The Inheritance
Page 27
Her mother had changed from the beaded red dress into a dark blue velvet dress. That was the first thing Holly noticed as she came quietly into the bedroom behind her. Constance was sitting at the vanity table, painting her lips. She did not look up from her reflection until Holly arrived beside her.
“Hello, Mother,” Holly said.
She watched in satisfaction as the woman dropped the lipstick on the table, her temporarily-brown-but-actually-blue eyes widening in disbelief.
“What?” Constance gasped. “What did you call me?”
“I called you mother—Constance.” Holly was still watching her face in the mirror.
To her credit, Constance Randall did not so much as pause for breath. She lunged sideways off the vanity stool, toward her bedside table.
“Looking for this?” Holly asked, slowly raising the gun.
The woman sank back onto the stool. Her face was white now, Holly noticed, completely drained of all color. She took several deep breaths before she spoke.
“Holly,” she said. “Holly—darling—you must listen to me. I—I’ll do anything you say, only please—”
Now Holly pressed the .38 against her mother’s right temple. “Anything?”
“Yes!” Constance cried. “I’ll do anything you say!”
Holly pressed the gun harder and smiled.
“In that case,” she whispered, “go to hell!”
And she squeezed the trigger.
When Holly pulled the letter from her pocket, she got a surprise. There was an identical envelope already on the vanity table, but this one was addressed to John. She picked it up and tore it open. She read it through quickly, then turned around and looked at the bed.
Standing over her dead mother, Holly Randall started to laugh.
There was a medium-sized suitcase on the bed, half full. In the note, Constance had told her husband that she was leaving Randall House tonight. She would take the first available Concorde flight to Paris, and she would meet him there, at the George V, on the seventh of January. John was to tell Holly that a dear friend had become ill and that “Catherine” had rushed to her side. In Paris, she concluded, the two of them would decide on a new course of action.
Still chuckling, Holly swiftly unpacked the bag and put the clothes away in drawers and the closet. Then she tore up the good-bye letter, replacing it with her beautiful forgery, and dropped the paint jar with the remaining insecticide in the waste-basket, where it would later be found. Leaving her mother’s bedroom door locked from the inside, she went back through the two closets to her room, bolting the sliding wall behind her.
Then she ran back downstairs.
I noticed Holly flinch as I spoke of her trip upstairs to her mother’s bedroom, after she’d left her father to die in the library. I figured—correctly, it turned out—that she was remembering the moment when she shot the woman. But she didn’t tell me about it that night in the hospital. She told me later, when we were alone and at our leisure, after the scandal had finally disappeared from the front pages.
Now, I simply filled her in on everything I’d seen. I’d watched her with John through the library window on the ground floor, and then she had left the room, to go upstairs. I kept my eye on him through the window, making sure he didn’t get up again and ruin her plan—whatever her plan was. He didn’t: he vomited once, then lay still. Satisfied, I left my vantage place and went over to the front door.
It was unlocked. Tonto wanted to come in with me, of course, but I made him stay outside. I slipped into the foyer and concealed myself under the grand staircase. A few minutes later I heard the gunshot, so I knew Holly was on schedule—whatever her schedule was. But it was good enough for me.
When she ran downstairs again, I thought she’d go back in the library, but she didn’t. She went around the stairs—I shrank back into the shadows—and through the dining room into the kitchen. She was there about three minutes. Then she came back past me across the Great Hall, wiping her mouth as she went. Milk, she later told me: two tall glasses of it, to dilute the poison. I waited until she was back in the library before coming out of my hiding place and venturing closer. I heard her phone call to Chief Helmer, with all the affected gasping and mumbling. Then she dropped the receiver to the floor. I peeked through the open library door to see that she was laughing, holding her hand over her mouth as the small, tinny voice of the chief continued to shout through the phone.
“Holly! Holly!”
I had a sudden, incredible desire to join her then, to make my presence known and share her hour of triumph. I had actually begun to step forward into the open doorway when she did an extraordinary thing, stopping me in my tracks.
She cocked her head, listening for something, and I heard her speaking softly under her breath.
“One. Two. Three. Four …”
She counted nearly to thirty before the first siren became audible at the end of the front drive. Then she smiled again, picked up one of the two full glasses on the tray, and drank from it.
I nearly cried out. I nearly ran into the room and knocked the glass from her hand. But then I figured it out, what she was doing. I smiled and watched her.
Suddenly she came toward me. I ducked down under the hall table as she came out into the foyer. She went over to the front door and threw it open. Then she walked back toward the Great Hall, passing within two feet of me. She went over to the bottom of the stairs near the Christmas tree and slowly, carefully lay down on her back, waiting for Chief Helmer to arrive.
I nearly left then. I didn’t want to be found here in the next few moments, when Helmer burst through the door. I had slipped out from under the table and begun to edge toward the door when Holly stopped me.
She hadn’t seen me or anything: that isn’t why I stopped. I stopped because she screamed. She clutched her stomach and rolled over onto her side. Then she tried to vomit, but the pain was apparently too great.
