She grasped it and smiled. “Terri Fiori. Come on in. Susan is out on the terrace.”
I followed her into the foyer and through the broad passageway that bisected the big old colonial. The Ames house had stood there since 1748. Minutemen had drunk rum and plotted in it with Colonel Buttrick and Captain Eben Ames in the cold winter of 1775. A few generations later the Concord writers used to gather there to argue transcendentalism and Unitarianism and drink more rum with Francis Ames, a very minor poet and failed philosopher himself. The big dwelling had nine fireplaces, six bedrooms, two parlors, a library, two studies, a birthing room, and a mud room to go along with the dining room, the kitchen, the two pantries, and the assorted bathrooms. The servants’ quarters were upstairs in back.
Susan Ames lived there alone.
Terri Fiori paused inside the glass doors that overlooked the fieldstone terrace and beyond it the lawn that swept down to the river. Warm morning sunlight filtered through the big maples and willows. She put her hand on my arm. “She’s been looking forward to seeing you.”
“How is she doing?”
She shrugged. “She’s dying.”
“Yes, I know. But—”
“You’ll see.”
I hesitated.
She gave me a gentle push. “Go ahead,” she said. She smiled. “Hard, huh?”
“I knew her when…”
“I know.” She gave my arm a quick squeeze.
I took a deep breath and pushed open the glass door. Susan was sitting at the patio table. Her glasses were perched low on her long aristocratic nose. She was studying a stack of papers. She wore a bulky sweatshirt and baggy blue jeans. Her white hair hung in a long pigtail over her shoulder. Aside from a few more creases in her craggy face, she looked the same as ever to me.
“Susan,” I said.
She raised her eyes over her glasses without lifting her head. “Well, Brady Coyne. Come sit.”
I went over and sat across from her. She held her hand out to me and I took it. It felt weak and bony to me, but that could have been my imagination.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.
“Nonsense,” I lied.
“You should be used to dealing with half-dead old people by now.”
“You never get used to it.”
She smiled. “That’s what we love about you.”
“Tell me how you are.”
“Well, I survived my three-day sojourn at Mass General.”
“Yes. You told me you’d been in when you called. And?”
She took off her glasses and put them on top of the papers in front of her. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I have been given three choices,” she said, gazing past my shoulder toward the river where the morning sun glinted off its surface. “There is an operation. There is chemotherapy. Either one, they tell me, will buy me maybe six months.”
I waited for a moment, then said, “And the third choice?”
“Nothing. Do nothing. Wait.” She turned her head and looked evenly at me. “I have selected number three.”
“And that…?”
“Could give me six months, too. Or maybe only one. Modern medicine, Brady, is about as precise a science as your law. I shall take my chances and let nature follow its inevitable course. I die regardless.”
“Aw, Susan.”
“Enough,” she said. “This is a morbid subject. I forbid it. We must discuss the future.”
“You mean your will.”
“The disposition of my estate. Yes.”
I shrugged. “It’s a simple will, Susan. Everything goes to your daughter. Should she predecease you—”
“An unlikely instance, it would now seem,” she said.
I nodded. “Well, if she should, then the house and its contents and all your liquid assets as well all go to the Concord Historic Places Commission. Is there something you’d like to change?”
“Mary Ellen is the problem.”
I nodded. I had heard it from Susan many times before. Charles and Susan Ames’s only heir had always been a problem. “We can still alter your will, you know,” I said.
“Frankly,” said Susan, “I’d like to. I don’t mind her getting the money. But I’m worried that she’ll turn the house into a communal shelter for foreign revolutionaries, or free-loving potheads, or motorcycle gangs. There are absolutely priceless things in here. You know that. First edition Emersons and Alcotts. Furniture that Eben Ames himself sat upon and slept in. Copleys and Singers and Doolittle engravings on the walls. I doubt if my wayward daughter has any conception of the significance of any of this.”
