It certainly didn’t make Helena want to help her.
“I have never once visited your brother,” said Declan coolly. “I didn’t even know the man, except to say hello to him in the hallway.”
“And you?” demanded Pamela Pommard, turning her full attention to Helena. “Did you see any important documents, maybe out on the counter, when you were visiting with my brother?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? You seemed awfully fond of my brother. Maybe he confided in you?”
“It’s hard to say,” said Helena, conscious of the thick packet of papers tucked away inside of the book that she was carrying. She clutched it tighter against her side. “Especially since you didn’t bother to say what sorts of ‘important papers’ you were looking for. There are a lot of important papers in this world. How should I know which exact ones you’re looking for?”
Pamela Pommard considered Helena through narrowed eyes for several moments, before saying abruptly “A will; a pair of wills now, I suppose. Everyone in the family has been fighting over what my sister-in-law, Caroline Rothschild, left for them. My brother Mitch had a copy of her real will, the one where she left everything mostly to him and a little to me.”
“No,” said Helena blandly. “I haven’t seen that.”
She might have, if she’d gone through Mr. Lazarus’ papers when she had first found them. Fortunately, she had not.
Helena had never been much of a liar, except for when it was entirely true.
“My sister-in-law’s will is worth millions to me,” persisted Pamela Pommard. “That’s why I’ve been going through and cleaning out his apartment myself, instead of hiring someone to do it for me.”
“Then I hope you find it,” said Helena coolly.
“It’s what he moved in here to protect,” continued Pamela Pommard. “It’s what he died for – protecting my sister-in-law’s money for me.”
That last was said almost triumphantly, as if it was obviously the winning argument.
Helena was beginning to strongly dislike Mr. Lazarus’ sister. She wasn’t half as good at emotional manipulation as she seemed to think she was.
Unless her goal was to turn my partiality towards her on Mr. Lazarus’ behalf into strong dislike, thought Helena, annoyed.
“I know you have them! Or that you know where they are!” That was Pamela Pommard again, her accusations loud and strident. She would have made them in Helena’s face, but Declan blocked her way. “I saw the recognition in your face when I first told you about them!”
Maybe she wasn’t as relentlessly self-absorbed as she seemed; or maybe she just paid attention to other people’s emotional responses to her when it suited her purposes. Either way, she reminded Helena of a certain type of girl that she had gone to school with. Helena hadn’t liked them then, and she found that she didn’t like them now either.
“So what if I did?” said Helena. “Your family is hardly the first or the only to employ wills as a means a distribution of wealth after death.”
“Big words for a thief,” sneered Mr. Lazarus’ sister. “Look, let’s cut to the chase. I know that my cousins don’t have the wills yet. They’d have never have kept it quiet if they did. I’ll pay you double whatever they promised you for the wills.”
Helena drew back, deeply affronted.
“And if you don’t give me what’s legally mine,” continued Pamela Pommard, “then I’ll sue you!”
“Go ahead and try it,” sneered Helena. That threat was old when she was in the third grade. It took better threats than that to ruffle her feathers nowadays.
Stabbing a finger in the general direction of Helena’s face, she snarled “Fine! But don’t say that I didn’t warn you! I’m going to own and then burn every wretched family heirloom that you ever dreamed of handing down to your great-grandchildren.”
And with that parting shot, Pamela Pommard flounced off, leaving the box where she had put it and her brother’s apartment unlocked, its front door open.
Together, Helena and Declan watched her go.
“Does she even know your name?” asked Declan presently, breaking the silence between him and Helena. “I wonder how she’s going to sue you without that?”
Surprised, Helena blinked at him. Then, delighted, she threw back her head and laughed.
Unphased by Pamela Pommard’s threats, Helena nevertheless took one look at Declan’s trashed apartment, and then diverted them back to Dolf’s place. There, she put on a pot of coffee, before sitting down at Dolf’s coffee table to try to figure out what Mr. Lazarus had tucked in the back of his book. Declan took one packet of papers, Helena the others.
It became pretty apparent pretty quickly that they were looking at a pair of wills, ones that left almost everything to the other spouse if one spouse predeceased the other.
The money in the marriage had come from the wife, and she had made two additional provisions: a small trust fund for her sister-in-law, Pamela Pommard, regardless of whether she predeceased her husband or vice versa, and a distribution of her wealth among her unborn offspring, living relatives, and a couple of charities, if her husband predeceased her.
Her husband, in the event that his wife predeceased him, had left all of his assets, both his own and those inherited from his wife, to be divided between his much younger sister, Pamela Pommard, whom he and his wife had raised as their own child, and whatever children their marriage had produced.
This, thought Helena, as she snapped photographs of the wills with her cell phone, is worth killing over.
Caroline’s disbursement choices, in the event that she was the surviving spouse, weren’t so bad. Only a fraction of her wealth would have gone to her husband’s sister, a person outside the family.
But a family so much like her own would hate Caroline’s disbursement choices in the event that her husband survived her. She had transferred the bulk of her vast assets to him, a person from outside the family. That was a big reason for murder.
