‘Taith and Gerrold Faragher,” a spunky-looking woman said. She pointed to the man sitting next to her. They were probably in their mid-forties, obvious suburbanites not from this area. “I’m Lafayette’s daughter.”
And the mother of the ever-rebellious Danette, I thought to myself.
“Craig Lewis,” a smooth voice said, and a man held out his hand for me to shake. He had been the bearer of the Kleenex to Maribelle. “I’m Maribelle’s son. And this is my wife, Tiffany.”
Okay, let’s just say that Craig was about forty and Tiffany was. . . well, Tiffany was barely drinking age. She couldn’t have been over twenty-two, with long, long legs and bouncy chestnut hair. I didn’t think it was my imagination that certain family members turned their noses up and shifted in their seats. She seemed to provoke a reaction from almost everybody there. Oblivious to the reaction she caused, she wrinkled her nose and waved to me.
There was only one other person that I did not know. A round, balding man with a hideous comb-over sat on the edge of the couch clutching a briefcase. It seemed as if nobody else in the room knew who he was, either, because every eye was now focused on him. He looked very uncomfortable in the accusatory silence.
“Sir?” I asked.
“Uh, I. . . uh, I’m Oliver Jett. My friends call me Ollie.”
“So who the hell are your Lafayette asked.
“I’m Clarissa’s lawyer and I came here to read the will. The new one,” he said.
I thought about the burned pages that I’d found in the fireplace. Norville Gross thought about them too, because his head snapped around and he looked at me as soon as Mr. Jett made his announcement.
“You’ve come all this way for nothing,” Dexter Calloway said. “As soon as we found out she was dead, I went to her office to get the will to put in a safe place, and it was gone. It was the only copy.”
There seemed to be relief in the room. What changes had Clarissa made in her will that had the family so concerned? And who had been bothered enough to go to the great lengths of burning it?
“Does this mean the old will stands?” I asked Mr. Jett the lawyer.
“It would in most cases,” he said.
“Why not this one?” I asked.
“Because I have a copy of the new one,” Ollie said. “Clarissa downloaded it to me over the Internet three days ago.”
You could almost hear the family saying, “Drat! Plan foiled again.”
When I’d rebounded from the astonishment of the little old centenarian surfing the Net and transmitting her new will to her lawyer, something occurred to me. “Mr. Calloway,” I said.
“Yes?”
“We need to see to it that no more people go in and out of Clarissa’s office. Seal it off too until the sheriff arrives,” I said.
He nodded his head that he understood.
“I’ve had about enough of you, Mrs. O’Shea,” Prescott said. “Just who put you in charge?”
“My granddaughter,” Gert said, “knows what she’s . . . Her step-father is a sheriff.”
“I don’t care if he’s an alien,” Prescott said. “You think you can just come here from your fancy big city and boss us all around. Well, you can’t!”
“Mr. Lewis,” Ollie said. “Somebody has to keep things under control, and Mrs. O’Shea is doing a fine job.”
“She’s just concerned about her inheritance,” Prescott said.
“You seemed to be equally concerned about it,” I said. “Mr. Lewis, I have no idea what you are talking about. I’m sure that if Clarissa had anything to give to me, it was something that belonged to my great-grandmother. That’s all.”
“You can act all innocent if you want,” he went on. “But we all know better.”
I looked around the room, astonished. “Just what do you think is going on here?”
“The boardinghouse,” Maribelle said from behind her Kleenex.
“What do you mean?”
“We feel that—”
Maribelle was cut off in mid-sentence by who else? Her husband, Prescott. “She’s leaving you the boardinghouse!”
All was quiet a moment and then the quiet was shattered by my laughter. That was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. Why would Clarissa leave me the boardinghouse? And why would they care? It’s not as if the place was worth much. The land that it sat on was probably worth something, but not a huge amount.
“Clarissa Hart did not leave me the boardinghouse,” I said. “This is the most absurd accusation. There is no reason for her to leave me the boardinghouse. Why would she think I would even want it? She doesn’t even know me.”
