Inside the church all was hushed other than men’s voices coming from the basement office, softly distant as if they were murmuring in a mine shaft. Following my instincts, I sat on one of the wooden pews far off to the side and continued to work on my half-melted chocolate bar while waiting to see what there was to see.
I didn’t have to wait long. A fellow in a tailored suit soon emerged from the doorway that led to the stairs down at the end of the nave, thickish leather briefcase in hand, and strode with presidential purpose along the far aisle toward the front door. I didn’t stir or say a peep, and he didn’t notice me as he passed by, his face an unreadable blank, just a man walking along minding his own. When he exited, a shaft of brutal silver daylight invaded the dark interior of the church long enough for the large oak door to open and close. Right after that, my father and another man I no more recognized than the suit that had just come up from the catacombs, in part because he averted his face, were talking about things that, try as hard as I could to understand, I couldn’t make hide nor hair about. I do remember the man saying “Milton.” But that was only because there was a skinny kid at school with that name, Miltie Milquetoast was his uninspired nickname, and he was always catching flak because of it. And as they walked down the aisle toward the door, their footsteps on the stone floor echoing more audibly than their voices, I swore I heard my father say, “…generous margins.” Generous margins? Clueless as to what they were talking about and feeling a little weird that they were so close to me but thought they were all by themselves, I cleared my throat.
“Hi there, Liam,” the reverend said in a very different, louder, more carefree tone of voice. “Give me a minute here, son,” and with that he and his companion, who decidedly looked away so I could no longer see his face, went outside together, not saying a further word in front of me.
I smelled something was up. And if a smell could be deafening, that’s the smell I heard. For one, it wasn’t like him not to introduce me. He brought me up to be more polite than that, and even if I didn’t always measure up, not by a long shot, wasn’t it somewhere in the Bible that it was the parent’s job to teach by example? Maybe not, but damned if this whole episode didn’t made me nervous as a turkey on Pilgrim’s day. It didn’t help that when my father came back inside, he acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had even happened. Well, I figured, I had my secrets—ah, Amanda, I wonder if you knew how devoted I was to you back then—and I guess he had his. Just that those men didn’t look like contractors here to discuss church repairs or even local businessmen offering loans or help or what have you. They and their cars were not, I believed, from our particular backwaters. Crocs from a different swamp, or I’m an alligator’s uncle.
Back home, I wondered if the men at the church had anything to do with my parents’ after-dinner wringing of hands. Beyond offering to look for a job and assuming they’d let me in on what was happening when it suited them, there was nothing I could do. So what I did was nothing, and put the matter out of my mind. My little brother Drew would ask me what was up, but I’m sorry to admit that I kept him as much in the dark as the progenitors kept me. I reassured him, my arm over his bony shoulder, which he disgustedly shook off, that just as they had persuaded me—not even slightly—that all was well, he should be persuaded, too.
“Kemosabe,” I said, to his annoyance, “Life’s tough. Chill, my man.”
He ran upstairs to his bedroom and I didn’t blame him. I knew more than he did, but because of that fact, I was even more confused than he. As I recall, I went up to my room, too, shut and bolted my door, and played on my Xbox all night. I hesitate to provide the name of the game, as it’s not one I am proud of, but for partial disclosure, let it be said that pixilated blood was lost, virtual limbs were separated from their host bodies, and mayhem and madness blanketed the screen. In a healthy way, for sure. Getting my angst out, I suppose one could assert. Getting some balance back in my life. Sort of.
