by Luke, Jason
“Can I see her now?” Connie asked sweetly.
The Director nodded. “I’ll have one of the staff show you the way. I believe she is out in the garden. She apparently told one of the other residents that she was planning to steal one of the golf buggies we use to transport our most frail clients down to the duck pond.”
Connie arched her eyebrows, and hid another grin behind her hand. She went back out into the foyer, and the receptionist who had greeted her on arrival led her down a wide passage with numbered doors on either side. At a T-intersection, the nurse turned left and Connie could see a sun-drenched garden area with lawn chairs nestled between the arms of the building.
“She’s over there,” the nurse pointed. Then she called out suddenly, her voice clear in the sleepy silence. “Ruthy! Your daughter is here to see you. Make sure you behave…”
A frail old lady, hunched down on a bench turned her head, the puzzled expression on her face clearing when she saw Connie standing in the shade. She waved to her daughter delightedly, and then flipped the receptionist the bird, thrusting the gnarled middle finger of her hand high into the air.
Ruth Dixon was a frail-looking old lady with withered arthritic hands, and a face lined by the creases of a long life beneath a shock of soft grey hair. She was tiny, the flesh withering on her bones, but her eyes were bright and glittering behind the steel frames of her glasses. She looked up into Connie’s face with an expression of pure joy and lifted her arms. Connie bent over the bench, hugged her mother and kissed her on the cheek, her fingers feeling the feeble frame beneath the long-sleeve dress and the cardigan around the old woman’s stooped shoulders.
“Hello, mom,” Connie smiled warmly. “I hear you’re still causing trouble for the staff. I’ve just been hauled into the Director’s office about your most recent antics.”
Ruth grinned with wicked mischief. Connie sat close beside her mother and the old lady clasped her hand.
“Hello, lovey!” Ruth’s voice was a thin and reedy chirp. She studied Connie’s face closely as if to remember every detail of her daughter. “Don’t mind what they say,” she lowered her voice to a whisper and leaned in conspiratorially. “The screws just want to keep me down.”
Connie nodded and then turned away, amused. An elderly man shuffled across the lawn, supporting himself with a walker. There was a young uniformed woman at his side, holding the man’s elbow.
Connie felt her mother’s fingers squeeze her hand and she turned back. Ruth had a proud, contented smile on her lips.
“Are they treating you well, mom? Do you like being here?”
Ruth nodded. “I’m surrounded by old people,” she lamented seriously, and flung a thin arm in the air to gesture her impatience, “but a couple of the screws are good. They look after me.”
Connie shook her head in mock horror, and tried to admonish the old lady. “Mom, they’re not screws, they’re nurses. This isn’t a prison.” She paused for a thoughtful second. “Would you prefer to live with Jean again?”
Selling one of the paintings she had would make that possible, Connie realized. Her mother could move back to Jean’s home and be with family. The house could be renovated to accommodate her. There might even be enough for regular visits from nursing staff to the home.
“Oh, hell no!” Ruth’s face became wide-eyed and animated with horror. “Lovey, if I hadn’t fallen down those stairs at Jean’s place I probably would have thrown myself down them. She’s my daughter, and I love her… but the woman has absolutely no sense of humor!”
Connie couldn’t help herself. She giggled and shook her head. “Well then stop giving the nurses such a hard time. The Director told me about the young man yesterday … and the poor little cat.”
Ruth gave her a scornful look. “That damned cat,” she hissed. “I’ll kick its ass if I ever catch it.”
They lapsed into a contented silence. The sun was warm, and there was just a whisper of cool breeze through the trees. Connie sighed, felt weary muscles beginning to relax from the long drive back from Maine.
Ruth watched her daughter’s face with a kind of knowing that only a mother could have. She waited until the elderly man and his nurse were out of earshot.
“Are you still on with that Dunstan?” she asked at last.
“Duncan.”
Ruth shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Dunstan, Duncan… whatever you call him, he’s no good for you, lovey.”
