Murder in the Family

by Ramona Richards

  “You may not know me as well as you think.”

  He crossed to her, pulled her arms away from her body and took her hands. “Twenty-five years ago, when Granddaddy died, you pushed Mother and Gram to sell everything. Get the temptation away from the relatives. You didn’t want them to deal with what was to come. Even then you cared more about them and their emotional comfort than you did for possessions. That part of your personality has not changed. The reason you so desperately want to walk away is not fear of being beaten up. It’s because you seriously don’t care what happens to anything in this house. True?”

  “True.”

  “What you do care about are the people who need the help this stuff could bring. True?”

  “True.”

  “So I have a suggestion. It’ll make Bird lose his mind, but it might work.”

  “If it irritates Bird, I’m in.”

  He squeezed her hands. “Stop trying to divvy up pieces and focus on what will help folks. That would be money. Put it up for auction. What’s left of it. All of it. House and everything. If Bird wants it, he can bid on it. If others want it, they can bid. Then take the money and distribute it to the relatives who need the most help.”

  “And the people who claim they were just storing stuff here?”

  “Buying it at auction is cheaper than a decade of storage fees.”

  “That’s not exactly what Aunt Liz wanted.”

  “I know. But sometimes you have to look at the intention of the request, not the details. Aunt Liz was overthinking it. She cared about the ‘legacy’ of these pieces. It is all too clear that no one left alive feels the same. They’re only interested in the value these things represent. So turn them into value—money.”

  Molly squeezed his hands in return. It made sense, almost too much. “You sure you won’t stay?”

  “Now who’s indulging in a guilt trip?” He walked over and pulled back the curtains, peering out at the side yard. “When did all those houses go up?”

  “Not sure. A few years ago.”

  “We used to chase lightning bugs and rabbits in that field. We’ve been gone a long time.” He let the curtain fall and turned to her. “I can’t come back, Molly. This is no longer home. I’m way past the point of no return. You don’t have to either, unless you want to. I made my choice five years ago. You still have time to decide.”

  “Do you like being a monk?”

  “I do. It was not an easy decision, but it was one I was pulled toward until I could no longer resist. Since I answered that call, I’ve been more content than I ever had been before. There is meaning in my life I wouldn’t have understood ten years ago. It’s where I am meant to be.”

  Molly reached out and pulled Michael into a tight hug, which he returned with gusto. As they released each other, Molly took a deep breath. “Russell’s waiting. Anywhere you want to stop before you go back to Greg’s?”

  He paused, then a slow grin spread over his face. “I don’t suppose Betty still has that crazy Coke machine.”

  Molly laughed. “Yep. Right up front. She’s going to hug you half to death too.”

  “I would expect no less.”

  22

  Monday was a day of rest. Greg dropped Michael off at Russell’s condo at eight thirty, just as the lawyer headed to his office. Michael had shed his habit for jeans and a t-shirt, which seemed a little more appropriate for the lounging they had planned for the day. Her brother insisted that Molly walk some, to work out sore muscles, but for the most part, they piled up in the living room, and talked about twenty years of who, what, where, when, and how. The past made for a tense morning, but by lunch they had found tenderness and laughter.

  Their lives had been troublesome, Michael pointed out, but in the global scheme of things, they had been remarkably lucky. It was a new perspective for Molly, but as the afternoon wore on, it grew on her.

  They ordered Chinese takeout for lunch, and by midafternoon, the past had given way to dreams and hopes for the future. Michael fully admitted that his future seemed a lot more solid than Molly’s.

  “Have you taken your final vows?”

  “About a year ago.” Michael hesitated, stirring his rice with one chopstick. “I almost tracked you down then.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because, ultimately, it felt wrong to call you to say goodbye, when I hadn’t seen you in more than twenty years. Seemed like the ‘goodbye’ had been over and done with.”

  Molly thought about where she had been a year ago. “A year ago, I was in Alaska, trying to capture the calving of an uncooperative glacier. Given my frame of mind at the time, I’d say you made the right call on that.”

  “Still … I didn’t expect our reconnection to look anything like this.”

  “I honestly never expected either of us to show up in Carterton again.”

  “Have you made up your mind on St. Louis?”

  Molly set her food aside and shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. “I honestly don’t know. It’s a good opportunity. I’m not sure where else I would go.”

  “And staying here is completely off the table?”

  “Can you see me staying in the same town with Bird and Kitty after this is all over and done with? It’d be like eternally existing with two splinters in your butt.”

  Michael laughed. “But I can see you staying in a town with Finn and Greg and Russell.”

  Molly released a long, dramatic sigh. “I don’t suppose monasteries take girls.”

  “There are Cistercian nuns, yes, ma’am.”

  Molly’s phone rang, and she realized it was Hunter Bradley. She picked it up. “St. Louis beckons.”

  He stood. “I’ll clean up the kitchen.”

  Molly answered the call, but the conversation was brief. Her counter offer had been approved, and she’d be getting a new contract via email in a day or two. She could sign it electronically, and they’d be on their way. Easy, over and done. Molly hung up and summarized the chat for Michael.

