The Art of Inheriting Secrets

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “Isn’t that Tony Willow’s apprentice?” He rolled a mint around in his mouth. “He your boyfriend?”

  “A, yes, and B, none of your business.”

  “Bit young is all.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said with a sigh. “He’s my friend. Of which I have very few around these parts.”

  “Fair enough.” He gave me a tip of an imaginary hat. “You ever want a grown-up”—the r rolled elegantly—“friend, I’d be delighted to buy you a scotch.”

  It was said without any rancor at all, and I gave him a smile. “I’ll keep that in mind.” I dashed over to the car and managed to get inside mostly dry, holding the umbrella out to shake it.

  Samir chuckled. “Not sure how much water you’re getting out if you shake it in the rain. Just throw it in the back.”

  “You’re right.” I did and flung myself against the seat. “Oh my God, what a day. Did you see the roof?”

  “I did.” He didn’t drive away and instead peered toward the crowd at the abbey. “Is it her? Sanvi?”

  “They don’t know. The detective is pretty sure it’s older than that, but they have to follow the rules.” I buckled my seat belt. “Will you drive back by the house so I can see it from this side?”

  “Sure.”

  He bumped down the hill, and I said aloud, “I have to get the roads done. They’re terrible.”

  “Maybe you can cross that bridge when you come to it.”

  I nodded, suddenly so tired I could barely turn my head. He guided the car around a giant tree, and there above us loomed the cave-in. A profane swear word came to mind, but I only said, “Damn. What am I doing, Samir?”

  “It’s not as terrible as it looks. That part of the roof was destroyed anyway. The stonework—” he shrugged. “You’ll no doubt be doing a lot of that too.” He looked down at me. “I wouldn’t fret.”

  In my rag doll state, I only turned my head toward him. Repeated his words back to him, in his accent. “I wouldn’t fret.”

  He smiled very slightly. The moment hung suspended, filled with his scent and his eyelashes and the shape of his nostrils. His mouth.

  But he only shook his head and put the car in gear, and we bumped all the way down the road to town without saying a word. I kept hearing the detective say, “Bit young, isn’t he?” But in that moment, did I even care? I wanted some comfort, some warm arms around me.

  Wrong attitude. Redirect. “I’ve been trying to work out the clues my mother left. If it’s a treasure hunt, the first clue was the paperwork, all the stuff she could have burned or shredded. She left it all out on her desk.”

  “Right.” He drove around the church, and I thought about my grandmother’s grave, which I’d still not visited.

  “Most of the paintings are missing, but everything in Violet’s room is untouched. Why? That doesn’t make sense. Maybe we should go there first. Explore. Maybe there’s a clue.”

  “Yeah.” He looked upward through the windscreen. “Let’s do it tomorrow. The minute the rain breaks, I’ll be back to work.”

  “I really appreciate it. I’m afraid to be alone in there.”

  He flashed a smile. “I know. Ancestors who mightn’t have bodies.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What else happened today? You said you’d tell me about it later.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot this part—my old boyfriend is suing me. So there’s a hold on the closing, which means there’s a hold on the money.”

  He whistled. “Will he win?”

  “I don’t think so. But it’s a lot in a day.” Again that sense of being overwhelmed, the pressure of a boulder bearing down, came over me. “I’m a fool.”

  “No. You’re mighty, Olivia. You can do anything.”

  “Am I?” I looked at him. “Mighty?”

  He looked back. “Yes.”

  We drove a little farther in silence, and I realized that I was enjoying the sexual tension between us, the push and pull, the pleasure of his face and long, lean body. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

  “I did have one. Not a very serious one.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “I broke up with her,” he said without looking at me. “That day you were at my house the first time.”

  “Your dinner date.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the same day I broke up with Grant.”

  “I know.” He pulled up in front of my flat. “See you in the morning.”

  It took every bit of my remaining will to simply open the door and step out. “Bye.”

  As I set the kettle to boil, the earl’s accountant called, quite polite. He gathered an overview of the situation and then asked if I could fax the files to his office, along with a form he would email to me, giving him permission to contact Haver. “You’ll also need to contact their offices and let them know what we’re going to do. I expect they will not be pleased.”

  “No, I’m sure.” I glanced at the clock—how could it only be three thirty? “I should be able to get that all done this afternoon.” It wouldn’t be fun, but if I was to free money from somewhere, I had to do whatever I could. “I’ll find a place to fax it all this afternoon.”

  “You’re in Saint Ives Cross?”

  “Yes.”

  “The library will have a machine.”

  “Thanks.”

  Reluctantly, I turned off the kettle and stomped my feet back into my boots, gathered up all the material I needed, then trudged back out into the miserable day. The high street was quiet, of course, and I splashed mostly by myself to Haver’s office. The alley was so narrow that I had to close the umbrella, and by the time I arrived at the door, my hair was a soggy mess.

  Mrs. Wells was just coming around the corner. “Well, hello, Lady Shaw! What brings you out on such a terrible day?”

  Rain dripped from my hair down my nose. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve hired an accountant on the advice of the Earl of Marswick, and their office will be contacting this office for information.”