I felt a little uncomfortable with all of the people staring at me as I stood in front of the fireplace where I’d found the burned pages to the will. The new will, I reminded myself. Somebody had burned it thinking that the old will would be the one filed in probate since the new one would be nonexistent. And whoever had burned the new will had done so either last night or early this morning. If it was this morning, I would assume that whoever had done so had also put the pillow over her face.
“Now, Prescott,” Maribelle cooed. “Maybe Mrs. O’Shea doesn’t want the boardinghouse.”
“No, I don’t want the boardinghouse, and Clarissa didn’t leave it to me.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Prescott asked. “Do you really think that we believe you drove all the way from Missourah for a. . . a. . . cake plate or something?”
“We would have driven all the way from Missouri just for the chance to see Clarissa and speak with her. She invited us, we have family here. We had the opportunity to come back here and we did. That’s all there is to it,” I explained.
“Gertie,” Lafayette said. “Talk some sense to your granddaughter.”
My grandmother was as confused as I was. She said nothing to me or him, she just looked around the room with a blank stare on her face.
“Do you guys really believe that Clarissa was leaving the boardinghouse to me?” I asked.
“Why else would she invite you to the reading of the will?” Lafayette asked.
“Look, I am telling you that there is no way that Clarissa Hart left me the boardinghouse. Absolutely, positively no way. She had no reason to. It would make no sense. Now, everybody, calm down and relax. I assure you she did not leave the boardinghouse to me.”
Six
Clarissa Hart had left me the boardinghouse.
I felt so stupid. She had left the boardinghouse, the land it sat on, and all of its contents to me. Little old me. What was up with that?
I sat across from Mr. Oliver Jett with Maribelle Lewis, Lafayette Hart, Edwin Hart, and Norville Gross on my side of the great room in the boardinghouse that I now owned. As a matter of fact, if I wanted to get technical, they were sitting on my couch and eating my food. I’d better not go too far with that though, since there was also the matter of my new employees that I would now have to pay.
“I don’t understand, Mr. Jett,” I said. How can you take a man named Ollie seriously? It’s sort of the male equivalent of Buffy. “How can this be? Why would she leave me her boardinghouse?”
“She claimed that it was a ‘debt repaid,’ “ Mr. Jett said.
“A debt?” I asked. “What sort of debt?”
“Yeah, what sort of debt?” Edwin asked.
I was very happy, by the way, that Preston Lewis was not in the room as we discussed this. Mr. Jett had made the spouses leave the room. Preston would have made this uncomfortable situation all the more uncomfortable. But I truly didn’t understand what the big deal was about the boardinghouse, anyway. Clarissa Hart owned many other properties, along with insurance policies, money market accounts, and stocks. All of which were worth a lot more than this old boardinghouse, and all of which she had divided up between her three children.
Except for the nice tidy sum of $50,000 dollars. Which she left to Norville Gross. Fifty grand! It takes Rudy almost two years to make that kind of money. I could not imagine ha
ving that kind of money just sitting in the bank, much less signing it over to somebody else.
This was very interesting information, though. Just who the heck was Norville Gross? Clarissa had made him out to be just another boarder last night at dinner. I’d say that he was a tad more than that, but I did not know his relationship to her, and he had not volunteered it.
“A debt repaid,” I said aloud. “What does it mean?”
“I heard Momma say many times that if there was a person in this world that she owed her life to, it was Bridie McClanahan,” Lafayette said.
“My great-grandmother,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Did she say why?”
“She hinted at a lot of things,” Maribelle said. “None of which you could actually pin her down on.”
I thought about it a minute and tossed it around in my head. It made absolutely no sense. What could my great-grandmother have done for her that would have inspired this degree of loyalty? My great-grandmother, on my mother’s side, had died at the age of twenty-eight in 1926. So whatever it was she had done, she had done it in a relatively short period of time, from about 1916 to 1926. Whatever it was, it had also been extreme enough that Clarissa hadn’t forgotten it in the eighty years that followed Bridie’s death.
