A Rather Lovely Inheritance

by C. A. Belmond

  “Oh, well,” I said nonchalantly, “somebody had to.”

  “No, actually, you didn’t,” he said. The champagne arrived and was opened with a nice, lively pop!—always a good moment whether you’re celebrating something or not. We clinked our glasses, then ate our supper quietly.

  Finally, we went upstairs. Our rooms were right next door to each other. We paused in the hallway, in a moment of awkwardness that betrayed something in both of us. He tried to look normal as he kissed me on the cheek, but it wasn’t a totally cousinly kiss. There was that little moment of heat, and breathlessness, feeling each other’s warmth and scent. I don’t think we even looked at each other as we retreated into our own rooms for the night.

  When we came downstairs in the morning, I heard familiar theme music from the TV and saw that the lady at the front desk was watching one of Pentathlon Productions’ movies.

  “Shh!” I told Jeremy.“I just want to see which one it is.” It turned out to be the story of Calamity Jane. I cringed a little when she started firing off pistols. “Boy, it wasn’t easy finding the right guns for her,” I muttered.

  Jeremy was fascinated, and stood there watching with the concierge. But soon his mobile phone was besieging him with urgent calls from his office, which he responded to tersely, sometimes with exasperation. I glanced up at the sky and saw that those pearly gray clouds were still threatening rain.

  In fairness to the lush French countryside, the trip started out charmingly enough. A temporary burst of sunshine lulled us into a false sense of security. Outside of Paris, the traffic tapered off, and Jeremy piloted his modern-edition Dragonetta with ease and skill. It was definitely a car made for the open road. I leaned my head against the butter-soft leather upholstery, and I felt like a goddess being whisked through the sky in a chariot, watching the earthly scenery flash past me. Jeremy laughed when I exclaimed at the fluffy sheep and their babies, which dotted the fields just like the puffy clouds dotted the sky overhead.We stopped for lunch at an inn that served everything baked in a small pie—meat, fish, or vegetables—and I got a bit groggy on the local ale, which was more potent than it first seemed.

  But by early afternoon the rain arrived in a sudden downpour. Jeremy had to yank the roof up, and of course he got soaked in the process.We pushed on, but the rain was so heavy that the windshield wipers could barely keep up. It was impossible to enjoy the scenery, which became such a blur that I began to feel carsick.The only thing that helped was for me to sleep, feeling a bit guilty because Jeremy had to stay awake; but he had that dogged look on his face, staring straight ahead as if, by God, he’d seen his duty and wouldn’t stop until he’d done it. When a man gets that hunkered-down quality behind the wheel, it’s best not to speak to him.

  I woke to the rather alarming sound of an even fiercer rain pounding on the canvas roof like impatient fingers drumming on our heads. The roof held watertight, which I thought was miraculous and I ventured to say so.

  Jeremy had a moment of pride and said, “Of course it held, you silly girl.”

  He pulled into a gas station and said,“I don’t wish to be indelicate, but if you need the loo, this is a good time to go. I’ve got to pump some petrol. Looks like it’s do-it-yourself, of course. How on earth did we all get suckered into this filthy habit?”

  Fortunately there was a roof above the pumps and the path to the restrooms. I slid out of my seat because Jeremy was waiting, holding my door. As soon as I was out, he reached inside and actually pulled out a pair of old driving gloves from the glove compartment.What a fussbudget, I thought, glancing back at him as he slipped them on to wear while pumping gas.

  When I returned from the ladies’ room, Jeremy wasn’t there, and I assumed that he was in the men’s. I opened the glove compartment to study the map anew.Then I froze.Those gloves were back in there, and they smelled of gasoline.

  I could feel the blood drain out of my head, and I felt slightly dizzy for a moment.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I told myself.“There is no real motive here for Jeremy to break into Aunt Penelope’s apartment in the dead of night. He had access to it all along.”

  Still, I must have seemed subdued as he climbed back in and drove off, because he said to me, “Everything all right?”

  “Right-o,” I said, trying to be jaunty, but my voice cracked.

  “Are you ill?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Female trouble?” he said teasingly.

  “Don’t be daft,” I responded.

