Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  Still, it wouldn’t do to become too curious. A list sale meant not only a higher commission for the broker but more money for the heirs, and that was where his primary responsibility lay. Once this deal went through there would be no more business pending on the estate. An association between his family and the Wymans which reached back nearly a century would at last be ended and he could close the book on it.

  That would be a relief.

  . . . . .

  He told himself that it was part of the job, that until the Wyman property was claimed by its new owners it remained his responsibility and he ought to go out there one last time to inspect the premises, to make sure everything was as it should be and there was nothing which could possibly queer the sale. That was what he told himself and it was all perfectly true, but he knew it was not the whole reason and that the account he hoped to settle within himself had nothing to do with land values.

  So the morning after his conversation with Mr. Grayson he phoned the real estate company and told them he wanted the keys to the Wyman property.

  “We can drop the keys off at your office,” said a woman, presumably young, with an attractive, sweetly tremulous voice. “As a matter of fact, would you mind if I went with you? I’ve been the listed agent for nearly a year and I’ve never seen the place.”

  Yes, he minded. But he could hardly make an issue of it. After all, what possible legitimate reason could he give for wanting to go alone?

  “I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get out there, and I’d hate to inconvenience you . . .”

  “Not to worry,” she answered brightly. “I’ve got lots of free time. I can be there on twenty minutes notice. You have no idea how slow business has been.”

  Okay. So maybe she had him trapped. But he would make one last try.

  “Then shall we say, tentatively, tomorrow morning? About eight?”

  “That would be great!”

  Just his luck, she had to be an early riser. Kinkaid decided he disliked her already.

  . . . . .

  He was watching from his bedroom window when, at exactly two minutes before eight, she pulled up in front of his house in a dusty, pale blue Fiat that was at least ten years old. She got out and slammed the car door vehemently enough to give the impression she meant it as a kind of wake-up call, in case he had overslept.

  There is a limit to how much you can tell about a person when you are looking down at them from about a sixty-degree angle. He couldn’t see her face at all, but she had shiny black hair, cut short enough that it hardly reached her collar, and above a dark, full skirt she was wearing a forest green jacket that somehow managed to suggest the Austrian Alps. This on a morning that had already reached seventy degrees before the sun was up. Her gait, what he saw of it, was rapid and angry—her shoulders rocked a little as she walked, as if she looked forward to slamming his front door too, just for good measure.

  He was already on the stairs when he heard the bell. He passed Julia in the hallway and told her not to trouble herself about seeing who it was.

  “It’s only business,” he told her, with something like relief. “She won’t be coming in.”

  So Kinkaid wasn’t at all prepared for what he found when he opened the door.

  “Good morning!”

  She stood there smiling at him with that cheerful prettiness that goes with a slightly turned-up nose and freckles, except that there weren’t any freckles. Her eyes were large and amused. With her little cap of black hair, she looked like a pixie.

  Normally, pixies were not much to his taste.

  “Mr. Kinkaid?” she asked. “I’m Lisa Milano—from Prestige Properties?”

  She thrust out her hand and he took it, realizing with embarrassment that he hadn’t answered her.

  “I’m Jim Kinkaid,” he said quickly, returning her smile. “Good morning.”

  For a long moment he stood there staring at her, struggling to find something more to say. Her hand, he noticed, was small and exquisite. She was not what he had expected—she had startled him, that was all.

  Finally, he managed to suggest that they take his car, since he knew the way.

  Well, it wasn’t precisely his car. In real life Kinkaid drove a dark blue Honda with a dented right rear fender and bad shocks. The Mercedes had belonged to his father.

  It was a 400SE, five years old but with less than 15,000 miles on the odometer. James Kinkaid III had bought it just a few months before his first heart attack and for the remainder of his life he had hardly driven it anywhere except around town. It was a metallic green and the paintwork was like new. Mr. Kinkaid Senior had taken it for a wash and polish two days before he died and it hadn’t been out of the garage since.

  His son, who had been raised to be a gentleman, opened the car door for the lady and, when he was behind the wheel, he switched on the air conditioning.

  “It’s really nice,” she said, looking at the instrument panel with admiration.

  “My dad’s,” he answered, a little perversely. Still, he could not stifle a certain pride of ownership. It pleased him that she liked his father’s car.

  The Wyman place was far enough away from town that even the housing developers hadn’t encroached on it, and as a result the drive there was a pleasant ten minutes along a road hardly wide enough for a farm cart. At one point they even had to slow down for a couple of teenage girls on horseback.

  “I’ve never been out here.” Lisa Milano gazed at the riders as if she had just discovered what horses were for. Then she looked embarrassed. “You can live in Stamford and think the whole of Connecticut is just like Philadelphia.”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  She nodded, giving the impression she thought there was something a little shameful about Philadelphia. “You?”

  “I was born here, “ he said. “Unless you count New Haven, I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

  “You must like it then.”

  Kinkaid shrugged. “I console myself with the thought that at least it isn’t New York.”

  “Or Philadelphia.”

  He had to check to make sure she was joking before he allowed himself to laugh. Where he wondered had he learned to be so cautious?

