Bum Steer

by Nancy Pickard

  She glanced over at Brady. “What is that worth?”

  “Three to four million,” I said. I was getting quite good at reeling off the essential facts of the inheritance by now. “Not including livestock, equipment, and, uh, improvements.”

  “And I suppose,” she said, “that you think we’re just going to let this ranch, this last remaining ranch, go out of the family.”

  “Yes,” I said, “because your father’s will says you each have to sign an agreement that you will not contest the will or interfere with the management of the ranch, or even attempt to go onto the ranch.”

  She straightened her spine. “Or what?”

  “Or you lose your inheritances.”

  They all looked over at Brady, who nodded.

  I said, “I’m curious about something myself.”

  “Uh, Jenny,” Brady said.

  “Were all of you at home last night?”

  “Jenny!”

  “Were you?” I insisted.

  Merle stroked the cat. “Yes, of course. Why?”

  “That’s good.” I smiled at him. “You’ll want to be sure to tell the police that, when they investigate your father’s murder.”

  They stared at me.

  I stared back.

  “Mr. Brady?” Alice asked.

  “That’s true,” he admitted. “I was getting to that.”

  It was while Dwight was explaining to them about the murder that I realized that the cat on Merle Lawrence’s lap wasn’t a real one. At least, not a live one. It was either an amazingly lifelike stuffed toy or an actual stuffed animal. I hadn’t felt such a chill go down my spine in a very long time.

  At the end of Brady’s recital, Alice, exuding false briskness, got up from the chair where she had been sitting. “We’ve been so rude! We haven’t offered you a thing to drink. Miss Cain? Mr. Brady? A Bloody Mary perhaps? Tea? Would you like some coffee?”

  “Coffee,” I said.

  “Good! Why don’t you come out to the kitchen with me, and I’ll show you more of the house, Miss Cain.”

  Clearly, she was also getting me out of the room so the other two could talk to the lawyer behind my back, probably about their inheritances. Well, that was fine with me. When they talked to my front, I got altogether unnerved. A nest of cobras, they were, mesmerizing their victim with politeness and then spitting their poison. And what the hell was the story on that cat, anyway?

  I slipped the book into my briefcase.

  My tour of the mansion consisted of following Alice through a dining room that featured a great carved oak table from which I could imagine drunken lords tossing gnawed, roasted deer legs to hungry serfs and slavering hounds. From behind her, I admired the cut of Alice’s suit. This was definitely not my idea of a cowboy’s daughter. I had expected something more along the lines of a country-western singer in tight jeans and rhinestones.

  And found her, minus the rhinestones, sitting at a counter in the kitchen.

  6

  Lilly Ann!”

  Alice clapped her hands at the sight of the girl, who flinched at the clap but didn’t look up. I thought that took a bit of highly disciplined disregard. Was the woman given to clapping for attention? Was the girl given to ignoring it? She sipped from a can of Dr Pepper and leafed through a magazine, acting as if she had not heard a thing. In front of her, there was an open sack of potato chips and a waxy carton of dip. I was suddenly so hungry I wanted to scoop my. bare fingers into that container.

  “I’m glad you’re here, darling,” Alice said.

  The girl raised her glance, but not her head.

  I lusted for those potato chips.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  She flicked her gaze at me before returning it to the magazine. Her face revealed her to be a little older than her slim body suggested, maybe eighteen or nineteen. Here at last was someone in blue jeans and a cotton shirt, even cowboy boots and a fringed suede jacket. Her blond hair was pulled severely back into a ponytail that was secured with a rubber band at the nape of her neck. She wore no makeup that I could detect. But she didn’t need any, having (as John D. MacDonald might have titled one of his mysteries) a tan and lovely skin. The expression in her eyes—which were blue and large, like her mother’s and aunt’s—matched the sulky look of her mouth.

  “Dear, this is Jennifer Cain. Miss Cain, I’d like you to meet my only child, Lilly Ann.”

  “Hello,” I said, dragging my glance up from the dip.

  “Hi.”

  If there ever was a girl who didn’t look like a Lilly Ann, this was the one. She should have been a Kate or a Carla, names as lean and abrupt as she was.

