Mr. Ashworth led me through the lobby of Oak Ridge Country Club to a small office behind the front desk, set my pecan pie carefully on his blotter, and unlocked a gray filing cabinet. I am Opal Haskins, seventy seven years old, a cattle farmer from Cullman, in my good boots, and I sat in a leather chair that had been bought with the money from my husband Wade. The manager drew out a thick file with a blue tab and laid it before me. It was labeled Vance, Preston, Member Account. “Madam,” he said gravely, “I should have called you months ago.”
The file was as thick as a Bible. Preston Vance was not, as he had always claimed, a founding member of Oak Ridge. He had joined in 2019 as a guest of the late Wade Haskins, on a courtesy account that the club had never closed. Since then he had run up two hundred and twelve thousand dollars in unpaid charges, none of which he had ever paid. Worse, there were pages of invoices for dinners held in the private dining room, for eight or ten guests at a time, hosted by Preston in the name of a company called Vance Capital Partners.
Mr. Ashworth tapped the last page. “Mrs. Haskins, he has been using our private room to host investor dinners for a real estate fund. Every time, he tells the guests it is a club investment, backed by the family of the owner. The Hendersons, who are in the ballroom tonight, put in four hundred thousand dollars in March. I believe he has taken in more than three million from members of this club.” I put my hand on the table. Outside, a string quartet began a waltz, and my granddaughter Ellie laughed, bright and unknowing, in the crowd.
A brass plaque on a country club wall gave one cattle farmer the length of a front door argument to bring her son in law back to the truth in Birmingham.
I gave my terms in the ballroom, quietly, with my hand on the arm of Mr. Ashworth and the pecan pie in the hands of Marcus. I walked to the center of the floor, where Preston stood with a champagne flute, and I said, “Preston, put that down. You will come into the office with me and the manager. You will bring the books of Vance Capital. You will tell the Hendersons the truth tonight, before the toasts. And you will pay back every dollar, even if it takes the roof of your house.”
Preston lowered the glass, and his laugh like a cash register faded away. “Opal, I only needed a little time,” he said, low and fast. “The market turned in 2022, and I owed the early investors, and I borrowed from the new ones to pay them. It is how every fund works.” His hands trembled. “I used your name because nobody would question a Haskins. Jolene does not know. If she knew, she would leave me. I could not face her.” He looked across the ballroom at my daughter. “I am so frightened, Opal.”
But fear drove him past reason. Preston suddenly dropped the flute, snatched the blue file and a sheaf of investor statements from the table by the door, and ran for the terrace, meaning to cross the golf course to the parking lot. He hurtled through the French doors. Marcus, the young doorman, stepped squarely in front of him. The fiancé of my granddaughter, the young veterinarian, planted himself on the steps. And old Mr. Henderson, seventy eight, rose from his chair with his cane raised.
Preston stopped on the terrace, in the light of the lanterns, with the file against his tuxedo shirt and the lawn rolling dark and silent beyond the railing, the crowd gathering at the glass doors behind him. Ellie pushed through them with her hands pressed to her mouth. “Daddy,” she said, in a small voice, “please. Mamaw told me when I was little that a man who runs is a man who knows he is wrong.” Preston turned. His knees gave way. He sat down on the terrace step and dropped the file at her feet.
The consequences were firm. The district attorney charged Preston with securities fraud and theft, and the court froze his assets. Jolene, shaken, stood by her daughter and divorced him a year later. I paid the first two hundred thousand dollars to the Hendersons myself, and the remaining victims were repaid from the sale of his office building and the lake house. Preston received a sentence of six years. The committee of Oak Ridge voted unanimously to open its membership to cattle farmers, and to serve pecan pie on Sundays, which the cook baked from my recipe and which the members demanded with great enthusiasm every week.
In the name of my husband Wade, who passed in 2016, I started the Wade Haskins Fund. It pays for livestock projects and scholarships for 4 H and FFA students and for legal help for seniors who are victims of investment fraud, in Cullman, Blount and Morgan counties. In the first year we funded two hundred and six livestock projects and helped thirty seven families recover savings. One was a fourteen year old from Hanceville who showed a Black Angus heifer at the county fair, and who cried when she won the blue ribbon.
On a golden Saturday in May, I stood in the doorway of my barn in Cullman, which had been swept and strung with white lights, while two hundred guests found their seats on hay bales. My granddaughter Ellie came down the aisle in the wedding dress of her mother and a pair of my old boots, on the arm of Jolene. At the altar, the young veterinarian wiped his eyes. Mr. Ashworth had come with a hundred members of the club, and the doorman Marcus stood in a clean suit, holding a pecan pie and grinning from ear to ear, the proudest man in the state of Alabama.