The Silent Inheritance

by Joy Dettman

  Then Gramp wrote her a note. She still had it in the cake tin.

  YOU’RE DEAF, I’M HALF-BLIND, GRAN’S LOST MOST OF HER MARBLES, BUT GIVE US A DAY OR TWO AND I RECKON WE COULD ADD UP TO A PRETTY GOOD WHOLE.

  They’d added up well enough from December until June. She’d trimmed Gramp’s moustache and he’d started wearing his false teeth, and if she hadn’t said too many words, he’d understood.

  His sight had deteriorated. Near the end, when they weren’t in the house, he’d had to walk with one hand on Sarah’s shoulder. Near the end, Gran had become dangerous to Sarah’s baby.

  Then that letter from Perth. She’d recognised the return address. Hadn’t wanted to open it, but Gramp had wanted to know what it said.

  Sarah shook that memory away and picked up the flowers Bob and his mother had brought. Pretty things. She owned no vase large enough to hold them so she filled a jug and stood settling the flowers into it and thinking of Mrs Vaughn’s garden, a wild pretty place in winter when her camellias and magnolia bloomed.

  The new owner would cut those trees down, would probably rip the house down and built a McMansion. The only way to buy a piece of inner city land was to buy an old house and rip it down. A few in this area had been wrecked.

  Well after midnight when she unloaded the washing machine, and for the first time looked at its brand name. Whether she bought a house or rented, she’d need a washing machine. She liked this one. It spun her washing near dry.

  The house locked, the key beneath its pot, she carried her basket past the Hyundai – and its ready-made scratches. It was three years old, and except for when Raymond had taken it for weekends, it hadn’t been driven further than the local shopping centres, doctors and funeral homes. It needed a new battery and its scratches repaired, but she’d buy it tomorrow if Raymond agreed to sell it.

  She didn’t hang her washing. It would be easier to do in daylight. She checked her emails. Raymond hadn’t replied. Too late now for him to reply, so she closed down, turned the power off at the wall and was packing the photographs back into the cake tin when her hands delved deeper, for an old envelope, addressed to Jillian Jones, c/o Peter Clark.

  She’d kept it, not its contents but the envelope, only because she’d loved looking at the return address. The address was no longer current. Her name was no longer Jillian Jones, so she ripped the envelope in half, in half again and tossed it into the bin.

  THE SALE

  He’d heard her moving about in the yard. He’d tolerated her for the first year or two, relieved to hand over the responsibility of an impossible parent to paid help – and she had been paid, if not in cash then with free rent and utilities. He hadn’t expected her to become a fixture.

  For the past ten years she’d been paying his mother a pittance in rent, and she had the nerve to ask for a rental reference. She’d get none from him, or the car. He had to speak to her though. She needed to be told that the agent was holding three open days and two evenings, and he’d said that the unit could be a selling point if the buyer was looking for a rental property.

  Raymond was looking at the passenger-side doors of the Hyundai. One of them could need replacing. He wanted to get rid of it, and as it was it had to be worth sixteen thousand.

  He unlocked the house and walked through, taking inventory as he went. The piano no one had played in twenty years could have had some value, the glass cabinet, the television was new. He found a notepad and started listing items of possible value, and had worked his way down to the laundry, when he saw her through the window. She was at the clothes line, removing and folding sheets – and she hadn’t washed sheets and towels by hand! She’d been in here.

  His inventory forgotten, he was out the back door.

  She saw him coming and stopped what she was doing. ‘I require your key,’ he said.

  ‘I paid my rent before we have our holiday,’ she said.

  ‘Your key to my mother’s house, Mrs Carter.’

  ‘I have got no key for her house.’

  His inventory page turned, he wrote, You have been inside the house. You used the washing machine and I require your key.

  ‘I have got no key.’

  He pointed to the clothes line. ‘You deny you used the laundry?’

  She snatched his pad and wrote, If we had a key, Marni would not have to climb through the bathroom window when your mother fell over. Your mother never gave me a key to her house.