But for him, not her, thought Helena.
If Helena had made a will like that, her grandfather would have made certain that her husband predeceased her by a safe margin so that there was never any danger of his family getting their hands on her family’s carefully hoarded wealth.
So why had Caroline died first?
Had it been a true accident, one that had later caused two murders?
Or had it been an accident in that she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught a murder that had been meant for someone else, namely Mr. Lazarus?
Helena didn’t know, but she knew enough to make Declan take additional pictures of the wills with his own cell phone. That done, they gathered both the wills and their various codicils up, put them back in their envelope, and tucked them back into the copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.
Then Helena made Declan take her down to the nearest police department so that she could as the officers – or maybe the detectives – there if they needed the wills.
They had to wait ten minutes while the detectives handling the case were located, and then awhile longer as they made their way back to the police station. But on the bright side, they proved to be very interested in the two wills that Mr. Lazarus had accidentally left at Helena’s place; the classic book, not so much.
“If you’re going to keep them,” said Helena earnestly, “then I’ll have to get receipt from you, preferably one that has the time and date that these papers were relinquished to your control; notarized, if possible.”
“Getting kind of fancy, aren’t you?” inquired one of the two detectives sardonically.
“I’m told that Caroline Pommard’s estate is worth millions,” said Helena dryly, watching with amusement as the two detectives instantly perked up. “That’s worth killing over. Or suing the messenger, if she can’t prove what she did with those wills, when.”
“So it is,” said the other, and then the police did her one better.
They furnished Helena
with time and date stamped pictures of the wills as well as a notarized receipt for the wills. Helena got to keep the leather bound copy of Jules Verne’s classic, however. She was not unhappy with that division of assets.
“All right,” said Helena, as they left the police station. “Now we’re going to go clean up your apartment.”
“Just don’t see anything interesting on our way back to my place.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Helena, “but no promises. For instance, that burger place’s drive thru is looking pretty fascinating right about now.”
“I could go for a closer look,” agreed Declan. “That thing with the police was not quick.”
They grinned at each other.
After a very close inspection of the drive thru, (and the enthusiastic consumption of a certain materials collected from it,) Helena and Declan went home.
They were crossing the parking lot when there was a high pitched squeal and then Declan’s hand was suddenly on her hip, shoving Helena to one side. She hit the trunk of a car hard, knocking all the breath out of her and losing her grip on her book.
To one side of her, there was a sickening thud, and Helena looked up just in time to see a cobalt blue Ferrari hit her cousin. Horrified, Helena watched as her cousin went rolling up the length of the car’s hood and hit its windshield, shattering it. Declan went sailing over the top of the car, landing hard behind it.
He was very still.
Is he dead? Helena wondered, frightened, and that was the thing that propelled her to her feet.
Pushing off of the car, Helena stumbled to her cousin’s side.
Declan was breathing, his lungs making an awful wheezing noise on every inhale, but he was conscious. Collapsing to her knees beside him, Helena tried not to take it personally that Declan looked absolutely horrified to see her.
“Declan! You’re alive!” cried Helena.
In the distance, there was an awful grinding noise, the squeal of metal parts protesting their ill use.
It was a man that she went to hug, but an armful of pouncing feline that she ended up putting her arms around. The enormous black creature knocked into Helena hard, and they both cried out at the pain of it.
Helena landed on her back between two cars, the impact knocking the breath out of her again. And this time, she didn’t get it back so easily, not with the enormous weight of the feline on her chest.
Down the length of her body and past one of the enormous cat’s shoulder blades, Helena watched as the cobalt blue Ferrari zoomed past her again, this time going in reverse.
They’d tried to back over Declan!
The weight on her chest scrambled off of her, the cat making pained noises as it moved, and Helena pushed herself up into a sitting position, moving more slowly this time. A cold nose nudged her shoulder impatiently, and Helena obediently scrambled to her feet.
Standing, she could see that her cousin wasn’t just an enormous black cat, he was a jaguar with short black fur and bright blue eyes.
Helena gaped.
Well, she would have. Declan bumped his head into her belly, hard, driving Helena back several steps.
“Dec – oof!” began Helena, only to be cut off by another head butt to her belly, and another few steps lost.
In the distance there was that grinding noise again.
A third head butt from her cousin, and Helena finally got the message.
She stumbled backwards, past the hoods of the two cars that she had fallen between, and up on the sidewalk.
Declan was still guiding Helena backwards, closer to the buildings and further from the parking lot, when the cobalt blue Ferrari slammed into one of the two cars that had sheltered Helena and Declan, hitting it at speed.
There was an awful scream of metal, and Helena watched as one car fell sideways against the other car, its weight falling where they had been lying. If Declan had been any slower about getting Helena up, on her feet, and out of the way, they would have been crushed.
Left to her own devices, she definitely would have been crushed.
I would have died there, thought Helena, numb, as the Ferrari backed up again.
A bite from Declan, hard enough to get her attention but not enough to break the skin, got Helena’s attention. He nudged the back of her knee, briefly buckling it, and Helena took the advice to heart.
Turning, she ran.
