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  Movie Mogul Mama

  Heist Ladies Book 3

  Copyright © 2018 Connie Shelton

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  Chapter 1

  Gracie Nelson folded the last of the five pink cloth napkins, checked the table centerpiece—a mass of casual flowers in shades of vivid purple, yellow, and red—and turned toward the kitchen. Her cell phone buzzed on the countertop. Her mother’s fifth text message of the day. Gracie ignored it.

  A three-tiered plate held cupcakes, each frosted lavishly and decorated in the same reds and purples as the flower arrangement. She carried it to the table, frowning. The pink napkins were all wrong—too pastel and not at all in keeping with Amber’s personality. She set the cakes in place and picked up the napkins. She owned a set of bright yellow ones; maybe she could find them before the guests arrived. A tight pain formed between her eyebrows, and the thought crossed her mind that this was the worst day of the year for her to have agreed to host a party.

  But it was done. Amber Zeckis’s birthday happened to coincide with the long-awaited cooling trend the Phoenix weather folks had been promising for weeks, and Gracie had leaped at the chance to invite her four closest friends to celebrate with an autumn afternoon of poolside chat. Their last real gathering had been nearly eight weeks ago when, at the height of the triple-digit temperatures, all they could think of for an activity was to see the newest Drew Barrymore chick-flick at the mall theater with the most ridiculous air conditioning. Bundled in sweaters and lap blankets, they’d laughed for two hours. Phoenix area businesses seemed to think if it was 120 outside, it should be 60 degrees inside—there was simply no reasonable way to dress for the contrast, so everyone carried jackets when they went anywhere. Gracie needed to leave early that day to pick up her kids from day camp, and she’d missed the Heist Ladies’ social camaraderie.

  Her phone buzzed again; this time the text was from Scott. She would have to deal with this issue—soon. But the doorbell rang and saved her having to make an immediate decision.

  Sandy Warner stood at the door, a brightly wrapped package in hand. Her blonde hair curved neatly behind her earlobes and she wore an attractive blue tunic top Gracie hadn’t seen before. Aside from her hair being slightly longer, something else was different. She started to ask if Sandy had lost weight, but the arrival of another car at the curb distracted both of them.

  “Mary’s got a new car,” Sandy commented. “Boy, a lot can happen during the long, hot summer, can’t it?” She chuckled, but Gracie didn’t pick up the mood.

  “I guess the fitness business is going well,” she said.

  Mary Holbrook had joined the group fifteen months earlier when she’d been ripped off by her ex-husband, who left her almost penniless, and the Ladies had helped her get back her share. Resemblance to the dumpy, homeless woman who’d entered Sandy’s bank that day was completely gone. The happy side effect of Mary’s newfound confidence was business ownership, a trendy haircut, and a fit new body.

  “Hey, you two!” Mary shouted. She trotted up the sidewalk and gave Sandy a hug before the two of them entered Gracie’s foyer.

  Gracie stepped aside and ushered them through to the patio, where sandwiches and chilled Sangria waited. Mary and Sandy set their gifts on a side table; Gracie told them to help themselves to the wine while she attended to the front door once again.

  Amber was bouncing on her toes when Gracie opened the door. The youngest of the group, her petite frame conveyed nearly electrical energy. “Woo-hoo!” she said. “Be sure to congratulate Pen.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the tall blonde who was locking her Mercedes at the curb.

  “I heard that,” Penelope Fitzpatrick said. She balanced a huge box while shifting her purse strap to her left shoulder.

  “What’s this about?” Gracie asked.

  “I just finished my latest manuscript and hit the Send button. It’s off to my editor.”

  “Ooh, I can hardly wait!” Gracie remembered the first time she’d met her favorite novelist at a luncheon gathering where Sandy introduced them. It was at the beginning of the first case the Heist Ladies had undertaken. Since then, she’d become slightly less star-struck around dignified, British Pen but she still ran out to buy each new book the moment it came out. She congratulated Pen on the book and Amber on this being her birthday.

