What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  And now her mother was dead, and in typical fashion, she hadn’t gone quietly. She couldn’t have reached out to Casey before she died so they could have seen each other one more time in the flesh and perhaps could have forgiven each other. That wasn’t her style. Instead, she wrote a letter, sealed it and signed across the seal, and put it to Eliza to mail it after she passed.

  She had probably believed that she would watch from heaven as Casey read the letter and learned of the miserable illness that claimed her life. How did she think Casey would receive this plea to atone for her sins and save her soul in this life so they could meet again in the hereafter? Did she expect Casey to tear her hair and rend her clothing in some kind of Old Testament display of grief? To rush to the nearest church and throw herself upon the altar? To lift her eyes to heaven and thank her mother for showing her the light? It was almost a comfort to know that her mother still had the power to infuriate her, even in death, even after twenty years.

  Eliza’s accompanying letter suggested that Maureen’s dying wishes had vexed her as well. She made it plain that she was the one who nursed Maureen through her fight with cancer. She was the one who made time to make sure Maureen got to her appointments and had her prescriptions filled. Despite her busy life as a mother of three with a full-time job, even though Maureen had never really been a mother to Eliza, who was already eighteen when Maureen and Eliza’s father wed, Eliza had been the daughter Maureen needed in her last days. And for all of that, the thanks she got was only half of Maureen’s estate, not all of it, as she had expected. For some reason, Maureen had decided to divide her effects between them.

  What was particularly shocking was the size of Maureen’s estate. Casey and Eliza would each inherit about two-hundred thousand dollars, an unthinkable sum. Casey supposed the money had come from Ed, which must have added to Eliza’s sense of insult. After all, Maureen had been unemployable for most of her adult life. Her career as a lawyer ended when she was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Casey had only been five or six at the time. Later, Maureen’s relationship with Ed helped keep her from dipping too low or swooping too high, but the career she had dreamed of for herself as a litigator was impossible after her first breakdown. The stress of such a job was more than she could handle, medicated or not. She was never the same after that, and she never had a full-time job after that, either.

  The fact that Maureen had left any sort of inheritance to Casey was as surprising to Casey as it must have been to Eliza. Did Maureen owe Casey for the way she’d treated her when she as a teenager? Yes. Did Ed owe her for turning her own mother against her? Undoubtedly. But Casey never dreamed her mother would see it that way. Perhaps the cancer had spread to her brain before she finalized her will.

  Nonetheless, Casey didn’t want the money. She didn’t want anything from her mother—it was bad enough to share her genetics—and she would never dirty her hands by accepting something that had been Ed’s. The question was should she give it to Eliza? If Eliza did even half of what she claimed she did for Maureen in her dying days, she had earned it. Casey couldn’t imagine the patience it would take to play nurse to her impossible mother.

  But the Eliza who Casey remembered was so like her father—self-righteous, judgmental, and Bible-quoting, forever finding fault in her young step-sister. What a torment it would be for Eliza to know that there was an account out there full of Ed’s money with Casey’s name on it, collecting interest and dust, and Eliza would never see a penny of it. There was something satisfying in that. Sometimes wastefulness could be incredibly enjoyable.

  Chapter 7

  St. Nabor Island, South Carolina

  Two nights after the funeral, Angela lay sleepless in bed, watching shadows flicker on the ceiling. Every little noise made the knot of tension in her stomach tighten. The creaking window in the breeze, the intermittent click and rattle of the ceiling fan in the guest room down the hall where Molly was sleeping, the random gurgle and sigh of the plumbing—each arriving in turn whenever her eyelids began to droop, and then she was wide awake again. On the air mattress, Nicole sprawled on her stomach, legs splayed, head half under a pillow, breathing the deep breaths of the darkest reaches of slumber.