Connie turned, her expression curious. “How can you say that, mom?” she asked softly. “You’ve never met him…”
Ruth smiled, but it was a bitter touch at her lips without any trace of humor. “A mother knows,” she said sagely. “A mother always knows. I don’t need to meet the man. I can tell what he is like because how he treats you is reflected in your eyes and your face. It’s all there to see.”
Connie fell silent. She watched a workman on his knees, digging at a garden bed with a small hand-held shovel, grateful for the small moment of distraction.
“It’s over with Duncan,” Connie said at last. She was surprised how easy it was to say the words, how they spilled from between her lips with no regret – nothing but a bitter taste of resentment.
It was over with Duncan, she knew that, and it gave her a little lift. But it wasn’t something she wanted to discuss with her mother. She hadn’t come to share her problems.
They talked for an hour; desultory conversation with no purpose other than the closeness of companionship. Finally Connie got to her feet and glanced up at the afternoon sun. “Mom, I need to go,” she said softly. “I told Jean I would stay with her tonight, and then I’m driving back to New York tomorrow.”
Her mother nodded, understanding, yet unable to hide the shift of sadness behind her eyes. “Of course, lovey,” she patted Connie’s hand. “Try not to fight with your sister. Remember, she doesn’t have a sense of humor.” The old woman winked, then sat back on the bench. It was getting cool.
Connie hesitated in the shadows of the doorway and watched her mother for a long moment, conflicted with a child’s guilt. Then she set her shoulders and strode away down the long passage. She needed to be at Jean’s place before nightfall.
18.
Her sister answered the door on the third knock. Connie stood on the front steps harried and weary. The drive had taken forty minutes through heavy traffic, including a stop at a thrift shop where she bought an old briefcase to carry the paintings. Jean answered the door with a wan smile, glanced down at the briefcase in one of Connie’s hands and the suitcase in the other, but said nothing. She held the door open and Connie stepped inside the old house that was filled with the aromas of cooking and coffee.
The kitchen was bathed in the last of the afternoon’s light, spilling through a window above the sink. Overhead cupboards had been replaced, and the stove was new, Connie noticed, but that was where Jean’s money – or her will – had run out. The curtains across the window were pale and faded, and the kitchen counter was chipped old wood. Jean went to the sink and filled the kettle with water. Connie could hear the thump and knock of old pipes in the walls.
Jean set two enamel mugs on the counter, arranged sugar and a jar of instant coffee near her elbow, then turned back to Connie with a flicker of a smile while she waited for the water to boil.
“How is mom?”
Connie nodded. “She’s good,” she nodded her head sincerely. “Still getting into trouble, but she seems fine.”
Jean made a tired face. She nodded. “The coffee shouldn’t be long,” she said in a brittle show of domesticity. “How was your drive back from Maine?”
“Good.”
The superficial smile stayed fixed on Jean’s lips. She began to say something else, and then seemed suddenly to remember her manners. There was a wooden table in one corner of the room. She waved Connie to a chair with a flutter of her hand.
“Please…”
The table was the kind of piece that interior decorators would call ‘distressed�
�. There were dark marks and scratches in the surface, and ancient notches along the edges. Connie scraped back a chair and sat. She set the suitcase down beside her and laid the briefcase flat on the table.
Her sister reminded Connie of a dried flower, or maybe a black and white photo. Somewhere in her past, the color had been drained from her life, and Connie couldn’t quite recall when. They had never been close – the age gap had prohibited that – and it hadn’t been until recent years that the two sisters had even been in regular touch.
In a way, their mother’s failing health had brought them together, but there was a strain between them – a sense of awkwardness that comes from unfamiliarity. The two women hardly knew each other.
Connie sat in the silence while Jean turned her attention back to making coffee. There was the harsh clatter of a spoon, the hiss of the boiling water, and then just the distant monotonous ticking of a clock… sounding like the prelude to something explosive.