  “Hey, I just think it’s cool you guys would take an afternoon off work to celebrate.” Amber’s dark, springy curls bounced as she practically danced her way out to the back deck where Sandy and Mary had already poured sangria into five glasses.

  “I just assumed everyone would be up for wine,” Sandy said. “An afternoon away from the bank is celebration enough for me.”

  Mary handed a glass to the birthday girl. “Hey, I’m always up for someone else’s birthday party. We can ignore mine though, thank you very much.”

  Pen laughed. “I outrank you by a good twenty years, Mary, and I could be Amber’s grandmother, so let’s don’t talk about ages and forgetting birthdays. I’m actually flattered you lot want to hang out with me.”

  “Absolutely.” Gracie loved the easy banter among the friends who had grown so close in such a short time. “And, hey, what’s this new bling, Amber?”

  With her hair pulled on top of her head, it was hard to miss the sparkle of diamond earrings.

  “A little birthday thing from my parents. They’re abroad this week, and this was their way of saying sorry for not visiting me.” She preened a little. “Gorgeous, huh. Although I wouldn’t have minded going to Australia with them instead.”

  Pen raised her wine glass. “Here’s to our birthday girl, to our lovely hostess, and to great friends.”

  “And to your new book,” Gracie added. “Just because you have a dozen of them doesn’t mean this one isn’t just as special as all the others.”

  Five glasses clicked. Five shouts of “Cheers!” and some hugs. Gracie heard the phone ring in the kitchen.

  “Sorry, I’ve been ignoring this all morning. Maybe I’d better take it. Help yourselves to the food, and there’s plenty more sangria if we polish off that pitcher.”

  She hurried to the marble counter where she’d set her cell phone earlier. Six missed calls showed on the screen, and the current one was from her husband—again. She picked it up.

  “Honey, sorry. I’ve been busy getting the party ready for Amber.”

  “Gracie, you’d better sit down. It isn’t good news. I’ve just got off the phone for the third time with Ken Yearout.”

  The loan manager at their credit union. Although she had a pretty good idea what Scott was about to say, she sat.

  Chapter 2

  “Gracie? What the hell?” Mary was the first to spot Gracie as she walked through the dining room and came out the sliding door to the patio. The others looked toward her.

  Gracie jammed the tissue into the pocket of her white capris. Amber’s birthday party really wasn’t the place to get into this.

  “Your eyes are red and your nose looks like a clown-face reject,” Mary said. Hard to believe she’d once been shy about speaking out. “You were gone ten minutes and something has obviously happened.”

  Pen reached out and took her hand, drawing Gracie to sit beside her on the cushioned swing.

  “Tell us about it,” Sandy suggested. “Maybe we can help.”

  Gracie felt her eyes well up again. She blinked hard and took a deep breath. She didn’t see any way out of the mess at this point.

  “My mother’s going to lose her house and take all our savings along with it,” she said.

  “Oh, no.”

  “How the hell did that happen?” Mary burst out.

  “Mary!” Sandy put a restrai
ning hand on her friend’s arm. “It’s not really our business.”

  Gracie sniffed and tried for a smile. “No, it’s okay. I wish I could say someone did this to us.” A glance at Mary. “It’s not as if I have a rotten ex, like yours. Scott has been so great, and the whole thing is my fault.”

  Sandy’s banking experience had revealed all types of financial mishaps, but from what she knew of Scott and Gracie Nelson and their personal situation, she couldn’t imagine their falling into any of the usual traps. People typically either bought way more than they could afford, or they encountered a terrible setback such as the loss of a job—neither was the case here—or they borrowed against their equity and spent the cash on an extravagant vacation or some other luxury, then regretted it later. She knew of nothing like that in Gracie’s life. She and Scott were the epitome of stable, settled suburban life—he with a lucrative career, she a stay-home mom, and two high-achieving kids in school. What could Gracie be talking about?