Rewind now back to present. My dad is dead. My brother and I are fatherless. My mom’s a widow. The First Methodist church has no minister. Winter’s coming. None of these are even slightly good things. I liked it better when the reverend was around and I could be a friendly pain in his neck and my mom could feed him his meat, vegetable, and starch every evening, and our little corner of the world thrived on its trivial routines. At the same time, hard as it was to wrap my tired and meager brain around it, thanks to my father’s bequest and the literary nougats I discovered inside those dusty Bibles, I was worth well over a million dineros. If there was ever such a thing as a silver lining on a cloud, this was it. Not even silver, a gold lining. I kept everything to myself but wondered why my dad, looking as haggard as our threadbare sofa, wasted so many evenings worrying about church finances when he had to have known that any one of these books would have bought him a new organ or paid for his steeple repairs. I wanted to shout “We’re rich” to my mom and brother at the top of my lungs, but I knew I needed to stay calm, remain as stupid as I looked until I got a better handle on how my pater acquired these rare books and why he had been so worried about money during the last months of his life.
Whether from concern or lenience or distractedness or all three, my mother allowed me one last day home from school. I had told her I was feeling a little better, cough cough, but as it happened, a soaker of a rainstorm had settled in, driving the last leaves out of their trees and hammering against the window panes. If it had been nicer outside, she probably would have made me go. But since the weather was rotten and it was a Friday, anyway, she gave me a pass.
“Monday means you’re back at it, though,” she warned while stirring the hot oatmeal she was cooking us for breakfast.
“No problem,” I said, sitting in my robe at the table, trying to appear chipper and under the weather at the same time. “And I’ll get my makeup work going as soon as I can.”
Oh, I was a regular valedictorian.
As it turned out, it was a good thing I stayed home that day since I had almost as many visitors as Amahl. Not three friendly kings but two men showed up unexpectedly, one in the morning, the other midafternoon.
I was upstairs documenting books when I heard the doorbell ring. Quickly replacing a slim volume by Samuel Taylor Coleridge back in its biblical hiding place, I cinched my robe, slid into my slippers, went downstairs, and opened the door. The detective, Reynolds was his name, stood there looking every bit the street thug once again, if this time showered and smelling of fresh talc. And, as before, I took his casual appearance to be a sign that he was good people, somebody I could maybe trust. Not that I was in a trusting mood.
“Hey, Liam,” he said, as the chilly outside air blew around him and right through me.
“Hello, sir.”
“Your mom in?”
“Not right now,” I said with an unfeigned sneeze.
“Well, as it happens, I wanted to talk to you, too,” he went on. “I see you’re home sick, though. I can come back another day if that’s better.”
I should have said yes, but the words, “No, that’s okay, come on in,” flew out of my mouth instead.
We sat down in the living room. I knew the polite thing to do would be to offer him some of my mother’s leftover coffee, given what a cruddy day it was outside, but kept my mouth shut. Sure, I kind of trusted him, but there was no need for me to roll out too big of a welcome mat. Besides, I didn’t want him or anybody else messing with my inheritance. Money aside, I had gotten very possessive of my books just as, or so I’d started to believe, my father had.
Reynolds was speaking about how he was still on the case regarding my dad’s death. “I seem to be the only one in the department who isn’t convinced it was a hundred percent accidental. Coroner ruled it accidental. Prosecutor’s office sees nothing in it for them to pursue a trip-andfall. I got no leads, just a nagging hunch. Looks like it’s only you and me thinking there might have been foul play,” as he summed it up, an awkward smile very briefly complicating
his face. Smile gone, he asked, “You still thinking, like the last time I saw you, that your father was the victim of a crime?”
“Maybe,” I said, less sure now if the reverend wasn’t the perpetrator of one, too, since I knew he hadn’t enough dough on the up and up to acquire even one of the rarities hidden inside those Bibles upstairs, sharing shelf space with my innocent smut.
“You sounded a lot more sure the last time I dropped by.”
I shrugged, feeling almost as guilty as if I had killed him myself.
“Well, since I’m here, let me ask what I asked your mom the other day. Have you had any visitors or phone calls that are out of the ordinary?”
Black sheep atheist though I styled myself, I thought the better of lying to a cop, even one who, like Reynolds, was nonchalantly dressed like a homeless man in fifty cent’s worth of threads from Goodwill. Somewhere behind his rumpled sweater and ripped jeans there was a badge lurking, and my personal brand of anarchism only went so far.