  He’d been away at the time of his mother’s fall. He’d heard about the eleven-year-old girl who’d climbed through a window and called the ambulance, who’d given the hospital his contact details. And he had better things to do than stand in that yard arguing with pen and paper.

  The house will be open for inspection on Saturday morning. I expect your premises to be habitable and accessible at all times.

  She scribbled a reply. We will be looking at cars on Saturday, or I will buy your mother’s car. Do you want to sell her car?

  Leave your key beneath the doormat for the agent.

  ‘My rent is paid. The key belong to me,’ she said.

  ‘Your rent?’ he sneered. ‘You paid my mother a pittance.’

  ‘For no stove, no fridge, no nothing. We paid her too much,’ the daughter commented as she stepped out to her mother’s side.

  He turned his back before she mentioned the possible asbestos content of the roof – if she knew about it – which may present problems with the sale, according to the agent.

  The land had value. The block was huge by today’s standards and its position excellent. The house was a good size. Its brickwork and roof appeared solid. Its interior was a shambles, the bathroom uninhabitable – and whatever he got from the sale, his sister would get half.

  *

  A windy day, Saturday, which may have kept interested parties away. Raymond sat by his phone, waiting for the agent to ring.

  ‘We had six groups through,’ he reported. ‘Two expressed some interest in the land.’

  Then late on Monday afternoon, Raymond’s mobile rang while he was on the road. He put the caller on speaker, and drove on.

  ‘We’ve had an offer from a Sydney buyer. Five hundred and fifty thousand,’ the agent said.

  ‘I’m in heavy traffic and in no mood for hilarity,’ Raymond said. ‘The land alone is worth more than I’m asking.’

  ‘The old timber homes are easier to demolish,’ the agent said. ‘She’s a cash buyer, and in a hurry to buy close to schools. She may go higher.’

  ‘Six hundred and fifty,’ Raymond said. ‘I’m not prepared to consider one red cent less before the auction.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you.’

  He called back at seven. ‘The Sydney buyer will go to six.’

  ‘A house in the same street went for seven hundred and eighty thousand—’

  ‘More modern, two renovated bathrooms, two levels …’

  ‘Get him up to six forty-five and I’ll consider it,’ Raymond snarled.

  At eight, the agent called again. ‘She said she needs a car for her daughter and will go to six thirty-five, if you include the car parked in the drive. She’s currently negotiating on two other houses in the area.’

  ‘Six hundred and sixty thousand – with the car,’ Raymond snarled.

  ‘She’s a cash buyer, Mr Vaughn, eager for a fast settlement—’

  Raymond hung up the phone.

  At ten that night, Raymond got rid of his mother’s house and car for six hundred and fifty thousand, to the Sydney buyer, and he considered it worth the discount to get that place and its possible asbestos off his mind. The details left in the hands of his solicitor, Raymond forgot about it until Wednesday, when he learned that Ainsworth, Adam-Jones and Smyth were handling the sale for the buyer.

  They defended murderers. They didn’t soil their hands with conveyancing work – unless they’d made the purchase for some Sydney drug lord looking to set up an indoor hydroponic marijuana plantation or ice laboratory. It had the
space and the privacy, and was no longer his problem.

  The following Friday afternoon he entered his mother’s house for the last time and set about emptying drawers, shaking garments, checking pockets before stuffing each item into a garbage bag. During her latter years his mother had developed the habit of hiding money in odd places.

  He found four hundred dollars inside the piano, found a hundred and seventy-five tucked between tea towels in a kitchen drawer, two hundred and twenty in a vase on the lounge room mantelpiece, and he wondered how much that bitch had found while she’d been cleaning.

  She wasn’t about today, nor was she answering her door. The removal van had been ordered for two o’clock. It was now ten after. He walked down to the backyard to knock on the prefab’s door. She didn’t open it, so he took the opportunity to look at its roof, to peer in through the window, to write her a brief note which he slid beneath her door.

  Mrs Carter,

  The property has been sold. Please leave the unit in the condition you found it and the key beneath the doormat.