“We’ll bequeath it all directly to the commission, if you want. It’ll take me about two days to redo it.”
Susan hugged herself. She stared up into the sky for a moment. Then she looked at me and shook her head. “No. It’s not how Charles would have wanted it. I’m just a temporary trustee here, Brady. It came through his family, and now it’s mine only because Charles happened to marry me and then died before I did. He left it to me with no strings attached. He trusted me to care for it as he would have, and when the time came, to pass it on to Mary Ellen. And she to her heirs, and so on.”
“Except…?”
“Except, as far as I know, Mary Ellen has no children.” She smiled. “As far as I know, she has never married and never will. Of course, part of the problem is, I don’t know what she’s done. Anyway, it appears that, after two and a half centuries of Ameses, Mary Ellen will be the end of the Ames lineage. In which likelihood, Brady, I want her assurance that she will do the right thing.”
“The right thing.”
“Yes. Give the place to history. It’s a simple request. Take care of it as long as she lives, and bequeath it to the commission when she dies. If she doesn’t want it, she can turn it over to the commission directly. Willard Ellington,” she added, “is very eager to acquire it.”
“Who?”
“Willard Ellington. The current director of the commission. His family wanders back to the Minutemen in a murky sort of way. Willard owns a bank in town. He was, at first, quite gleeful to hear that my days were severely numbered. I believe that he would consider it a major feather in his cap if he negotiated the acquisition of the Ames House. Then when he realized that Mary Ellen would get the place, he sobered up fast. He was just here, in fact. You just missed him.”
“Actually,” I said, “he just missed me. He drives a Jaguar?”
“That was Willard. I asked him to wait for you to arrive, but he fancies himself a very important man who has no time to wait for anyone else. Everything must follow his schedule. That’s Willard.”
I nodded. “He was in a big hurry. He seemed distracted.”
“We conferred, and I think it was the first time he realized that when I die he’ll be at the whim of Mary Ellen, and that she’s likely to outlive him, and that the commission will not get this place during his lifetime. He is unhappy that I will not bequeath the place directly to them. But,” she said with a twirl of her hand, “I won’t. Charles wouldn’t have wanted it.”
“Well,” I said, “the hell with Willard Ellington. We’ll do exactly what you want.”
“Good.”
I paused. “Which is what?”
“Pardon?”
“What exactly is it that you want, Susan?”
“Oh. Simple. I want to talk with Mary Ellen. Get her assurances.”
“You need me for an interlocutor?”
She smiled. “I have never needed an interlocutor for anything, Brady Coyne.”
“Then pardon my ignorance, Susan, but why don’t you call her yourself?”
“Alas. I haven’t spoken with her in eleven years. Since the day she inherited a significant amount of money from her father. You know what happened.”
“Not really. It’s a subject we haven’t discussed. I believe you told me that she quit college and did some traveling.”
Susan laughed. “Traveling. That is probably what I said
. How euphemistic of me. She ran off with that—that Arab, is what she did. And for some reason that remains obscure to me even today, she has neither spoken nor written to me since.”
“What happened, Susan?”
“I honestly don’t know. She and Charles were very close. She and I less so. But we weren’t enemies. We got along, if distantly. I suppose I wasn’t the warmest or the most nurturing mother. I believed a young woman should learn independence and self-sufficiency, and I placed little emphasis on teaching her traditional female skills such as tatting and cooking. Which was probably just as well, since she was more interested in fast automobiles and fast company. But I loved her and tried to care for her. Charles doted on her. Her reaction when Charles died so suddenly was—it was strange.”
“Strange?”
“She didn’t react at all. She was at Tufts. She came home, of course, when she heard. She stayed here through all the morbid business of corpse viewing and church ceremonies and burial. Then she brought that Arab with her to the reading of the will. Afterwards she said good-bye to me and drove off, and I haven’t seen her since. I still don’t understand.”
“Have you tried to contact her?”
