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“Now, when is your mother coming back?” she asked.
“Oh, soon, sometime this week. She wasn’t defi- nite. She just didn’t want to call in to the office; maybe she was scared if she talked to one of you she’d just get to talking about work. She was just using me as a mes- senger to you all.” All of the other offices that I passed were busy or showed signs of work in progress. Phones were ringing, papers were being copied, briefcases were being packed with paperwork.
For the first time in my life, I wondered how much money my mother had. Now that I didn’t need it any- more, I was finally curious. Money was something we never talked about. She had enough for her, and did her kind of thing—expensive clothes, a very luxurious car (she said it impressed clients), and some good jew- elry. She didn’t play any sport; for exercise she had installed a treadmill in one of the bedrooms of her house. But she sold a lot of real estate, and I assumed she got a percentage from the sales of the realtors she employed. I was very fuzzy on how that worked, be- cause I’d just never thought it was my business. In a moment I was not too proud of, I wondered if she’d made a new will now that John and she had married. I frowned at myself in the rearview mirror as I sat at a stoplight.
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Of course, John already had plenty of money of his own, and he had two sons . . .
I shook my head impatiently, trying to shake those bad thoughts loose. I tried to excuse myself by rea- soning that it was really no wonder that I was will- and death-conscious lately, or for that matter that I was more than usually interested in money matters. But I wasn’t happy with myself, so I was quicker to be displeased when I pulled into the driveway of the house on Honor to find Bubba Sewell waiting for me. It was as if I’d conjured him up by thinking about him.
“Hello,” I said cautiously as I got out of the car. He got out of his and strode over to me. “I took a chance on finding you here. I called the library and found out you were off today.” “Yes, I don’t work every day,” I said unnecessarily. “I came to check on the kittens.”
“Kittens.” His heavy eyebrows flew up behind his glasses.
“Madeleine came back. She had kittens in the closet in Jane’s room.”
“Have Parnell and Leah been over here?” he asked. “Have they given you much trouble?”
“I think Parnell feels we’re even now that I have four kittens to find homes for,” I said. ~ 180 ~
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Bubba laughed, but he didn’t sound like he meant it.
“Listen,” he began, “the county bar association dinner-dance is next weekend and I wondered if you would go with me?”
I was so surprised I almost gaped at him. Not only was he reportedly dating my beautiful friend Lizanne, but also I could have sworn that Bubba Sewell was not the least bit interested in me as a woman. And though my dating schedule was certainly not heavy, I had learned long ago that it was better to be home alone with a good book and a bag of potato chips than it was to be out on a date with someone who left you cold.
“I’m sorry, Bubba,” I said. I was not accustomed enough to turning down dates to be good at it. “I’m just very busy right now. But thank you for asking me.”
He looked away, embarrassed. “Okay. Maybe some other time.”
I smiled as noncommittally as I could.
“Is everything going—all right?” he asked sud- denly.
How much did he know?
“You read about the bones found around the dead end sign?” It had been below the report about ~ 181 ~
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Bubba’s run for representative: city workers find bones. It had been a very short story; I expected a much fuller account in the next morning’s paper. Maybe, I suddenly thought, now that the law had the bones, there would be more information on the sex and age of the skeleton included in the next story. The few paragraphs this morning had stated that the bones were going to a pathologist for examination. I swam out of my thoughts to find Bubba Sewell eyeing me with some apprehension.
“The bones?” he prompted. “A skeleton?” “Well, there wasn’t a skull,” I murmured. “Was that in the paper?” he asked sharply. I’d made a mistake; as a matter of fact, the skeleton’s skull-lessness had not been mentioned in the story. “Gosh, Bubba,” I said coolly. “I just don’t know.” We stared at each other for a minute.
“Gotta be going,” I said finally. “The cats are wait- ing.”
“Oh, sure.” He tucked his mouth in and then re- laxed it. “Well . . . if you really need me, you know where I am. By the way, had you heard I’m running for office?”