  “Lilly?” Alice waited until the girl was forced to look at her. “Lilly, your grandfather Benet died last night, dear.”

  The girl dropped her gaze again.

  “He bequeathed a ranch in Kansas to a foundation that Miss Cain runs, back in Massachusetts.”

  This time when the girl glanced up, I saw a glimmer of real interest in her eyes. “My grandpa had a ranch in Kansas? Can I go there?”

  I regretted what I had to say next.

  “I’m sorry, but your grandfather’s will bars his family from the ranch.” This was embarrassing to say. “If you so much as set a foot onto it, you’ll lose your inheritance.”

  Lilly glanced angrily at her mother before quickly looking down again.

  “I’m going to the ranch when I leave here,” I said, trying to cover the awkward moment. All the while, I was inching closer to the potato chips. “Maybe I’ll find out what that’s all about.”

  “It’s the strangest thing I ever heard,” Alice said, and her amazement sounded genuine. “Why would Father do this?”

  “Because you didn’t give a shit,” Lilly muttered.

  “Lilly! Don’t you have a hair appointment … dear?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Oh, Lilly.” Her mother’s voice softened. “Please.”

  The girl turned a page.

  I sneaked a potato chip and ate it.

  “My hair’s clean,” she said.

  “But you will look ridiculous in that ponytail and a ball gown.” Alice turned to look at me, catching me in midcrunch. “She’s ‘coming out’ tonight at a benefit ball. Our Lilly’s a debutante this season.”

  “Lilly’s a hypocrite this season.”

  “You’re not, darling.”

  The girl looked up. “I am, Mother!” She slammed the magazine shut. “I hate it!”

  “But it’s such a lovely evening, dear.”

  “Yeah. All the white girls in our white dresses.”

  At that, I expected her mother to say, “That’s enough, Lilly Ann.” But she surprised me. She reached over to gently touch her daughter’s fist, though she drew back quickly before she could be rebuffed. “It’s too late now, darling. You can’t expect years of tradition to change between now and the time the ball starts tonight. You’ve already accepted this responsibility, Lilly, months ago …”

  “You accepted it for me!”

  “You’ve been to the parties, now all that’s left is the ball, dear. Just this one more night and then it’s over and you can go back to riding your horses. Lilly, you can’t let your escort down, really you can’t, and besides, his poor mother would kill me. Please, darling. Try to do this with some grace, if not for me, then for your father.”

  “That’s a great guilt trip you’re laying on me, Mother.”

  Alice’s smile held a touch of guilt. “I know, I probably should have been Jewish.”

  “Mother!”

  “Oh, Lilly.” She sighed. “Does everything I say offend you? I wish you were more … flexible.”

  “Me inflexible! I’m not the one who—”

  But now her mother did stop the argument. “Lilly, it’s too late for this, and I’m sure we re making Miss Cain feel quite uncomfortable.”

  No, just ravenous.

  “I feel a lot worse than uncomfortable, Mother, I feel—” />
  “You have a hair appointment, dear.”

  The girl clamped her lips together in a ferocious scowl. She slid off her stool, stomped over to the refrigerator, and jerked open the door with such force that I thought she might pull the whole thing down on top of her. There were covered dishes inside that I wanted to grab and consume whole. I cursed myself for being such an oversensitive twit and not eating my breakfast eggs. Lilly extracted another Dr Pepper, butted the door closed, and wrenched open the can with one angry pull. The aluminum tab fell onto the carpet with a soft tap. Without another word, she walked out of the kitchen and out of the house, via a back door. The suede fringes on her jacket swung angrily.

  “I apologize,” Alice said to me.

  For which offense, I wondered. I grabbed a handful of chips and mumbled something. She bent to pick up the tab and put it into a wastebasket, and I took that opportunity to shovel some dip. She poured a cup of coffee and handed it to me. Since my right hand now had potato chips stuck to it, I had to take the coffee cup and saucer in my left. Every time I raised the cup to my lips, bits of chip snowed to the kitchen floor.