  “How is it your fault?” Amber asked. The question seemed pointed but was asked with such genuine concern, no one took exception.

  “Well, you’ve already heard the bottom line, so I might as well start at the beginning,” Gracie said.

  She smiled when Mary handed her a fresh glass of wine. The others settled on chairs all around.

  “So, it started a couple of years ago with my sister. Hannah is three years older than me, two kids, divorced from a guy who did okay paying his child support until he had a bad accident and never went back to work. Hannah’s got a decent job but they live in California. Things are expensive there, and she didn’t make enough to stay afloat without Jay’s help. Two years ago she moved in with Mom, since her kids weren’t in school yet. Daycare cost was eating her alive, so they decided Mom would babysit and they’d pool their resources until Hannah figured out what to do next. She has applications in with companies all over the country, but so far nothing’s worked out.”

  A ripple of impatience crossed Amber’s smooth forehead as she clearly wished Gracie would get into the nitty-gritty.

  “You have to know Hannah and Mom to get the full picture,” Gracie said. “My sister has always been a dreamer. It’s why she married a movie stuntman. Jay is gorgeous but way too daredevil to be married with kids. He made great money when he worked, but Hannah never did consider what might happen to all of them if he didn’t. Mom and Dad had some money—he did well for himself when he started a restaurant, opened several more, franchised the whole lot of them and sold to a corporation. But they spent like crazy, too. Lots of overseas travel, big house, even bigger vacation house, fast cars, loose women …”

  She blushed. “Sorry, that’s more than you wanted to know. Long story short, Dad took off with a French model and continued the high life. Mom tried to keep up her lifestyle but soon ran low on funds. To keep living that way, she got a huge mortgage on her house and tried various investments to keep up with the payments. Some worked out, others didn’t.”

  “I get the feeling you and Scott got yourselves pulled into one of those?” Pen asked the question gently.

  “Not directly, thank goodness.” Gracie realized her wine glass was empty. She set it on a side table. “What happened was, one of Mom’s less-brilliant ideas basically left her strapped. By then she had Hannah and two toddlers living with her. When she begged me to help out, I asked Scott. We borrowed against our retirement funds and gave Mom the cash. We could afford it and she assured me she would soon get her money back and would repay us with interest and then some.”

  “But she didn’t.” Mary recognized desperation. She’d been there herself.

  “She didn’t. She still swears she’ll get her investment back, but Hannah’s told me differently. The money is most likely gone forever.” Her voice went a little ragged. “Even that setback wouldn’t have killed us, but now her mortgage company has merged with another and they’re calling in the loan. They want it all, in full, in thirty days.”

  Penelope had been quiet. “Let’s talk about this. I’d like to help.”

  “Pen, I can’t let you …”

  “Temporarily, Gracie. I know you don’t want a handout. But we can’t see your family booted from their home. Let me see what I can do. I’ll talk to this loan manager … perhaps a portion of the loan amount would satisfy him …?”

  Sandy looked skeptical. “I don’t know about that. This mortgage thing has blown up. It’s made the national news, and your mother isn’t the only one affected.”

  Gracie’s face crumpled, but Pen put a reassuring hand on her knee. “We’ll work it out.”

  The older woman stood and walked the length of the patio, then turned and approached the group once more.

  “We’ll sort it out,” Pen announced, “then we’ll catch up with this investment firm, or whoever it is, and we’ll get your mother’s money so she can keep her home and repay you. We’ve done it before, we can do it again.”

  Amber sent Mary a high-five.

  Gracie spoke up. “When I met you, I mentioned one of my reasons for helping was because I felt my family had been taken in by someone. I thought joining all of you to solve crimes where con artists had taken advantage of an innocent person would somehow … maybe … make up for it. I really wasn’t thinking of dragging you all into my personal troubles.”

  “We are not being dragged,” Pen said. “We are leaping in.”

  “Scott and I don’t even know what kind of deal it was or who this guy is that Mom ‘invested’ her money with.”