Jean brought the cups to the table and slumped down in a chair with a sigh. She closed her eyes as if drawing on some inner reserve of strength. There was a loosening of her body, a relief. When she opened her eyes again she looked impossibly tired.
“How is work going?” Connie asked.
Jean’s look said it all. She scraped her fingers through her hair. Her face seemed to collapse, becoming haggard. “The days are getting longer, the nights of rest shorter, and the money is stretching less than ever before,” Jean admitted. She was an accountant, employed by a local firm.
Connie nodded, unwilling to continue with a conversation that would highlight her sister’s frustration. The two women sat in stilted silence.
“You?”
Connie shrugged, said nothing. She was beginning to regret visiting. The bitterness and sadness of her sister’s life seemed to drape itself around her shoulders like a cloak. She was a sad, lonely woman in a sad home. Connie felt sorry for her… until she realized that Jean’s fortunes were little different from her own. That realization made her shake off her melancholy and force a smile onto her face and hope into her voice.
She reached for the briefcase. It was old, battered around the edges like a tradesman’s well-worn tool. The black leather had been stripped off the handle. Connie squeezed the latches and the sound of the brass tabs snapping open on their springs was as loud as twin gunshots in the fragile silence. Jean flinched.
Connie reached her hand inside for the first painting, and then paused. She flicked a glance across the table to Jean and then took a deep breath.
“I withdrew two thousand dollars from the nursing home joint account when I was in Maine,” she said. “I used the money to buy something.”
For a long moment Jean sat perfectly still, and then a look of appalling horror came over her face. She began to shake her head in slow, numbed disbelief.
“Connie… that money…” the words faltered.
Connie nodded. “I know,” she said. “It was the money for the next payment at the nursing home. But I bought something, Jean – something that will mean you will never have to worry about money for mom’s care ever again.”
She laid the first little painting out on the table, turned it around so Jean could see the beautiful colors, the exquisite craftsmanship that had gone into rendering the delicate gem of art. Connie’s eyes were alight and she waited to see the spark of understanding and joy come into her sister’s gaze.
Jean lifted her head slowly. Her eyes were dead.
She looked at Connie aghast – as though she had just come to her having spent all of their money on something as fanciful as a handful of magic beans.
“You…” Jean’s voice faltered, wavered and then came back, “You paid two thousand dollars for… for this?”
Connie shook her head. Jean was staring at her white-faced. “No. I paid three thousand dollars for two paintings. I have one more here in the briefcase. I used the last thousand dollars I had, and the money from the account.”
Connie laid the second, larger painting on the table. “They’re Blake McGrath originals!”
Jean sat back slowly in her chair and tears of despair ran down her cheeks. Her face seemed to crumple, her shoulders sagged as though her tenuous grip on life had at last slipped and the misery that was her desperate existence suddenly overwhelmed her.
“Can you get your money back?” she sobbed. “Connie? Will the person give us our money back?”
Connie shook her head, saw the tortured pain in her elder sister’s eyes. She reached across the old table and clasped at Jean’s hands. “These are original Blake McGrath’s,” Connie said again with more emphasis. “Together, they’re worth close to half a million dollars, Jean!”
Her sister looked blank and disbelieving at her through the smudge of her tears and there was nothing Connie could do to console her or convince her. She got up from the table, looked down at the forlorn figure of Jean one last time, and then made listless excuses to be away from her. “I’m tired from the driving. I think I’ll go to bed.”
As she lay in bed that night, Connie could hear her sister weeping softly through the thin walls.
In the morning, Jean moved listless as a ghost as Connie went out through the front door and set the suitcase and the briefcase in the trunk of her car. She came back to Jean then.
“I know you think I’m a fool,” Connie said, “And I know you don’t approve of the way I have lived my life – the choices I have made or the decisions I have made. But I am right about the paintings, Jean. And if all goes as planned, by this time tomorrow, you will never need to worry about the cost of mom’s care ever again.” She gazed into Jean’s eyes, hoping she could reach her with the force of her voice and the earnestness in her eyes. “Just trust me. Just this once, trust me to know what I am doing.”