  Alice poured herself a cup, too.

  “Cream or sugar?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Sometimes I think my daughter is a throwback to my father.” From Alice’s sigh, I gathered she considered that a splintery cross to bear. “She wants to be a large-animal vet, of all things. You can’t imagine what that does to her fingernails. The child looks and smells like a stable hand, most of the time. Lord.” She stopped abruptly, looking slightly horrified. “I hope she gets a manicure while she’s at the beauty shop.”

  The little scene had given me an edge, and I took it.

  “Mrs. Lawrence,” I began, “I didn’t know your father. I didn’t know anything about this bequest until Dwight Brady called me yesterday. I can’t imagine why your father gave the ranch to our foundation instead of to yours, and I swear I don’t know what we’re going to do with it now that we’ve got it!”

  She seemed to bite back a smile, a real one.

  “I believe you,” she said. I thought I heard a faint emphasis on the first word. “That’s how I feel about ranches, too.”

  “Why do you think he did it?”

  Her smile instantly metamorphosed into the one she kept for company. “I can’t imagine.” She set her cup and saucer on the counter and turned away, as if to lead me back into the living room, and so I followed. Behind her back, I rubbed my hands together remorselessly; where I walked, potato chips crunched under my shoes. Too late, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be Margaret who had to vacuum, it would be a maid. We reached the foyer just as sweet Margaret was pushing Merle Lawrence’s wheelchair clatteringly over the tiles to the front door. They were accompanied by Dwight Brady, who handed me my briefcase.

  Merle still had the stuffed cat on his lap.

  Well, I thought, maybe he felt about cats as the settlers in these parts once felt about Indians, as in, the only good Indian is a—

  I finally recognized in myself the signs of incipient giddiness, a prelude to hysteria.

  “Good-bye,” I said firmly to them.

  They smiled and thanked me for coming. They didn’t ask me to come back. I was more than glad to oblige. Brady seemed to want to linger under the copper overhang to exchange more conversation (probably offering a cut rate on their wills, I thought), so I excused myself and scuttled back down the front walk through the drizzle to his car.

  I opened the door and got in.

  “Hi.”

  7

  The girl, Lilly Ann, was in the driver’s seat.

  “My God! You startled me! I do not need any more surprises today!”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Her legs were pressed together at the knees and she was clutching her own arms.

  I took a deep breath. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  “I want to go to the ranch with you,” she said in a stronger voice. “I won’t get in your way, really.”

  The fright she gave me was a good thing—like shock treatment on a mental patient, it had the reverse effect one might expect, calming me down, cooling me out.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said about the terms of the will, Lilly?”

  “I know! I won’t go on it! I just want to see it.”

  “But what about the ball tonight?”

  “I’m not going. Please!”

  I gazed at her for a moment, observing how pretty she was and how unhappy she looked. There was nothing artificial about this girl, either in appearance or attitude. Lilly Ann Lawrence displayed her feelings all over her face, and she blurted them uncensored from her mouth. I felt sorry for her, but I couldn’t help her.

  “No,” I said. “For one thing, it would be incredibly unethical of me to encourage you to violate the will. Furthermore, if you don’t go to the ball tonight, that’s your business. But it’s none of mine. I’m not going to put myself in the middle of a fight between you and your parents. So, I’m sorry, but no.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  She got out of the car, then ran with swift, scissoring steps across the street. Lilly Ann was already halfway down the block—her head down, her shoulders hunched, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her jacket—when Brady slid into the seat she had just vacated.

  “Where are we going now?” I asked him.

  “Downtown Airport. Sorry we can’t stop for lunch, but this visit put us behind schedule, and the pilot will be waiting. That was Benet’s granddaughter, wasn’t it? What’d she want?”

  “She wanted—to look at your car.”

  “More boy than girl, that girl.”

  I thought that appraisal grossly unfair, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t want to argue with him about her. I didn’t want that much more involvement with these strangers. Still, I had ample reason to be curious about them.

  “Dwight, what do you think happened to Merle Lawrence?”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror before pulling away from the curb. “The wheelchair? I’ve heard that was a horseback-riding accident.”

