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“You’re not supposed to have Merodie’s file. Should we move on?”
G. K. took a deep breath and said, “Let’s,” with the exhale.
“Merodie has no income. However, there is this.” I quoted the crime lab report. “ ‘One white, number ten envelope, blank, containing one personal check dated Saturday, One August, in the amount of four thousand, one hundred sixty-six dollars and sixty-seven cents made out to Merodie Davies and drawn on an account owned by Priscilla St. Ana, Woodbury, MN.’”
“The envelope seized by the crime lab,” G. K. said.
“Two things. The first is the date. August first. That’s when most people get paid, the first and the fifteenth of the month. Second, the amount. Forty-one hundred sixty-six dollars and sixty-seven cents is an odd number. It doesn’t really fit anything unless you multiply it by twelve, and then we have a nice round figure. Fifty thousand dollars.”
“From that you deduce what?”
“Priscilla St. Ana is paying Merodie’s way.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I think we should find out, don’t you?”
“Merodie won’t like it.”
“We won’t tell her.”
“What do we know about Priscilla so far?”
“We know that Ms. St. Ana has a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Minnesota and a master’s in business from the University of St. Thomas. She’s an active partner in a property acquisition and investment firm. Apparently, she and her partners identify under-performing businesses, buy a controlling interest, turn them around, and then sell them for obscene profits. Sometimes they’re invited to do this by the company’s directors; sometimes they’re not. In addition, Priscilla is on the boards of several charities and nonprofit organizations. She’s not married. However, she is the guardian of a sixteen-year-old niece named Silk St. Ana, who has a good shot to make the U.S. team in the next Summer Olympics as a diver. There’s a nice piece about both of them in Women’s Business Minnesota from a couple of months back.”
I glanced at the magazine article while I spoke. In the photo I’d downloaded Priscilla appeared very regal, very proud, with golden hair piled high on her head like a crown. There was also a shot of the girl. She was sitting on a diving board, hugging her knees to her chest. The cutline read Olympic hopeful Silk St. Ana enjoys a quiet moment at the family’s backyard swimming pool.
“Apparently, Priscilla inherited St. Ana Medical, a pharmaceutical company, when her father drowned in his swimming pool about eighteen years ago. Her mother died a year before her father. Traffic accident. Priscilla took over the company and ran it for a couple of years. She sold it after her younger brother—what’s his name? Here it is. Robert St. Ana. Priscilla sold the business after her brother died in another traffic accident.”
“She’s taken a beating, hasn’t she?” G. K. said.
“Seems so. Anyway, she went back to school to get her MBA, helped found the investment firm, and is now flying high. Makes you wonder what you’re doing with your own life, doesn’t it?”
“No, but it does make me wonder why a woman like her is involved with the likes of Merodie Davies.”
“I’m working on it,” I told her.
People outside Minnesota think of the Twin Cities as just two municipalities—St. Paul and Minneapolis—sitting across the Mississippi River from each other. In reality, it’s a sprawling amalgamation of 192 cities interwoven into a single tapestry by an intricate and occasionally overwhelming system of U.S., state, and county highways. There were over 2,950 miles in all the last time the Department of Transportation bothered to count, and the 2.7 million people who drive those roads slip from one city’s limits to another so frequently and so casually that over the decades the borders have become blurred. It’s the reason I became lost in Anoka while looking for an address in neighboring Coon Rapids; it’s why I now live in Falcon Heights when I had vowed never to leave St. Paul.
It’s also the reason why I carry a Hudson’s Twin Cities atlas in my car. I know St. Paul and Minneapolis well enough, but when you start getting into our sprawling suburbs, you either use a map or suffer the indignity of stopping at gas stations for directions. I used the Hudson to find the address of Merodie’s mother in Mounds View, and even then I got turned around.
As it turned out, Sharon Davies lived at the far end of a dead-end street in a one-story pale green stucco bungalow located on a bluff overlooking Highway 10. The house and a spotty, weed-infested lawn were both surrounded by a three-foot-high Cyclone fence. There was a front door, but there was no sidewalk leading to it, which was just as well since the only opening in the fence faced the back door. Before I could reach it, a voice rumbled out through the screened window.
“What do you want?”
“Mrs. Davies?”