June

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  His frown deepened. “I’m sure the news comes as a shock. I should have—”

  “Wait.” Their presence had been so obvious, so apparent, that her incredulity won over discretion. “You didn’t feel that?”

  “I heard you call out your grandmother’s name. And Jack’s. And then your eyes kind of rolled back and you went like—” He pushed himself back in a crude imitation of how she’d looked. He winced as he said, “Was that a seizure?”

  “I was reacting. To the…the way they just—” She clasped her hands together and squeezed until her knuckles turned white. “The”—she almost said “ghosts,” then noticed Nick’s pursed lips and thought better of it. Talking this openly about the dream people was, like the horrifying pile of mail just a few feet to her left, a sign she’d been spending too much time alone, and she was only just now seeing that. She cleared her throat. “Whatever it was.”

  His brow furrowed. “Maybe you should lie down.”

  “I don’t need to lie down,” she said, her voice rising higher than she wanted. She reached for a handful of chips and shoved them into her mouth. He was still watching her carefully. She uttered a gruff and crumby “Sit.” He obeyed. She felt grumpy, ruffled, judged. She’d been wrong to let him linger this long. “So—this inheritance. How much did the movie star leave me?”

  He folded his hands in his lap. Back to business. “Thirty-seven million dollars.”

  At the mention of this sum, Cassie nearly fell out of her chair. Her question had sounded flippant, but only because she’d thought they were playing a flirtatious game. And also because how on earth had an old dead codger of a movie star thought to leave her, Cassandra Danvers, any money at all, let alone money like that? She tried to ask a question about it, but the words wouldn’t stick together.

  “…plus a few properties—the home in Malibu, the apartment in Paris, an island in the Caribbean.” Apparently, Nick had been talking for a while and, now finished, was awaiting her reply.

  “That’s…” Cassie couldn’t even imagine what that amount of money looked like. “That’s…”

  “A lot of money,” Nick said, in his patient, gentlemanly way.

  Cassie nodded, but she was watching him carefully. It couldn’t be this simple, could it? A man bearing $37 million doesn’t just show up on your doorstep. “Who do you work for?”

  Nick lifted his eyes to meet hers. His irises were a surprising gray, swirled with silver. “Tate Montgomery,” he said softly, and the wince was undeniable.

  Of course. Tate Montgomery. Jack Montgomery’s second daughter, the one who was so famous there was a haircut named after her. Cassie had known Tate was Jack’s daughter at some point, back in middle and high school, when she’d pored over fashion magazines. Now the facts flooded back: flat-abbed, perfectly coiffed, ivory-toothed Tate Montgomery had a royal bloodline. The goddess rose up in Cassie’s imagination: in her midnight blue bikini holding hands with Max Hall in that famous paparazzi shot from the day they got engaged; locking up her bike in front of the coffee shop on that sitcom she’d starred in for nine years; crying her eyes out on the tarmac in that tearjerker, when Rob Lowe finally went back to his wheelchair-bound wife. Compared to Tate Montgomery, people like Cassie were mere mortals.

  “How does Tate feel about her dad’s money going to some stranger?” Cassie asked. It felt strange to say only her first name, as if she knew her.

  Nick leaned forward awkwardly. “Are you? Just some stranger?”

  Cassie laughed, one loud laugh she didn’t know she had in her. “Are you asking if I’ve ever met Jack Montgomery? Uh, no. I barely know who he is.”

  “So you didn’t know anything about this?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He shook his head quite seriously.

  “Nick Emmons.” Cassie felt positively giddy; this whole thing was absurd. “This is obviously”—she hesitated, relishing how he hung on her words—“an epic mistake.” He sat back in his chair, disappointed. She shook her head and shrugged. “Was Mr. Montgomery demented? That strikes me as the most likely scenario. Maybe he, like, picked my name out of a phone book. Maybe he didn’t want his children to get his money and a random girl in Ohio seemed like a better choice.”

  Apparently this was no laughing matter. “Tate is upset,” Nick said gravely.

  “Understandably.”

  He cleared his voice. “He left a letter.”

  “To me?”

  “To Tate and her sister.”