“I don’t care about any of this ‘debt repaid’ nonsense,” Edwin said. He turned to Norville Gross. “I wanna know who the hell you are.”
It was hard to say who was more deathly quiet, Norville Gross or Mr. Jett. They both looked at each other, and then Mr. Jett looked impassively at Edwin. Norville, however, stared at the wall.
“If. . . if Mr. Gross doesn’t want to tell you who he is,” Mr. Jett said, “he doesn’t have to.”
“Do you know who he is?” Edwin asked.
“No,” Mr. Jett said.
I studied Edwin, and I knew exactly what my grandmother meant by “Edwin was always a slick fart.” He had that sort of shiny-suited, used-car-salesman aura about him. He even wore a gold pinkie ring.
I looked up at the wall that Norville was busy studying to see what was so interesting. The fireplace where I had found the burned will was set back into a redbrick wall. The mantel had one of those Home Interiors sculptures of a deer on one end, a mantel clock that was about fifteen minutes slow sitting in the middle, and an ancient, dusty china doll on the other end. Right above the fireplace, on the brick wall, hung a big picture, with a bunch of people in it. From where I sat, it looked like there were twenty people in the picture. On both sides of that big picture were a few other small pictures. I assumed that the nails were driven into the mortar with special mortar nails.
I didn’t think there was anything special on the wall. I think Norville Gross was just trying to avoid looking at any of the Hart children. It did not escape my attention that Norville and I were the only two who were not Clarissa’s children who had been left something in her will. We were also the first two who had been in her room after her death.
“I don’t think that Mr. Gross is going to answer you,” I said.
“Can I be excused?” Norville asked Mr. Jett. Mr. Jett nodded his head, and Norville got up and left the room. I now had everybody’s undivided attention, even though I did not necessarily want it.
“Why wouldn’t he want people to know who he is?” I asked quickly, in hopes that people would forget that I now owned the boardinghouse.
“Maybe he doesn’t want the will to be contested,” Mr. Jett said. “So he believes it better to remain quiet.”
“Well, we can still contest it,” Edwin said.
“I think,” I said, ignoring Edwin’s last statement, “that it would be better if he just came out with it. This way it makes him appear as though he does have something to hide. Maybe you can speak to him about that, Ollie?”
He checked his comb-over to make sure that it was still plastered in place on top of his head. “Certainly,” he said. “I’ll try.”
It was quiet, suddenly. All three of Clarissa’s children— Lafayette, Maribelle, and Edwin—tried very hard to stare at me without obviously staring at me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and finally got up and stretched.
“Well,” I said. “I don’t know what to make of this. I honestly had no idea that this would happen or that my great-grandmother had ever done anything important enough to warrant such devotion from your mother.”
“Preston was right,” Maribelle said. It wasn’t particularly vicious or ugly the way she said it. She was simply stating a fact.
Slowly, they all got up and left the room, leaving Mr. Jett sitting on the couch to ponder the silence in the great room with me. I walked over and looked out the window for the fifteenth time since six o’clock this morning. The water had started to recede, although not fast enough in my opinion. I wanted to be able to leave this place in a hurry if need be.
“You know,” I said finally. I walked over to the fireplace and looked up at the large picture that hung on the wall. “I most likely will not keep the boardinghouse. I’ve no need for it. It doesn’t exactly turn a profit, and I’m three states west of here and unable to really take care of it.”
“You might want to wait a few months or so before making that sort of rash decision,” Mr. Jett said. He picked up his briefcase and put the copy of the will inside. “This is an opportunity that has been handed down to you. Even if you just sell it outright. You have children. It’s not worth a fortune, but you could start a college fund for them.”