  “Is that right?” Her tone was frosty.

  “Yes. Is that a problem?” I could match frosty.

  “No, my lady, of course not.”

  “Thank you.”

  In the library, I stood by the fax machine feeding in papers, one after the other, for what seemed like a year. I hoped they would be able to make some sense of it all.

  When I was finished, I checked the time. A half hour until the building closed, so I headed for my familiar spot, the microfiche machine. The librarian on duty recognized me, of course, and greeted me by name. “What can I help you with today?”

  “I need all the papers from the summer of 1975.”

  “Ah. The girl? We heard there’d been a discovery.”

  “We don’t know if it’s her yet, but yes. I’d like to acquaint myself with the details.”

  I already knew Sanvi had gone missing in late July, so I concentrated my reading there, late July and early August. Because it was a weekly, it didn’t take long to find the first mention on August 6, 1975.

  GIRL MISSING

  The parents of Sanvi Malakar, age fifteen, have reported their daughter missing. The girl, a student at Saint Ives Cross Secondary School, was last seen when she left for the market Saturday afternoon. According to her parents, she was a good student and did not have a boyfriend.

  I looked through the next three papers, and there was not a single other mention—I read stories about dinner parties and a lost dog and the best methods for canning peaches, but not another word about a missing fifteen-year-old girl. Would it have been different if it had been a white child instead of a brown one? It made me sad to think so, but I suspected that was at the heart of it.

  I wondered how Samir’s father was taking the possibility that his sister’s remains might have been found. It couldn’t help but reopen old wounds. I hoped that her story would someday come to light.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On the day m
y mother fell ill, we woke up the way we always did. I made coffee in her drip pot, which I could not convince her to change no matter how many times I illustrated the virtues of a french press. Through the kitchen window, I saw a neighborhood cat perched on the patio table, tail switching in the rare October sunshine. I heard my mother get up, coughing, which was what a person who had smoked for five decades did. I thought nothing of it. She let herself out to the patio to have a cigarette, wearing her pale-pink bathrobe and a pair of white slippers. She had always been thin but had grown more so over the past year or so, making her look as if she might just fade away. I poked my head out the window. “Do you want some oatmeal for breakfast? I bought some blueberries yesterday.”

  “That would be lovely, dear,” she said, smiling at me. “It’s always a pleasure to eat whatever you cook.”

  I didn’t know then that our ordinary daily moment would be the last we’d share. Not until twelve or fifteen moments later did I realize she had collapsed outside, and by the time I rushed to her side, she was unconscious. I didn’t know that I’d think of it every single time I made oatmeal for the next six months—maybe always.

  Today opened in an ordinary way too.

  I made oatmeal for my breakfast, trying to warm myself up in the damp. The rain had slowed, but it was still drizzly and cold for May, and I tugged on one of my favorite sweaters, soft turquoise with a loose, open weave and flecks of gold. It was silly to wear such a thing to explore Violet’s dusty bedroom, but it felt right. Part of me wanted to show up in the ways that were like her, to show her spirit, should it be lingering, that I was cut from the same cloth.

  Which also made me feel guilty. My mother would not want me to be like her, would she? In a way, I was lucky to have been spared the wild dynamic of wanting to please both my mother and my grandmother.

  Although, really, I wished I’d had the chance.

  Samir knocked, and when I opened the door, he was carrying a paper cup with a lid. His hair was damp, as if he’d just come from the shower, and he smelled of orange zest and patchouli and a thousand other notes that wafted in with him. I inhaled. “You smell really good.”

  He lifted his sleeve, offered it. “That?”

  “Yes,” I said emphatically. “Wow. What is it?”

  “Cologne. Someone gave it to me a while back, and Billi knocked it off the bureau this morning.”

  Someone, I thought. “Did it break?”

  “No.” He blinked, slowly. “But if you like it, I’ll be sure to get it into rotation.”

  “You don’t strike me as a cologne kind of guy.”

  “Not usually. Anyway”—he held out the paper cup—“special delivery from Pavi. She wants you to try her new smoothie.” His mouth tilted sideways. “Which I would just call a posh lassi, but it sells better as a smoothie. She said you went mad for strawberries the other day.”

  “I may have been a bit crazy. They’re better here.” I took a sip of the concoction. “Oooh. She added fresh coriander! That’s amazing. Did you taste it?” I held it out to him. He shook his head, held up a hand, and walked over to the dry-erase board. Touched one finger to Violet’s time line, then Caroline’s. “You’ve got practically nothing on Roger.”

  “That’s because practically nothing exists.” I carried the cup over to the board. “Seriously. I’ve looked in all the newspapers around here, looked for records of any kind, and there’s just nothing. It’s like he wasn’t even real.”

  “How old was he when they came to England?”

  “Maybe in his midteens, I think.”

  “Where was his father?”

  “Died of cholera in India, which is probably why Violet stayed. She was mistress of the plantation there. She was a good businesswoman. The earl said she turned the fortunes of Rosemere around, made it profitable.”

