Chapter 14 - THE MISSING PLACE CARD
Thomas’s brass place card should have been in Elaine’s china cabinet.
It was not.
Elaine searched.
Nothing.
Derek checked storage.
Nothing.
Raymond laughed.
“We are not launching another investigation over a place card.”
Then Kristen remembered seeing it in a display box at Cole Urban Homes headquarters.
The box had been installed after Thomas retired.
They checked.
Empty.
Melissa searched old inventory photos.
Thomas’s card appeared in the display until eighteen months earlier.
Then disappeared.
“Who stole Grandpa’s chair name?”
“No one stole it,” Raymond said.
“How do you know?”
He did not.
They asked longtime receptionist Nora Bell.
She remembered Thomas’s card.
Then remembered giving it to someone.
“Mr. Cole asked for it.”
“Which Mr. Cole?”
She laughed.
“That is the problem with family companies.”
Her sign-out note said:
R. COLE.
Raymond stared.
“I never took it.”
Derek said:
“Neither did I.”
“Your first name isn’t R.”
“I know.”
Then Elaine remembered Thomas had a younger brother.
Robert Cole.
Dead now.
Rarely discussed.
He had left the company decades earlier after a dispute with Thomas.
Raymond had barely known him.
Nora checked the date again.
The place card was signed out by:
Robert Cole Jr.
Raymond frowned.
“There is no Robert Junior.”
Elaine went still.
Derek saw it.
“Mom?”
Elaine sat down.
Thomas’s younger brother Robert had a son.
The cousins had not seen him since childhood.
Why?
Because Robert broke with Thomas over the original company name.
Cole Residential had not originally been Thomas’s company alone.
Robert helped start it.
Then left.
The family stopped speaking about him.
Raymond asked:
“What does that have to do with the place card?”
Elaine answered:
“Thomas had two made when the company started.”
“Two?”
“One for himself.”
“And one for Robert?”
“Yes.”
“Why did someone take Thomas’s eighteen months ago?”
Elaine looked toward the Northline closing binder.
“I don’t know.”
Then Paige called.
Northline’s title and corporate-history review had found an old 1994 partnership termination agreement.
Thomas bought out Robert.
Cleanly.
Except for one clause.
Robert retained a right to receive annual historical financial statements for as long as the Cole name remained in the company’s legal title.
A strange sentimental clause.
Long ignored.
Northline wanted it cleaned up.
Raymond asked:
“Who owns that right now?”
Paige answered:
“Robert’s estate.”
“Who is the executor?”
Paige named someone Raymond had never met.
Robert Cole Jr.
May you like
The cousin who had taken the place card.
And he had sent a letter asking to attend Thanksgiving.
