of the trust’s assets, our fee percentage is quite small. Its amount is 0.75 percent of the valuation of its assets with an annual adjustment made for the income or profits of the businesses owned by the trust. I assure you that this is a very fair fee and my firm is honored to have been chosen to be the trustee. I hope that you will continue this relationship.”
Nadine nodded; she was still stunned by this news. She realized that the value of the contents of the safe-deposit box was a trivial amount compared to the value of this trust.
“I did read that section, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to me because I had no idea that Manman had assets in a trust,” Nadine replied. “Is there anything more? This has been an overwhelming revelation for me; I need time to assimilate this news.”
“Understood. No, that is all that I have. Of course, now that we have your contact information, we shall send you updated information about the trust’s holdings and current valuations. As both a U.S. and Haitian citizen, there are inheritance issues you’ll need to face so I recommend you retain a tax solicitor in the States if you don’t already use one. We would be pleased if you continued to retain Cabinet Toussaint, Leblanc and Baptiste to represent you here in Haiti. We have arrangements which will allow us to represent you in the various countries where your trust’s holdings are located, too. That’s all I have, now, Dr and Mlle Alexandre. And Mlle Alexandre, please do consider us to represent you for your commercial activities here in Haiti. I have both of your addresses, both postal and electronic, so we’ll be forwarding your updates regularly now and I will send a representation proposal to you, Mlle Alexandre.”
“Wait, but you don’t know my needs yet...” Tamara began.
“Au contraire,” Leblanc responded, smiling. “My contacts in the Haitian ministries have kept me informed about your meetings with them during the past week. As I mentioned, our intelligence sources in this firm are quite good. If there are no further questions, it’s been an honor and pleasure to meet you both and I hope to continue this relationship.”
They all stood and shook hands, then Nadine and Tamara departed.
“What a hell of an impressive guy,” Tamara observed as they rejoined their security team in the lobby.
“True. And I’m staggered by this news. I can’t wait to see what Manman’s letter holds. Let’s go to the hotel now instead of going out to Henri’s and Julianna’s place; we’ll go out there a few hours later.”
In their hotel room, Tamara set up her laptop for a video call to her dad while Nadine opened her mother’s letter. She read it, crying softly, as Tamara connected with Wilson.
“Hey, wasn’t expecting your call till this evening,” he told her when he answered his phone. “Let me go to my cubicle and log on to the video.”
“We’ve got unbelievable news, Dad,” Tamara told him a few minutes later when he got connected. “The lawyer here had a letter to Mom from her mother. And there’s much, much more too. Ah, Mom’s looking at me now. Mom, Dad’s on the screen now; you okay with Granmanman’s letter?”
“Hi honey,” Nadine told Wilson. “Nice to have you with me, even virtually,” she chuckled. “I could use a virtual hug right now.”
“I’ll give you a real one, Mom, looks like you need it,” Tamara said and they hugged.
“Okay, honey, let’s go in reverse order to today’s revelations,” Nadine began. “I’ll start with the law firm. The firm’s partner we met gave me a letter from Manman—among a lot of other things. I just opened the letter and it confirms everything that Tamara had told me about my Benin priest father and Manman’s time in Africa and her caring for her sick parents. She wrote all about that in this letter and there’s more details too; things that our Tamara didn’t know or recall from her memories.
“You remember that Tamara had said that Manman’s family had some wealth?”
Wilson nodded.
“That was a gross understatement, it turns out. In Manman’s letter, she apologizes for keeping that information secret, and her reason was just as our Tamara told me; it was to allow her to fit into the community she served—I told you all that. But here’s something new. Manman wrote about a very strong premonition that she had, that something very bad would soon happen to her and that she knew that she wouldn’t survive it. She wrote that she was beginning to plan for getting me the information I would need to continue her work when she was gone. Her letter says that everything would be completed right around the time I was to graduate with my degree—which was only about a month or so later, based on her letter’s date. So she was anticipating a problem and was planning for it, but apparently Vanessa moved much faster than Manman expected.”