I thought about it a moment as I studied the photograph closely. It was a morbid photograph of a funeral. In the middle of it was a casket, with the lid open and the dead body inside, stiff and pasty-looking. Twenty people surrounded the casket, all looking rather unconcerned. Nobody was partying exactly, but nobody looked all that sad, either, in my opinion.
I’d seen this sort of thing before, especially in Appalachia. One photograph I remember in particular showed the body of Devil Anse Hatfield in his casket. Hatfield of the infamous Hatfields and McCoys.
“Still,” I said, looking to Mr. Jett. “I doubt seriously I’ll keep it. I don’t feel right about it.”
“Contact your lawyer,” he said. With that he turned and left the room. It was about two hours before dinnertime and I was starving. I’d just been left a boardinghouse, ten acres, and twenty rooms full of furniture and stuff, and all I could think about was food. Well, that and how much I wished the local sheriff would get here.
Seven
It sounded as though Danette Faragher was trying to wake the dead. I walked past her room on the first floor on my way to speak with Sherise Tyler. I thought if anybody knew any good gossip on the place it would be Ms. Tyler, providing, of course, that she was a local journalist. Instead of going on to Ms. Tyler’s room, however, I backed up and knocked on Danette’s door. She, of course, didn’t answer, since she probably couldn’t hear me. I knocked louder.
Finally the door opened with an even louder rush of music. Danette looked fairly surprised to see me. She did not invite me in.
“May I come in?” I asked.
Danette shrugged her shoulders and opened the door the rest of the way so I could enter. She flopped on the bed and reached over with one long, incredibly skinny arm and turned off the music. I got the impression that this must have been Danette’s room when she came to visit, because there were a few posters on the wall, Limp Bizkit, Korn, and a few other teenage celebrities that I recognized. Not to mention the CD player and a dresser that had quite a few personal items scattered on top. The room look lived in, even if only on a short-term basis.
“You don’t have to turn off the music for me,” I said. “I happen to like the Offspring.”
“Don’t think for one minute that you can come in here and pretend to like the in music and that I’ll think you’re hip and forget that you were the first one in Granny’s room. It won’t work,” she said with more venom than I was ready for.
“Well,” I said. “For your information, I’
m not the least bit hip, that I know. But I do like the Offspring. I like almost every kind of music there is. I’m a huge Beethoven fan, too, which makes me an old fuddy-duddy. So I assume that makes me a hip old fuddy-duddy? I had no idea that the music I listened to decided my fate on the hip scale. Is that why you listen to it?”
She studied me a moment. Clearly, she was not ready for my retort, as much as I was not ready for her attack in the first place. “What do you want?”
“I simply was going to ask you to turn the music down a little bit, because I know that it drives my grandmother crazy, and I wouldn’t doubt it had the same effect on your grandfather,” I said. “And then I was also going to try and reassure you that I did not hurt your granny.”
She leaned back on the bed and somehow managed to get her legs under her in one of those pretzel positions that only teenagers can make look painless, and that I couldn’t even begin to attempt in my present state. “My uncle Prescott said that you came here for the boardinghouse and that you killed Granny to make sure that you got it.”
“Why would I have to do that?” I asked. “The new will states that I receive the boardinghouse. The old one does not. So, therefore, if I was after the boardinghouse, I would want to make sure that your granny lived. At least until the will was read.”
She thought about that a moment.
“You might inform your uncle Prescott of that.”
She said nothing to that, but she looked around the room with big tears welling up in her eyes. “I can’t believe somebody would hurt her. She was just a little old lady. She was harmless.” Her voice was nearly a whisper from her grief, and suddenly that tough, rebellious teenager slid away, revealing the true fragile state of most of them. Teenagers’ hormones take them on a wild ride that they can’t escape until Mother Nature says so: it was kind of like being pregnant, now that I thought about it. No wonder I was so grouchy.
“I don’t think Clarissa Hart was as harmless as you think,” I said with a smile. “The woman surfed the Net and downloaded her will to her lawyer, a feat that I couldn’t accomplish.”
A MistY MourninG Page 4