  Jeremy said soothingly, “Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you when we’re in Antibes.”

  But I didn’t sleep after that. I kept watch over this ex-cousin of mine, covertly, from the corners of my eyes. For now he really seemed like a stranger to me.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  WHEN WE PULLED INTO THE CIRCULAR DRIVEWAY OF THE VILLA, the rain had long since stopped and the sun reigned again. At first the only sign of Denby was his car, a small sporty red convertible, parked at the turnaround.There were, however, plenty of sounds indicating his presence—clanks, clatterings, rattlings, and other metallica. The doors to the garage were flung open, and he’d hung up more than one battery-powered lantern-style light.

  “Severine’s assistant, Louis, let him in,” Jeremy explained to me. He parked the car, and we got out and approached the garage. “Denby!” Jeremy shouted above the clanking.

  Denby was lying under the car, and all I could see of him were his legs from the shins down, in tan pants, expensive brown loafers, and white socks.These did not really look like the feet of a mechanic.

  Deftly he slid himself out from under the car. Above the tan pants was an impeccable white shirt. He was about fifty-five years old, good-looking in a salt-and-pepper-hair kind of way, and his skin had that year-round luxurious tan of a man who lives in Monte Carlo, owns his own business, and hangs around rich people who pay him well.

  “Penny Nichols, this is Denby,” Jeremy said. Denby pulled a blue handkerchief from his pants pocket, carefully wiped his hands, and then held out a big square paw to shake mine with friendly but not overpowering gusto.

  “Hallo, love,” he said in a working-class accent but the gentle tone of a man who had, as Jeremy told me earlier, taken care of his mother and sisters when he was only fourteen years old.The mother died, and the sisters were comfortably married off, so now he was on his own. He had a loyal wife who raised pedigreed dogs.

  “Are you the young lady recently become the proud owner of this buggy?” he asked in his soft, pleasant voice. He spoke to me with particular kindness, like a tough man who automatically viewed women as smaller and more delicate creatures in need of protection.

  “She is.What’s the prognosis?” Jeremy asked, bursting with curiosity. Denby stood back a bit to gaze admiringly at Great-Aunt Penelope’s car.

  “It’s a ’36, all right,” he said.“Body’s begun to rust, but the chassis’s just dandy—no cracks that I can see, no rot on the frame, which is solid ash, as you expected. No scuttle shake, and the doors aren’t dropped, although one of them looks to be a bit wobbly on the hinge. She’s got one of those monster engines built to live forever. Bet she was devilish quick.”

  “How fast will she go when you’ve fixed her up?” Jeremy asked.

  “I’d say that engine could take her up to eighty miles an hour,” Denby said confidently.“Brakes need work, bit o’ this-and-that needed on the wheels.Tires and water pump should be completely replaced, but I believe with a bit o’ detective work I can find the proper parts. Worst of it’s the skin-deep, you know, the paint, the upholstery, but h’it’s to be expected. ’At’s her original horsehair stuffing in there, you know. In short, the old girl’s not as bad as she looks. I expect she was kept covered most of her life and somebody kept ’er oiled and polished up. Just towards the end, I suspect, she was left ’ere lonely in the damp.”

  “Any idea what it’d cost to get it up to snuff?” Jeremy asked casually. Denby smil
ed and shook his head.

  “Have to take a closer look for that.” He nodded encouragingly to me.

  “Um,” I said, “if we did fix it up, um, what would it be—that is, how much—?”

  Denby understood.“Well, darling, it depends on what I find when I look closer under her hood,” he said, “but they only made about seven, eight hundred of these beauties in their day and most of them have vanished, so that ups the ante a bit. If she’s got a bad cough or other trouble, she still might fetch about ten thousand pounds from a buyer who wants ’er bad enough. Now, if we could fix ’er up to modest condition, you’re looking at anywhere from fifteen to twenty thousand pounds.”

  Jeremy was listening attentively, and Denby glanced at him when he added, “But if we can bring her back to the days of her youth, she might be worth more, say, tops, forty-five thousand quid. Of course, you’d have to invest money into ’er to bring it up to that price . . .”

