30DaystoSyn (46 page)

She looked away. “And I’m on that bad side
big-time. I still think this is a mistake, Jonny. This could very well be a
train wreck in the making.”

“We’ll sort it,” he said and flicked on his
turn signal, glancing in the rearview mirror as he did. “Think of it as a
judder bar, love.”

“Did he ever tell you about totaling the
Lamborghini?”

She shook her head.

“I guessed not. He doesn’t like to talk
about it but it bears telling ‘cause it relates to what Jake did. Just don’t
tell him I told you.”

“Okay.”

“It was after the whole thing with
Sheridan and he’d been in a foul mood for weeks. So he was cruising
around—looking for trouble if you ask me—when he sees this Lamborghini
dealership. He buys one. Day he took delivery of it, he decides to take it for
a test drive. Trouble is, he gets on I-75 and just keeps on going. Drove all
the way down to Tifton before he gets off, heads over to Albany. Why is anyone’s
guess. He gets over there and first thing right off the bat gets a speeding
ticket. Now, he’s really pissed and he’s tooling around the town and comes up
on this driving course out in the back of beyond.”

“Where?”

“Boondocks,” he explained. “It was a
homemade course for redneck driver’s training or some shit like that. The
course is wibbly-wobbly—you know curving—and he gets it in his pig shit for
brains head that he’s going to drive the course as fast as he can. Stupid shit.
He gets going flat out on that thing and all of a sudden there are a series of
judder bars in the road.”

“Roadblocks?”

He shook his head. “You call ‘em speed
bumps over here and these weren’t just the garden variety judder bars. These
were homemade and they were too tall and had too sharp an angle. They sure as
shit weren’t designed for sports cars with low ground clearance even at very
slow speeds. Now instead of swerving around these things—which the cops later
told us a driver was meant to do—pig brains drove right over them. He lost
control of the car, it flipped over about five times and came to rest upside
down in a fucking creek bed six-hundred yards from the track.”

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Lucky for Synnie, there were some
hunters out looking for quail who heard the noise and came running out of the
woods. If they hadn’t been there, Synnie would have drowned. He had a
concussion, a broken arm, a broken pelvis and both legs were broken. He was in
a coma for six days then spent weeks in the hospital down there and was in a
wheelchair for six more weeks.”

“He’s lucky to be alive.”

“True that, but it served as a wakeup
call for him in more ways than one. He had a lot of time to lay there and think
and when he got back to Atlanta, he called Jake in to draw him up a will.”

The sign read WindLass Estates. A security
hut was situated in the middle of two winding red-brick-paved lanes that were
blocked by rolling gates closing off each. Eight-foot-tall closed-perimeter
brick walls fanned out from the rolling gates. Atop the walls were tri-wing
aluminum vanes that were no doubt razor sharp.

“Rotating anti-climbing spikes,” Jonny
said.

“That’s some serious security,” she said.

“There are some seriously wealthy people
who live here,” Jonny said, pulling up to the guard booth. He rolled down his
window. “Morning, Alton.”

“Morning, Mr. Taunoa,” the very fit-looking
guard replied. He held out a portable palm-print scanner that looked like a
small computer pad.

Jonny extended his right hand outside the
window and placed his palm on the screen. “The lady with me has her print on
file as well.”

“Very good. Would you pass this over to
her?”

Jonny took the pad, held it for her to
place her palm on the screen. The pad beeped as it did when Jonny used it and
she pulled her hand back. Glancing down as she did, she saw her name on the
screen with a large green check beside it.

“Welcome to WindLass, Miss Wynth,” the
guard said, putting his hand to his cap.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’ll be seeing a lot of her, I imagine,”
Jonny said. “She’s the boss’s missus.”

She stared at Jonny as the heavy wrought
iron gate began to slide back slowly. “Why did you tell him that?”

“‘Cause it’s true,” he said.

“He may disagree,” she told him. “Beside
which, I am not his missus.”

“You don’t need to be married to be his
missus, love,” he replied. “And stop borrowing trouble. You’re overthinking
this thing. I told you we’d sort it so stop worrying.”