“What did she need to prepare for?” Wilson asked.
“Here’s the stunner. It seems that the David family was quite wealthy, and not just by Haitian standards. The attorney we saw gave me some information about the family’s trust; I have that here,” she lifted the packet to show him, “and we haven’t opened it yet. The attorney said that the trust owned businesses in several countries in the Caribbean area plus a lot of stock investments. Let me do the great reveal and we’ll see what’s here.”
She opened the envelope and slid out a sheaf of papers. She saw that the top several pages contained a listing of names, addresses, followed by two numbers, all arranged in columns.
“Okay, there are five pages here, it’s a long table,” she interpreted. “There’s a name—company or business name and its address... and what are those numbers? ... mezanmi ... Haitian gourdes and U.S. dollars! Oh, the date here is from five years ... that’s right; he said that this was an old list and needed to be updated, but it essentially hasn’t changed all that much. Let me look through the list... oh, spirits, here are two banks! A bank in the Cayman Islands and one in Jamaica!”
“You own two banks?” Wilson said in disbelief.
“Apparently the trust does. The list says it’s privately owned so even if... wait, Tamara found something.”
“Yeah. I was looking through the rest of the papers in that packet. The Cayman bank, here’s the docs on that. It’s a privately held corporation and this is a certificate for a 75 percent corporate ownership. So the trust owns three-quarters of the bank’s value. The ownership of the one in Jamaica is 55 percent, same deal.”
“Jesus,” Wilson breathed, “and how many other companies are on that list?”
Nadine looked at the sheets. “Ah, about twenty-five on a page and five pages. Some seem to be pretty small, like part ownership in several jewelry store chains around the Caribbean...”
“Damn, that’s a big Caribbean industry in itself,” Wilson mused. “Anything else stand out?”
“Let me count... six. Resorts. Two in the Bahamas, one in Jamaica, one in the Caymans, one all the way over in Saint Martin in the Anguillas, and one on Roatán Island, Honduras.”
Tamara was flipping papers. “Majority ownership in all of them. I see about eight hotel chains; two of them have large holdings but not majority ones, here. The other six are at least 60 percent ownership. Jeez, Mom, this is a whole empire. It makes what I’ve put together look like small change.”
Nadine had been looking at the the five pages of ownership listings. “Most of these other company names here seem small; in U.S. dollars from five years ago, about eighty entries have less than a $100,000 valuation—that’s small in comparison to the big ones. Oh, this looks interesting. There are three yacht charter companies on the list. Looks like a lot of the trust’s holdings are tourist related. Wilson, we need a law firm with serious chops back home to advise us. I like the guy we saw here today; he’s really sharp and has good contacts. And my special sense of him is that he’s completely honest.”
“Mom, there’s that other packet,” Tamara reminded her.
“Goodness, that’s right... more to look at. This last batch was properties. He said that the other packet, which was valued as of December, has the trust’s securities and funds.”
She opened the envelope. The top sheets again contained a listing.
“Honey, the trust has a whole lot of stocks—ah, let’s see, common stock, preferred stock—what’s the difference?”
Wilson shrugged. “Don’t know...”
Tamara interjected, “I do. I spoke to Werner about stock ownership and then to my attorneys when we were setting up the corporate structures. Holders of preferred shares have priority over getting the proceeds from a company’s income—they’re paid dividends before those who own the common shares. But with preferred stock, you have no voting rights while owners of common stock do. And usually the preferred stock dividends are larger than for the common stocks.”
“Ah, that’s good to know, I suppose,” Wilson mused.
“There are a lot of corporate bonds listed here,” Nadine said. “Again, I haven’t paid much attention to what the difference is between bonds and stocks.”
“That one I know,” Wilson said. “Bonds are like loans and pay a constant interest rate so they’re a stable income source. Stocks’ values change with market conditions and the only income they produce is usually by dividends, which is the shareholder’s piece of the company’s profits, or income is generated when the shares are sold to make a profit. So if a stock’s price is lower than when you bought it, you’d lose money. Oh, there are different kinds of bonds, too. What are they called on that list?”