  Vaughn

  *

  Marni saw a pile of mattresses and Mrs Vaughn’s moth-eaten couch and chair on the nature strip when she came from school. The kitchen table and four chairs were out there too, and there was nothing wrong with them. Those chairs were more comfortable than the ones Marni and Sarah sat on.

  The Hyundai wasn’t in the drive. She found it parked in the garage. Found the note too and read it.

  She’d been shopping for bread and fruit. Her mother was back at work and had used the last of their bread to cut lunches. She’d bought steak too, because a supermarket employee had just marked its price down and Marni loved steak when it was cooked properly. Their magic frying pan cooked it properly.

  She stuck the note on the fridge and thought of Uncle Fred, who she’d hated the night he’d gatecrashed her mother’s licence party. She called him Hubert now, after a chubby angel she’d read about in a book, who had come into the lives of two elderly sisters as they were about to be murdered by their evil nephew. Hubert had fixed him up fast and sent him down to hell.

  Marni’s Hubert had fixed up Raymond Vaughn, though only after she and her mother had done the wheeling and dealing on the phone, which had been the most fun they’d ever had in their lives – until the agent said yes, and her mother had stopped laughing and said that Raymond would change his mind about selling her the house as soon as he found out that she was the buyer.

  The agent had told Marni that she’d need to get a solicitor to do the legal bits of buying, and barristers were only solicitors with a few more letters after their names, so her mother had found Frederick Adam-Jones’s card. Marni phoned him and left a message asking him if he knew a solicitor who did the house-buying stuff.

  He hadn’t phoned back. He’d called in that night, and Marni had explained about Raymond Vaughn being likely to change his mind when he found out they were the buyers, and that fat old cherub had suggested that they could get around the problem by transferring their money to his office account, and he’d transfer it on, so that’s what they did.

  But the best part, the absolute best part, was being driven to school one morning in a Ferrari, and Samantha seeing her get out of it, and when she asked who he was, being able to say, he was Frederick Adam-Jones, and her uncle.

  *

  She stole the four chairs from the nature strip, or swapped them for her mother’s old wooden chairs. She took three perfectly good cake tins and a box of assorted mugs, glasses and vases and would have dragged the kitchen table in if she could have, if it hadn’t been too big for the space their tiny table fitted into. She took the coffee table that used to live beside Mrs Vaughn’s lounge room’s corner window with the ashtray ever on it, and it was a nice old table and there wasn’t anything wrong with it except for a couple of burn marks where cigarettes had rolled off the ashtray.

  Bob’s car drove in before six. Marni heard it arrive, heard it leave, and when her mother didn’t come in, she knew where she’d find her.

  She’d found two Pyrex bowls, a heap of cutlery and a set of better saucepans than they owned.

  That night, they borrowed the key again, hoping their house might look better without the furniture. It looked worse. The carpet was piebald, clean and new where the furniture had been but old and filthy where it hadn’t.

  ‘We can buy new carpet, and get someone to paint the walls,’ Marni said.

  ‘Uncle Fred said guttering first.’

  ‘Have you told Bob yet that we bought it?’

  ‘I will. I have to.’

  *

  Marni phoned two plumbers to fix the guttering or she left them messages. One called back. She phoned a painter who didn’t call back.

  Uncle Fred popped in with some papers to sign about the car and Marni found out the names of the seven Jones boys in the old photograph.

  ‘A larger version of that old atrocity hung in our front room until one of the brothers knocked it down and broke the glass. I was unaware a copy had survived,’ he said, then he pointed with his stumpy fat finger and listed them. ‘Clarry, Joe, Bill, John at the back, Bert, Gordon and myself on the table.’

  ‘Do any of them live in Melbourne?’ Marni asked.

  ‘Sadly, our lives went in very diverse directions, Marni.’

  He gathered up his signed papers, zipped them into a black leather folder, then stood, looking at Sarah until she looked at him, when he asked if she’d been out to the farm in recent years.

