“You’re under arrest for forgery, conspiracy to commit, theft by swindle, and financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult.” The string quartet stopped in the middle of a note.
Henrik stood holding those enormous silver scissors, his mouth slightly open. And then over the heads of the crowd, his eyes found me.
Maybe it was my chin. Gus always said I had my mother’s chin.
I didn’t look away. I didn’t say anything.
I just stood there and let him see me. Dolly Mercer’s girl, the daughter of the cleaning woman who wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of money.
You would think that was the end. I did for about three weeks.
But men like Henrik Ammonson don’t believe they’ve lost until a judge tells them so. They just buy more lawyers.
On the 1st of January, Henrik’s attorneys filed a civil action in St. Louis County District Court. His lead lawyer was a woman named Victoria Ashkam from a corporate firm in Minneapolis, sharp as a paper cut.
The lawsuit said that the 1981 stock certificate was invalid. It said Felix Ammonson had never had the authority to issue shares without a vote of the board.
It said that Dolores Mercer, a night janitor with access to every office in the building, could easily have taken a blank sheet of letterhead from Felix’s desk. And it said that even if the certificate had been real, my mother had sold her shares back to the company in 1999.
They attached a copy of a check, Ammonson Cardiac Systems, payable to Dolores M. Mercer for $500, dated April 1999. On the memo line, it said, “Full repurchase of all shares.”
Gus read me the complaint at his desk above the hardware store. When he got to the check, he took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“That’s clever,” he said quietly. “That’s the one that worries me.
If your mother cashed that check, a judge could find she sold the shares for $500.” I went home that night and sat in my kitchen and couldn’t stop thinking about it.
$500. 1999, the year my furnace died.
The winter my mother told me she had $300 to her name. Had she sold them?
Had she taken $500 for her share of everything without ever knowing what it was worth? And then I thought of the coffee can.
The coffee can from the top of her refrigerator labeled emergencies with $11 and a stack of folded papers I had been too sad to read. It was in a box in my basement.
I went down the stairs in my socks, found the box, pried off the plastic lid, and took out the papers. And at the very bottom, folded in thirds, a check.
Ammonson Cardiac Systems payable to Dolores M. Mercer, $500. April 1999.
Never cashed, never endorsed. And across the front in my mother’s blue ballpoint cursive, she had written three words.
Not for sale. I sat on my basement stairs and held that check and cried until my neck hurt.
Then I called Gus at 11:00 at night. He answered on the first ring as if he’d been waiting.
When I read him those three words, he was silent for a long moment, and then very softly he said, “Oh, Dolly, you magnificent woman.” The hearing was held in February before the Honorable Bernadette Raskque, a small, sharp-eyed judge in her 60s, who, Gus told me, had no patience at all for people who mistook money for intelligence.
I wore my navy blazer. I wore my mother’s rosary in my pocket.
Victoria Ashkam went first. She was very, very good.
She painted a picture of an elderly cleaning woman who had taken advantage of a grieving young man and who had happily accepted $500 when the company bought her out. Several times she said the word janitor in a way that made it sound like a crime.
I sat very still and let her talk. My mother had taught me that when someone is busy showing you who they are, don’t interrupt.
Then Gus stood up, leaning on the cane he didn’t need, and began. He didn’t argue either.
He just told the story one piece of evidence at a time. Exhibit one was the original certificate on Felix Ammonson’s letterhead, signed and dated in Felix’s handwriting, which a document examiner confirmed.
Exhibit two was Felix’s original shareholder ledger from 1981, showing the entry for Dolores M. Mercer in Felix’s own hand, 3% recorded the same day as the certificate. Exhibit three was the minutes of the company’s very first board meeting in January 1982.
The board at that time consisted of exactly two people, Felix Ammonson and his accountant. The minutes approved unanimously the issuance of 3% of common stock to Mrs. de Mercer, whose assistance saved this company.