Tamara answered, “They all have names of companies.”
“Okay, those are corporate bonds. No government ones?”
“Not in these bond certificates here. Mom, any government names on the listing?” Tamara asked.
“Don’t see any.”
“Ah, I wonder...” Wilson asked. “There used to be a thing called ‘bearer bonds,’ but those haven’t been around for maybe forty years and most of them have no value anymore. Any of those bond certificates have coupons to clip off—oh, and are they the originals?”
Tamara shuffled the pages. “Um, no, no coupons, they’re all photocopies, and the dates aren’t before 2000. I wonder where the originals are... oh, here’s a separate bond list. The originals are kept in the law firm’s vault, it says. How do you know all that about bonds, Dad?”
“My Uncle Dan used to clip his bearer bond coupons when he lived with me and told me then that those kind of bonds, which weren’t issued in any person’s name so whoever had the certificate owned the bond, were being discontinued because of money-laundering problems. He told me that soon they’d be illegal. I’m not sure that was true, but bearer bonds don’t exist anymore.”
“There’s more here,” Nadine told them. “A bunch of bank statement summaries dated last December. The first batch is from the two banks that the trust owns, Cayman and Jamaica. There are CDs showing ... can this be real? Almost 15 million U.S. dollars! More statements, two banks in the Bahamas and these are money market accounts. There’s just shy of a million there. Two Haitian banks with money market and checking and these have, let me add it, about 275 million Haitian gourdes. That’s, um, a gourde is now around 135 HTG to the dollar...”
Tamara was calculating. “Two point zero-four million dollars, Mom.”
Wilson leaned back and sighed. “Sweetie, you might be one of the richest woman in the world, you know.”
“I really doubt that, honey. It’s a huge amount, but lots is tied up in non-liquid investments. Still, I wonder what the annual revenue stream actually amounts to. All those investments produce income. Where does that go?”
“Here’s the answer, Mom. Here’s the trust’s annual financial statement. It was at the back of the stack of bonds. The annual operating income—gross revenue isn’t used, this says, because of the diversity of the kinds of corporations held by the trust and their varied services, shown here is $101,572,458. That’s exclusive of unrealized capital gains, it says. The expenses of the entities held by the trust total $30,471,227. That means the trust is currently earning about $70 million a year before taxes, Mom! The tax info is very complex ‘cause of the multiple countries involved but it looks like it comes out to around 30 percent. That leaves about $50 million in net revenue. It looks like the trustees have been reinvesting that money in the businesses and in security purchases.”
“That’s a good custodial idea,” Wilson commented. “Given that it’s in Haiti, I’m glad that there was no skimming.”
“The partner was very straight with us,” Nadine said. “And he was clean. That’s why the firm has such a good rep.”
“Tell Dad about the safe-deposit box, Mom,” Tamara said.
Nadine startled. “Oh my! That’s right. Listen to this.”
Wilson leaned forward expectantly.
“What new surprise do you have for me now, darling?” Wilson asked. “There isn’t much that can beat what you’ve told me already.”
“You’re right, that would be hard to beat. But this was close,” Nadine affirmed. “We went there first. Had a bit of a situation when we arrived; the officials were wary of mere women wanting to access a safe-deposit box. But when that got settled, we opened the box. My family, my grandparents I assume, or their parents, didn’t trust banks much, it seems, because they had stashed a lot of U.S. money in there—but get this; the money was from maybe a hundred years ago. There was currency from 1928, but not regular currency. Gold certificates, as many as twenty of them, and each was a $5,000 note.”
“The U.S. isn’t on the gold standard any more, so...” Wilson began.
“Still legal tender, Dad. But the point is, the $5K gold note from 1928 is unique, the only one known is at the Smithsonian and it’s serial number one. We didn’t touch the stack of notes ‘cause they looked like they’d never been handled. The one on top had the number six. A lot of zeros and then six. I looked on line and found that none of these notes are known to be in private hands and the site says that they are profoundly rare. I took photos. You’ll need to get advice about what to do about this find and even come here to retrieve them.”