  He slipped the car back into gear and they were on their way again.

  Three minutes later they turned into an even narrower road which, after about a quarter of a mile, ran through a patch of woods and up to a gate of wrought-iron bars, the two sides held together by a chain and padlock and each side displaying a florid letter “W” enclosed in a circle. The spaces between the bars were narrow enough that not even a small child could have slipped through them and the gate was the only opening in a wall of rough stone that stood about eight feet high.

  “I gather they liked their privacy,” she said, with what amounted to a kind of awe.

  This time he didn’t risk sneaking a look at her.

  “When you have that kind of money, and that kind of power, you like to think you can keep the world at bay,” he answered. “At least you did if your name was Wyman. But there were always chinks in the armor—about fifty feet from here, down there where the ground begins to slope, the wall slants in a few degrees and you can climb it if you know where to look for the handholds.”

  “Did you ever do it?”

  He didn’t reply but instead took the set of keys from her hand and got out to unfasten the chain. When he returned to the car they drove on to the house in silence.

  The Wyman mansion dated from 1904. Preston Wyman, old Judge Wyman’s grandfather, had had it built as a wedding present for his son and had given the commission to the architectural firm of Peabody and Stearns, who had designed Cornelius Vanderbilt’s summer home at Newport. The house, called “Five Miles” because that was the length of the stone wall enclosing the property, was in the Palladian style, neoclassical and grand, with four great white columns and a thirty-foot wide stairway marking the entrance. Preston Wyman had meant his new home to command the w
orld’s envy and respect, and he had succeeded. Judge Wyman had been born here and, at the end of a long life, he had died here, leaving a widow but no descendants. The line was broken forever.

  The law firm of Kinkaid & Kinkaid regularly issued checks to landscape gardeners and painters. The gutters were kept clear and the roof was checked every spring. But the Wymans were gone now and the house had remained unoccupied. For six years no one had eaten a meal or slept within its walls. White paint and well-trimmed grass could not dissipate the sense of lifelessness. Its windows were as lightless and empty as the eye sockets of a skull.

  Mrs. Wyman had been a very old woman when her heart finally stopped beating. She had died just at sunset in the middle of a February snowfall, and her body had been carried out through the front door at night. That had been her exit from the world, in the muffled darkness, attended by a few old servants and the ambulance crew. Somehow it was as if the atmosphere of that last night had never been dispelled.

  But for Jim Kinkaid the house had been dead longer than the six years since old Mrs. Wyman had relinquished her ferocious hold on existence. He had not set eyes on this place in over a decade, but it haunted his memory. He would have been glad if some accident had burned it to the ground.

  “It looks like a hotel,” Lisa said, favoring him with the full impact of her smile as he held the car door open for her. She seemed amused—after all, he hadn’t been quite quick enough to bestow this old fashioned courtesy before she was already halfway out. Perhaps she thought he was stuffy. He wondered when he had begun thinking of her as Lisa.

  Maybe he was stuffy. Probably.

  “Maybe it will be.” He turned to look at the colonnaded entrance, which just then was easier to look at than Lisa Milano. “Maybe the new owners will convert it into a conference center, or maybe a nursing home.”

  “And thus the mighty are brought low.” She raised her eyebrows and smiled. It was a simple declarative sentence that somehow had the force of a question, or perhaps even a reproof.

  “Do I sound as if I’m avenging a social slight?” he asked, knowing even as he spoke the words that that was exactly how he sounded. And, yes, he would like to see the Wyman mansion turned into something like a hideaway for wealthy alcoholics. “Sorry.”

  She didn’t answer, but only smiled at him again.

  The house seemed to lead a charmed life. The landscaping people came every two weeks or so during the summer, so any damage would have been reported, but in six years the firm of Kinkaid & Kinkaid had never been called upon to pay for any repairs. Perhaps the place was too far out of the way to attract the notice of tramps or high-school kids looking for someplace to vandalize, or perhaps the prestige of the Wyman family had outlived its members long enough to keep people away. In either case, a quick tour of the perimeter revealed not so much as a broken pane of glass.

  “It’s even bigger than it looks from the front,” Lisa said as they turned the last corner and found themselves stepping back onto the gravel driveway. “How many bedrooms, do you suppose?”

  “No idea.” Kinkaid shook his head, suggesting it was one of those unanswerable questions, like the weight of the planet Jupiter. “I’ve never been upstairs.”

  “Well, now ‘s your chance.”

  The front of the house consisted of three huge rooms joined by arches wide enough to have comfortably straddled the driveway. The middle room was the foyer, a vast empty square with a double stairway at the back. The room on the left was the library and it was full of books which, had one opened them, would have revealed underlinings and marginal notes in several different hands, for the Wymans had always been men and women of high intelligence and vast cultural ambition. On the right was the sitting room, its chairs, tables and sofas exactly where Kinkaid remembered them but covered with sheets that had grown gray with six years of accumulated dust. Even the table lamps and chandeliers were thus shrouded, giving the place an odd, morguelike appearance.

  The carpets and hardwood floors were also covered with a patina of dust that revealed no footprints. No one had been within these walls in a very long time.