“Oh, God!” she moaned. “Oh, God, I don’t want to die—”
And I was at her side.
Weeks later, she would admit with a rueful smile that she’d drunk too much of it. She’d known the expected effects, having minored in chemistry at college, but she’d underestimated the potency of the insecticide. All she’d wanted was a trace amount, enough to hold together her scenario. Enough to prove that Constance Randall had poisoned her and her father before going upstairs and shooting herself in her locked bedroom.
Well, it turned out fine, after all. That was precisely what everyone believed, from Helmer and the county and state police to the coroner at the inquest two days later, on the third of January.
And every journalist in America believed it. The next morning, in her hospital room, Holly held the first of several press conferences she would give in the next days and weeks. The press ate it with a spoon: they shouted it from newspapers and television sets for months. So, of course, you all believed it, too.
Yes, you all believed her, and for the most simple of reasons. She had an eyewitness who backed up every single last detail of her story.
Me.
We Randalls have to stick together, you know.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Departing
Holly was sitting at her vanity table, gazing at her reflection, when the knock came at her door.
“Come in,” she called.
It was Mr. Wheatley. “I’ll take your suitcase down, Miss Holly. The car is ready.”
She smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Wheatley.”
He picked up the Louis Vuitton from the bed. She rose, put on her white wool coat, and looked around the room for a long moment before following him out.
“I want you and Zeke and Dave to supervise the renovations,” she told him as she followed him down the stairs. “I want that woman’s bedroom completely redone. Mrs. Jessel and I have discussed the new decor, so she’ll be in charge of that. Make sure she gets rid of those damned mirrors! I want the room to be perfect for him.”
“D
on’t worry, Miss Holly. We shall see to it in your absence.” He paused at the bottom of the stairs and turned to face her. Lowering his voice to a murmur, he added, “Shall I have the men wall up the connecting door between the closets?”
Holly thought about that for a moment.
“No,” she whispered at last. “Leave it.”
Mr. Wheatley nodded, and the tiniest trace of a smile appeared at the corners of his lips.
“Very good, Miss Holly,” he said.
Then he went across the foyer and out the front door. Holly followed, wondering again just how much the inscrutable majordomo knew, or thought he knew. Well, no matter. He was retiring next year to an apartment in New York City, near his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and when the time came he would be buried beside his wife in the Randall cemetery. Holly was paying for the apartment. She’d pay for the funeral, too.
She came out into the gray daylight, smiling in grim amusement at the inevitable snow. Indio was going to be a veritable treat after this constant freezing cold, she decided. And, after that, Greece …
The staff was waiting for her, lined up at the bottom of the front steps as they had been on that day in November, when she’d arrived. It had been snowing then, too. She moved down the line of now-familiar faces, shaking hands. Mrs. Ramirez, Martha, Frieda, Grace, Zeke, Dave. Mrs. Jessel was last.
“Please be sure that Mr. Jessel has everything he needs,” she told the housekeeper. “And send all the bills to Mr. Henderson in New York.”
“Bless you, Holly,” Mrs. Jessel said. Then she stepped forward and embraced her new employer. “God bless you, for everything!”
Holly blinked, wondering—as she had with Mr. Wheatley moments ago—just how much Mrs. Jessel knew. No, she decided; I’m being paranoid. With that, she turned to her relatives.
“Good-bye, Ichabod,” she said, kissing his discolored cheek as she would steadfastly do in the future, every time she saw him. “I’ll be back to play chess with you again soon. In the meantime, I think you should teach him how to play.” She jerked a thumb at the young man who stood silently beside him.
“I don’t think I’ll have to teach him anything, Holly,” her great-uncle said. “I think he knows all the moves already.”
She laughed. “Checkmate!” Then she turned to her half brother and took him in her arms.
“Your new bedroom will be ready in a few days, Toby,” she told him. “You can move in whenever you like.”
He nodded.
“Mr. Henderson will be calling you,” she continued. “You’re going to be signing a lot of papers—the same papers I signed a few weeks ago.”
He nodded again.
“You’re one of us now, Toby, and I couldn’t be more pleased. You and I will share the Randall name—and everything that goes with it. Fifty-fifty.” She kissed him and reached down to pat Tonto on the head.
“I love you,” Toby said, and then he and the German shepherd went up the steps and into the house.
Holly watched them go. Then she went over to the limousine, where Kevin stood in his father’s gray uniform. He was not smiling today. He held the door gravely as she got into the car, then he went around to the driver’s side, got in, and started the engine.
Holly leaned back against the soft leather and closed her eyes as the car began to move. Then, on an impulse, she leaned forward and opened the little bar above the facing seat. She took a small bottle of white wine from the cooler and poured into a crystal glass. Then she leaned back again and took a long, appreciative sip.
