Inheritance (2 page)

"Felix!" Paul's deep voice cut across his uncle's raspy one. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"You fucking bastard!" Clay bellowed, riding over Paul's words. "Who the fuck do you— *'

"Keep your mouth shut," Felix snapped and went on, never breaking stride. "—entire month after his stroke was a helpless invalid who could neither move nor speak— **

"Felix!" Paul said again.

"He could speak!" Laura said. "He talked to me—we talked—"

"—neither move nor speak intelligibly, and it was obvious to everyone that he had lost his ability to think clearly. And that obvious fact was taken advantage of by this girl, who was only one of his whims until she wormed her way into his life, and then, when he was dying, kept the nurses out of his room so she could be alone widi him and manipulate him into changing his will—^"

'That's enough," Paul said furiously. "God danm it, Felix, you're mad; what the hell has gotten into you? This is a goddam pack of lies— **

Judith Michael

**Owen didn't want the nurses!" Laura cried. She had barely heard Paul. "He told me to keep them out!" She shivered with cold; her tears had dried in cold streaks on her cheeks. "He didn't want strangers; he wanted me!"

"He didn't know what he wanted—^" Felix began for the third time.

"Shut up!" Paul roared. "Let Elwin finish reading! and by God you'll explain this to me later; you'll apologize to Laura and to the whole family— "

Ignoring Paul, Felix put his head back, looked down his thin nose, and flung his voice at Laura. "He didn't know anything, did he? He didn't know that you're a criminal with a record, that you have a criminal for a brother, and that you lied to him—you lied to all of us—for four years while we took you in and gave you everything."

Laura's gasp was like a cloth ripping across the dead silence of the room.

"Four years," Felix said, his words like hammer blows. "And we all know that four years ago, the summer you and your brother appeared at our door, our house was robbed of an irreplaceable collection of jewelry and— "

"We didn't have anything to do with that!" Clay shouted.

Everyone was talking at once, turning to each other in alarm, calling out to Felix to explain what he meant. But Felix spoke directly to Laura. "You don't think we'd believe that! From the evidence I now possess, I have concluded that you came here for one purpose only—to rob us—and then decided to stay when you saw you could wr^ your tentacles around my father, just as you'd done once before with another old man who left you a fortune before he died, and then!"—he shouted above his family's rising clamor, with a glance at Paul—^"then you wrappeid yourself around a young man of wealth, because professional fortune hunters never miss a chance, do they. Miss Fairchild?"

"I'm not! I loved Owen!" But the words lacked force; she felt crushed beneath too many accusations. "I love Paul. You have no right to lie—^"

"Don't you talk to me of right! You came to us with lies; you came to entr^, to ensnare; you wormed your way into our household . . . and you robbed us of my wife's jewels and almost killed my fatherr

Inheritance

"It's a goddam lie!" Clay shouted. "We didn't do tfiat job; we changed our— '*

He stopped, his face deathly pale. Laura, her tears gone, almost numb with cold, felt Paul's arm drop from her shoulder, saw Leni's look of disbelief, and saw Allison—dear Allison who had been so good to her—stare at her in shock and growing anger.

"K?« changed nothing^'' Felix said with contempt. His eyes had gleamed when Clay blurted his fatal words, but then he masked his triumph and now stood at the table with the look of a remote god. "You're a couple of common criminals, you've never been anything else, and I'm going to see to it that everyone knows it. I'm going to break that codicil in court; I'm going to see to it that you don't get a penny of my father's fortune. You'll leave the way you came, with nothing; you'll leave now, and you'll never have anything to do witii any of us again!"

Laura put a hand against the windowpane to steady herself. The glass was warm in the sunlight, but nothing could warm the coldness within her. She felt a movement beside her and looked up. Paul had moved away from her; he was looking at her as if he were meeting her for the first time.

It was all over. The nightmare she had lived with for four years had become real.

Chapter 2

/ / "T"T looks awfully tough," Clay mumbled as he eyed I the clustered rooftops of the gray shingled Cape Cod J. mansions that were their target. '^Guardhouse, fence, and I saw a dog . . ." He was trying to sound like a cool professional instead of a seventeen-year-old in unfamiliar territory, but his hand was cold as it clasped Laura's. Hers was cold, too, but she looked calm to him; she always seemed more daring and determined than he, but then she was a year older and had already graduated from high school. Moving closer to her in the back seat of the rented car Ben was driving past the Salingers' summer compound, he said, 'I'll bet they have lots of dogs.*'

"Probably," Ben agreed. He slowed to catch a glimpse of the ocean and the sailboats and motorboats moored at private docks. "But once you get me inside, I won't have any trouble getting away."

'They can follow a boat as well as a car," Clay argued. "Why'd you pick this place, anyway? It's a goddam fortress."