“You guys are right; this is another amazing experience,” Wilson told them. “Wonder how they got such high-denomination bills.”
“Um, Dad, maybe this way. That Cayman bank, from the papers we have here, was established in 1927. I’ll bet the David family was involved in its chartering and possibly those notes were involved in moving money interbank during its early years. They used those large bills to move money between banks, as the websites I looked at explained. I also read that a number of very astute investors moved a lot of money out of the States just before the 1929 market crash; they were worried about how the market had been rising crazily. So probably they got the large 1928 bills and brought them out to the Cayman bank. Or the Jamaica one; that one was chartered in 1925.”
“Sure. That makes sense.”
“There’s more,” Nadine commented. “Along with the currency, there were six bags of coins. These were twenty-dollar... what are they called?” she asked Tamara.
“Double eagles. Gold coins. We saw the ones that spilled out of a split bag and they had different designs. The dates of some of the spilled ones were between 1881 and 1930 and the coins all looked pretty new.”
“Tamara looked them up, Wilson. She found that the average price at auction for those kind of coins is around $2,000 each but some can fetch much more—what is it, Tamara? The date?”
“Yep. Also where they were made; they have marks that show that. Some versions appear to be very rare so those get big bucks when they’re sold.”
“We figure that there could be as many as 200 to 240 coins in there,” Nadine told him. “So that find, although it represents a whole lot of money, is tiny compared to the trust my family had started.”
“For sure,” Wilson agreed. “Well, I suppose taking action to do something about the safe deposit box can wait till you return.”
“Absolutely. The box contents sat there for many years; a few more weeks or months won’t matter at all,” Nadine agreed.
The rest of their conversation was about the progress that the two women had made in their plans for Haiti’s recovery. Nadine was pleased with how her team of faculty members had enthusiastically embraced the idea of using lay teachers to supplement education in the rural areas, and she was delighted with how the manbos she had spoken with accepted the idea that they could be involved with helping their communities with micro-loans.
“I did learn one major thing,” she told Wilson. “These ideas won’t work well with a bunch of volunteer people doing the field work. There needs to be organizing structures here to plan and oversee progress. Fortunately, all the money I fell into here can help us greatly. I can use a lot of trust money to create an organization.”
“You know, Mom, I bet that Kevin can help; that foundation of his that started in Indonesia might be the model you could follow here in Haiti. Kevin’s people know all about setting up and organizing grass-roots self-help teams in small villages. They’re doing that in parts of Africa now as well as in southeast Asia.”
“You’re right, darling; that’s an excellent suggestion,” Nadine smiled. “Tell your dad about your own projects.”
“Sure. Both of them. The Universite GOC’s administration’s agreed in principle to create a technical training program with a bachelor’s and associate’s degree. They liked the suggested curriculum my team put together, but, you know, its corporate management is located back in France, so they need their approval too. They said it won’t be a problem, though.
“The other project is the commercial development and that’ll take a whole lot of work since the government is so closely involved. I met with all of the players, but I’ll need to get a team working here that will be composed of legal, development, lobbying, PR, architectural, and engineering people. We need a site that’s accessible but stable and anything we’ll build will need to be designed to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes. I liked the attorney we met today and think he’d do a good job. He’s going to submit a proposal for representing us. I’m gonna have our legal team hire a stateside design-and-build company, you know, construction management, to write some manufacturing facility specs and then put them out as RFPs—requests for proposals. I’m told that process can take a year. But we need at least that amount of time to do the turbine designs.”
“Sound like you have your part well in hand, then,” Wilson told her. “You going to see Henri today?”
“We are,” Nadine said. “We were supposed to go earlier but this trust thing came up and I had to get my bearings. We’re going there for dinner. They’ve invited some friends too.”