“A guy did call looking for my dad. Didn’t know he was dead, I guess.”
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“Nope. And when I asked him his name and number, he hung up on me.”
“You didn’t tell him your father was deceased?”
“Not my job.”
This made Reynolds smirk a little. “Figured he might give you a clue if you played dumb, eh? Smooth thinking, Liam. One of these days you might want to consider going into my line of work. Better watch out for my job.”
I didn’t want to insult him by saying that I’d rather be a blind garbage man with brain cancer and no legs than a police officer, so I said instead, “Well, the fish wasn’t biting.”
“You know what reverse dialing is? You try that?”
“I tried, but it was blocked.”
“I have a question for you, Liam,” Reynolds said, shifting subjects as he shifted on the sofa, and his voice also shifted to a more buddybuddy tone. “After your dad died, we looked through some of his records at the church just to see if anything was suspicious. You know, to see if he’d gotten any hate mail or stuff like that.”
“No way,” I said.
“You’re right. We didn’t find a thing. Your father was very well liked.”
All this hollow pitter-patter was now making me antsy. It was my last day with the house all to myself and I still had a dozen Bibles left to open and catalogue, and though I didn’t dislike Reynolds, he was getting on my nerves. I waited for him to finish whatever was on his mind.
“Well, since there really is no criminal investigation still going on—like you, I’ve got the day off—I don’t have any legal right to ask you this and doubt if I could even get a judge to issue a search warrant, but I’m wondering if your dad had an office in the house here, as well as in the church basement?”
“Not really,” I said, relieved. That was a pretty long windup to a slow pitch, and I was bracing myself against the possibility he was going to ask about my Bibles.
“I was just thinking that since you and I are the only ones who think there might have been wrongdoing involved, that if I could go through his desk at home—”
“Well, my mom’s the one who did all the bookkeeping and I guess you could have a look at her stuff if you thought it was important. I doubt she’d care.”
“If it’s not a lot of trouble,” he said. “I don’t want to impose.”
“No problem,” I told the detective, grateful to accompany him to the downstairs family room, a corner of which doubled as my mom’s study, because it led him to a part of the house that was in the opposite direction of my trove. Besides, even though he didn’t really have any right to riffle through her papers, as he himself conceded, my mother, of all people, had nothing to hide. As I led the way down, I heard him breathing a little heavily behind me, and thought to myself he needn’t be so excited about all this since I knew there was nothing to be found that would assist in his investigation. And yet, while I stood there shifting weight from one foot to the other while I watched him go through her files, I found myself feeling a bit annoyed that I’d allowed him access. What if he did find a misplaced piece of paper that might betray the existence of the rare books hidden upstairs? On top of that, long minutes were ticking by that might better have been spent doing my internet research.
I was right, however. He discovered not one thing worthy of pursuing further.
“I knew it was a long shot,” he said, clapping his palms down on his knees where he sat on my mother’s swivel chair, and rising to go. “I really appreciate your time and trust, Liam.” As we headed back upstairs, he added, “We probably should keep this to ourselves, if that’s all right by you.”
“No reason not to,” I said, having no intention of telling my mom anyway.
At the door he thanked me again, requesting that I get in touch if anything developed that I thought he might need to know.
“I’ll keep an eye out,” I assured him, then hacked out a cough that was almost as fake as my brother’s had been a couple of days before.
“You take care of that cold, you hear?” he winked, handing me his card before sliding on his raincoat and leaving. I watched through the front door window as he lit a cigarette while ambling down our walk, then neatly tucked the match back into his pocket rather than toss it on the long wet grass that could have used one more mowing before the snow started.
That’s one sharp hombre, I recall thinking. Don’t want to find myself on the wrong side of his good graces. Bad for health. The fact was, since the reverend didn’t keep a separate office at home and they found nothing among his papers at church, I’d figured there were no papers to be found, period. That this assumption would prove to be way wrong was probably what got me started, in my tender middle teens— Amanda, how I missed having all my spare time to think of you and you only—on my first ulcer.