  “The sister’s famous too, right?” Cassie remembered that her father had loved the sister. Her name started with an E. He’d watched her on TV when he, and this sister, were both young.

  Nick frowned at the word famous. He was oddly prim, Cassie thought, for a man who worked for a movie star. “Elda Hernandez. Used to be Montgomery. You’d likely know her from Planet Purple.”

  Planet Purple, that was it. A show from the early seventies with low production values, because who needed them when you had barely legal girls flitting around in bikinis, waving ray guns? Cassie could vaguely summon up this bronzed, Amazonian version of Elda with a long ponytail set high atop her head. Cassie had seen the show a few times on sick days; it had played on midday reruns. But these days, Elda Hernandez was three times the size she’d once been. She wore healing crystals over her long linen dresses. She showed up in the tabloids every once in a while, usually for flipping off some paparazzo or saying Hollywood was run by misogynists or making a frank statement about the realities of menopause. There’d been a scandalous memoir, but Cassie had been too young to read it.

  “What did the note say?” Cassie asked.

  “It said…well, it implied that you were Jack’s…granddaughter.”

  “Nope,” Cassie replied. No, she had a grandpa. Not exactly the fun get-on-the-floor-and-play-with-you type, and dead since she was nine years old, but certainly a decent man, decent enough to urge his wife to move a hundred miles away so as not to disrupt the life of his newly orphaned granddaughter, even though his heart disease was bad enough to kill him within the year. Not to mention that Cassie’s grandmother was by far the most straitlaced, morally upright person she’d ever met; it was impossible to imagine her having an affair with anyone. It was impossible to imagine her ever having had sex.

  “Arthur was my grandfather,” she explained. “June married him the summer she was out of high school. She had my dad exactly nine months later. And, believe me, my grandmother was definitely a virgin when she got married.” Nick was looking at her dubiously. “You can’t seriously think anyone believes Mr. Montgomery was right? How would June have even met someone like Jack? She was a small-town Ohio girl.”

  “The thing is…” Nick cleared his throat and met her eyes again. She was reminded of the Atlantic on a January day. “The thing is, Cassandra, Jack Montgomery actually filmed a movie in this town sixty years ago this month. Your grandmother would have been eighteen—”

  “But that’s what I’m telling you,” Cassie pressed. “That’s when my grandparents got married. There’s no way—”

  “It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Jack fathered June’s child.” Nick pulled a thick legal document from his bag and handed it to her. It said “Last Will and Testament” across the top, but she didn’t want to look at it now, not when Nick could tell her what she needed to know. “Especially because, were he still living, your father, Adelbert Lemon Danvers, would be fifty-nine years old.”

  She felt that dangerous switch flip inside her chest, the switch that turned her small and afraid.

  Nick saw what her father’s name did to her, she could tell that by the careful way he watched her. But he went on. “And then there’s the matter of your father’s first name. According to the Social Security Administration, Adelbert hasn’t even been in the top thousand male names since 1932.”

  “So?”

  “So,” he said gently, “Adelbert was Jack’s real name, before he changed it for Hollywood. Ad
elbert Michaels.”

  “What do you want then?” She clenched her jaw. “Obviously you want something.” What she wanted was to leave, but this was her house now.

  He nodded, as though grateful to have finally gotten to this part of things. “Tate’s going to contest her father’s will. The good news is she believes, as you do, that Jack Montgomery was not your grandfather.”

  Somewhere outside, a dog began to bark, sharp and insistent. Had this been any other day, Cassie would have investigated, creeping out onto the porch or leaning her forehead against the front parlor window. Instead, she sat back in her chair and crossed her arms, like a teenager with a bad attitude. “How is that good news?”

  His eyes skipped nervously over the parlors again, really just two halves of the same giant room. In the shakiness of his gaze, Cassie noticed the crumbling ceiling, the water-stained wall above the fireplace, the open wiring where there had once been a light switch and from which, only two weeks before, she’d seen sparks shoot. “Well, if you cooperate with Tate, she’s prepared to pay you a million dollars.”

  “Cooperate?”