“Yes. I’d heard that, sure had.” And we looked at each other for a second more. Then I marched up the sidewalk and unlocked the front door. Madeleine ~ 182 ~
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slithered out instantly and headed for the soft dirt around the bushes. Her litter box was only a backup system: she preferred to go out-of-doors. Bubba Sewell was gone by the time I locked the front door behind me. ~ 183 ~
Chapter Ten
A
Irattled around restlessly in the “new” house for a few hours. It was mine, all mine, but somehow I didn’t feel too cheerful about that anymore. Actually, I preferred my town house, a soulless rental. It had more room, I was used to it, I liked having an upstairs I didn’t have to clean if company was coming. Could I stand living across the street from Arthur and Lynn? Next door to the unpredictable Marcia Rideout? Jane’s books were already cramming the bookcases. Where would I put mine? But if I sold this house and bought a bigger one, probably the yard would be big- ger, and I hadn’t ever taken care of one . . . If Tor- rance hadn’t mowed the yard for me, I wouldn’t know how to cope. Maybe the yard crew that did the lawn at the town houses?
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I maundered on in my head, opening the kitchen cabinets and shutting them, trying to decide which pots and pans were duplicates of mine so I could take them to the local Baptist church, which kept a room of household goods for families who got burned out or suffered some equal disaster. I finally chose some in a lackadaisical way and carried them out to the car loose; I was out of boxes. I was treading water emo- tionally, unable to settle on any one task or course of action.
I wanted to quit my job.
I was scared to. Jane’s money seemed too good to be true. Somehow, I feared it might be taken away from me.
I wanted to throw the skull in the lake. I was also scared of whoever had reduced the skull to its present state.
I wanted to sell Jane’s house because I didn’t par- ticularly care for it. I wanted to live in it because it was safely mine.
I wanted Aubrey Scott to adore me; surely a minis- ter would have a specially beautiful wedding? I did not want to marry Aubrey Scott because being a min- ister’s wife took a lot more internal fortitude than I had. A proper minister’s wife would have marched out of the house with that skull and gone straight to ~ 185 ~
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the police station without a second thought. But Aubrey seemed too serious a man to date without the prospect of the relationship evolving in that direction. I did run the pots and pans to the Baptist church, where I was thanked so earnestly that it was soothing, and made me think better of my poor character. On the way back to the new house, I stopped at Jane’s bank on impulse. I had the key with me, surely? Yes, here it was in my purse. I went in hesitantly, sud- denly thinking that the bank might present difficulties about letting me see the safe deposit box. But it wasn’t too difficult. I had to explain to three people, but then one of them remembered Bubba Sewell coming by, and that made everything all right. Accompanied by a woman in a sober business suit, I got Jane’s safe de- posit box. Something about those vaults where they’re kept makes me feel that there’s going to be a dreadful secret inside. All those locked boxes, the heavy door, the attenda
nt! I went into the little room that held only a table and a single chair, shut the door. Then I opened the box, telling myself firmly that nothing dreadful could be in a box so small. Nothing dreadful, but a good deal that was beautiful. When I saw the contents of the long metal box, I let my breath out in a single sigh. Who would ever have imagined that Jane would want these things?
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There was a pin shaped like a bow, made out of garnets with the center knot done in diamonds. There were garnet and diamond earrings to match. There was a slim gold chain with a single emerald on it, and a pearl necklace and bracelet. There were a few rings, none of them spectacular or probably extremely valu- able, but all of them expensive and very pretty. I felt I had opened the treasure chest in the pirate’s cave. And these were mine now! I could not attach any sentiment to them, because I’d never seen Jane wear them— perhaps the pearls, yes; she’d worn the pearls to a wedding we’d both attended. Nothing else rang any bells. I tried on the rings. They were only a little loose. Jane and I both had small fingers. I was trying to imag- ine what I could wear the bow pin and earrings to; they’d look great on a winter white suit, I decided. But as I held the pieces and touched them, I knew that de- spite Bubba Sewell’s saying there was nothing else in the safe deposit box, I was disappointed that there was no letter from Jane.