  I figured forty-five thousand pounds, roughly times two, less a bit o’ this-and-that—I guessed it was about eighty thousand dollars. Jeremy, however, was not thinking along these lines because he was utterly fascinated with the auto, and pleased to hear that it was not as bad off as it looked. He and Denby were nattering on about car stuff, but Denby kept trying to include me in the conversation by turning to me and nodding encouragingly. When Jeremy paused in his questions, Denby smiled in a kind way and said to me, “Ah, darling, I did find a few l’il trinkets and things I saved for you. Come ’ave a look at this.”

  He bent to the floor on the passenger side and showed me where he’d placed a rusty metal box that was once a tool kit for tire changes, originally screwed into the “boot” at the back. He’d taken the old tools out and left them in the trunk, then used the box to collect any small items he found in the car and the garage that we hadn’t already tagged. He’d kept everything he found, no matter how trivial, because, he said, he didn’t take it upon himself to decide what items were of “ ’ighly sentimental value.” So the box had some faded postcards, old hairpins, a small gold pencil engraved P.L., a matchbook from a Monte Carlo casino with a unicorn on it, an ivory-colored cigarette holder, an old thimble, an empty key chain, and . . .

  “This,” Denby said, unwrapping something from a tissue.

  “An earring!” I said, startled. It was beautiful, very Deco, a drop earring with wine-red stones, set in gold. I recognized it from the Venetian-costumed photo in the album.

  “Are those rubies?” Jeremy asked, examining the larger cherry-colored stones that were set at the earlobe part. There were smaller, sparkly stones that looked like diamonds, too.

  “Wouldn’t be so difficult to find out,” Denby said easily. He was a man who’d seen the rich and all the conceivable trinkets they’d come up with over the years—all the accoutrements for yachts, cars, villas, racehorses, mistresses and other assorted pets. He respected this little item enough to protect it in tissue, but he was not about to get excited and fanciful over a lone earring. In Monte Carlo fortunes rose and fell every day, like the ebb and flow of the sea.

  He was asking Jeremy about his own car now, and Jeremy was describing the way the brakes and steering behaved, the sound the engine made, and other things that Denby nodded about.This gave me time to study the postcards he’d found. Some were highly amusing, from a man named Simon Thorne, who sent them from, it seemed, all the corners of the English empire. From India, for instance, he’d scrawled a jaunty rhyme, Hotter than hell, but I do very well; at noon I just snooze, and then I drink booze. There were a few from Grandmother Beryl, but hers were rather dull, of the “How are you? I am fine” variety.

  Jeremy telephoned Severine’s assistant, Louis, and asked him to pick up the earring from Denby. Louis would have it appraised and then keep it in a safe-deposit box.They would catalog everything, but nothing must be taken out of the country.There was still a combination lock on the garage doors.

  “Can you leave your car here for a couple of days?” Denby asked Jeremy, and to my surprise Jeremy readily agreed. Denby would let Jeremy know when to come back and pick up his car, and he’d have a more formal estimate for me soon.

  Denby wished us both luck when he dropped us off at the airport. It was the first time that Jeremy and I had been alone since we arrived at the villa, and I’d been mulling something over and working up a head of steam. After we boarded the airplane and took our seats, which were in the quiet, first-class section thanks to Jeremy’s constant travel and its attendant perks, he turned to me and said,“Well? What’s up? You look like the cat that swallowed the canary.”

  “It’s that earring,” I said.“It belongs to a necklace-and-earring set, very ornate, that Aunt Penelope wore to a costume ball. I saw it on her in a photograph in her album.”

  “Do you think it’s very valuable?” Jeremy asked.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that none of Aunt Penelope’s jewelry has turned up?” I asked. “Nowhere, not even in a safe-deposit box?”

  Jeremy paused a moment, then said thoughtfully,“All women have jewelry, don’t they?”

  “Especially in those days, after one world war and heading into another,” I said, bursting with enthusiasm for my own theory. “Women hid their jewels as a hedge against bad times.”

  “But darling, she could have sold them to pay the grocer,” Jeremy said.