  “We’ll fly back to L.A. tonight in her private jet—it’s waiting at the airfield. A physician will take your DNA sample. A few swabs of the cheek, and he’ll analyze it in his state-of-the-art facility. If you’re a match, well then, obviously you’ll inherit the thirty-seven million as Jack specified. But if not, you’ll fly home a million dollars richer, and Tate will pay all the legal fees to straighten this mess out.”

  “Why not just swab my cheek and take it to her yourself?”

  “We want to do this right.” Crossed t’s, dotted i’s; Cassie supposed she should expect nothing less of Hollywood royalty.

  “And if I don’t cooperate?” Cassie knew enough about death and what came after it to avoid a whole other family’s drama, especially that of the most famous family in the world. But then—$37 million. Not to mention the matter of June’s and Jack’s names, clasped together. The dream people had certainly expressed an interest in that union, and this fact itched at Cassie, whether it meant she was going crazy or not.

  The skin between Nick’s eyes wrinkled, giving him a worried frown. His fingers nervously edged his smartphone. “Your father went by El, right?”

  She nodded, wondering what that had to do with anything.

  “I like that.” He coughed nervously. “El, uh, he had a drinking problem, huh?”

  “What?” She was too shocked to say anything else.

  “Your art show,” he said, as though it was her fault this had come up. “The Times mentioned your bravery in their review of your installation piece. The Jack Daniel’s bottle on the car floor—they really loved that.”

  “Are you kidding me?” She felt disgusted, raw, exposed, and incapable of sputtering out anything but utter disbelief at Nick’s gall.

  He turned red-faced and apologetic in the wake of her reaction. “It’s just that his addiction, well, it points to a certain weakness, you understand? I’m sure you can imagine how well connected Tate is. She’ll go to the ends of the earth to prove her case if she can’t just settle it with a DNA sample from you. Even, you know, even trying to prove that your father, or who knows who else, could have, I don’t know, tried to coerce Mr. Montgomery into, well…” His hands were open in logical supplication; why wouldn’t she just agree? “Cassie, please consider how many resources Tate is willing to devote to this cause.” He leaned forward as if offering a helpful tip. “Ask yourself if you’re financially prepared if and when she goes after you.”

  “Goes after me?” Cassie was seeing red.

  Nick scrabbled together his things and stood, knee jolting the snack tray and nearly sending the remaining nibbles flying. He swallowed, as if he didn’t want to say the words he was about to. “This is a nice house. I’d be sad to see you lose it.”

  “Okay.” A great, roaring power from within pushed Cassie to her feet. “It’s time for you to leave.” As though she’d asked for this, or had any interest in fighting with rich ladies over some stranger’s money. She pointed toward the front door with a shaking hand, imagining what the anger looked like as it licked off of her. “Get out.”

  Nick was already in the foyer, chandelier chattering with the reverberations of his footsteps.

  The heavy door protested as he pulled it open. The front porch groaned under his step. She cursed her earlier daydream of it trapping him out there forever; what she wanted, more than anything, was for this stranger to just be gone.

  “If my DNA is so goddamn important to Tate Montgomery, then tell her to come get it herself,” she growled. And she slammed the front door in his face, noticing, in the split second before she shut him out, that Nick looked both relieved and appreciative, not at all what she was expecting.

  The vibrant scent of Ivory filled the room. It was the first day of June; finally, June! Lindie had planned to get to Center Square before breakfast and sniff out the movie shoot. Today she’d finally see if Erie Canal was really coming to town. But even for Lindie, it was early; the light filling the room was rosy and low. Already June was primping. Lindie burrowed back into the creamy pillowcase, warming to the idea that June had changed her mind and would, in fact, be coming along to the extras casting. The prospect of putting on that horrible strawberry dress was much more pleasant if June would be by Lindie’s side. Together, they’d comb the rats out of her hair, and June would invite Lindie down for breakfast in the grand Two Oaks dining room. The doughy promise of Apatha’s biscuits filled the air.

  Lindie dozed again, and in that drowse of morning, the big house loved her. It had always loved this little girl who, in turn, loved its creator, Lemon Gray Neely. Before June and her mother moved in, Lindie had spent countless childhood hours helping Apatha wash Uncle Lem’s hands with a knit cloth, or skating across the ballroom floor with soft rags tied to her feet. It loved the tangy stain of brass polish on her father’s fingertips almost as much as she did.

