houseofcards_rp | Hot as a hare, blind as a bat

Maggie sets her trowel on the ground and sits back on her heels. The Datura didn't need deadheading, yet the evidence lay before her eyes: small, precise cuts separating flowers and leaves from stem. The Heart rises to her feet in a smooth motion that belies her age and makes her way down the neat cutting beds. No mistake. Someone's come in with small sheers and pruned some of her more interesting plants. Foxglove, morning glory, monkshood, castor oil plant, someone's disturbed them all. Lovely.

"How very unwise of my uninvited guest," she murmurs to herself before turning back to the gate and inspecting the lock. An enterprising soul could hop the wall, but in this case, a close look reveals scratch marks around the mechanism. A short walk brings her to her Cannabis plot. Unmolested. She claims to grow the weed for medicinal reasons--indeed, she has a prescription for it. But truth be told, she enjoys the relaxation it brings her and never begrudges a few leaves here and there should anyone ask her. Yet the plants escaped this latest harvest. Clearly, her prowler hadn't cared about medicine.

"I suppose I'll need to reinstall the surveillance cameras. And let one of the Faces know so they can pass the word along. Bloody nuisance."

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"No, I suppose not." She'd never known Dwayne Novak, and Hadyn hadn't really talked about him much. She did know, though, that Jordan had adored his father, and the Novak side of the family was less...

Well, less typically Spade.

"Hadyn thinks he didn't want him."

"Who knows when he found out Laureline's boy was his son? I know Georgios. If he hadn't cared, he would have left that money to you. I suppose Haydn thinks he had a guilty conscience.

"I feel for him. His world turned topsy-turvey."

"That's probably what he thinks. We didn't really talk about it much. He loses his temper a little whenever he does," Zoe says, and pauses. Aunt Maggie, unfortunately, knows why hot tempers sometimes bother her; Papa and Charlotte's battles were violent at times. She's not afraid of Hadyn, of course, but she always likes to avoid shouting if possible, even when she can hold her own.

"I'm just not sure what to do with it. He told me to keep it, but you know I can't do that."

"He may never come to accept things, but eventually he should be able to hold a conversation.

"Perhaps you could manage the funds for him. There may come a time when he'll need them. I'm not sure of the legalities, but when has that ever stopped the Deck from taking care of business. I hope you don't let him take his temper out on you."

"I hope so," Zoe says, taking a drink of her tea.

"I can probably manage it the same way I manage my own," she adds. She'd received the same $500,000 when she'd been eighteen, and had grown it over the past three years with a mix of careful and judiciously risky ventures. Even without Victor's considerable savings, she was comfortably set.

Even without the Huntly funds Charlotte had cut her off from.

"I don't let him," she says, half-smiling at Maggie. "Sometimes I just don't want to get into it, though."

"Good. Just checking. As for his inheritance, that's all you can do, really. You can't force him to take control of it if he doesn't want to. I suppose you could dump it all into an account under his name and forget about it."

"Yeah, I suppose." It doesn't sit well with her to just have money lying there, honestly. "Maybe I'll ask Elisha to talk to him about it. He listens to him, I think."

Maggie splits and butters a scone. "If you think that's best. I wouldn't care for someone telling me what to do with what's mine, lover or not. But I'm a stubborn old woman set in her ways."

The money has been sitting around for years apparently. Another month or so, even another year, until Haydn was ready to deal with it wouldn't matter.

With Hadyn and his stubbornness, they could all be dead before he decided to do anything with it. Zoe just sighed a little, though. "I'll think about it."

Later. It wasn't as if she didn't have enough to think about right now, anyway.

Hot as a hare, blind as a bat

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