The Fifteen Minute Novel is a novel written fifteen minutes at a time with each week day’s section starting with the sentence from the previous day. At least it is attempting to be a novel. For now I am just aiming at one continuous story, worked on for fifteen minutes each day. Started Friday January 1st, 2021 (in case you want to search for the beginning. I can’t wait to see where it ends up. It could be good, or it could be a mess. We’ll have to see. For now, here is today’s fifteen minutes.
Day 218: “What have I done?”
“What have I done?” James swallowed hard. “Oh god.” James sat back down on the edge of the bed perched as though ready to run. The impulse to help her out had been too strong to ignore and now he had done something he knew he shouldn’t have done.
“Winsome,” James said. “Of all the places.”
The Winsome Way address started off as a challenge. He was at one of those clubs, the ones attached to a high end golf club. He played with the group, making up their fourth. They had a good enough game. They returned to the club for a drink, to rehash the game and to talk a little business. Business spilled them into the dining room for dinner and even though business was completed before the desert course, James could find no easy excuse to leave and was drawn into post dinner drinks back in the bar. Somehow, talk turned to shell companies and hidden assets.
A lot of the conversation was drawn from crime dramas on the television while most of them had some sort of off shore account, that was as far into the matter as any of them were willing to get. If James remembered correctly one of the men in the group was going through a particularly nasty divorce and wishing he had stashed money away in a shell corporation of some sort that no one knew about.
At that point James was beginning to suspect Faith was having an affair. It wasn’t the one involving his step brother, not then. It was one of her earlier flings, the ones she though he knew nothing about. As the affair with his step brother had been damaging enough during the divorce that he hadn’t bothered bringing it up. He started wondering then if divorce was in his future.
Somehow the idea of a shell corporation stuck with him. Later he investigated it and found legal ways to set one up. He made certain everything was legal and that all appropriate taxes were paid on the money, but he also tried to see how far he could still distance himself from the shell within a shell corporation. He built layers upon layers, insulating him from the company.
He then began seeing what he could add to the company. He added a safety deposit box and a few other items, the property of on Winsome Way among them.
It wasn’t an extravagant property but it made his fantasies of running away when things began getting messy seem almost plausible.
James snorted. ‘Now I have run away. Sort of.’
Tucker wouldn’t like the property, or that he posted on the message board. He never mentioned it in any of the paperwork. At the time, it slipped his mind. It didn’t come up in the search of his assets either. He hid it too well. In truth he forgot about it until now. The thought that it might not be Cassie on the message board occurred to him.
‘But I was logged on as an admin instead of under my personal id,’ James thought. ‘And if it isn’t Cassie, they won’t know about Hank.’ James wondered if Cassie would even remember about Hank. It was so long ago.
Ten til Midnight 