  ‘Before Marni is born,’ she said.

  ‘Do you recall the buyer’s name?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Gramp selling one part before … before I was there.’

  ‘He retained over thirty acres,’ Uncle Fred said. ‘You are aware that he altered his will in your favour before he died?’

  Sarah didn’t catch his words. Marni did. She repeated them, and again Sarah shook her head.

  ‘You would have been contacted.’

  ‘The Clarks said something about your grandfather’s will, Mum.’

  ‘That land always go to first son,’ Sarah said. ‘Always. Gramp is second, but his brother die, in the dam. Bill will know.’

  ‘Bill had no interest in the land,’ Uncle Fred said. ‘Given the situation when the will was written, our father apparently decided to skip a generation. I am certain that he named you.’

  ‘Because the first son was dead?’ Marni said. She was learning stuff, but he was standing, ready to go.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘Too late now,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Perhaps not, Sarah. I had occasion recently to drive by the property. It appeared deserted. It may well be worth your while to … to look into it. I believe the chap who handled the estate was from Eltham … Towers, an elderly chap.’

  ‘Gramp is dead ten year.’

  ‘Is it that long?’ He looked at his watch, turned to the door then back. ‘Thirty-odd acres of land so close to the city has value, and I’ve known similar cases where probate has been delayed longer – when there are family disagreements over inheritances.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘To use our Mr Rudd’s expression, I must zip. My wife is flying in from Greece tonight.’

  ‘Thank you very much for everything you doing,’ Sarah said.

  ‘It’s very little, my dear,’ he said.

  ‘We call you our angel,’ Marni said.

  ‘Never an angel, Marni,’ he said, then he took the hand she offered and like a fat old knight from a movie, he kissed it. ‘A few phone calls should put the matter of that land to rest,’ and he went on his way.

  He may not have had wings or a halo, but he looked like a pink, chubby-cheeked cherub, and as far as Marni and Sarah were concerned, the little hand he raised in salute had performed miracles.

  He’d got rid of over a million of their dollars; had paid for the house and car and stamp duty, donated two hundred thousand dollars as a reward for information leading to the arrest of t
he Freeway Killer, and he’d posted four cheques.

  *

  Ten seconds after Jackie came into work, everyone in the office knew about her windfall, and when Shane arrived, and they compared amounts, Rena confessed to having received twenty thousand.

  Bob had received the same amount. He mentioned it that evening in the car, then he asked if Sarah had received a similar windfall.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Who’d be giving away that amount of money?’

  ‘Bonus from David Crow …’ Sarah said.

  ‘I thought it might have been Maureen, celebrating getting rid of the bastard. You know he’s living with Barbara Lane in a posh harbourside unit.’

  ‘When he is bankrupt I have a party.’

  ‘I’ll supply the champagne. When are you and Marni moving in?’

  ‘I buying Mrs Vaughn’s house, Bob.’

  ‘What?’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘I buying her house and car.’

  ‘How much was your cheque?’

  ‘Too much,’ Sarah said. Almost told him about TattsLotto, but he’d tell his mother and she’d tell her daughters—

  ‘You’ll be paying it off when you’re sixty!’ he said.

  ‘I want something that belong to me, something that don’t move so Marni will have one place, her place forever.’

  ‘She could have it with me. I love that kid.’

  ‘She like you too, very, very much. You are a very good, nice man, Bob—’

  ‘But you don’t want to move in with me.’

  ‘I don’t … don’t want … very close. I am not very true person, Bob.’

  ‘What do you mean, not true?’

  ‘I am not Mrs Carter. I am not marry Marni’s father.’

  ‘As if I care—’

  A row of cars braked in front, Bob braked, but the car behind him didn’t, or not fast enough. It altered the conversation. The damage was minimal, a scratch, a small dent, a bank-up of cars while Bob got the driver’s details. They were late home, and there was a stranger leaving the yard when Bob drove in. One of the plumbers or the painter Marni had called – or a robber – or the Freeway Killer. He didn’t wait to introduce himself.