  Lindie was a child who needed Two Oaks; that made her easy to love too. Her mother, Lorraine, had left Lindie and Lindie’s father, Eben (and St. Jude entirely), two years after Eben returned from the war, when Lindie was seven. In the ensuing years, Apatha—who kept Two Oaks shipshape, no small feat—had become Lindie’s new mother, especially indispensable on those days when Eben needed to balance the books for Uncle Lem’s vast business holdings. So sweet were the memories of the little girl gathered onto Apatha’s lap in the yeasty kitchen, that though she had grown, and the roost was now ruled by June’s mother, Cheryl Ann, Two Oaks still considered Lindie to be its own.

  It was in business school in Columbus that Eben had met Lorraine. Eldest son of the original caretakers of Two Oaks—Mr. and Mrs. Loftus Shaw—scrawny little Eben had had a shrewdness with numbers that impressed Uncle Lem. The great man admired the way the boy divided ten cookies evenly among sixteen children, how he estimated the number of apples in a bushel just by looking at the top of the crate. When it came time for a high school graduation gift, Loftus and Ellen were shocked and delighted to receive a large check in Eben’s name, accompanied by an enthusiastic acceptance letter to business school in Columbus. The old man had arranged it.

  Eben didn’t talk much about his parents, but Lindie knew they’d been hardworking folk whose trade was more like Apatha’s (sweeping, baking, dusting, waxing) than like his own. Two Oaks remembered its original, lovely caretakers—how they sometimes held hands over the kitchen table, how the sour stink of Ellen’s boiled cabbage would fill the whole downstairs, and the awful day when she fell from the ladder while dusting the foyer light fixture. And though the son of these good, simple folk had become a man of numbers, land, and oil, he’d never forgotten where he’d come from. In the days before Cheryl Ann, he and Lindie spent hours on the Two Oaks front porch, tending to the small and necessary tasks Apatha couldn’t get to. Sundays, Eben would fiddle with the shrieking doorbell with a Phillips screwdriver, his ledger and fountain pen forgotten on
the porch floor, while Apatha read aloud from Huckleberry Finn. Beside Uncle Lem on the porch swing, Lindie watched the old man’s wrinkled lips putter along with Mark Twain’s sentences. Eventually, he would doze off, and, dappled in sweet summer light, Lindie would imagine Jim and Huck on their raft as her father unscrewed a porch bulb atop a ladder, and bumblebees mumbled lazily across the afternoon.

  After lunch, little Lindie would help Apatha put up the wash, and the wet, white linens would flap in the sun. In the evenings, Apatha would bring out her darning gourd and repair their socks, or knit cotton dishrags while Lindie lay, chin propped up, in front of the great radio console in the foyer and listened to The Lone Ranger followed by The Grand Ole Opry. Sometimes at night they’d put an old Strauss waltz onto the Victrola that Lemon and his long-dead wife, Mae, had received as a wedding gift many years before, and the whole house would bloom with the tinny pace of one-two-three one-two-three.

  Lindie’s drowsy mind mingled with the household’s lulling memories of that sweet time, now gone, until she heard a sound that alarmed her. It came from June’s side of the room. It was a sound Lindie remembered from Lorraine’s days, one she hadn’t heard often, but enough to recognize, the sound of a woman getting ready to go out, not to the market or the corner, not to school, as she’d heard June do on plenty of cold winter mornings (the scratch of wool, the slip of buttons), but to impress: the adult swish of ironed cotton as it drops down over a nylon slip.

  Lindie sat up. June was standing before the mirror to the left of the window that, in the light of day, now overlooked Lindie’s humble bungalow just across the street, where Eben was still snoring, and the dishes remained unwashed. June wore a navy dress that brought out the dark ocean of her eyes. The fabric nipped in at her waist, making her hips seem even curvier than they already were. Her breasts pressed, high and round, against the bodice, as though begging to be set free. Her cheeks were rouged, her lips stained red, her long hair curled and tucked under.