“He might have some good technical contacts among his friends and associates, you know,” Wilson remarked. “Tell him about your tech plans, Tamara. Anyone he recommends, you can trust to be honest and do a good job.”
“Good idea, Dad.”
They said goodbyes and Nadine and Tamara prepared to go to the Benoits for dinner.
~~~~
When Nadine and Tamara returned home, their Haiti trip finished and mostly successful, Wilson picked them up from the airport.
After they had retrieved their luggage, Tamara commented, “Not like the last time I came through here. I was half expecting being stopped at Customs,” she joked.
“Glad that’s all done with,” Wilson remarked and Nadine nodded. “So you’re both good with what happened back there?”
“I think so, but sweetheart, there’s just so much work to be done. The conditions are even worse now than when we were there the last time,” Nadine lamented.
“Did Henri have any good ideas for people for you, Tamara?”
“Oh, he did. And he’s got a list of my requirements. He was so excited to be part of what I’m trying to do there,” Tamara said.
“Excellent... oh, right. I didn’t mention this to you during our chats while you were in Haiti, but your new car’s finished. They installed the accumulator. And you know? They had some engineering big-wigs come out from Detroit to look over the installation. Expect them to contact you; they are really interested in getting a piece of that contract you offered the dealership for a dozen of the batteries. They want some to play with, they told me.”
“Ha. Good. I’ll put them in touch with Dr Stafford in Cambridge,” Tamara responded. “Emma told me that this would happen; all the car makers are lining up now to get samples for their engineering people to work with. Emma told me that they’ve begun building a manufacturing facility just for the auto accumulators. She thinks it could be a billion-dollar industry in itself. And my foundation has a fifteen percent share in it!”
“Speaking of that,” Wilson said, “any idea of how much your new empire is valued, Nadine?”
“Tamara finished some calcs on the plane coming home, honey. She can tell you.”
“Dad, I told you on our video chat that the annual income amounts to about 100 million. It’s really hard valuing all the businesses that the trust owns a piece of—it’s so diversified with banks, hotels, resorts, retail operations, and service industry operations. There’s something I found called a times-revenue method which is supposed to help determine the maximum value of a company. It’s a multiple of its revenue for a defined period of time. Then there’s another method called the price-to-earnings ratio which is a multiple of the company’s earnings. There are other methods too, but because of the diversity of the businesses in the trust, it’s really hard to get even a ballpark number.
“The best guess now, and accounting for partial ownership of a lot of the holdings, is that the business assets are worth in the range of 300 million and the cash and securities amount to about 18 million in cash, 27 million in bonds, and I-don’t-know-how-much in stocks ‘cause their value fluctuates. That December report showed it was 34.6 million then. And then there’s an unknown amount from the value of what’s in the safe-deposit box. Call that value 2.5 million. Who knows, but it’s the smallest of the holdings. So I came up with about 382 million, give or take 50 million. You guys need a financial advisor real quick, you know.”
“You’re right. I already spoke to Werner and he has some people that he deals with; says they’re good. When your mom’s ready, we’ll make an appointment to see them. Oh, back to your new car. Hope you don’t mind, but Peter and I have been out joyriding in it...”
“Dad!” Tamara exclaimed and he laughed.
“No, seriously, we’ve driven it for several days and you’ll love it. Handles really well, good acceleration, and after short trips, recharges a fair amount without having to connect the charger.”
“How’s it recharge?” Tamara asked. “I don’t think I saw a charger at my Baltimore apartment.”
“Peter says that there are six charging stations in the building’s parking garage. There are a bunch at the APL; almost every building has a few parking spots with them. And a fair number of gas stations are putting them in—the high-output kind that can charge most batteries from 10 percent to 80 in about ten minutes.”
“The battery in my new car can go from 10 or 20 percent to 100 with a Level-2 charger in less than five minutes,” Tamara said.
“Yeah, I saw that in the battery spec sheets with the car. That’s a game-changer for the EV industry, you know.”
“I do, and Emma is really happy about it too.”