  If Nicole woke up, Angela wouldn’t have to be alone with her fear, but she wouldn’t hear what Angela was hearing. She’d insist that Angela’s exhausted, over-stressed imagination was playing tricks on her, as if fatigue and grief invalidated her senses. No, it was best for Nicole to sleep. It was enough for her to be in the room where Angela could wake her if she got desperate enough.

  As she rolled over and tried to find sleep, a sound caught her ear—a footstep on the squeaky floorboard in the hall near her mother’s room. As she feared, the mystery pacer was back. She stayed very still, holding her breath. Nothing. But when necessity forced her to exhale, there it was. Another single footstep.

  Doing her best to be silent, she sat up, leaning slightly toward the door. After several seconds, she heard another footstep and the faint yawn of a door opening. Her first thought was that Molly had no right going into her mother’s room, but of course, Molly never would. Someone was out there, but it wasn’t Molly. Her heart raced.

  This was the third night in a row that she’d heard footsteps in the hall in the wee hours of the morning, the second night she swore she heard her mother’s door opening. Careful not to disturb Nicole, she slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the door of her bedroom. She opened it slightly and peered into the hallway. Only the door to her mother’s study was open, propped with a heavy doorstop.

  Whoever had opened the door to her mother’s room must have also shut it, and Angela hadn’t heard it because she’d been making noise of her own getting out of bed. Moonlight poured through the two-story windows of the foyer and bathed the hallway in light. There was no darkness in which to hide. Angela moved softly toward her mother’s door, one hand trailing along the wall as she went. As she stepped into the puddle of moonlight, she heard a voice and froze.

  “Angela,” the voice said. “Go to sleep, Angela.” It was a hoarse whisper, at once quiet and deafening. It seemed to echo inside her head. “Go to sleep, Angela. Go back to bed.”

  Angela pressed her hands to her ears but the voice continued, “Go to sleep, Angela. Go back to bed.”

  It had begun gently but was now growing more insistent, repetition after repetition, overlapping like a song in rounds, and Angela clamped her hands over her ears, stretching her fingers through the sides of her short hair. She pressed one shoulder against the wall and slid down into a crouch, curling in upon herself, making her tiny gymnast’s body even smaller, a little knot of firm limbs, balled up tight.

  “Go to sleep, Angela.”

  It was a taunt now, a curse. Angela shook her head and whimpered without meaning to. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until she was overcome with a gasp and the flood of oxygen brought a cascade of tears so sudden she sobbed aloud.

  “Stop,” Angela said. “Please, stop, please.”

  At the touch of a hand on her shoulder, she lurched, flattening herself against the wall. The sudden silence surrounding her was total.

  “Okay, okay,” Molly said, stepping back, as startled by Angela’s reaction as Angela had been to her touch.

  Angela’s chest heaved with labored breath. Her face was soaked with tears. She slumped down, letting her legs stretch before her, her back pressed to the wall. She jammed the heels of her hands into her eyes. When she lowered them, Molly was sitting in front of her, her thick dark hair a messy tangle, her eyes puffy with sleep.

  “You heard it, didn’t you? Please tell me you heard it?” Angela asked. If ever she needed her best friend to back her up, it was now. Neither Molly nor Nicole had heard anything for the past two nights, but tonight it had woken Molly up. Finally, Molly would believe her.

  “You had a nightmare. It’s okay,” Molly said.

  But I was awake, Angela thought. I was wide awake. You don’t have a nightm
are when you’re wide awake.

  “It’ll get easier in time,” Molly said.

  “But she was here. I heard her.”

  Concern shaded Molly’s face. “We talked about this—”

  “I know it was my mother,” Angela said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Oh, honey.” Molly moved beside Angela against the wall and rested her head on Angela’s shoulder.

  They sat in silence, and after a few minutes, Angela realized that Molly had fallen back to sleep. Sweet reliable Molly, the best best-friend she could ever ask for, getting up in the middle of the night to care for her while Nicole slept through it all down the hall. But Molly was wrong. It hadn’t been a nightmare. What she’d heard was real—her mother’s voice, her mother’s anger, her mother’s frustration. Her mother had been there. Angela knew Molly and Nicole thought she was cracking under the weight of her grief, but they were wrong. Her mother’s body had failed, her heart had stopped, and she had died, but she was still here, and she wanted something.

