“Faith showed up in my restaurant one day. She came in at lunch with a guy in a suit and came back later that evening alone. It wasn’t long before one thing led to another. She was beautiful as all get out, smart, and charming. I fell for her hook, line, and sinker. She claimed to have an MBA from Fordham, which, I found out later, was bogus, but even without that degree, she knew way more about accounting than I did. After we were married, she was only too happy to take over the bookkeeping and accounting jobs at the restaurant. That’s how she met Rick Austin. He was my financial advisor and also my best friend.
“Once they hooked up, the two of them managed to drain my bank accounts—all of them. The first I knew anything at all about it was when I wrote a check to pay the next month’s rent on the restaurant, and the damned thing bounced. That’s about the time both the IRS and the Illinois tax collectors came calling. Even though I had dutifully signed all the tax forms Faith handed me every year, she hadn’t bothered to file them, or to send along the taxes that were due, either.
“By the time I wised up, she had slapped me with a restraining order so I couldn’t even go home to get my clothes, couldn’t even get into the building to get my car. It was February in Chicago. I had no vehicle, no money, no working credit cards, and the tax men breathing down my neck. Fortunately, I was wearing the sheepskin coat I had bought two years earlier when we went to Vail on vacation. I ended up walking to the building where my former maitre d’ lived and crashed on his couch.”
“So after she wiped you out like that, I take it you hit her?” Jamison asked. “You were violent?”
“I was not,” I replied hotly, feeling my blood start to boil all over again. “I never so much as raised a hand to the woman, not once, but that didn’t keep her from claiming I had. She went crying to a local domestic violence shelter with some cock-and-bull story about how I had beaten the crap out of her. They helped her do the paperwork to take out a restraining order and helped her find a shark of an attorney to come after me. I ended up being ordered to pay five thousand a month in temporary support while she and Rick got to stay on in our condo. Of course, with the restaurant shuttered, I couldn’t make the support payments. That’s when she had me served with papers taking me to court for nonpayment.”
“What did you do?”
“The night I got served was the night I hit bottom. I was completely busted. I had gone from having everything to having less than nothing, and here she was threatening to take me to court for not sending her monthly support checks? What kind of deal is that? To drown my sorrows, I drank far too much of my former maitre d’s easily accessible booze and very nearly threw myself off his balcony. Ten stories up would have been more than enough to do the job. Luckily for me, I passed out before I could make it happen.
“The next morning, I woke up with a terrible hangover to the sound of a ringing telephone. Grandma Hudson always claimed to be psychic, and maybe she was, because she called me that morning when I was at my lowest ebb. When I had nowhere else to turn, she offered me a lifeline. She told me to wipe the slate clean—to put it all behind me, come to Arizona, and start over. I think it’s the best advice anyone has ever given me.”
“So that’s what you did?” Jamison asked. “You came here?”
“I left town, came to Arizona, and started over from scratch.”
“Never tried to get your money back?”
“That would have taken lawyers, and lawyers cost money, which I didn’t have. Besides, there was no point. From what I could tell, Faith and Rick had run through most of it by then anyway. Instead, I went to work with my grandmother here at the Roundhouse and lived rent free with her in the apartment upstairs. I filed bankruptcy to get out from under the credit card debt Faith had run up, but that didn’t fix my back taxes problem. Grandma Hudson found someone here in town, a retired IRS agent, who helped me cut a deal with the tax man. It took every penny I made for the first three years I was here to pay off the back taxes.
“The restaurant I’d owned before—the Uptown—had been more of a fine dining establishment. Grandma taught me the basics of running your ordinary blue-collar diner. When she died a few years later, she left the restaurant to me—lock, stock, and barrel. By the way, I’m still driving the car she left me, too—an early nineties vintage Honda with very low mileage.”
“And when’s the last time you saw Kather . . .” Jamison hesitated and then corrected himself. “When’s the last time you saw Faith?”
“The day the divorce was final—seven years ago, October thirty-first. It always seemed appropriate that we got divorced on Halloween. I was living in Arizona then, and she’s the one who filed. I flew into Chicago the morning of the court appearance and flew back out again that same night. On Halloween, I always allow myself a single trick-or-treat toast in the witch’s honor.”
“Faith maybe cleaned you out, but it looks like you landed on your feet,” Jamison suggested. “After all, you’ve got all this.”