A Comedy of Heirs

by Rett MacPherson

  “Swollen glands?”

  “I can’t tell,” I said.

  He felt my neck and made me say aaah with one of those popsicle stick things, which of course I gagged on. “Fever?”

  “No, not really,” I said.

  He reached in a cabinet, pulled out a box and removed a stick covered in plastic. He handed it to me. “Go pee on this.”

  I looked at him like he was crazy.

  “Go on,” he said. “And then come back in here. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  I did what he said. As I was walking back to his office I noticed that the stick had turned blue. I gave it to him as I walked back in and sat down on the examining table again.

  “You’re pregnant,” he said.

  “Yeah, right,” I said and laughed. I continued to laugh until I noticed that he was not laughing. “You … you can’t be serious.”

  “Yes,” he stated.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  “No, really, Doc. That’s not possible. Rudy and I are very careful.”

  “Obviously not careful enough.”

  I did not believe him. Even though he was standing there with one hand on his hip and my blue stick in the other hand, I still didn’t believe him. “You told me to pee on a stick,” I said. “And that’s supposed to prove something?”

  “It means you’re pregnant. You don’t have mono.”

  “How do you know I don’t have mono?” I asked. The blood had drained from my face, I could feel it.

  “I can test you for it if you want, but you don’t have swollen glands, fever or sore throat. What you do have is symptoms of feeling run down and being tired and one blue stick that says you’re pregnant,” he said, all chipper. “A lot of women mistake early symptoms of pregnancy with the flu or mono.”

  I sat there perfectly still. The other two times I found out I was pregnant I was at my OB’s office, not my regular doctor. They made me pee in a cup and I didn’t see what kind of test they used. Plus, we’d been trying so I was expecting it. This came out of left field and I was not prepared for it at all. It never even occurred to me. This just could not be. I was pregnant? I was going to have a baby? The last time I had a baby Rachel threatened to make it sleep in the street if it was a boy. Thank goodness it was a girl.

  Tears welled in my eyes. I wasn’t ready for another baby. There weren’t supposed to be any more. What was I going to do with another baby? Where would I put it?

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “There are other things that can make you tired, but before poking your veins for blood, I thought we’d go this route first. I was right. When was your last period?”

  I thought about it for a minute. I was so wrapped up in this whole reunion thing that I hadn’t even realized that I was … five weeks. I counted it on my fingers. Five weeks. It was five weeks ago. And the blue stick said I was pregnant.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Told ya,” he said and smiled.

  “Don’t smile like that,” I said, all serious.

  “What?” he asked. “This isn’t good news?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I have no idea what Rudy will say. My mother will probably have a stroke. Sylvia will go ballistic. None of the dresses will fit. Oh, man.”

  “Do you want me to call somebody to come and get you? Are you so upset that you can’t drive yourself home?” he asked.

  I barely heard his words echoing around in my head. I was off on another planet somewhere. “When?” I asked. “When is it due?”

  “August sometime,” he said. “You need to make an appointment with your OB.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”

  Pregnant. I got off the examining table, picked up my purse and book and headed out the door. Pregnant. Baby. Baby. Pregnant. My head hurt.

  Six

  There’s nothing like having a really big secret and not being able to tell it to anybody. Which is why most secrets don’t make it as secrets very long, I would presume. I let the whole evening pass and didn’t say one word about that blue stick at the doctor’s office. Not one. On one hand it took every ounce of self-restraint that I had, and God knows that ain’t much. On the other hand I was actually afraid to bring up the subject. This wasn’t something that had even been discussed. Rudy and I had our two kids and never talked about what we would do if this sort of thing happened. I was clueless as to how anybody would react.

  I stood by the refrigerator drinking a glass of milk. Mary’s newest artwork was hanging from a magnet of a pig that said Pig Out. The drawing was of our house and it had people coming out of all of the windows and doors, even the chimney. I think she was trying to tell me something.

  My father walked up the basement steps and surprised me. I jumped. It was late, almost midnight, and everybody was in bed or off to their hotel, bed and breakfast or whatever it was they were doing. I gave a small jump when my dad came in the kitchen.

  “Scare you?” he asked and sat down. He wore his hair in the same fashion that he’d worn when he was eighteen. The Elvis pompadour thing, even though he wasn’t much of a fan of Elvis. He wore a red work cap with marble dust splatters on it, cocked to one side so that his pompadour wouldn’t get too smashed. His hair used to be so black it was nearly blue, but now it was turning gray around the edges.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry. Got any coffee made?” he asked.

  “I think there’s some sludge in the bottom of the pot,” I answered.

  He got up and filled his giant, filthy QT mug with my wonderful sludge and sat back down. He lit up a cigarette and I handed him a saucer.

  “Wish you people would get ashtrays around here,” he grumbled as he took the saucer from me.

  “None of us smoke,” I said. “It just never occurs to us to get an ashtray.” I walked over to the table and sat down with my half full glass of milk. “Uncle Melvin go home?”