She studied the back of Kevin’s head as he drove. He would not be at Randall House when she returned. He was going back to New Haven to work for a former professor of his at Yale. In the fall, he was going to graduate school. Holly would be paying for it, but he had not smiled when she told him that. She wondered if she would ever see that wonderful Irish grin again. Probably not, she decided. He’d waited until she was out of the hospital to tell her, politely but firmly, that he wanted nothing more to do with the Randalls. Well, he hadn’t said it so callously; he was actually rather charming about it. But the message was clear. His delayed guilt over his sister’s “suicide” had ended their relationship before it really began. Oh, well …
It doesn’t matter, she decided. Nothing matters, except the fact that I’m on my way. A quick visit with the Smiths in Indio, then London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Sydney. But first, Greece …
And then, when she had seen the world, she would come back to Randall House. Her house.
She spared a fleeting thought for John and Constance Randall, buried in a public cemetery at the expense of the state. She thought of Kevin Jessel, and Dora, and Missy MacGraw, and the dead man who had met his kismet in the Kismet Motel. She thought all of this, but all she managed to say was:
“Fuck them. Fuck them all.”
She whispered it softly, so Kevin in the front seat would not hear. Then she took another sip of the wine. As the car moved down the curving drive and out through the iron gates, Holly Randall smiled.
She really had no use for these people.
EPILOGUE
Holly Randall Now
It has been seven years since the events I’ve described here, and a great deal has happened to me. To all of us. First, let me tell you about the others.
Mr. Jessel died of a second heart attack that February, and Mrs. Jessel, my grandmother, followed him a few months later. Not surprising, or so I’m told—people who have been married that long often die within a year of each other.
Kevin got through graduate school and went to work in a psychiatric clinic in New Haven—a clinic in which his sister, my mother, had once been a patient. He’s there now. He arrived here for a brief visit last Christmas with his new wife, who is also a clinical psychologist. Holly didn’t like her much, but I wasn’t really expecting she would. The wife is pregnant, and I thought she was perfectly pleasant, but what do I know?
Mr. Wheatley and Uncle Ichabod both passed away two years ago. They’re buried in the Randall cemetery. There was a lot of press attention when Ichabod died, because he was such a famous chess player. Holly handled the press conferences as graciously and gracefully as she’d handled her own press conferences, years before. She told me in private that she was glad to have played chess with him so often in his final years. I used to watch them sometimes, and they would talk quietly together as they played. Ichabod had figured everything out in the hospital, he told her, when he’d remembered the milky white vomit on the chessboard tiles of the Great Hall. She’d had chicken and créme caramel with white wine and coffee for dinner—he’d known that because he was always served the same meals in his room—and champagne in the library. So why, he’d wondered, had she been drinking milk? That tiny detail had nagged at him until the moment in the hospital room, when her strategy had at last become clear to him. The two of them always laughed together when they spoke of this. Then they would call for champagne, and I would join them in a toast. We never told him about my mother.
They played a final game the night before he died, and Holly won. I wasn’t surprised to learn that he had left his considerable fortune to her.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Holly’s foster parents, are still alive. They’re in California, and they occasionally come to visit. Once, three years ago, Holly took me to Indio to visit them. I couldn’t believe how hot it was there! As for my foster parents, the Carters, the less said the better. They were always rather horrible to me and to each other, and age has not improved them. They’re divorced now, married to other people. But they have no part in this story, so who cares? Not I, certainly.
Pete Helmer married that redhead, Debbie, the secretary at the police station, and they have two children now, a boy and a girl. He still has those two deputies, and he still hates them.
Tonto is very old now, but he still gets around a little. He sleeps at the foot of my bed, in the bedroom that briefly belonged to Constance Randall. The bedroom in which she died.
On that birthday, last Christmas Eve, we at last became lovers. She came through the secret door into my room and got in bed with me. It was the loveliest night of my life. Three days later we drew up wills together, with Mr. Henderson. She says she’s leaving her half of the fortune to me, so I told her I was leaving my half to her. She seemed touched by that, but it’s not exactly the truth. I don’t have to tell her everything, do I?
I’m twenty-three now. I was graduated from Yale last year with a degree in English literature. I wrote my first attempt at a novel there, but I haven’t shown it to anyone. It isn’t very good.
But this is, I think. I began this a year ago, right after my graduation, when I came home to Randall House again. It is the fulfillment of the promise I made to myself, to write down the story that plays over and over in my mind, like a song. My only regret is that no one will ever read it. At least, I don’t expect anyone to read it. As soon as I print it out, I’ll mail it to a lawyer I’ve retained in New Haven. It is to be published only in the event of my death.
Not that I’m expecting to die anytime soon. I’m perfectly healthy, but—well, you can never be too careful.
You see, I know everything about Holly, but I’ve promised to keep it all a secret. I know, for example, about the college sweetheart in San Diego and his fiancée. That’s why Holly was so amused when she learned what Mr. Buono had been planning with the brakes of the BMW. She’d done the exact same thing to Gregory Sandford III’s Porsche years before. He died, and the fiancée is in a wheelchair for life, courtesy of Holly.