The Inheritance

by Savage, Tom

  The service in the chapel had been mercifully brief. Father Bob had recited the usual words, assisted by two boys who were obviously there without Father O’Brien’s permission. Holly silently thanked the boys and their parents for their mutiny. Then the coffin had been carried here, to the cemetery, followed by the silent congregation.

  She shuddered as the soft snow began to fall around them, thinking, God, I hate this.…

  As the eulogy came to an end, the six men who had carried the coffin here—Zeke and Dave, who would ultimately bury her; Chief Helmer’s two deputies; George, the stableman; and Mr. Miller, the pharmacist—stepped forward. They were moving the coffin closer to its final resting place when Brian Jessel suddenly uttered a small moan, clutched his chest, and sank slowly to the ground. Mildred reached out desperately with her hands, but she was too late to help him. She clawed at empty air.

  Everyone at the graveside reacted in one way or another, but none more swiftly than Chief Helmer. He was immediately kneeling beside the fallen man, doing something Holly could not see because his body blocked her view. Moments later, Brian Jessel sat up on the ground, still moaning. Pete Helmer and Kevin lifted him between them and carried him over to Helmer’s car. Mildred followed them and got in with her husband, indicating to Kevin that he should return to the ceremony. He nodded and went back to stand beside Holly. As everyone in the little cemetery watched in silent confusion, the police car sped away toward the main road.

  Before she even realized what she was doing, Holly stepped forward. With a wave of her hand, she indicated to the priest and the pallbearers that the ceremony should continue. The final words were spoken, and Kevin placed a single red rose on the coffin. Then, before the coffin was lowered into the cold earth, Holly took Kevin by the hand and led the mourners out of the cemetery and across the back lawn to Randall House.

  John and his wife were in the library alone one hour later, away from the others, when the call came from the hospital. Mr. Wheatley came in and told John that Chief Helmer wanted to speak to him.

  Pete Helmer informed him that Brian Jessel had suffered a heart attack, but that he was expected to recover. Mildred was with him, seeing to his needs, and he would be kept in the hospital until further notice. John thanked the police chief for the information and was about to hang up, but the chief’s next words stopped him.

  “Mr. Randall, I meant to ask you earlier, but there was never a good time for it. Perhaps you can help us with another matter. A week ago, just before Christmas, a man was found dead at the Kismet Motel out on the highway. He’d been beaten to death and robbed. You may have read about it. Well, he was registered under the name Edwards, but his real name was Buono. Alec Buono, of Brooklyn, New York. On the night of his murder, I saw his car—a red Infiniti—driving through Randall from the direction of Randall House. Do you know anything about this?”

  John swallowed hard, his mind racing.

  “Uh, no,” he finally managed to say. “I don’t know anyone named Buono.” He grimaced, thinking, At least that’s true enough. I only knew him as Ed.

  “Well,” the chief continued, “I was just wondering. We don’t know anything about the man, but my colleagues in New York are very interested. It seems he was a member of a mob family in Brooklyn.”

  “Oh?” John heard himself saying. “How very … melodramatic.”

  “Yes,” Pete Helmer concurred. “Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you with this at such a time. But, could you ask around? I mean, your staff and so forth. Maybe someone at Randall House saw something that night It was the twentieth, five days before Christmas.”

  “Of course,” John said, amazed at the steadiness of his voice. “I’ll ask them, but I don’t hold out much hope for you. That road goes right on up the coast: he could have been coming from anywhere, and I’m certain he wasn’t around here. A mobster, you say.…”

  “Yeah, well, it was worth a shot. I’m not really involved in that investigation. The county police are handling it, but I told them I’d ask you. Please tell Kevin Jessel that his father is going to be all right.”

  “I will, Chief. Thank you.”

  When John replaced the receiver, he looked over to see that his wife was watching him intently. Without a word, she stood up and left the room. Reluctantly, he followed her.

