A Billionaire for Christmas

Her heart was knocked around in her chest at telling him this, and she swallowed hard. “I’m boring you. You don’t want to hear all this.”

He leaned forward and said quietly, “I’m listening.”

Dree sighed. “When I walked into my apartment, it was bare. I mean, there was nothing. All my furniture, my clothes, my jewelry and computers and kitchen appliances and everything were gone. You could see the marks in the carpeting where my couch and other furniture had been, and some crumbs on the kitchen counter where I needed to clean under my toaster. When I went outside to look, my car was missing, too. That really felt like the Twilight Zone. It was like I’d been erased.”

Augustine nodded. Dree absently noted the way the strong cords of his neck moved under the open collar of his white shirt.

Her hands were fluttering in the air with nerves. “So, I called my boyfriend, Francis, because I was freaked out. I mean, of course I called my boyfriend, right? I thought I’d been robbed and had my identity stolen, or maybe I’d accidentally slipped into another dimension where I didn’t exist. But he started screaming at me that he needed money, and did I have any other credit cards or bank accounts because he needed it all right then.”

Augustine frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t, either.” Her incomprehension had turned to realization and then horror on the plane to Paris. It had been almost a fifteen-hour flight. That was a lot of time to be tied to a seat alone with one’s thoughts. “My boyfriend stole everything from me. Everything. Like, a swindle. A con job. We were together for eleven months. Eleven months is a long time. We stayed over at each other’s apartments most nights for the last six months. I’ve met his parents and his brother, and we hung out with his friends all the time. I’m not rich. I didn’t have that much to steal. He knew that. We went and met my parents on their sheep ranch. It’s a sheep ranch. It’s not even cattle. It’s nothing, and I don’t even own it. He couldn’t get at that. This couldn’t have been a long con, not for almost a year. I mean, with all of it, everything he sold and all my bank accounts and the money he withdrew from my retirement account—”

“He stole from your pension?” Augustine asked, his voice rising in dismay.

“Yes, he called HR, told them to screw the penalties for early withdrawal, and sucked it dry for everything he could, and he did the same thing with our credit cards we had together. He maxed them out with cash advances. I found the ad on Craigslist where he sold my car. He negotiated online. He got a thousand dollars for it. That’s all. It was only eight years old! With everything he stole, my whole life, he couldn’t have gotten more than thirty thousand dollars, total, and now I’m probably in debt that much again from the credit card advances. He even took money from a checking account where I put money for my sister and her kid.”

Augustine said, “Tell me about your sister.”

Her family had kept this quiet for years because they might have gotten thrown out of their church if they’d just said it outright. “Mandi got pregnant in high school. She wouldn’t tell anyone who the dad was because then his family would be in trouble, too. We sent her to live with my aunt over in Flagstaff to have the baby, and then she ‘adopted’ the kid while she was there. Nobody believes it, but they don’t have to. It’s just what we say. When her kid didn’t start talking by the time he was four, we figured out he was autistic. He’s on the far end of the spectrum, too. He’s ten now, and he’s non-verbal. She lives in Tucson so she can be nearer to doctors and get him therapy at the medical school there.”

“And you give her money?” Augustine asked.

Dree shrugged. “Someone has to. She waits tables at Applebee’s. My parents try to send her twenty bucks a month, but money is tight around the sheep ranch, like always. Raising sheep in southern New Mexico is not like having a sheep farm up in Massachusetts where you can sell overpriced sheep cheese to the rich people.”

“What’s his name?” Augustine asked her.

Dree was confused. “The guy who knocked her up?”

“Your nephew.”

“Victor.” That was weird. No one asked what her nephew’s name was. Some people were cruel about it and said it didn’t matter what his name was because, like barn cats, he wouldn’t come when he was called, anyway.

“And his last name is—” Augustine asked.

“Clark. Like mine.”

“Ah, all right.”

Oh. “I didn’t mention my last name last night, huh?”