  “Is Margaret Stewart married?”

  “She told me she’s a widow, that her husband died in a hunting accident a long time ago. No children. Hard luck all around, I guess.”

  “I guess. She lives here, too?”

  “You might say so. On the third floor. Margaret has her own suite up there.”

  Margaret? “A close family.”

  “Evidently.”

  The rain accompanied us down the Southwest Trafficway, back across the Broadway Bridge to a little airport just across the Missouri River from the downtown skyscrapers. With the weather conditions as bad as they were, I thought maybe the plane wouldn’t be able to fly, but Brady told me there was enough clearance and the pilot was instrument rated.

  “I guess you think that’s reassuring,” I said.

  He actually smiled. “Afraid to fly?”

  “Not in jets, but I don’t know about small planes. I guess it’s like the old joke—I’m not afraid to fly, I’m afraid to crash.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Then why aren’t you going, too?”

  “I can’t, Jenny. I have to get those names and addresses to Detective Canales. Besides, you won’t need me. I don’t know enough about ranching to fill one side of a legal pad. You’ll learn everything you need to know from the people down there. They’re the cowmen, not I.”

  “I feel as if I’m flying to the moon, Dwight,” I confessed. “This whole thing is so alien to me.”

  “I sympathize.” He didn’t look sympathetic, he looked smug. “Believe me, if you scratch a Kansas Citian, you do not find a farmer underneath. All it takes is one generation away from the farm, and we forget everything our grandparents ever knew. I hardly know the front end of a cow from the back.”

  “I’ll send pictures.”

  He smiled again. It occurred to me that Dwight might be as glad to be rid of
my company as I was to be leaving his.

  Brady drove the Mercedes right up to the wing of a single-engine, propeller-driven aircraft. It looked like a toy that ought to be connected to a remote-control device operated by a ten-year-old boy on the ground. To board, I’d have to climb up the wing to a little door on the passenger’s side. The pilot, a heavy-set blond man wearing a dark windbreaker, was already in his seat, one of only four in the plane. From the ground, I could see him reading a thick notebook that looked like an instruction manual of some sort; I hoped the title was not “How to Fly This Thing.”

  Brady opened his car door, but then paused with one foot on the pavement. “This area you’re going to visit, the Flint Hills, it’s not like the rest of Kansas. It’s more like some parts of Wyoming or Montana, real ranchland. Hardly any farming at all. Most people have never heard of it, much less ever been there. I didn’t know much about it, myself, until I met Mr. Benet.”

  Ol’ Dwight was certainly turning loquacious, I mused, like somebody who was getting a load transferred from his shoulders to somebody else’s: mine.

  The pilot was talking into a tiny microphone that was attached to headphones, and he merely nodded at me when I climbed in. Suddenly, I thought of something. I leaned out and called down the wing, shouting over the whiny vroom of the engine, “Dwight, will there be a funeral?”

  He shook his head. “No, the will forbids it.”

  Of course, I thought, shaking my own head as I pulled myself back inside the cockpit, why should anything about this bequest be standard operating procedure?

  “Jenny?”

  I leaned back out again. Dwight had his hands cupped to his mouth.

  “You may have to tell the men about Mr. Benet!”

  Just as I opened my mouth to echo Lilly Ann’s Thanks a lot! the pilot leaned over me. I jumped back in my seat, startled, until I figured out what he was up to, which was merely to close my door. “Excuse me,” he said. He flipped the door handle up until it clicked twice, and then he belted me into the seat. A few minutes later, as we taxied down the runway, I looked back, expecting to wave to Dwight Brady, but all I saw was the red of his taillights in the rain. I didn’t even like him, but now I felt bereft, as if he had been my last link to civilization as I knew it. A ranch, for God’s sake. What the hell was I doing, going to a cattle ranch in the middle of Kansas. I sighed and turned around in my seat, only to gasp with horror. We were taking off, heading straight into those tall buildings downtown. I closed my eyes, convinced this was the last minute of life (as I knew it). When I opened my eyes again, we had swung safely to the west and were now flying over river bottoms.