by Sarah Graves
She had already had a lot to drink, and either didn’t notice or didn’t care how many people she wounded.
“I mean,” she went on after another long swallow, “it’s not your face or your body Bob’s after, or the mystery of your missing mother who you’re never going to find, is it?”
“All right,” Bobby Taylor said evenly, “that’s enough. You should keep a civil tongue, Patty, and not go blathering on about money when your dad’s not even in the ground yet.”
He got up. “And for your information, I was a drunk until I gave up booze, which I advise you to consider doing, too. Unless,” he added with a good-tempered twinkle in his eye, “you want to end up going along with me to meetings.”
He drew Janet up from the sofa. “Come on, kiddo. Your sister didn’t mean what she said. Let’s go watch ourselves a ball game on that great big satellite TV your dad put in the rec room.”
Wanly, she followed him out, looking as limp and passive as it is possible for a woman to be without actually dissolving into a spot on the carpet. As she went, she fingered a bright, beaded Passamaquoddy pendant that hung on a narrow leather thong around her neck. She’d bought it, I supposed, at the Quoddy Crafts shop where she put in a couple of hours, one afternoon each week. On anyone else the pendant would have been pretty, but on her it only emphasized her sparrow-drab appearance.
Watching her go, I took a sip of my Laphroaig, allowing its smoky burnt-peat taste to rinse away the sourness gathering at the back of my throat.
“I did mean it,” Patty spat when the two had left the room. “You’ll notice he already knows where all the good toys are. Got his eyes on that big TV, I’ll bet. How long d’you think it’ll take him to ask for it? Janet,” she finished, “is a fool.”
“Honey,” Gerry murmured in embarrassment, glancing at me.
“Oh, get away from me. You’re just as bad.” Then, as I’d known she would eventually, she turned her pie-eyed gaze on me. “What’re you doing here, anyway?” she inquired owlishly, waving her drink for emphasis. Her voice turned uglier. “You’re her friend, the one who killed him, aren’t you? What,” she demanded injuredly to no one in particular, “is she doing here?”
“Jacobia is my guest,” Nina answered in sharp, warning tones, and Patty subsided sullenly.
But not completely. “Oh, sure. Janet plays nursemaid to the mother, and you invite the friend,” she muttered thickly, not quite to herself. And then, “Why is she taking care of that old bitch, anyway?”
Have another drink, I urged her silently, and pass out. But aloud I answered as politely as I could. “Well, Janet’s been caring for Mrs. White all along, when Ellie couldn’t. Perhaps Janet feels that now is the time she’s needed most. Maybe,” I finished into the sudden silence in the room, “Janet is like all of us, and wants to feel that somebody needs her.”
As soon as I said it, I felt that it was at least partly true. Janet wasn’t sticking with Hedda for no good cause; she was doing it for a reason. But Patty made a rude noise, incredulously.
“Yeah, needs her. Like I need typhoid.” She took another gulp, to express her opinion of this theory. “I say,” she asserted thickly, “someone oughta burn that house down, with her in it.”
Ellie, she meant, and I folded my hands as to avoid wrapping them, firmly and fatally, around this poor soused idiot’s throat. But just then a funny expression spread across Patty’s face: one part sudden unhappy realization, one part pure green-gilled misery.
“Oh, damn it.” Putting a hand across her mouth, she bolted unsteadily from the room, with Gerry following behind.
Which left me and Nina. “My family,” she commented in tones that, if she had been a poisoner, would not have reassured me—whereupon a small light bulb went on in my head: why had that particular thought occurred to me?
She waved a graceful hand. “Sit down, please. I think it’s safe to do that, now. The piranha are left. I mean gone.”
She sank onto the tan suede sofa that Janet and Bobby had vacated, and I sat on a matching chair across from her, placing my glass on a low table whose surface was made from a gleaming slice of polished onyx.
The room smelled of lemon oil and Windex, and had the staged, spotless look that you can only really get in houses where there are plenty of servants: wiping fingerprints, plumping pillows, sweeping crumbs by hand from the carpets with brush and dustpan. I hadn’t seen them, but I felt them—a not-quite-silent presence, like squirrels in the walls.
“I really am sorry about your husband,” I began.
She nodded. “Thank you. He was kind to me.”
An interesting way of expressing wifely grief. It emboldened me to cut to the chase. “But I wonder if I could ask a question.” Hey, all she could do was toss me out.
“Sure. Any you like.” She was dry-eyed and calm, and I thought—again—that her composure was not artificial. Mcllwaine was dead and Nina didn’t give a damn.
“I was going over Mr. White’s books this morning, at his request. From them, I learned that your husband and Mr. White were financially … entangled.”
She eyed me acutely, her gaze narrowing at the mention of money. “Maybe. They were old friends. My husband told me that when Mrs. White was in New York, he spied an eye on her. Kept her out of troubles.”
Then she smiled. “I was not even born, then. Did you know he had six wives before me?” Now that Patty and the others were gone, she was relaxing a bit, dropping the lady-of-the-manor act, and her accent was more audible.