“No. It’s not up to me.” She hesitated. “That sounds strange, I know. Understand, Brady. She was nineteen. A young woman, not a child. Her father’s death clearly affected her. She and I, as I said, had never been close. So after the business of Charles’s death, the fact that I didn’t hear from her for a few weeks did not seem unusual. After a while I tried to call her at school. I learned she had not returned. So I tried to call the—Professor Rahmanan. I learned he had taken a leave. I inquired further and deduced that he and she had run off. Okay. Young women do such things. Mary Ellen was brought up to be independent. Weeks turned into months. And months into a year, and then more years.” Susan smiled softly and shrugged.
“And no word whatsoever?”
She shook her head. “None. You—you get used to it. That may not speak well for me, but it’s true. I’d think of her now and then. But she was not a part of my life. Truthfully, it would be inaccurate to say I’ve missed her.” She looked down at her hands. “Until this. Until now.”
“You haven’t tried to track her down?”
“No. She has made her choice. I always assumed one day I’d hear from her. I guess I still assume that. Except now…”
“And you don’t know where she is?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.”
“So…”
“So I want you to find her, talk to her. Persuade her to communicate with me. Reassure her that I—I still love her.”
I stared at the old woman. I thought I understood. It was simple, and it had little to do with wills and estates. She just wanted to hug her daughter before she died. She was too proud to say so directly.
I reached across the table and grasped one of her hands in both of mine. “Susan,” I said gently, “I’ll hire a private investigator to track her down. It shouldn’t be difficult.”
“You will do absolutely no such thing, Brady Coyne. The Ameses do not hire sleazy private investigators.”
“They’re not all sleazy.”
“Of course they are. There are better ways.”
“Meaning me.”
“Of course.”
I smiled and nodded. “Yes, I expected you had something like that in mind.”
“You’ve always been kind to me,” she said.
Susan was too genteel to mention the hefty retainer she paid me for what she called my kindness. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “But you’ve got to help me.”
“I can’t help much. I do know this. The Arab’s name was—or still is, I imagine—Sherif Rahmanan. He was a professor of international relations at the Fletcher School at Tufts, a man in his forties then, with, I believe, an Arab wife and a clutch of Arab children, whom he eagerly abandoned for my amoral—and quite suddenly wealthy—daughter, who was a child of nineteen. He was very swarthy and spoke with an accent. Mary Ellen seemed quite proud of him. She tugged him about on her arm like a trophy. I was convinced at the time that this was some attempt to embarrass me, or hurt me, though for the life of me I still can’t understand why. Nineteen! She’ll be thirty in two months. That’s one third of her life that I have missed. I wonder what she’s like now.” She shrugged. “Anyway, that’s all I know.”
I took my notebook from my jacket pocket and wrote “Sherif Rahmanan, Fletcher School” into it. “Do you have a photo of Mary Ellen?” I asked.
“Her high school graduation picture is the most recent. It’s twelve years old. Will it help?”
“Maybe.”
“Sit tight. I’ll get it.”
She got up and went into the house. I leaned back and gazed over the backyard. Yellow warblers flitted among the shrubbery that bordered the sweeping lawn. From the river beyond I could hear ducks quacking at each other. I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the warm morning sun.
“Are we catnapping?” she said.
I opened my eyes. She was back in her seat across from me. Beside my arm sat a mug of coffee. She was holding one for herself against her chest, warming both of her hands with it. “No,” I said. “We are savoring the sunshine. Winter’s coming.”
“Don’t I know it.” She smiled and handed me a framed photograph. “Mary Ellen Ames as she looked her senior year at Concord Academy.”
The teenaged Mary Ellen Ames had a long thin face with prominent cheekbones, a delicately pointed chin, and Susan’s narrow aristocratic nose and silvery eyes. In the picture Mary Ellen was not smiling. She was quite beautiful. She had the kind of face that would continue to be beautiful throughout her life. “A lovely young lady,” I said.