Westphalia University and Baltimore, Maryland: end of June
Several weeks later, Nadine was back at her regular work now after a week-long session with attorneys and a financial advisor that she had engaged, accepting a recommendation from Werner. She had also contacted Kevin to get information about how his foundation operated to provide services in the countries where it operated. Kevin had put her in touch with Janet Hadad, who was the CEO of the Coris Foundation back in London. The two women discussed forming an exploratory committee to see how Nadine and her trust could set up an operation similar to the Coris Foundation’s local agencies in Haiti, and Nadine had her local law firm begin the process of coordinating with her Haitian attorney to create a charitable foundation under U.S. corporate law which would function to allow the foundation to fund aid operations in Haiti, taking advantage of the best available tax treatments.
And Tamara was back at her dissertation research. She was designing several of the experiments which would show some of the additional characteristics of the G-force field to further support her theory that the force was derived from the dark energy of the universe. And she was continuing to collaborate on many research projects which her discoveries had spawned at Hopkins, including an interesting one she had visualized which involved a flexible polymer that, when activated by a set of tiny G-force coils, could be made to expand or contract. She needed such a device because the standard electromagnetic solenoid or mechanical relay couldn’t function properly in G-force fields.
In mid-July, Tamara got a phone call from Denise.
“Hey, girlfriend,” Denise began, “our moving date is all settled and Kevin and I will be up in Maryland on the 24th to close on the house Peter’s granddad found for us. The movers will be coming two days later.”
“Cool! I heard from Peter that Werner had found you something.”
“He sure did. We bought it without even a visit needed; can you believe that? The agent had a complete video walkthrough and Kevin had a local engineer Werner recommended go through the place carefully. It’s exactly what we wanted.”
“Yeah, something big. Why six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and over 7,000 square feet? That’s a castle, not a house.”
“It’s got three separate living areas, each with its own kitchen and two bedrooms. There’s a great room and a central commercial kitchen. It was a large house that was made larger to turn it into a bed and breakfast but the owners retired and nobody else wanted to run a B and B. There’s a pool, a bathhouse, and about five acres too, and a little river is on one boundary.”
“Jeez. Where’s it at?”
“Near Upper Marlboro. About four miles from Westphalia.”
“Nice, give you short commutes.”
“Yeah, like we have in Atlanta. We had much longer commutes when we lived in London,” Denise said. “So one reason why we got a large place is Amelia and Jeremy. Amelia’s coming here to Westphalia too. And Jeremy.”
“Damn, that’s awesome,” Tamara exclaimed. “What’s their deal?”
“Amelia was offered a full ride scholarship and in addition to that, under the umbrella of that Columbia Institute of Economics there, she’ll be involved in setting up a program for training cultural missions in third-world countries, just like she’s been doing for the Coris Foundation back in London, but on a much larger scale.”
“Oh, now that’s something my mom will be really interested in hearing about. She’s trying to do that in Haiti right now, actually, and has had several discussions with Janet Hadad about that very thing.”
“Ha. Small world, it seems,” Denise remarked. “Anyway, about Jeremy, he was offered a full-ride uni scholarship at Westphalia together with an internship in international law and relations in their new institute. He’ll be starting in a pre-law program; he plans to go on to law school and specialize in the international law area. They’ll be living with us. And we offered Cindy and Tom an apartment in the house. When Cindy does her medical fellowship, she wants to remain in this area and is thinking about living with us too. We all get along so well—that is, us with Cindy and us with Amelia. We’d have to see about Cindy and Amelia, but I’d expect that they’d get along well too.
“I didn’t offer you and Peter an apartment ‘cause you told me that you have other plans.”
“I do. It’s a planned community in the Davidsonville area. Near the research facility and school I want to build. I’d like to have my home there.”
“Our place isn’t far from there; I checked the map,” Denise said.
“I think I know where Upper Marlboro is; there’s a rodeo arena near there.”
“That’s the place. We’re north of there.”
“I checked my calendar—Peter and I can come help when you move. Where are you staying before you move in?”