  “Yeah, I’m about ready to head out myself.”

  “Before you go,” I ventured, “I was wondering. How exactly was it that Great-grandpa Keith died again?”

  He looked at me strangely and raised an eyebrow. My father hated it when I knew something about his family that he did not. He felt like it was his family, he knew them before I did and so he should know everything first.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Just tell me how he died.”

  “Why?”

  “Come on, Pop, just humor me.”

  “Well,” he said and took a drink of the sludge. He actually grimaced but took another sip anyway. “It was August.”

  “What’s in season in August?”

  “This was the forties, in the country. You can hunt whatever you want,” he said, irritated. “They were hunting squirrel, though, I imagine.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “It was August and Grandpa Nate took his son, Uncle Gran—”

  “You mean Granville?”

  “Uncle Granville,” he said. “And my dad and Jed along with him. I heard they’d been drinking a little, because it was so hot and everything.”

  These particular ancestors of mine didn’t need the excuse of the heat to be drinking, but I thought it best not to express my opinion on this. Dad continued.

  “Anyway, they got turned around in the woods and couldn’t figure out where they were—”

  “Why would they go so far in the woods if they were just hunting squirrels? You could practically find them in the backyard,” I said.

  “Are you gonna let me tell this damn story or not?” he asked. He was slightly annoyed. Ticked would be more like it.

  “Sorry,” I said all sheepish.

  “So, anyway, Uncle Jed suggested that they just go in the opposite direction of the sun and eventually they’d run into the river because they’d be heading east,” he said. “Grandpa Nate wouldn’t hear anything of it. H
e wasn’t going to listen to no snot-nosed grandkid tell him which way to go in the woods. He knew those woods like the back of his hand.”

  “Even though this snot-nosed grandkid was twenty-eight years old?” I asked.

  Dad gave me the eyebrow again and I shut up.

  “Anyway, so Jed decided he was just going to head for the river. He didn’t really care what Grandpa thought. So, him and Dad, which was your grandpa, headed for the river. Well, Uncle Gran decided about five minutes later that his dad was being foolish and that yes, he was going to go with Jed. Well, about ten minutes after they were headed to the river, they heard a gunshot.”

  He stopped talking and looked at me as if I was going to butt in. I shrugged my shoulders that I didn’t have anything to say, really, and he went on.

  “They ran back and found Grandpa Nate. They said that he’d tripped and shot himself with his own gun,” he said and took another drink from his QT cup.

  “First of all,” I said, “how could four grown men who grew up in that area, who grew up in the woods, get lost in broad daylight?”

  “The woods are thick and I guess when you’re drinking it can all begin to look alike,” Dad said.

  “Why would they go off and leave him?” I asked. “Why would they just decide to leave a seventy-eight-year-old man alone in the woods to find his way home?”

  “He was being stubborn as a mule,” my dad said. “Jed said that they couldn’t get him to do anything, so they just left him.”

  I didn’t buy it. And I had proof that was not how he died, anyway. But, even without that proof, I couldn’t figure out why they would go off and leave an old man in the woods. Didn’t anybody question that? I just found that hard to believe, although I did realize that my uncles and such were ornery.

  “Well, Dad,” I said. I got up and put my glass in the sink and reached up on top of the refrigerator to get the manila envelope. I set it down in front of him. “Somebody sent these to me, anonymously, I might add. I checked them out at the library and they are the real thing. I’m not saying that you’re lying to me, but I am saying that what you’re repeating is a lie.”

  My father looked at the newspaper articles with no expression whatsoever. He read them silently and then set them down. “That’s just bullsh—”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “I looked for myself. They are real. Look at that porch. That’s the porch you grew up on and I did, too. Della Ruth was his wife … it is real.”

  “Who have you told?” he asked.

  “Nobody. You’re the first,” I said.

  He picked the articles up again and after about a minute shoved them back into the manila envelope. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I’m going to find out why this investigation was dropped. It’s classified as unsolved. I don’t know if I can ever find out who killed him or why, it being so old a case,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked. “What does it matter to you?”

  “It matters,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “He was my great-grandfather.”

  “You never knew him,” he said.

  “His blood still runs through my veins and I want to know who killed him. Don’t you?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “It doesn’t bother you at all that, number one, you’ve been lied to your whole life? You obviously believed the hunting story,” I said. My father only shrugged his shoulders and lit up another cigarette. “Number two, you knew this man and it doesn’t bother you that somebody just killed him? Killed him violently and left him on his front porch for his wife, your grandmother, to find?”

  “You don’t know what you could be stirring up,” he said. “This is people’s lives we’re talking about.”

  “Your grandmother lied to you, your parents lied to you,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I would want to know just what the big secret was that they had to lie about it.”

  My father stood and dumped the cigarette butts into my trash can, then placed the saucer in the sink. He looked at me for a second with an expression I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. I couldn’t begin to name the emotion that was running through him or just what the look meant. “Keep it quiet,” he said. “You don’t know when you might be talking to the person who did it.”