“She was. Oh, she was wild and unpredictable and difficult. Headstrong and brilliant. But, yes. She was lovely in many ways. Until…”
“Yes.” I touched the picture. “May I keep it?”
“Of course. If it will help.”
“Everything will help.” I slid the photograph from its frame and put it into my attaché case. Then I lit a cigarette and sipped my coffee.
“I can’t think of anything else,” she said.
“Call me if you do.”
“I will.” She stood up. “Come see my flower beds.”
She held her hand out to me. I took it and rose. She led me down the two wide stone steps from the patio onto the lawn. The grass was long and soft and damp and impossibly green underfoot. We walked hand in hand along the edges of the mulched gardens. “I’ve planted lots of bulbs,” Susan said. “Daffs and croci and snowdrops and narcissi and tulips. Tell me why.”
I turned to her. “Huh?”
“Tell me why I’ve done this. They won’t bloom until spring.”
“Oh.” Susan expected to be dead by then. “You can give me a tour when they’ve come up,” I said to her.
“Don’t try to bullshit me, Brady Coyne.”
“I try not to bullshit anybody, Susan.”
“Try harder.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We finished our tour of the backyard and returned to the house. Terri Fiori was seated at the kitchen table with a stack of papers in front of her. I poked my head in and said, “Take care, General.”
She looked up and winked at me.
Susan led me to the front door. “I don’t know what I’d do without her,” she said.
“She seems very competent.”
Susan jabbed my side with her elbow. “Competent? You are an incorrigible bullshitter, Brady Coyne. Terri’s beautiful, is what she is.”
I shrugged. “I hadn’t really noticed.”
Susan chuckled.
I opened the door, then turned and hugged her and kissed her wrinkled cheek. “Be well, Susan. We’ll keep in touch.”
“Can you do it?” she said. “Can you find her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try.”
2
I STOPPED AT THE Walden Sandwich S
hop in West Concord for Italian subs for me and Julie. I thought of dropping in on Doc Adams at his Concord office. It was likely that Doc would be performing surgery at Emerson Hospital, but maybe his unbearably delicious assistant Susan Petri would be in, and I could ogle her.
Somehow, my morning with Susan Ames had deflated my enthusiasm for that. Even Susan Petri. A temporary condition, I trusted.
So I took the back roads through Concord and Sudbury and Lincoln, out past the farm stand at Nine Acre Corner where I bought a pumpkin for Julie’s daughter, past all the harvested corn fields where murders of crows and gaggles of Canada geese gluttonized, past the Sudbury River, past Walden Pond, and finally back onto the highway. Autumn was everywhere, the annual and inevitable maturing that presaged the death of the earth, and it reminded me of the cycle of all things. Turn, turn, turn. Susan’s impending death found its place, as, one day, would my own.
I recalled the way Terri Fiori had smiled and winked at me. It made me feel better.
I got back to my office in Copley Square a little after noontime. Julie was on the phone. I plunked the pumpkin down on top of her desk, gave her a sniff of the bag with the subs in it, and went into my office. I thumbed through my telephone directories. No listing for Mary Ellen Ames anywhere.
A few minutes later Julie joined me.
“Hey, thanks for the pumpkin,” she said.
“It’s for Megan, not you.”
“We’ll carve a jack-o’-lantern and name it Brady.”
“I’d be flattered.”
“Let’s eat,” she said.
We spread waxed paper over the top of my desk and dug into the thick sandwiches. We drank Pepsi from cans and chomped on giant dill pickles and barbecued potato chips. I told her about my morning with Susan Ames.
“Boy,” she mumbled around a large mouthful. “That sucks.”
“Death generally does,” I said.
“About her daughter and her, I mean.”
Megan, Julie’s daughter, was five. I knew what she was thinking. I have two boys of my own.
“So how do you plan to find Mary Ellen?” she said.
I reached over with a napkin and wiped a dab of olive oil off her chin. “I guess I’ll start with this Rahmanan and see where it leads me.”
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