  When the last of the guests were gone, Kevin went off to the hospital to join his mother and Holly went wearily upstairs. She removed the dress and the hat and kicked off the uncomfortable black shoes, took a long, hot shower, then put on jeans and a sweater. She was tired of wearing black.

  She called the kitchen and asked for a glass of white wine. A few minutes later Mr. Wheatley knocked on the door, brought the wine into the room on a silver tray, and left without a word. When she was alone again, Holly went over to the phone and called Missy MacGraw.

  She got the message almost immediately. Missy was polite, as her breeding dictated, but evasive. She hemmed and hawed around Holly’s invitation to lunch the next day, finally blurting out that she expected to be very busy through New Year’s Eve, and for weeks after that.

  Holly hung up the receiver, staring down at it. So, she thought, that’s that. That’s how it’s going to be, not just with Missy, but with everyone else in this place as well. I’m Holly Randall now.

  With a little shake of her head, she picked up the wine and drank it.

  The black dress and hat from the funeral were lying on the chair where she’d dropped them. She could leave them there, she knew: she had servants now. But force of habit, some vestige of Holly Smith, prompted her to pick them up and carry them over to the walk-in closet. She would save the dress, she supposed, if only for funerals. But she would hide it at the very back of the row of dresses, behind everything else, where she wouldn’t have to look at it. It was a small decision; unimportant, really.

  But it changed everything.

  She switched on the closet light and walked past all her other clothes to the back. She was reaching for a padded hanger when she heard the voices from the other side of the wall. She froze, holding her breath, listening.

  “… just wonderful!” her mother was saying. “So, what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” John replied. “I’ll think of something. I’ll call J.T. and see if—”

  “Oh, please!” Constance snapped. “It was J.T. who sent you this guy, this Buono person, and look what happened to him! He’s dead! Murdered!”

  “Come on, Cathy. How could anyone have predicted there’d be a robbery at the Kismet, of all things? It was just bad luck, that’s all.”

  Holly strained against the tiny sliver of light shining through one back corner of the closet walls, taking it in. Why did her uncle call Constance “Cathy,” she wondered, even in private? Had she made a mistake?

  No, she reasoned, there had been no mistake. Calling her Cathy was practice, discipline, so that John would never make a mistake in public. The woman was Constance Randall, all right. The next words Holly heard through the wall served to confirm this.

  “Don’t tell me about bad luck!” the woman snapped. “I know all about bad luck. I had nineteen years of it, thank you very much, and I will not tolerate any more. If anyone has earned the Randall fortune, it is I!”

  “All right, settle down,” John murmured. Then he said an odd thing, something Holly didn’t understand. “If you think about it, my emotional stake is as high as yours—if you’ve been telling me the truth, that is.”

  Her mother’s reply was equally cryptic. “I’ve told you the truth. Always.” There was a sound of footsteps, and then she said, “Where are you going?”

  “To get ready, Cathy,” he replied, and Holly could hear the weariness in his voice. “We’re leaving for the city in twenty minutes. We have a dinner reservation at the Oak Room, and theater tickets, remember? I—I’ll call J.T. from the apartment. I’ll get someone else to follow the same plan. You and I will go to Paris on the seventh of January, as scheduled, and they’l
l fix the brakes on the BMW while we’re thousands of miles away.”

  There was a slight pause then, during which Holly heard her mother’s bedroom door open.

  “So, that’s the plan?” Constance said. She apparently hadn’t known.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” John said. “She’s as good as dead. Now, for heaven’s sake, get ready. I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes.”

  The door closed. Holly stood at the back of her closet, breathing slowly in and out, her eyes tightly shut, her mind struggling to process all of the information she’d just learned. The next sounds she heard shattered her fugue state, forcing her to move. There was a sudden, loud thump against the hollow wall beside her, followed by the distinct rasp of hangers sliding and dresses brushing against each other. Her mother’s closet was obviously on the far side of this wall. Its door had probably been standing open, which explained the clarity of the voices. Swiftly and silently, Holly backed out of her closet into the bedroom.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, her mind racing. Only minutes ago she hadn’t been able to think of anything at all, but now the images were crowding in, flashing through her brain with uncanny speed.