  “Hm,” he said, as he settled back in a recliner. “You explained that with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner requesting his last meal.”

  She shrugged.

  “Molly, with the possible exception of the life I’ve chosen, change is the one common element in everyone’s world. Jobs don’t last. People move. Parents die. Nothing remains stable forever.”

  “Your life will. Is that what drew you to it?”

  He tilted his head as he looked at her. “Actually, it was the thing I wrestled with the most. And there is some change. We rotate duties, and a farm is never a constant. But change is not as much a part of my world as yours. So I ask you … what if you don’t stay here or go to St. Louis?”

  “I’ll get a little money from the estate. I’ll go back to shooting storms and freelancing.”

  “Which is what you were doing when you got here.”

  “Yes.”

  “So no worse off.”

  She wondered where he was going with this. “No. But it’s a field in flux.”

  “So while you freelance, you’ll be thinking about a new career.”

  “Probably.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “All I’ve ever wanted to do is be a photographer.”

  “Which is a hard field unless you have an established niche.”

  “St. Louis would help me further establish that.”

  “So would having a home base that costs you almost nothing. There’s even room for a studio. So in essence you have two good options, both of which have great potential.”

  “And the point is …?”

  “Which one do you really want to do? In your heart, which one calls to you? Because that’s the one that you’ll make work.”

  The next morning, Molly still did not feel comfortable driving, so Russell played chauffeur for Molly and Michael. Back in his habit, he got the usual stares, but Molly began to feel an odd pride about her brother’s choice. He’d answered a drive from deep withi
n his soul. Now if only she could do the same.

  Michael hugged her tightly, holding on for several minutes.

  “We didn’t used to hug,” she whispered.

  “What fools we were,” he whispered back.

  She laughed, and he released her, focusing his gaze on her eyes. “Mollybelle, you will know which door to follow when the time comes. Trust your gut. It’s the oldest adage in the world, and a horrible cliché, but unbelievably true. You will know when it’s right. Everything else is just biding your time.”

  Molly stayed until he stepped onto the bus. He waved one last time, and Molly returned to Russell’s car.

  And collapsed, weeping into her hands.

  Russell drove her back to the condo, and Molly spent the afternoon making phone calls. An auction company met her in one of Russell’s conference rooms the next morning. By that afternoon, the auction signs went up in front of the house, at the end of Maple Street, and at every interstate exit for twenty-five miles around. The auction announcement went in every local paper for two hundred miles.

  And life settled into a slow routine. The auction, which would include the entire estate, was scheduled six weeks out, which would give Molly time to finish the inventory and get it back in front of Judge Petrie. Russell arranged for a security firm to watch the house for the next six weeks, and scheduled installation of security cameras. Molly had a much smaller dumpster set to the side of the house. She took down the pavilions, and the block party that had been Liz Morrow’s house vanished.

  Molly’s insurance came through with a small check, and she bought another car, an Explorer, of course, with only 21,000 miles on it. She took a brief trip to St. Louis, met the team, and toured the station. She explained what was happening in Alabama, and asked for an extra month to decide. They agreed, provided she granted them the exclusive rights on the first three videos of merit without compensation. It was a just compromise, and she spent the trip back embedding the “pros” of the job into her brain.

  The legal packages arrived from Sarah’s dad as well as Jimmy, and Molly turned them over to Russell. Linda, Finn, and Sheila went back to work, and for the first week, the only people at the house were Molly, the guards, and the cleaning firm she’d brought back in. They were efficient and thorough, so Molly focused on the inventory and documenting the “after” of the house with her camera. Between the new storm pictures and the viral video, her social media profile had exploded … along with a half-dozen new requests for pictures through her website. She gave Aunt Liz’s house its own Facebook page, and the before and after shots brought in a riot of comments and suggestions for remodeling.

  The work kept her mind off everything else. She had not seen Greg since Michael left. Nor Bird, although he’d left an angry voice message on her phone the day the signs went up. She had decided to annotate the inventory with pictures and descriptions, which, once again, put her up close and personal with some remarkable family stories. As she posted some of the stories on the Facebook page, interest in the auction skyrocketed.

  Molly added the books to the inventory as well as the cash from the books, which had totaled almost two hundred thousand dollars. With the investments and other found money, Liz Morrow’s estate wound up totaling just over seven hundred thousand, not including what the house and furnishings would bring at auction.

  As she started divvying it up on paper, Molly could not stop smiling. The money would go a long way to help the people Liz cared about the most. Molly added that list to the inventory as well, so the judge could see her intentions for the disbursement of the estate.

  It paid off. When no other contests to the will showed up, they presented the inventory to Judge Petrie in his chambers. He signed off on it and told Russell and Molly to go, be wise, and watch their backs.