“He was worried about what would happen
to the company if something should happen to him. He might be a chop short a
barbie at times but he’s not a fool. He realized if he’d been left paralyzed or
brain dead because of that stupid shit he pulled in South Georgia, there would
have been one helluva power play by a whole bunch of people. Visions of
corporate raiders stepping in to fuck up his company scared the hell out of
him. Thus the will.

“What he did was this—he divided up
everything he owned between the four of us. Me, Craigie, Spike and Jake. Each
of us would get twenty-five percent of the company but only one of us would run
it. Be the chief operating officer. The others would be on the board and have
equal voting rights. In case of a tie—you know, two of us vote one way and the
other two vote another—Kit would have the deciding vote. He is named in the
will but I don’t know what provisions Synnie made for him or any of the other
employees. At that time, MI was worth about five bil. Today, it’s worth a
helluva lot more than that.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” she said. “He
provided for those he cared about. I take it his mother isn’t in the will.”

“She was but she isn’t now,” he said. “He
had it changed about a week or so ago and that’s when the shit hit the fan.”

The serpentine lane that wound its way
through the beautiful setting had her rubbernecking from one side of the road
to the other. Through the towering pines and spreading live oaks and amidst the
bare branches of what looked to be Japanese magnolia, forsythia and numerous
other flowering trees, she caught glimpses of stately homes. The houses were
situated well back from the road and each they passed had a gate denying access
up the driveway. There were no clear views of the homes, only fleeting
impressions of immense wealth.

“Gorgeous subdivision,” she commented.

“If you were to look at it from the
chopper, the whole shebang looks like a giant golf ball on a tee. The houses
circle the golf ball and the ball itself is a man-made lake. All but one of the
seven homes is situated on three acres of land that backs up to the man-made
lake.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “That other house
is his and its sitting on twice as much land.”

“Four times as much,” he replied. “Imagine
the top part of the golf ball and that’s him.”

“He owns the subdivision, doesn’t he?”

He just looked at her and grinned.

“That way he can control who lives out
here.”

He nodded.

“Do any of you?”

“Fuck no!” he said. “We couldn’t afford a
doorknob on the dunny out here, love! There is a state senator, one big-wig
judge, the CEO of a major land-development company, an A-list movie star, a
country music superstar, and a race car driver. Shit, none of us would feel
comfortable living out here with nabobs like that. We be simple folk and shit.
Besides, Synnie bought mine and Jake’s condos and houses for Craigie and Spike
and Kit.”

“He has this habit of buying people houses,
doesn’t he?” she asked with a sad smile.

“He sees to business,” he told her.

“He called Jake in and told him he
wanted to change his will. Jake wasn’t happy about it. Matter of fact, he was
irate,” he said. “They had one helluva row that day. The worst argument they’ve
ever had. Kit and a couple of his men got involved to separate them. He said he
thought they were going to start clocking one another.”

“They didn’t?”

“No, Kit never let it get that far but
they didn’t speak to one another for a few days there. Then it just seemed to
blow over. I should have known Jake wouldn’t leave it alone. He’s got a mean
streak wider than Synnie’s when he gets his back to a wall. Guess that’s what
makes him such a great corporate lawyer.”

“What changed in the will that made Jake
so angry? Why…?”

“He called a meeting that morning with
those of us he considers family—me, Spike, Craigie, Jake and now Kit,” he said,
cutting her off. “He told Jake he wanted to change the division of property to
give him, Spike, Craigie, Kit and me each ten percent of the company. Then he
changed who he wanted to run the company. That person would get fifty precent
of the company plus all other assets that belong privately to Synnie. We’re
talking the choppers, the jet, the yacht, all the businesses like Cedar Oak and
that place where you worked. All of that was originally supposed to be divided
equally between the original four of us. That’s when Jake went ballistic and
demanded they speak in private. The four of us left them to it but stayed close
by because they were shouting and calling one another names I hadn’t heard
since we were kids.”