  They were going to have her killed sometime in the middle of January, while they were in Europe.

  My mother, she thought. The woman who bore me is planning to kill me. First her husband, now her daughter. She’s planning to murder her own daughter for one hundred fifty million dollars, or thereabouts.

  Holly thought about that, about the money. She imagined simply giving it to them; signing it over, or whatever. Getting rid of them.

  No. She knew they would not accept it, not like that. It would be a virtual confession of guilt. And they would never do anything that might serve to expose their plan. If they did, Constance could go back to prison for the rest of her life, and John would be in another one.

  She could see to that, simply by picking up the phone. Calling Pete Helmer, who was so enamored of her, and getting him onto it. A dead man named Buono at someplace called the Kismet, whatever that was. Someone named J.T., who was apparently a friend of Uncle John’s. She could expose them, the whole plot, right here and now.

  No. She had no proof of anything, merely an overheard conversation. She knew nothing of the law, but she doubted whether this was enough to indict anyone, let alone convict them. If her mother and her uncle walked away from the charge—and they probably would—she would only be in danger all over again. No …

  Jane Dee. The name arrived unbidden in Holly’s mind, startling her. Jane Dee must be dead, she reasoned. It can’t have happened any other way. She could make an accusation, which would be followed by an order of exhumation, or whatever it was called, on the grounds that her mother, Constance—now Catherine—had murdered her. An examination of the two women’s dental charts at the prison in Kingston …

  No, she wouldn’t do that, either. Even if Constance were successfully charged and convicted, it would only leave Uncle John still at large, with more reason than ever to wish her harm. He’d kill her for revenge—not to mention a hundred and fifty million.

  So, she thought, what now?

  She smiled involuntarily, in spite of her predicament, remembering the words she’d heard through the wall, so similar to her own thought.

  “So, what do we do now?”

  Then she remembered something else, the cryptic exchange between her uncle and her mother only moments later.

  “If you think about it, my emotional stake is as high as yours—if you’ve been telling me the truth, that is.”

  And the reply: “I’ve told you the truth. Always.”

  Holly shook her head absently and frowned, thinking, What the hell does that mean?

  The sound of a car pulling up in the drive drew her over to the window. John and Constance were standing on the front steps, their bags beside them. As she watched, Zeke got out of the Mercedes and put the bags in the trunk. He then handed the keys to John. The couple got in and drove away, and Zeke came into the house.

  Holly waited until the car was out of sight down the drive. Then she went back into her closet and switched on the light. She walked directly to the back wall and felt along the cracked corner with her fingers. It only took a moment for her to find what she’d imagined, what she somehow knew, was there.

  It was a little latch, a dead-bolt lock at waist height. She unlatched it, put her fingertips in the crack in the corner, and pushed. The wall slid quietly to the side, forming a little passageway between the two closets—and between the two bedrooms.

  Of course, she thought. This house was built a hundred years ago, and old John Randall had designed it. He had the master bedroom, now Holly’s room, and his wife, the original Alicia, had been in the bedroom next to it. Her great-great-grandfather had cleverly included a discreet means of passage between the two rooms. She examined the other side of the secret door: nothing. The sole means of operating it were on the master bedroom side. The man’s side. How quaint, she thought as she began to slide the wall back into place. And how fortunate: that’s how I was able to hear the voices.

  She was about to relock the bolt when she stopped, arrested by a sudden feeling of curiosity. She had never seen her mother’s room, and she knew that it was always locked. Giving in to the urge, she slid the moving wall aside again and stepped through the opening. She walked through her mother’s closet and out into the bedroom. Then she made her way over to the door and switched on the light.