  “Who sells one earring? And trust me, that was a great necklace. She would never have sold it,” I insisted. “I mean you just can’t get jewelry like that anymore. I’ve heard of old ladies who’d starve themselves and their cats rather than part with stuff like that. They feel safe knowing it’s there. Like they’ll stay alive as long as they don’t sell it.”

  Jeremy tried not to look excited, but I could tell that my enthusiasm was contagious. “You know,” he said slowly, “if the guy who broke into Aunt Pen’s apartment—sorry, your apartment—was Rollo or somebody hired by him, perhaps he thinks the jewelry is still there. That would account for his rummaging through her clothing drawers. Perhaps you ought to have a good look around, just to see if the necklace or anything else turns up.”

  I was on the verge of telling him about Aunt Penelope’s secret admirer, a rich businessman bound to give expensive trinkets as gifts, but something stopped me. I’d like to say that it was because I didn’t want to gossip about my great-aunt’s sex life, but in reality I think it was the stinky-glove thing that was gnawing at me. I’d been watching his reactions for telltale clues. But now I decided to be bold.

  “Where were you that night, when I phoned about the break-in and you weren’t home?” I said. In all the excitement, I’d never asked before. He looked up, startled, then sheepish.

  “I took a good look at myself, and the apartment, and how it must have seemed from your perspective,” he said awkwardly. “I realized how I’d been holed up there feeling sorry for myself, so I had to get out. I went for a coffee, to clear my head.”

  It sounded sincere, but still I was watching him closely. “What about that little glass cube that we found on the floor of Aunt Penelope’s apartment? Near your shoe,” I said. “After you arrived.You were kinda funny about it.Was that yours?”

  “Mine?” he repeated blankly. “Why should it be mine?”

  “It could have been used to examine gems, I suppose,” I said, eyeing him for a reaction.

  His eyes narrowed. “Penny,” he said, slightly irritated, “get to the point, will you?”

  “All right, then,” I said bluntly. “Exactly what did you say to Aunt Penelope in those little teatimes with her? Rollo thinks you charmed her into dumping her old lawyer and hiring your firm, and making you the executor of her will. Now he thinks you’re trying to influence me.”

  “For God’s sake, what’s this all about?” he asked, appearing a bit wounded now.

  “Jeremy,” I said in a burst, “is it some weird English thing to wear gloves when you pump gas?”

  He looked embarrassed but confused. “What can you mean?
” he said finally.

  And I reminded him that the intruder had clapped a glove that smelled like gasoline to my mouth, not unlike the one I’d seen in Jeremy’s glove compartment. He, actually, had as big a motive as Rollo to get the jewelry out of the apartment, if he’d suspected it was there . . .

  I started out bravely enough, but ended up stuttering and stammering my half-baked theories. Jeremy saw how uncomfortable I was to think of him as a shady character, but somehow I pushed on, feeling that I had to confront him and size it all up. I figured I was on an airplane with loads of witnesses around, so he couldn’t exactly murder me on the spot.

  But Jeremy didn’t look at all murderous. As it slowly dawned on him, he stared at me, then threw back his head and burst into laughter—great big choking guffaws that made the flight attendant glance our way and say brightly, “Everything all right here?”

  “Dandy,” he gasped. He actually had to wipe tears from his eyes. “My poor dear Penny,” he said at last, when he could speak. “This whole affair is really taking a toll on you. I don’t blame you a bit. No, it is not some weird English custom, but perhaps it’s the one thing I have in common with Rollo. I’m glad he’s not my relative.That’s been the only good bit that came out of all this. I have no blood connection to him at all.”And he smirked, implying that I, of course, did.“And no, I did not break into your apartment looking for poor old Aunt Pen’s jewelry, though I may never forgive myself for not thinking of it. As for that cube, I wouldn’t even know how to use the wretched thing. I can’t tell a diamond from a rhinestone, anyway.”

  His whole reaction was so natural and innocent, and it was so annoyingly like him to find it funny, that I lost any modicum of mistrust that I may have harbored in my heart.

  “Okay, okay, quit laughing and forget it,” I said sulkily. He reached out to pat my hand, but at his touch we both melted a little, and he took mine in his and gave it a squeeze.