  Lisa peeked into the library as if she were afraid someone might catch her at it.

  “Where’s the dining room?”

  Kinkaid merely shrugged. When she looked at him quizzically he smiled. “I’ve only been in this house half a dozen or so times,” he said. “We weren’t shown in through the servants’ entrance, but we didn’t move in the same circles as the Wymans. As far as I can recollect, not even my father was ever invited here to dinner.”

  “Were they such snobs?”

  He didn’t reply, since no answer could convey how inadequately a word like “snob” described the Wymans. Besides, he was forced to admit to himself, for some reason he felt uncomfortable criticizing the family in front of a stranger. Lisa Milano could make what she liked of his silence.

  “I’m surprised all this furniture is still here,” she said. She really was a remarkably nice girl to be so forgiving of his rudeness, and by way of apology he frowned.

  “The heirs don’t seem to want it.”

  To give himself something to do he picked up one corner of the dust cloth that covered a massive chair standing beside the fireplace. He recognized it at once—Judge Wyman had been sitting in it during their one and only interview, when Kinkaid was about seven years old. He let the cloth drop back into place as if it concealed some dreadful secret.

  “I once suggested it could be put up for auction,” he went on, “but I never got an answer. The books alone would bring in a fortune.”

  “Maybe they don’t need it. You said they were rich.”

  “Did I say that?” He turned and saw that she was smiling at him. Maybe she was the cheerful type, or maybe the thought of somebody, anybody, having all that money made her happy. Or maybe she just liked him. In any case, the pressure of that smile made him avert his eyes. “Besides, there’s rich and there’s rich. And the estate was a lot smaller than expected—at least, than I expected. I can remember my father saying that Judge Wyman was one of the five or six wealthiest men in the state but, apart from this house and two hundred thousand set aside to maintain it until it’s sold, there was only about five million.”

  “That sounds like plenty to me,” she said almost gleefully, finally teasing a smile out of him.

  “But not enough to make you indifferent to another couple of million,” he went on, forcing himself to resume a proper, lawyerlike sobriety. “Especially when you don’t know how many other pockets it’s got to fill.”

  “Maybe your father was wrong. Maybe the Wymans just kept up a good front.”

  “He wasn’t wrong.”

  With a sense of having something to prove to himself, Kinkaid gave a yank to the dustcover off the Judge’s chair and let it slip quietly to the floor. It was a wingback, dating from the end of the 19th Century and covered in black glove leather, slightly smaller than he remembered it but still giving the impression of great weight and dignity, like a throne carved out of marble. He had no trouble remembering the awe with which he had approached it all those years ago, and the man in the charcoal gray suit, the oldest man Jimmy Kinkaid had ever seen, who beckoned to him with a slow waving motion of his fingers, as if testing to see that the joints still worked.

  “Your father tells me you’re a clever boy. Do you fancy yourself a lawyer like him?”

  At this distance of time Kinkaid couldn’t remember his answer, but he remembered the way Judge Wyman had nodded, with just the faintest shading of contempt, as if to say “just so, perhaps the most that one could expect.”

  And then he had raised one bony shoulder in a dismissive shrug. “Well, I won’t live to see it. You’ll have to scratch around for other clients besides the Wymans, boy, because I’m the last.”

  His dry, lifeless laughter still seemed to tremble in the air.

  And then it was dispelled in a sudden explosion—someone had sneezed. Kinkaid turned around to see Lisa M
ilano half doubled over, her face buried in a white handkerchief.

  “It’s the dust,” she said, wiping her nose. And then she sneezed again, even more violently if that was possible. “These old houses . . .I should be in another line of work.”

  “Why don’t you wait outside then? I’ll just poke around a little more here to make sure there aren’t any gopher snakes under the beds—I’ll only be a few minutes. Behind the house there’s a garden as big as Central Park. Go sit under the shade trees.”

  She looked at him for a moment as if he had said something unaccountably odd, and then nodded.

  “All right,” she said. “You’ll know where to find me.”

  “Yes. I’ll know.”

  9

  Until he heard the door close behind her, he hadn’t realized how desperately he had wanted to be alone. The house filled him with a mingling of melancholy and dread, but these were feelings which, by himself, he was at least able to confront. With the girl there he had to hide them away, even from himself.

  And yet he wasn’t quite alone.

  Kinkaid was not even a little superstitious—it was not the dead whose presence he felt but the living, the reverberation of their spent lives coming back to him like an echo. He felt himself like a ghost, a shade from the unreal future who wanders into a place where time has lost all meaning.

  Except for one brief period when he was not quite twenty, Kinkaid had been an infrequent guest at Five Miles, and yet he had seen it so often in imagination, like a landscape reflected in a pool of water, that sometimes he felt it was the most solidly familiar place on earth. So much about his life had been decided here.

  The stairway behind the reception hall was an elaborate affair. Like part of a double helix its two halves crossed in a kind of minstral’s gallery and then divided again to lead up to the left and right wings of the house. Kinkaid had never been upstairs, had never seen the rooms where the Wymans had lived their merely private lives. His footsteps were soundless on the dust-laden runner, and yet he felt certain his approach was heard and resented.