Why wrong? Because less than an hour later, having discovered a 1843 first edition, first issue of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with hand-colored illustrations by John Leech, and another early sixteenth-century Aldine title by Lucretius that needed more research but looked promising, I opened one of the last of my smuggler’s Bibles to find not a rare book but a sizeable stash of cash, about thirty grand, and a bunch of handwritten notes. The tidy wad of barely-circulated hundreds, held together with rubber bands, I put back where I found it, my fingers gone a tad numb. The notes, however, I spread out on my bed with utmost care. I knew what I had stumbled on even before I started combing through the receipts to sort out which ones went with which books.
Hurrying, I glanced at the treasures inside the remaining Bibles, jotted down my own notes about their authors, titles, dates, and so forth, then moved the trove of Holy Books into some boxes where I used to store my childhood comics before I sold most of them for enough to cover my Xbox acquisition. I cleared out the back of my disorganized warehouse of a closet, carefully stacked the boxes there, and proceeded to hide them under layers of wrinkled clothes, sports equipment I never used, a sleeping bag, piles of stuff it would take a team of archaeologists to dig out. The only Bible I kept out, besides the one my preacher father actually used to read when he wasn’t busy hoarding high spots of Western culture, was the one with the cash and paper trail in it.
Now, I always thought it strange that my father, who had a booming sermonizer’s voice on Sundays, possessed such dainty old lady’s handwriting. Just never made sense to me. Be that as it may, while his lion’s roar may have been gone, his little kitty claw marks remained on many of them.
Like some born-again bean counter, I started going through the slips of paper. At first I was frustrated to see some of the notes about prices were coded. What, for example, did $RLTAS and $VEASS possibly mean? My heart sank. I saw re- assuring names like Milton, Dryden, Swift, Poe, scattered here and there in the thicket of scrawl. Some of them were in my closet and others listed were not. When I happened to uncover a scrap that had been wadded up like some spitball with t
he word “$Revlations” penciled on it, I understood after a bewildered moment it was, eureka, the reverend’s price code. An ironic one, too, if you stopped to think that it was not meant to reveal a thing. Seemed he had chosen a book of the Bible in which, when he dropped one “e,” each letter could stand for a number, one through ten, and who’d be the wiser? Well done, pop, I thought proudly as a wave of missing him spread through me like the fast fever of a real cold, not my pretend act. It made me shiver to think of him somehow managing to assemble these books, to keep his doings so tight to the vest, or vestments I should say, and then the doorbell rang for the second time that day. Sensing this hoard of notes was almost as valuable as the books themselves, I stuffed them back in the hollow with the money and hid the Bible under my pillow. I had to figure that even if my room was searched by an alien strain of vampire stormtroopers they wouldn’t deprive a sick, mourning boy of his bedtime copy of the Word of God.
Leery by now of unexpected visitors, I peered out an upstairs window and saw, to my astonishment, the same black Mercedes I’d seen that freakish hot August day, parked right in front of our house. Was there any way this could be good? No, I didn’t think there was any way this could be good. But I couldn’t hide inside the house like a book in a Bible for the rest of my life hoping my father’s rare book contacts—and I was sure, Amanda, that’s who this was, wishing like crazy I could disappear in your warm, dreamy embrace—hoping they would leave me alone now and forever, Amen.
The doorbell rang a second time. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and all that. I slunk downstairs and opened the door. Middle-aged man wearing the most dapper raincoat I ever laid eyes on with its collars turned up. He had a salt-and-pepper moustache, steel-blue eyes, a learned face. City-looking, natty urban.
When he asked if my father was home, very polite and well-spoken, I recognized his as the voice on the phone from before. I also knew, seeing him there, beads of water trickling off the brim of his chic brown fedora, that he really and truly didn’t know that the person he was asking after was no longer with us. Which meant, of course, that this wasn’t the murderer.
The Nature of My Inheritance Page 3