  Nicole, with her insistence on science, logic, and reason, and Molly, with her perpetual skepticism, did not believe in ghosts. But their refusal to believe did not change the fact that her mother’s ghost or spirit or something was there, in the house.

  Angela nudged Molly, who spent a few blinking moments struggling to recall where she was before taking Angela’s advice and returning to bed.

  Angela went downstairs to the bright, modern kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. When it was ready, she took a steamy mug back upstairs to her mother’s study. She sat in the big desk chair and studied the antique roll-top desk where, until only a week earlier, her mother had sat every day, going through bills, taking care of the paperwork for Angela’s father’s nursing home, writing notes to clients. Angela pushed the top up along its tracks with a swish. The surface was free of clutter. Everything had a place of its own in one of the many drawers. Angela reached up and pulled the knob of one of the small drawers above the writing surface. It didn’t move. She pulled again, harder this time, but it was stuck. She tried the one below it and got the same result. She tried one on the other side. They were all stuck. Then she noticed the keyhole in the center of the desk, under the lip of the rolling cover.

  It was so like her mother to keep her desk locked up as if it were full of state secrets. Angela tried the file drawers and was not surprised to see that they, too, were locked. Only the shallow center drawer where pens and paper clips were stashed was not locked, because it had no lock. And of course her mother wasn’t so obvious as to keep the key in that drawer, which is probably what Angela would have done. Well, she’d have to find the key, wherever her mother had tucked it. She’d be going through everything to get the house ready to sell, and it would turn up. With any luck, it would turn up soon, because there were all sorts of documents she needed to settle her mother’s affairs, and every last one was locked up tight in the desk. She rolled the chair back and stood, stretching her arms over her head.

  Nicole and Molly weren’t likely to be awake for hours yet. Angela went back downstairs and replenished her coffee. Then she turned to her mother’s bedroom. Her mother had been gone for only a week and already a fine layer of dust had settled on everything. Angela swiped her hand across the dresser and brushed the dust onto her nightshirt. She picked up a bottle of her mother’s favorite perfume and sprayed it into air, inhaled its familiar sweetness that didn’t smell quite right without her mother’s flesh beneath it.

  At the end of the dresser were two framed photographs—one of her parents and her older brother Ryan, a formal, posed family portrait from when he was three, and one of her parents and herself when she was three. She picked up the older picture and studied it. Her mother looked so young, with her smooth, flawless skin and feathered blond hair. At the time, she would have only been twenty-eight. Her father, twelve years her senior, was already gray, but he was thin, fit, tall, and strong, nothing like the man who now resided at Our Lady of Mercy Nursing Home.

  In the second photograph, her mother was forty-seven, her hair still blonde and glossy, but cut in a tidy, chin-length bob. Her father, nearly sixty, had white hair, dark circles under his eyes, and a soft belly. In only a few years, he would be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Angela wondered if his mind had been going even then.

  She wished her brother were here now to take charge of everything. At 20, Angela might legally have been an adult, but she was not ready to be responsible for her mother’s household. Ryan would be thirty-six or thirty-seven now, a real grown up. He would understand things like how the sale of a house worked. Angela wondered if her mother and brother were together now, if her mother’s promises that Ryan was waiting for them in heaven were true. It was nice to think so, but as Nicole would say, there was no way to prove it. Then again, Nicole would also likely point out that Angela’s recent ghost sightings meant she believed in life after death, so why not also believe in heaven and hell? But that last assumption was a leap she’d never been able to make. She could only feel sure some people’s souls or spirits or whatever seemed to linger, and others did not. Where those others went was anybody’s guess.