Bosnia, I thought, or some other difficult place. Somewhere hard and dangerous. For all her china-doll prettiness, she wasn’t fragile; you could see it in the determined lift of her chin, the firmness of her carefully painted lip. And despite her casual manner, I could see that her brains were fully operational, thoughts clicking back and forth in that sleek head like beads on an abacus.
She hadn’t, I noticed, tossed me out, or told me that none of this was any of my business. Instead, while denying she knew the answer to my question, she’d elaborated in another direction, diverting me from the topic without making a point of it.
The topic being money, and when people divert me from it, it alerts me. But for the moment, I let her steer me into less tricky territory. “That must have been complicated for you, sometimes. How did you meet him?”
Her smile twisted wryly. “Complicated, yes. I lived in a tiny village. Lots of war, fighting, getting worse. Everything broken.”
Another diversion, as she mentioned a place name I didn’t recognize and couldn’t have pronounced without practice. “We had a cow, and chickens. So we were rich. My father would have given a good dowry for me, but I did not want the men who wanted me.”
“You wanted to come to America,” I guessed. A beautiful girl in the midst of a civil war that was simmering, rising to a boil; of course she would want that.
“Oh, yes. I saw magazine pictures, and at the hotel there was a television.” She smiled at the memory. “Everything on TV was so beautiful and clean. People were eating delicious foods, driving around in shiny cars.”
She looked at me. “Do you want something else to drink, or to eat? A sandwich? The cook will fix. Have something, please.”
All her brittle manner of earlier had vanished, replaced by the simple hospitality of a girl taking pleasure in the ability to offer food. The golden flecks in her eyes still gleamed with avarice, though, undiluted by grief. I asked for coffee, and moments later a carafe and cups arrived, confirming my squirrels-in-the-walls theory.
“I don’t quite see what your late husband was doing in your village, though. Was he on business?”
Nina waved a dismissive hand. “One of his companies. There was a river, and they thought they would put a dam and a factory. But it didn’t work out. Too much fighting. Not like here.”
“So all he got out of it was you.”
Her eyes crinkled but the effect did not charm, for the accompanying smile was coldly calculating. “And my mot
her, my father, two sisters, brother. All in America, now. Only my…”
She paused, searching for a word, and a shadow of caution muted her voice. “My cousin,” she seemed to decide finally. “He is still there, somewhere.”
She fell silent, gazing past me out the windows at the storm, which was again struggling to revive itself. The bouts of snow just kept coming, dying away only to resume when you were sure they were finished, like a mean fit of coughing.
“Fighting,” she said at last. “I wanted to keep searching for him, but my husband said he was a … a killed issue.”
I thought about the strength it must have taken to keep her father from handing over that dowry, to learn her English from television and old magazines, to spy her chance in the visit of an aging industrialist—Threnody Mcllwaine—and snatch accurately at it.
Accurately and, I thought, mercilessly; if it had suited her purposes, I felt sure as I sat there across from her, she’d have had his liver for her lunch.
Nina blinked, seeming to come back to herself. “What else have you wanted to ask me?”
Either she really didn’t know why Mcllwaine had given Alvin all that money, or she wasn’t saying. I ran at it from another angle.
“Well, it’s a bit awkward, actually. I don’t mean to pry, and I know this is a bad time. But I wonder about your husband’s will. Whether his death might benefit the Whites, or they might think it would.”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” she replied again. “The policemen say they will come back and ask me more things about it, too.”
Then she laughed, a startlingly merry sound in a house so recently visited by death.
“Forgive me. You will think I am terrible. But it is just the idea of knowing about my husband’s money, where it all is or where it will go.”
I sipped my coffee. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
Her eyes remained mirthful; she had decided to level with me a little.
But only a little. “In New York,” she said, “my husband showed me once a man on a street, playing a game. He was moving some cups around very fast. One had money underneath it, and the people watching, they are trying to guess which cup. To make the bet on it.”
She tipped her head at me. “You know about this game, yes? You could not see which cup it was, with the money under.”
I knew about this game, yes. On a larger scale, it was called Hide the Assets, and in my heyday I had played it against some of the meanest divorce lawyers in town. Just as with the shell game, there were two tricks to winning, the first being to keep the cups moving faster than the human eye could track.
A thought struck me. “You do,” I probed delicately, “know what your own arrangement will be? Financially, that is. To cover your living expenses, and so on.”
The other trick to winning the game, of course, was that by the time it was over, none of the cups had any money under it. I felt certain that Mcllwaine had known that, too.
“Yes,” she replied with a brilliant, confident smile. I had again the sense of a ravening ego no longer forced to hide behind feminine wiles. “My husband explained my part,” she went on, “and I have seen the papers about this money he leaves to me. Nothing else, but I saw that.”
She sat up straight, like a child reciting. “The other wives, he didn’t take care of them anymore if they got married again, and they all did. Except,” she added, “the one who died. A sorrow about her, yes? But I was more careful, so his dying makes me become, how do you say it? Filthy rich.”
That was how you said it, all right.
“He shouldn’t,” she ended with unconcealed satisfaction, “have showed to me that cup game. Although I do not see,” her slim shoulders moved under the silk as she glanced around the sumptuous room, “how that is making any difference, now.”