  My breath caught in my throat as I realized what exactly it was that he was saying. Tears welled in my eyes and I had to remind myself that it could be just hormones that was causing such a strong reaction. When I was pregnant with Mary I cried over toothpaste commercials, after all.

  “It could be any of your aunts and uncles that did that,” he said and pointed to the envelope on the table. “Could have been either one of your grandparents, could have been anybody.”

  The thought of my beloved grandparents being murderers made me sick to my stomach. I didn’t believe that. And if one of them had pulled the trigger there would have been a really good explanation. I just knew it. I hoped. What if I were wrong, though? I began to see just what he was getting at. If my Aunt Charlie, for example, was a murderess it would disrupt the lives of her two children and grandchildren. Was I willing to take that chance? But was it okay to let a murderer get by with it?

  I just looked at my father with a really confused look on my face, I know, because I was really confused.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said. “And if you see Aunt Ruth, don’t mention this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she gets really upset over things. She’s convinced herself that she’s Donna Reed. Don’t go making her think otherwise,” he advised me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Good night, Dad.”

  “Good night, Torie.”

  He shut the door and left me to wrestle with my own conscience about what to do. If I found out who murdered Nathaniel Ulysses Keith, I didn’t necessarily have to tell anybody, right? Besides, somebody wanted me to know about it. It had to be a family member. I decided that before I went to bed I would make a list of all the family I had that lived in St. Louis. That was where the postmark was from on the envelope. I needed an ally in this.

  Seven

  The next day I was driving down River Point Road and was going to make a right down by the Old Mill Stream restaurant and head out of town. I was on my way to see the sheriff. On my own accord, without being coerced. I did want something from him, though.

  The radio said that there would be snow tonight for sure, and I felt my heart give a little leap. Snow. I couldn’t wait and I hoped with all my heart that this wasn’t another false alarm. Just as I was daydreaming about playing in the snow with all of my cousins, as I used to do when I was a kid, this large figure stepped out in front of me. I slammed on the brakes. Luckily I was doing but twenty miles an hour.

  Eleanore Murdoch stood in front of my car with her hands on her hips, her big plastic Christmas tree earrings swaying in the wind. A green crocheted hat was pulled down to her eyebrows, making her look like one of those craft dolls with the big eyes and no hair under the hat. She was a very top-heavy woman and her brown wool cloak resembled a small tent.

  My purse, notebook and envelope that were sitting on the seat next to me went flying into the floorboard when I’d slammed on the brakes. I honked my horn at her for no other reason than being just fuming angry.

  I rolled down my window as she headed for my side of the car. “What in blazes is wrong with you, woman?”

  “I wanted to talk with you,” she said with her nose raised in the air. Eleanore was the town gossip. She and her husband, Oscar, owned the bed and breakfast in town, called the Murdoch Inn. She was booked this week with lots of my family. She also had a small, one-page article in the New Kassel Gazette, and thought she was the up-and-coming star of journalism. She was also a snoop. Of course, so was I, but I didn’t seem to be so blasted annoying with it.

  “Can’t you call me or knock on my door?” I asked. “Do you have to run out in front of my car? I could have hit you!” The damage
would have most likely been to my car, but I kept that part to myself.

  “I wanted to talk with you right now this minute,” she said. “It couldn’t wait. I saw you coming down the street and decided to flag you down.”

  “What is it?” I asked, checking my temper.

  “It’s your cousins.”

  “Which ones, Eleanore?”

  “You know,” she said and looked around self-consciously.

  “I have twenty first cousins and forty-three first cousins once removed with four new ones on the way. I can’t even begin to tell you how many second cousins I have. Which of the masses are you referring to?” I asked.

  “You don’t have to get snotty, Torie,” she said.

  “You don’t have to be so vague, Eleanore.”

  “I am speaking of Larry Keith and his … his … friend,” she said finally.

  “You mean Tommy?”

  “Yes,” she said. The end of her nose was beginning to turn red from the cold and she had started the “cold dance,” rocking back and forth to try and stay warm.

  “What about them?” I asked and threw the car into park. I knew what about them. They were gay.

  “I think,” she began and then stopped. Was Eleanore actually showing some finesse? “I think there is something not right with them.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “I think … I think that they are, you know,” she said and then leaned into my window and whispered, “gay.”

  “Oh, that,” I said.

  She gasped and straightened herself up quickly. “You mean they are?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

  “I can’t have gay people in my bed and breakfast,” she said haughtily.

  “Why not?” I asked. “Are you getting complaints about public displays of affection?”

  “Well, no,” she said.

  “Are they carrying around banners trying to persuade people to join them?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Well, you can tell that they are, you know, gay. And what will that do for my business?” she asked.

  “It will do wonders for your business,” I said. “The only people in the bed and breakfast this week are my family anyway, and we all know that they are gay. Just leave them be, Eleanore, and they won’t bother you.”