  Who were you? She asked her brother’s picture as she set it back on the dresser. She had asked his picture that question many times over the years, but to date, he’d never answered.

  When she was younger and she used to think her brother’s ghost was watching over her, he wasn’t a very active spirit, just a benign presence looming over her family like a wisp of cloud across the sun. The idea that her family was haunted made an exciting story, so she told her friends from elementary and middle school about Ryan’s ghost when they came over and saw her brother’s pictures.

  “He died before I was born,” she’d say. “I never met him, but his ghost watched out for me.”

  Any time she narrowly escaped danger—the car that swerved at the last moment, the day she was running late and thereby avoiding being caught in a multi-car accident at exactly the time she was usually crossing that intersection—she’d tell herself Ryan was looking out for her. She liked having a ghost-brother. It made her feel safe and special. But where was he now, when she needed him?

  ***

  Angela awoke in her mother’s sunlit bedroom. Down the hall, she heard water running in the guest bathroom. She rubbed her eyes and glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand. Eleven. She hurled herself from the bed. Nicole and Molly had to be at the airport by noon.

  In the hallway, she smelled fresh coffee and toast. The doors to both her bedroom and the guest room were open. Everyone was up and moving. She told herself this was a good thing. She didn’t want them to miss their flight. They’d already been here with her for a whole week, missing a full week of classes, which had barely begun when she got the news of her mother’s death. They’d be playing catch-up all semester. She knew if she had missed even one of the chemistry classes Nicole was taking, she’d be sunk, and Molly had undoubtedly drained her bank account for plane tickets and would now have to grab as many extra shifts as possible at her work study job in admissions to get by. They were the best, and she could never thank them enough. What was she going to do when they left? How could she stay in this house alone?

  She found Molly in the kitchen, her laptop open on the table beside her plate of toast.

  “We didn’t want to wake you,” Molly said.

  Angela hated the pity in Molly’s eyes. She had heard Molly and Nicole whispering about her the other day, worrying about her mental state. She needed them to understand and believe. Molly had been there last night, in the hallway. How could she still have doubts?

  “Listen,” Molly said. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

  What choice do I have? Angela thought.

  “You don’t have to withdraw from school. You can come back with us.”

  This was Nicole and Molly’s refrain, urging her to carry on with her life. But she couldn’t. There was no one else to sort out her mothe
r’s estate, and she couldn’t handle all of it from school while also keeping up with classes. Although she’d had a conversation with the financial aid office and the dean of students, she still didn’t know if she could afford to finish at St. Kate’s.

  But if she didn’t go back to school, where exactly would she go? What exactly would she do? Her mother’s lawyer who was handling her estate had made it clear that she had to sell the house as soon as possible. There were debts to reconcile and her father’s expenses to sort out. If she went back to school, at least she wouldn’t be homeless. She’d be racking up tens of thousands of dollars in loans that, until a week ago, she hadn’t even known about, but she’d have a roof over her head.

  It was almost funny. The day before her mother died, she’d been panicking that her mother would make good on her threat to bring her home from St. Kate’s, and now here she was. Her mother’s threat brought to fruition by her mother’s death.

  Angela shook her head and avoided looking Molly in the eye.

  “Maybe you should go stay with Grace. I hate to think of you alone here.”

  Actually Angela had had no shortage of offers of places to stay. Acquaintances of her mother, parents of high school friends, her old gymnastics teacher. She didn’t have to stay in the house, and even if it sold overnight, she had places to crash. She wasn’t really in danger of homelessness, at least in the short term. Couch surfing sounded miserable, though. She wanted to stay here—her childhood home, her safe, comfortable place—as long as possible. If only she could stay in the house and also get a good night’s sleep.

  Before Angela could formulate a reply, Nicole bounded into the kitchen, well rested and ready for action.

  “I wish we could do something fun before we leave,” Nicole said, pouring herself coffee. “Do we have enough time to do anything before we have to be at the airport?”