Jean said nothing.
19.
Connie rode the elevator up to the offices above the art gallery with the briefcase held across her hips, both hands clutching tightly to the worn handle. She was shaking – literally trembling in her shoes. She was tired and grimy from the long drive back to New York that had taken most of the day, but now that fatigue and exhaustion had suddenly been shed by her fear of confrontation – for she knew too well what a cunning and malicious man Duncan Cartwright was.
She stepped off the elevator into a small plush carpeted lobby. The doors to Duncan’s office were closed, but the door across from it – the one that opened into the boardroom – was ajar. She could hear the murmur of voices from within. Connie took a deep breath, raised her fist to knock… and then impulsively pushed the door wide open instead and went striding into the room, her shoulders back and jaw set with grim resolve.
Seated at the head of the boardroom table was Duncan, reclined and elegantly relaxed in a big leather chair, while across from him two older men stood respectfully facing him. One of the men was heavy in the shoulders, his suit polished shiny at the elbows, his tie awry around his neck. He was very old, Connie realized. He had spectacles perched on the end of his nose, his complexion florid with anxiety.
Beside him was another elderly man, overweight in an ill-fitting suit that seemed too small for him. The man was in mid-sentence, his rusty voice rising in some querulous protest. The words died on the man’s slack lips as Connie strode wordlessly past them.
Duncan turned in his chair, smooth as a leopard that had spotted prey and did not wish to startle it. His eyes glittered with sly amusement, and something darker and malevolent that made Connie shudder. He flicked his gaze to the two elderly men and dismissed them with a scowl. They fled from the room and Duncan waited, the unruffled smile on his face frozen, until he heard the click of the door latch and knew for certain they were alone and would not be interrupted.
“Darling, you got my emails.”
Connie nodded. “I got them,” she said, “But I didn’t open them.”
Duncan arched his eyebrow in a parody of surprise. “Really?” he said. “Then why are you here? Why a
ren’t you still traipsing up and down the coast of Maine, enjoying your vacation?”
“I came back early,” Connie’s mouth pinched. “I have something to show you.” Without another word she set the briefcase down on the gleaming boardroom table and left it there as a taunt.
Slowly, Duncan rose to his feet and stepped away from the chair. There was an antique counter against a wall with bottles of alcohol and tumblers on a silver tray. He poured himself a drink and then offered a glass to Connie in a silent gesture. She gave a curt shake of her head.
Duncan splashed cubes of ice into the glass, swirled the contents, and then sipped thoughtfully. He glanced at Connie over his shoulder. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked with feigned courtesy.
She shrugged her shoulders. Duncan lit a cigar and puffed contentedly for several seconds until the tip glowed. At last, he turned around to Connie, and they faced each other across the small space that separated them.
For the first time in many months Connie stepped outside of herself and viewed Duncan with eyes that were dispassionate – unaffected. He had become gaunt, she saw. His eyes were sunken, and below them there were smudges of some ordeal, like swollen bruises. His fingers were never still, and there were new creases chiseled around his mouth that had been unseen until now.
“The photos of the painting you emailed me – it is a genuine McGrath,” Duncan said, and his smile became oily. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”
Connie nodded. Her lips were pressed thin and pale together so the words were little more than a whisper. “I told you. You didn’t believe me.”
Duncan nodded and held his arms out wide in a disarming gesture of surrender. “And you were right,” he admitted ruefully. “So where is the painting… or is that what you have hidden in your briefcase?” His eyes flicked back to the table.
“That painting isn’t for sale,” Connie said. “I told you that too.”
Duncan threw back his head and laughed, and the sound of his voice had a slightly jagged edge to it. “Well, maybe you’re not quite persuasive enough,” he said, his eyes glittering. “Money talks, darling, and I happen to have enough of it to make a very loud noise indeed.” He paused then, gnawed on his lip and watched her over the rim of the glass. “Where is it?” he asked again.