After I’d driven back to the house, despite an hour spent watching Madeleine and her kittens, I still could not ground myself. I ended up throwing myself on the couch and turning on CNN, while reading some of my favorite passages from Jane’s copy of Donald Rumbe- low’s book on Jack the Ripper. She had marked her ~ 187 ~
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place with a slip of paper, and for a moment my heart pounded, thinking Jane had left me another message, something more explicit than I didn’t do it. But it was only an old grocery list: eggs, nutmeg, tomatoes, butter . . .
I sat up on the couch. Just because this piece of pa- per had been a false alarm didn’t mean there weren’t any other notes! Jane would put them where she would think I’d find them. She had known no one but me would go through her books. The first one had been in a book about Madeleine Smith, Jane’s main field of study. I riffled through Jane’s other books about the Smith case. I shook them.
Nothing.
Then maybe she’d hidden something in one of the books about the case that most intrigued me—well, which one would that be? Either Jack the Ripper or the murder of Julia Wallace. I was already reading Jane’s only Ripper book. I flipped through it but found no other notes. Jane also had only one book on Julia Wal- lace, and there again I found no message. Theodore Durrant, Thompson-Bywater, Sam Sheppard, Reginald Christie, Crippen . . . I shook Jane’s entire true-crime library with no results.
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Rinehart, Agatha Christie . . . the older school of mys- teries. And Jane had an unexpected shelf of sword- and-sorcery science fiction, too. I didn’t bother with those, at least initially; Jane would not have expected me to look there.
But in the end I went through those as well. After two hours, I had shaken, riffled, and otherwise dis- turbed every volume on the shelves, only a trace of common sense preventing me from flinging them on the floor as I finished. I’d even read all the envelopes in the letter rack on the kitchen wall, the kind you buy at a handcraft fair; all the letters seemed to be from charities or old friends, and I stuffed them irritably back in the rack to go through at a later date. Jane had left me no other message. I had the money, the house, the cat (plus kittens), the skull, and the note that said I didn’t do it. A peremptory knock on the front door made me jump. I’d been sitting on the floor so lost in the dol- drums I hadn’t heard anyone approach. I scrambled up and looked through the peephole, then flung the door open. The woman outside was as well-groomed as Marcia Rideout, as cool as a cucumber; she was not sweating in the heat. She was five inches taller than me. She looked like Lauren Bacall. “Mother!” I said happily, and gave her a brief hug. ~ 189 ~
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She undoubtedly loved me, but she didn’t like her clothes wrinkled.
“Aurora,” she murmured, and gave my hair a stroke.
“When did you get back? Come in!”
“I got in really late last night,” she explained, com- ing into the room and staring around her. “I tried to call you this morning after we got up, but you weren’t home. You weren’t at the library. So after a while, I decided I’d phone in to the office, and Eileen told me about the house. Who is this woman who left you the house?”
“How’s John?”
“No, don’t put me off. You know I’ll tell you all about the trip later.”
“Jane Engle. John knows—John knew her, too. She was in Real Murders with us.”
“At least that’s disbanded now,” Mother said with some relief. It would have been hard for Mother to send John off to a monthly meeting of a club she con- sidered only just on the good side of obscenity. “Yes. Well, Jane and I were friends through the club, and she never married, so when she died, she left me—her estate.”
“Her estate,” my mother repeated. Her voice was beginning to get a decided edge. “And just what, if ~ 190 ~
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you don’t mind my asking, does that estate consist of?”
I could tell her or I could stonewall her. If I didn’t tell her, she’d just pull strings until she found out, and she had a bunch of strings to pull.
“This Jane Engle was the daughter of Mrs. John Elgar Engle,” I said.