“We’re squatting in Cindy and Tom’s place. It’s okay; they have the space. Her brother and sister-in-law stay with them a fair amount,” Denise told her.
“Oh, you need to tell me about them.”
Denise laughed. “They’re two more awesome people. They still live here in Atlanta. Roger is in the graduate program here at Avery in education and Ayame’s in med school. And sure, offers of help are gladly accepted.”
“You mentioned Jeremy coming,” Tamara prompted. “When?”
“Right, so Amelia and Jeremy are arriving on the 26th. Usually Westphalia has a mandatory residence requirement for freshmen; that would have meant that they’d need to live apart and that was a non-starter. So the U.K. embassy worked something out. They’re British knights, after all,” she laughed. “I’m sure that Gerston told the university what to do.”
“Be nice seeing them again, You guys too. Hey, so can you make time for the resort? This year we’ll be going from August 9 to the 24th.”
“Hmm, you mentioned that back in mid-May,” Denise replied. “Kevin and I can do that but we need to be back at Westphalia that Monday. I did ask Cindy about her being able to come and she said that the 24th is at the end of both of their vacations; they’re getting back from visiting their folks in North Carolina right around the ninth. But what about Amelia and Jeremy? They’ll be here then.”
“Oh, sure, they’re invited too. Have they ever been?” Tamara asked.
“To a nudist facility? Well, not to my knowledge, but we had them at a really, really hot tantric massage session with a group of uni kids when we were working out how to teach the Avery Program; everyone was starkers, and those two were just fine with that.”
“Ha, you’ve picked up some Brit lingo,” Tamara chuckled.
“Sure did; their expressions seem more natural and descriptive, somehow. Earthy,” Denise explained.
“Oh hey, they’re both high school, right? Under eighteen?” Tamara asked. “The resort checks for that.”
“Let me think. Jeremy’s birthday’s early in the year... February or March, and he’s just finished Year 12. I know he didn’t skip any grades, so he’s eighteen right now. I do know about Amelia. She was born in October—oh yeah, that’ll be her eighteenth this October.”
“She needs a permission letter from her parents then,” Tamara told her.
“Right... um, say, you know? Elliot, her father, appointed Kevin and me as her legal guardians for when she was in London and those appointment papers had no end date. I still have them; came across them when I was packing. So we’re good; Kevin and I can give permission.”
“Those papers—how official are they?”
“Pretty damned impressive, I’d say. It was certified by an Indonesian court and has government stamps and seals attached and it was co-certified by the British embassy there, with their own seals embossed. So it has the approval of two governments. Believe me, it looks official. No doubt about that. It’s why I didn’t dump it when Elliot moved to London—hated to throw that gorgeous document away. Besides, it has fond memories for me. Amelia’s like a sister to me.”
“Aww, that’s so sweet. Okay, we’ll plan for your coming. Six people. Are you okay staying in a unit together?”
“Well, we’ve stayed together with Cindy and Tom—also with Amelia—we should be just fine.”
“What I’ll do is have a bunker camper trailer put on the Winsbergs’ site. There’s a hookup there and they use one when the entire clan is there together. They have twelve bedrooms with the house and cabins there, so this’ll give the extra beds we’ll need.”
“How much will that cost—not that it would be a problem, but we can pay our share,” Denise asked.
Tamara laughed. “You guys—Kevin that is—isn’t the only rich guy in this bunch. I’m catching up and might even pass him by, the way my battery invention’s taking off. Soon the other inventions will be too. And Mom just learned that her family has boatloads of money—she even owns two banks! We had no idea. Her mom had kept it a secret but she was killed before she could tell my mom.”
“Shit, that’s some story. I’d like to hear more of it.”
“Sure. When we get together, we’ll all have lots of stories to swap,” Tamara told her. “We’ll have a super time together.”
“Looking forward to that. Great talking to ya, girlfriend! Can’t wait to see you in person again.”
“Same here.”
They disconnected and Tamara sat back in thought.
It’s like I have a new sister—like Barbara—Denise is such a cool person.
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