  She stood there for a long moment, gazing around. This big room was the complement of Uncle Ichabod’s room, architecturally speaking, but there the similarity ended. Where his room was dark and crowded and masculine, this white-carpeted one was light and airy and distinctly female. The walls were a creamy white, and there was a frilly white lace spread on the king-sized bed. A lace-skirted vanity table between the two windows, a small chest of drawers, matching small bedside tables, and a white armchair in the corner with a standing reading lamp beside it. Lots of open space around the huge bed. There were no bookshelves, she noticed, and no artworks of any kind.

  But there were mirrors. Everywhere. Holly stared around at several glittering reflections of herself. There was the big round one above the vanity table, ringed with lightblubs in the fashion of a theatrical dressing room. The theater, she thought: of course. There were also full-length mirrors, one on the bathroom door and one on the door to the closet. And on the wall near the bed, where normally one would find shelves or paintings, was a huge, elaborate, framed mirror with etched Art Deco designs along the borders.

  Holly took it all in. Then she began to move swiftly and methodically around the place. She inspected the wide array of cosmetics in the vanity drawer, and the impressive collection of sweaters and lingerie in the bureau. She went briefly into the mirror-tiled bathroom and found the things she knew would be there: dark hair dye and all the accoutrements for contact lenses. There were even several extra pairs of dark brown-tinted lenses stored in the medicine cabinet.

  Back in the bedroom, she pulled out the drawers of both bedside tables and noted their contents. She smiled when she found the stash of Tootsie Rolls in one of them, and the dog-eared copy of Valley of the Dolls. Mrs. Jackson at the prison had mentioned Jacqueline Susann.…

  Then, with a fleeting pang of guilt at invading someone else’s fiercely guarded privacy, she returned to the bedroom door, switched off the light, and moved quickly back the way she’d come, through the closets to her bedroom, locking the sliding wall once again behind her.

  If she’d been unsure of the woman’s identity before, she was certain of it now. That bedroom was a dead giveaway, and not merely because of the dye and the contact lenses and Valley of the Dolls.

  The dead giveaway was the mirrors.

  She thought about the facility in Kingston, the gray walls and barred windows. She imagined the tiny, cramped, double-occupancy cubicles behind those windows, with narrow bunks and virtually no floor space. Then
she thought of the room next door, with its creamy walls and thick white carpet and that huge, lacy bed. And the mirrors: the one thing missing from every prison, even the bathrooms, because mirrors could be shattered and fashioned into weapons.

  For nineteen years, Constance Randall had been unable to see her own reflection. Now, she had surrounded herself with glass.

  In that moment, Holly knew that her mother was insane.

  So, she thought again, what now?

  What she finally decided on was another hot shower. Then she got dressed again and went downstairs. The maids were still bustling between the dining room and the kitchen, putting away the food from the postfuneral reception. Holly went into the kitchen to tell Mrs. Ramirez not to bother making dinner for her, that she wasn’t hungry. But when she arrived there, she saw that the woman had already prepared a tray of cold ham and salad. Mrs. Ramirez reminded her that she hadn’t eaten anything after the funeral, while the guests were around. She handed Holly the tray, insisting that she eat now.

  Holly ate in the music room, in front of the television. Far from not being hungry, she found that she was ravenous. She smiled as she ate, remembering that first night at the apartment in New York City, when she’d made a similar discovery. That first night on Central Park South—God, had it been only five weeks ago? Closer to six, she reasoned, but even so.…

  That first night, before she’d met these people, John and Constance Randall. Now, in retrospect, she wished she’d never met them at all.

  Someone came and took away the tray. With a sigh, she stood up, switched off the television, and left the music room. She wandered into the library, briefly scanning the walls of books before shaking her head absently and wandering out again. She didn’t want to read. She opened the front door and stood gazing out at the drive as the snow fell softly down. No, she didn’t want to go outside, either.