Her ears filled with the pounding of her own heart, her cousin the jaguar’s pained whimpers as he ran with her, and the occasional scream of protesting metal as the cobalt blue Ferrari jumped the curb behind them, Helena bolted for the relative safety of Declan and Dolf’s building.
She flung herself up the nearest set of stairs, not stopping until she was on the next floor up. As soon as they gained the relative safety of the second floor’s landing, the jaguar collapsed in a heap, his breath coming out of him in a pained wheeze.
“Declan!” gasped Helena. She was gulping for air. “Declan, don’t!”
Terrified that her cousin had died, she knelt next to him, but Declan was still breathing. He just looked awful, his lovely black fur matted with his own blood and some of his bones poking out of his skin in unnatural ways.
Declan was hurt. Bad.
“I’ve got my cell phone!” said Helena, while unlooping her little purse from its place around her wrist. Her hands were shaking. “Don’t worry! I’ll call an ambulance! You’re going to be fine!”
Next to her, Declan’s feline formed heaved, melting and twisting back into his human one. Maybe it was her familiarity with the human body, but he looked even worse in that one.
His hand bloody and shaking, Declan reached out to catch Helena’s hand with her own.
“Don’t call… the hospital.”
“But –”
“I’ll die if… you do. Listen carefully…”
Her hands still shaking, Helena somehow managed to call the number that he rattled off to her.
On the first ring, Declan blinked.
He still hadn’t opened them again on the second.
On the third ring, a woman said briskly “Van Hoorn speaking.”
“I – I don’t know! Declan said to call this number, but now he’s unconscious, and I think –”
“I’m coming,” snapped the woman, interrupting Helena. “Where are you?”
“The – The apartment complex? The one that everyone lives in,” said Helena. Memory jogged and she added “It’s called –”
“I know what it’s called,” said the woman – Van Hoorn. “I live there too. And I’ll be there shortly. Now, where exactly are you in the apartment complex?”
Looking around, Helena began to describe what building – and which stairwell – she was in.
“Okay. Can you get him to either his or Dolf’s apartment?”
Helena eyed her cousin doubtfully. He was a big man. And there seemed to be a lot broken inside of him.
“No,” she said at last. “I can’t. And he’s passed out.”
Van Hoorn talked Helena through checking Declan’s airway, breathing, and heartbeat, then kept Helena talking, asking her to tell her what had happened.
Helena was just finishing up her story, when Van Hoorn interrupted her again, saying, “Okay. I’m there. I can’t park in the nearest parking lot, the police have cordoned that off, but I’ll be there as soon as possible.”
“The police?” said Helena blankly. “Who called the police?”
She should have. As soon as she heard the words, Helena knew that she should have. But she just hadn’t thought of it, not after getting a good look at Declan.
“Probably everybody,” said Van Hoorn wryly. “I know I told the office secretary to call them as I was leaving.”
“Oh.”
There was the sound of light steps on the stairs, and Helena tensed, every muscle in her body aching with it.
“Is that you?” she asked, her voice quivering. “Coming up the stairs?”
“Yes,” said Van Hoorn.<
br />
And then Helena saw her, a small woman with short hair and large eyes. As Helena watched, she hung up and pocketed her cell phone.
Van Hoorn didn’t even flinch at the state Declan was in. Instead, she surveyed them both for a long moment before saying “Together, I think we can move him to Dolf’s place.”
“Should we move him?” asked Helena doubtfully. She had heard somewhere that it was best not to move injured people if it was at all possible.
“No, but I can hardly do my work here,” said Van Hoorn. “The stairwell is too narrow. Come on, you take the left side.”
At a loss – What did it matter how wide the landing was? – Helena did as she was told. Without ever waking up, Declan made a horrible, pained noise. Hearing it, Helena nearly dropped him, only a sharp word from Van Hoorn tightening her grip at the last minute.
Together, they lugged Helena’s naked cousin back to Dolf’s apartment, Helena feeling grateful on every step that Dolf’s apartment was the closest one to the stairwell that she had chosen. And that he had been kind enough to give Helena her own key to his place.
As they stepped out of the stairwell, Helena’s heart lurched. Her stomach tightened with fear.
The door to Dolf’s apartment was hanging open.
“That shouldn’t –”
“Shhhhh,” hissed Van Hoorn. She bundled Helena and Dolf back into the stairwell. “Stay here.”
And then, before Helena could protest, Van Hoorn was gone, leaving Helena alone with Dolf. He was cold and clammy against her, and the sounds of his stuttered, labored breaths made her heart ache, while the overly long gaps between some of them made her heart lurch in her chest. Most worrying, however, were the bruises pooling beneath his skin. They were so big.
Please don’t die, thought Helena, hugging her cousin closer.
She would never forgive herself if he died.
Van Hoorn reappeared, startling Helena.
“It’s clear,” said Van Hoorn briskly, while re-shouldering her half of Declan. “Come on.”
Van Hoorn led Helena and Declan out into the hallway again and then into Dolf’s apartment.
The Wyvern's Defender Dire Wolf Page 17