“The Mrs. Engle who lived in that gorgeous man- sion on Ridgemont? The one that sold for eight hundred and fifty thousand because it needed reno- vation?”
Trust Mother to know her real estate.
“Yes, Jane was the daughter of that Mrs. Engle.” “There was a son, wasn’t there?”
“Yes, but he died.”
“That was only ten or fifteen years ago. She couldn’t have spent all that money, living here.” Mother had sized up the house instantly. “I think this house was almost paid for when old Mrs. Engle died,” I said.
“So you got this house,” Mother said, “and . . . ?” “And five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” I said baldly. “Thereabouts. And some jewelry.” Mother’s mouth dropped open. It was the first time in my life I think I’d ever astonished my mother. She’s not a moneygrubbing person, but she has a ~ 191 ~
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great respect for cash and property, and it is the way she measures her own success as a professional. She sat down rather abruptly on the couch and automati- cally crossed her elegant legs in their designer sports- wear. She will go so far as to wear slacks on vacation, to pool parties, and on days she doesn’t work; she would rather be mugged than wear shorts. “And of course I now have the cat and her kit- tens,” I continued maliciously.
“The cat,” Mother repeated in a dazed way. Just then the feline in question made her appear- ance, followed by a chorus of forlorn mews from the kittens in Jane’s closet. Mother uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to look at Madeleine as if she had never seen a cat before. Madeleine walked right up to Mother’s feet, stared up at her for a moment, then leaped onto the couch in one flowing motion and curled up on Mother’s lap. Mother was so horrified she didn’t move.
“This,” she said, “is a cat you inherited?” I explained about Parnell Engle, and Madeleine’s odyssey to have her kittens in “her” house. Mother neither touched Madeleine nor heaved her legs to remove her.
“What breed is she?” Mother asked stiffly. “She’s a mutt cat,” I said, surprised. Then I realized ~ 192 ~
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Mother was evaluating the cat. Or valuing her. “Want me to move her?”
“Please,” my mother said, still in that stiff voice. Finally I understood. My mother was scared of th
e cat. In fact, she was terrified. But, being Mother, she would never admit it. That was why we’d never had cats when I was growing up. All her arguments about animal hair on everything, having to empty a litter tray, were just so much smoke screen.
“Are you scared of dogs, too?” I asked, fascinated. I carefully scooped Madeleine off Mother’s lap, and scratched her behind the ears as I held her. She obvi- ously preferred Mother’s lap, but put up with me a few seconds, then indicated she wanted down. She padded into the kitchen to use her litter box, followed by Mother’s horrified gaze. I pushed my glasses up on my nose so I could have a clear view of this unprece- dented sight.
“Yes,” Mother admitted. Then she took her eyes off Madeleine and saw my face. Her guard snapped up immediately. “I’ve just never cared for pets. For God’s sake, go get yourself some contact lenses so you’ll stop fiddling with those glasses,” she said very firmly. “So. Now you have a lot of money?” “Yes,” I admitted, still enthralled by my new knowledge of my mother.
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“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t made any plans yet. Of course, the estate has to go through probate, but that shouldn’t take too long, Bubba Sewell says.” “He’s the lawyer who’s handling the estate?” “Yes, he’s the executor.”
“He’s sharp.”
“Yes, I know.”
“He’s ambitious.”
“He’s running for office.”
“Then he’ll do everything right. Running for office has become just like running under a microscope.” “He asked me out, but I turned him down.” “Good idea,” my mother said, to my surprise. “It’s never wise to have a social relationship mixed up with money transactions or financial arrangements.” I wondered what she would say about a social rela- tionship mixed up with religion.
“So you had a good time?” I asked.
“Yes, we did. But John came down with something like the flu, so we had to come home. He’s over the worst, and I expect he’ll be out and about tomorrow.” “He didn’t want to stay there until he got over it?” I couldn’t imagine traveling with the flu. “I suggested it, but he said when he was sick, he didn’t want to be in a resort where everyone else was ~ 194 ~
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