  Afterward, with nothing to do but wait for the auction, Molly mostly found herself in the basement, going through Liz’s books. No surprises, for the most part. Liz had always loved the classics and Southern history. One quiet Saturday, Molly turned out a couple of silverfish that had escaped the fumigation, however, and headed to Carterton Hardware and Feed for some bug poison. Molly hadn’t seen Betty since she and Michael had stopped by there for Cokes. Perched on her stool, Betty waved her in. When Molly told her she was looking for silverfish poison, Betty clapped her hands. “Ah! You got to the library!”

  Molly stared at her. “You knew?”

  “Girl, we both loved books. We’d trade off, and she’d lend me classics.” She leaned closer to Molly and her voice dropped. “She didn’t used to have that wall of storage bins in front of it. Finn helped her put that up after Lyric started moving in. But there was still one narrow spot she could slip through.”

  “Why? I can’t imagine Lyric being interested in too many books.”

  “Nah. But rumors have circulated in this town for years that Liz had a lot of cash stashed in the house. Everybody, including Liz, knew that’s why Kitty and Lyric were putting the move on her. Probably why they killed her.”

  Molly shook her head. “Betty, we still don’t know—”

  Betty shushed her with a wave. “Oh, my girl. Your boyfriend has been putting pressure on all over town, making some of your blood kin nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. Something is going to crack. And soon.”

  “He’s not—”

  Another wave of dismissal. “Molly. I love you. But the only person who doesn’t seem to see it is you. No one has seen that man so smitten since his wife died. He tries to hide it, but he is not as stoic as he’d like to believe.”

  Molly felt the heat sear into her face. “Um … poison?”

  Betty laughed. “Aisle 2, down next to the mousetraps. Just make sure you confine it to the silverfish.”

  When Molly got back to the house, Finn and Sheila were sitting on the front steps. They stood as she got out of the Explorer. Finn snatched his cap off his head, and Sheila greeted her with a quick hug. Finn jumped in with no preamble, his words tumbling, one over the other.

  “We want to have a cookout in your honor. No, don’t say anything yet. Let me get this out. We know you’re leaving, heading back to Missouri. We just want to say goodbye in a Carterton sort of way. Friday night, just come. It’ll kick off around dark.

  “Okay.”

  “The whole town is turning out, folks you might not have even met yet, but they all know you. What you’ve done here is legendary. It’s really brought Carterton together. You should see the community social media pages. They are rocking, and not nearly as ugly as they usually are. People just want to say thanks. Wait— You said okay?”

  “I love you guys. I’d love to have a send-off.”

  Finn whooped and slapped his hat against his thigh.

  Molly looked at Sheila. “They’re going to turn him into a redneck yet.”

  Sheila grinned. “Maybe.”

  Finn harrumphed. “And maybe not. Grilling out does not a redneck make.” But he grinned again and gave Molly a quick hug. “See you Friday night!”

  And, hand in hand, Sheila and Finbar Eccles walked back to their castle.

  Molly, on the other hand, began the long, arduous task of trying to rid a basement full of books of all its silverfish.

  23

  Molly stood in the front parlor, thinking again about the estimate the auction house had given her on the contents … and the house itself. More than she expected, enough to take the estate up over her previous estimate of seven hundred grand. After bills, taxes … and more taxes … still a tidy sum for everyone in Liz’s last thoughts. And although Molly knew in her gut this was the best solution, she couldn’t shake a lingering sense of loss.

  Maybe it was just her grief over Liz finally working its way out into that final acceptance stage. Her aunt was gone. Mickey … Brother Michael … would never be a part of her life again. With the sale of the house, her contact with Carterton would be finally and unequivocally broken. And life would go on, just as it always had.r />
  “Endings,” she muttered. “But also beginnings.” Her mind and heart had finally accepted the St. Louis move.

  The roar of a pickup reminded her that the “party of the year,” as Finn had called it, was gearing up two doors down. He had promised that it would be one mighty shindig, with most of Carterton turning out to wish one of their native daughters a final farewell. He’d invited not only locals but some business folk in Gadsden and Attalla he thought would be interested in the auction. “A sneak preview,” he called it. She promised that she’d give a tour of the house later in the evening.

  But as much as she enjoyed Finn, Sheila, and Linda’s companionship, and as much as she looked forward to the send-off, she hated goodbyes. This one would be prolonged, and she dreaded the idea that anyone would turn hangdog looks in her direction and beg her to stay. She hoped … prayed even … that it would just be a celebration of Liz’s life, the wake she never got, and a sweet time of hugs and good wishes.

  “St. Louis, here I come,” she whispered. “Temporary stability, Michael. Until the next change.”

  Through the window, she could see strings of lights illuminating both the front and back yards, with clusters of folks in both with drinks in hand. Kids darted around the edge of the yard, many with Mason jars, attempting to corral a few lightning bugs. Molly knew they all had phones in their pockets and video games waiting inside, but the whole gathering reminded her of her childhood. A burst of flames from the grill cast wild shadows across the backyard. Even through the closed windows, laughter echoed, and the scent of woodsmoke began to permeate the neighborhood.

  Molly looked around the room again. “Goodbye, Liz. I hope you approve. I miss you, and I always will.” Switching off the lights, she left, locking the front door and turning.