  “All of them coming to England changed the course of my family’s life too.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to see that plantation, honestly. It seemed to mean a lot to her.”

  He nodded, touching one note on the board and another, frowning. “India, India, England, England. Is the secret with your grandmother or your mother?”

  “I don’t know. There must be something with my grandmother, or my mother would never have fled.”

  He frowned. “Maybe.”

  “Have you ever been to India?”

  “No. Seems a bit challenging, doesn’t it? People and chaos and heat.” He offered me a rueful half smile. “I’m an English country lad, I’m afraid.”

  “I never thought about it until now,” I admitted, “although I have a lot of Indian friends in San Francisco. It seems like someone is always going back and forth. They have long visits, like three months at a time.”

  “I might visit my mum there one of these days. She comes back here every summer, so it hasn’t come up yet.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Mumbai. And she is a snob about it too. No other part of India is as good as Maharashtra.”

  It was almost summer. “Is she coming this year?”

  In a gesture he used quite often, he ran thumb and index finger down the goatee on either side of his mouth, down and around the bottom, smoothing the hair. “Usually she comes in June.”

  “Hmm.”

  He cocked his head. “Why does that make you nervous?”

  “Um. How did you know I was nervous?”

  “You twist a bit of your hair.”

  I realized I was doing exactly that, twisting a lock of hair around and around my index finger, a habit I’d had since childhood. I dropped it. “I don’t know why I’d be nervous. I guess I’d want her to like me.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I like your family and you, and . . .” I rolled my eyes. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He gestured, palm up. “After you.”

  As I passed, I punched him in the arm.

  “Ow,” he said, but he laughed.

  We didn’t need umbrellas, so we sloshed through the mud to the side of the house where the roof had collapsed to get a better view. “I guess I was hoping it wouldn’t be so daunting today,” I said. “It looks just as bad as yesterday.”

  “That’s only because you’re not used to buildings in transition. The crew will get tarps over the holes in the roof, and that’s going to make it feel like it’s under construction, not falling down.”

  “I hope so.” Rocks that had tumbled from the wall were scattered over the ground, and Samir knelt to run a hand over one of them. “Beautiful stone. The color is remarkable.”

  “What makes it remarkable?” I asked, kneeling next to him.

  “The rose and gold together. That’s why it looks as if it’s glowing when you see it from the village.” He brushed his hands together, stood. “Let’s see what we can find, shall we?”

  We went in through the back door, as ever, but Samir had not been there since the work had started, and he made a long, low whistle as we entered. The kitchen was the same but much cleaner. The boxes had all been moved out to a storage facility at Jocasta’s order so that the historians and valuation specialists could take a look at everything. It was a giant room, made for serving a household of dozens. “Given this space, I’m giving very serious thought to the cooking-school idea. Plenty of room.”

  He nodded. “Or industrial kitchens for a hotel or some other kind of school.”

  “Hotel?”

  “Why not?”

  “But what’s here? Like, why would people come stay?”

  “A lot of reasons. It’s quiet. You could create value any number of ways. Wedding parties, family gatherings. Any number of things.”

  “Hmm. I hadn’t considered a hotel.” I touched the center of my chest, which didn’t seem to like the idea. “I’ll add it to the list.”

  This time, I could lead, taking him through the butler’s pantry into the gutted dining room and parlor. I hadn’t been inside in a week or so, and in the meantime, the vines had b
een cut away from the windows. Even on such a dark day, light poured in through the long windows and offered a view of the forest on one side and the open fields on the other, with the town of Saint Ives Cross nestled into a tuck of the valley.

  “It’s much less oppressive now, isn’t it?” Samir said, looking around.

  “They filmed in here a couple of days ago and in the ballroom. I guess they’ll have to come back and show the mess.”

  “You see, more drama for the show. That’s all.”

  I smiled. “It is exciting, actually. To see what we might be able to do here, how to restore it.”

  “Has Hortense seen the plans?”

  “The first round, but nothing else yet.”

  He grinned.

  “I know. She’s kind of scary too.”

  “You’re frightened a lot.”

  “No, I’m not!”

  “Yes, you are. Hortense, being in the house alone, my mother. You were afraid to go see the earl.”

  “It’s just that everything is so . . . unreliable lately.”

  “You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water,” he said.

  “Is that a quote?”

  He nodded. “Rabindranath Tagore. He’s a great writer. You should read him.”

  “You’ll have to tell me where to start.”

  “I will.” He cocked his head. “He’s one of India’s best writers, an amazing character writer.”

  I nodded. Took a breath as I looked toward the second story.

  “Let’s go up the main stairs, as your mother would have.”

  Things had not changed on the stairway, though it was cleaner. “I wonder where the cats are now that the construction has started.”

  “They’re clever. Likely hiding when people are here.”

  “Probably.”

  At the top of the stairs, we turned toward Violet’s room. “Wait,” I said. “I want to see how the damage looks from the inside.”

  He followed me down the hall to the gallery, and we peered over the edge into the ballroom. It had been so bad before that it was honestly hard to tell any difference, but debris was piled up on the floor.

  “Where are the construction crews today?” Samir asked.