“From twenty-five to ten is quite a
drop. I can see why Jake was so upset,” she said.

“Ten percent of eighty-five billion is
still a helluva lot of money, Lina, but it wasn’t the money Jake was so angry
about. It was the change in the person who would be running MI if something
happened to Synnie.”

“It was originally supposed to be him,
wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Who did Synnie want it changed to?”

He gave her a steady look. “You.”

The Kiwi’s gate was spectacular. The
scrollwork was a beach scene complete with seagulls and a lone pelican sitting
on a pier.

“We all grew up in the water,” Jonny said
as he reached to push a button on the dashboard of his Lexus. “Synnie is as at
home on a wave as he is on land. He skis and surfs and I don’t know anyone in
our circle of acquaintances who is as good as he is on a boogie board.” The
gate began to roll back. “And he’s that way on a skateboard, snowboard, or snow
skis. He’s a very athletic man.”

“It’s obvious he works out,” she said.

“Just about every morning,” he said. “You
gotta see him work the salmon ladder. It will fucking blow your mind.”

She had no idea what that was but it
sounded hard.

By the time he drove onto the property,
down a twisting lane overhung with spreading oaks, the rain had stopped. The
glistening brick driveway had wide curves that wound around stands of
magnificent trees bare now of leaves but she knew they would be impressive in
spring and summer and into autumn. Each tree was surrounded by azalea bushes.
Clumps of graceful dogwoods—denuded of foliage—and myriad varieties of shrubs
and bushes had been planted in tasteful islands all along the twisting, turning
lane. As they rounded the last curve, she sucked in a breath.

Ahead of them was Synnie’s home.

“Holy moly,” she whispered.

“He designed it himself,” Jonny said and
there was pride in his voice. “He’s got a thing for coastal architecture. He
named it. He calls it Lagniappe. Don’t know what the hell that means.”

She did. The word meant something given
unexpectedly. To the Kiwi, the house was an indirect benefit of the opportunity
his father had given him.

“It is a little over eight-thousand square
feet with five bedrooms and six-and-a-half baths.” He turned the engine off but
made no move to exit the car.

“He had a bedroom built for each of you,”
she said softly.

“Yeah, he did. He always has this fucking
big Christmas party here every year and none of us are able to drive home,” he
said with a laugh. “Has one on New Year’s Eve too. There’s a basement and
that’s where his gym is.”

It was a magnificent mansion that looked as
though it belonged on the coast of South Carolina rather than in North Georgia.
There were two garages on either side of the sprawling ground floor. Between
them was the stairway—the landing of which divided into two sets of stairs
bracketing a bubbling fountain. Those stairs led onto another landing from
which a third set of five stairs spilled onto a second landing. From that
landing a single flight of six stairs carried a visitor to the front porch
where two huge ceiling-to-floor, black etched-glass doors dominated the area.

Connected on both sides of the main house
via breezeways were identical two-stall garages.

“You each have your own garage,” she said.
She tore her attention from the house. “He built this for all of you, not just
him.”

Jonny nodded. “We are his family, Lina. We
are the brothers and the sister he never had. He rarely stays here unless one
of us is with him, though. He can’t stand the loneliness.”

She looked back at the house. The second
story had a stunningly beautiful veranda that wrapped around the front and
sides. When she asked, Jonny told her it carried around to the back where there
was a large patio with an infinity pool and hot tub.

“There’s hammocks and swings and lounges on
the patio. You step off the patio onto a teak walkway that carries you down to
the dock and the sailboat and pontoon he has docked there. It’s party central
in the summertime.”

“I can imagine,” she said.

“You’ll see,” he told her. “You’re going to
love it.”

They were silent for a moment then he
twisted around in the seat, his face completely devoid of expression.

“Lina, he loves you with all his heart.
When you left him down there, he went completely berkers. He drank a whole
bottle of scotch and half a bottle of tequila before we broke down the door. He
was so shit-faced drunk he didn’t even know he’d cut the bottom of his feet to
shreds on the broken glass.”