  Sandy took a deep breath. “What do you know about it, Gracie?”

  “It’s got something to do with producing a movie.”

  “Wait—your mother’s in California. So this is a Hollywood movie? Are there famous people involved?”

  “I think so,” Gracie said. “Are you all really sure about—”

  Amber’s eyes sparkled. “Well, yeah. Absolutely sure.”

  Mary paced, appearing ready to punch someone.

  Sandy’s conservative banker face was on.

  Pen seemed stoic. “I’m sure I’ve untangled much trickier plots in my novels. I say the Heist Ladies get back to work!”

  Chapter 3

  Birthday gifts forgotten, the Ladies fortified themselves with chicken salad sandwiches and iced tea, deciding the rest of the sangria was best left for later.

  “Let’s see what you got in writing,” Sandy said.

  “That would be a good start,” Gracie admitted. “I’ll get my file.”

  By the time the others had helped themselves to chocolate cupcakes with mounds of frosting, she had returned with a slender folder. Sandy wiped her fingers on her napkin and opened the file. Her mouth twisted in concentration as she paged through the sheets.

  “These look like standard mortgage documents,” she said, looking up. “They asked only the most cursory of questions about where the money would go, but I don’t see anything naming this Hollywood connection.”

  Gracie looked ill at ease. “I realize now that I should have asked a lot more questions. Scott and I just took Mom’s word for it that she desperately needed the cash. And Hannah played on my sympathy for her and her kids. I just couldn’t envision all of them suddenly homeless.”

  “Okay, we can’t focus on emotions or blame,” Pen said. “We need facts. Can you call your mother and get something for us to go on?”

  “If we had the name of the person who accepted her money, even the name of the film they were financing … I can fill in a lot of the other details,” Amber said.

  The other four looked at her. Their young cohort had unearthed amazing amounts of data in their previous cases. Mary and Sandy were nodding.

  Gracie picked up her phone and tapped a number. The voice at the other end went on nearly five minutes while Gracie nodded and inserted an occasional half-word. To the other women it sounded like chipmunk chatter. Amber raised her palms in a what gesture and Gracie took charge.

  “Mom. Mom! I know all that.
Listen a second, will you? I think I have a way to help us all out of the situation, but I need information from you.”

  She put the phone on speaker and set it on the table. The others gathered closer.

  “Mom, I’ve got some friends here who know how to track down money. Sandy, Pen, Amber, and Mary are on the line. If you can tell us something about this investment you got into …”

  “Oh, hi, girls!” came a smoke-roughened voice from the speaker. “I’m Janice.”

  Greetings all around.

  “Janice, can you tell us who you invested with? Gracie says it’s something to do with a movie production. We need some names and addresses if you have them,” Sandy said.

  “Well, how it all started was through a woman at my club. A bunch of us play bridge on Thursdays—well, every alternate Thursday, actually.”

  Sandy’s gaze went skyward. “Is your friend the one you gave the money to? That’s what we really need to know. Who took your money?”

  “Oh. I see Gracie has already confided some things.”

  Pen took charge. “Your home and your daughter’s savings are at risk, Mrs.—um, Janice. She needs to act now, and we’ve offered to help. If she can’t get help through her friends, she may need to report this to the authorities. Various agencies regulate investments, but they tend to act slowly. We want to help now.” Emphasis on the final word was subtle, but effective.

  “Oh, yes, well all right.”

  “Start at the beginning, but try not to digress,” Pen said.

  “Right.” They could almost imagine Janice sitting up straighter, taking them seriously. “My friend from the club had invested in an earlier film and she was thrilled with the results. The movie had apparently done very well at the box office and her returns were to start coming in at any time.”

  Pen’s alarm meter began a subtle buzz. Returns had not actually been paid to the friend.

  Janice continued. “Patty introduced me to her producer at a party. Nice man—so personable. Young, as they all are out here, and really good-looking. He actually thought I was Patty’s daughter—of course he told me that when she wasn’t standing there.”