Nicely done again, separating the topic of her inheritance from that of her husband’s death, and she had a point; she’d been filthy rich when he was alive, too.
She looked up openly at me. “You are wondering how I fooled him,” she said. “The big, smart businessman. But I didn’t fool him. He made a deal. And I,” she finished—coldly, terrifyingly—“made a deal, too.”
Part of the deal being that now she could stay rich, even if she remarried. In the financial world Mcllwaine inhabited—not to mention that of the police—it was a point that would swiftly become public, and she’d gotten it out right up front.
She’d seen the question in my face, of course. My estimation of her went up another notch. What I didn’t yet understand was why she’d answered it; after all, I wasn’t the police, and I hardly thought she cared about public opinion.
But in this—as in so much about Nina—I turned out to be wrong.
“What about his children?” I asked. “Did he also tell Janet and Patty what they would inherit?”
She looked at me acutely. “Mr. Arnold said that Mr. White’s daughter Ellie had confessed to killing my husband.”
“So she did,” I agreed. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I only wondered …”
“I know what you wondered,” she said, her eyes unfooled.
She went to the window. Through the snow, the bridge at Lubec was etched in charcoal against a grey sky, while the island of Campobello lay blanketed in white, clouds still hanging behind its long, low rise of land as the weather moved off toward Halifax.
“My husband kept his money matters under his vest,” Nina said. “But I told him that I must know before I married him what I would have, I must see the papers to be sure. Otherwise I would not marry him. I think,” she finished, “that maybe his daughters were not so particular.”
An ultimatum to the wicked old pirate of Wall Street; the idea was hilarious, or terrifying, depending on how much you knew about Mcllwaine. He must have wanted her very much.
Underestimated her, too, I thought, which was possibly the funniest thing of all—although you had to know just how heartless he’d been in his own business dealings to appreciate the humor of it. Now his widow turned, having told me precisely what she wished me to know, and no more: that she herself was going to make out like a bandit, while Patty and Janet got nothing.
The question was, what did she want me to do about it? For I no longer believed she had welcomed me in as an antidote to the always unpleasant company of the disinherited. She had a use for me.
“I brought your husband’s tie pin,” I said. “It’s in my coat; I’ll give it to you on my way out.”
In the hall I handed it over at last, and made one more try at my own agenda. “Why was your husband at the Whites’ house, do you suppose?”
She shrugged. “Visiting, maybe. I told you, the two old men were friends.” Then her voice grew somber. “You think badly of me, now. Everyone will.”
I turned. “Not exactly.” Hey, two can play the honesty game, and there are worse things than merry widows. Unless, of course, they’ve made themselves widows on purpose.
She followed me to the door. “In my old country, a woman like me is weeping, tearing her clothes. No one can console her, because her husband is dead.”
She looked out onto the grounds, an artificial park created amidst the harshness of the Maine seacoast, the clipped hedges and topiary shrubberies standing out sharply against the fresh snow.
“You wonder,” she continued after a moment, “why I am not doing those things. Why I don’t behave like a proper widow.”
Because you’ve been waiting for him to kick off since you married him, I thought. And if I could figure out how, I might even believe you’d killed him. But all I said was, “You are in America, now.”
“You are kind,” she responded. But her smile did not reach her eyes.
“My husband,” she went on slowly, “was not always a nice man. If you went against him, he was …” She shook her head.
There was a story on the street about Mcllwaine, around the time I got out of the money business: that whenever he went after a new company, union leaders
in the factories he had targeted sent their wives and children on vacations and bought life insurance, double indemnity if they could get it. Union guys were not high on his favorite persons list, and when push came to shove as it often did when he was around, they had a tendency to suffer accidents.
“Look,” I said, “why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do for you?” It had to be something; nobody dances you around like that for no reason.
She looked down at the vulgar tie pin in her hand. “I decided I want to live here. Not in the mansion in Chicago, or the place in New York. I want to stay where I can see the bay, and watch the little boats.”
“You don’t need me to help you do that.”
“Oh, but I do.” Her voice was childishly eager. “I do not want my neighbors to turn away in the street because I am a bad widow. I want you to tell the people in town I am sad my husband is dead. Tell them I am weeping, no one can make me stop to weep.”
Little boats, my great-aunt Fanny; she could buy every little boat in town with a day’s worth of her spending money. It occurred to me suddenly that she might have other reasons to want to stay here, out of the public eye—reasons she was keeping the media away, too. But I didn’t know what they were. Yet.
“Tell them,” Nina begged, dry-eyed, “I am tearing my clothes.”
“Excuse me.” Patty Porter had come up silently behind us. “Nina, Bob Arnold is on the phone for you.”
Nina gave me her smooth, cool hand very briefly and hurried away, leaving me to zip my parka under Patty’s flat gaze.
“So, has she given you the helpless-peasant-girl act? It’s what she used to get out of that rat-hole of a country she came from. Worked pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”
Pausing by the table with its gallery of photographs, she laughed contemptuously. I could smell the alcohol on her breath.
“What a crew,” she observed scathingly of the pictures. “You know what they were eating when he found them? Potatoes and acorn coffee. The dental work alone must have cost my father a fortune.”