"Cut it out," Laura said, her voice low. "We'll get it over with and then quit. I told Ben this was the last time I'd help him; you can, too. I wouldn't do this one, except I promised. But you know"—her voice wavered as she thought back to the pine forests and stretches of staiic sand dunes and wild grass they'd driven past in their circuit of the Cape before coming to Osterville—^"it is kinda scary to be this far from home, and everything so . . . different . . ."

Inheritance

Ben caught her last words and grinned at them in the rear-view mirror. "I thought I taught you to have more confidence in yourself. Is there any house in the world my clever brother and sister can't break into? You've helped me crack some very tight places."

"In New York," Clay said. "We know New York. It's got alleys and subways and crowds of people you can disappear in, not a million acres you have to be a cross-country runner to beat the dogs across—^"

"Five acres," Ben said softly. *The Salingers' summer home. Six houses on five acres surrounded by a fence with one guardhouse. That's all we know so far. We'll know more after you and Laura start working there. Listen, Clay, I'm counting on you. Both of you. I trust you."

Laura felt the rush of pride Ben's praise always gave her. He was much older than she, the child of her mother's first marriage. Her mother had remarried when Ben was almost nine, and a year later Laura was bom, and then Clay. They'd always adored Ben, trailing after him around their small rented house in Queens, trying to peek into his private attic room, following him outside until he sent them home. Then, when Laura was fourteen, her parents were killed in a car accident; and Ben Gardner, twenty-three years old, handsome, grown-up, with lots of girlfriends, suddenly became Laura's and Clay's guardian. From then on he was more like a mother and father than a stepbrother to them: he stayed home most nights to be with them, he took them for rides in his car, he helped them with their schoolwork.

He also taught them to steal.

Of all the jobs Ben ever had, stealing was the only one that kept him interested. He didn't make a lot of money at it and kept apologizing for not being professional enough, but he wouldn't join a gang and never found a way to become part of the tight-knit group of fences who controlled prices and outlets in New York. Still, he stayed with it, and filled in by working as a waiter. They'd moved to a tiny, dark apartment way up on West End Avenue, but still they had lots of expenses, and stealing was what Ben had always done so he kept on doing it—better than ever, he said, because now he had assistants.

Clay and Laura were good. Their bodies were agile, their

Judith Michael

fingers quick, their minds alert as they climbed drainpipes or tangled branches of ancient ivy, slipping silently through narrow windows into darkened rooms, opening the windows wider for Ben, afterward climbing swiftly down and disappearing in the shadows of the grafhti-coat&d, anonymous subway.

They learned fast and trained themselves to remember everything. They could distinguish between a policeman's footsteps and those of a casual passerby; after one tour of a room they knew indelibly the location of stereo equipment, paintings and objets d'art; they could hear an elevator start up in a lobby twenty floors below; they had a feather touch and were almost invisible when they shoplifted or picked pockets on the subway or among the after-work crowd jostling for cabs on Wall Street.

It was always exciting and dangerous and, best of all, it was something the three of them could share: planning the jobs, carrying them out, reliving them later. So when Laura suddenly found herself wanting to stop, she kept it to herself. She couldn't tell Ben she'd begun to hate what they did; it would be like saying she hated him, when he was the only one who loved her and Clay and took care of them.

But then things got harder. She was lonely. It was her senior year in high school and all the other girls had friends to bring home after school, or have sleep over, or stand around in the schoolyard with, giggling about dates and new clothes, Saturday night parties and boys feeling them up, monthly cramps, and their awful parents. But Laura couldn't get close to anyone and so she had no girlfriends or boyfriends; she didn't go to Saturday night parties; and she couldn't have a girlfriend sleep over, because Ben slept in one room and she and Clay in the other, with a pair of drapes that they'd found in a dumpster on Orchard Street hanging between them. She could talk casually to classmates in school corridors about their studies or a show on television, but never about how she felt inside or what she really thought and dreamed about. She was always alone.

But even worse than being lonely, she was afraid. Ever since she and Clay were caught, when she was fifteen, she'd been afraid. Everything about it was still fresh; she'd never

Inheritance

forget it: the pounding footsteps chasing them down the street, the gray smell of the police station, the way a policeman pinched her fingertips when he rolled them on the grimy ink pad, the flat face of the policeman who took her picture, growling, 'Turn left, turn right, look straight at the camera, you little cunt . . ."and then grabbed her ass and squeezed so hard she cried out.

Ben came down to the station with a lawyer he knew, who got them out on bond, and then nothing happened for almost a year until their case came up. They were found guilty, and put on probation for another year, and released in the custody of Melody Chase. She was just one of Ben's girlfriends, but he*d been sure the social workers in court wouldn't release two kids in the custody of a single guy, and also he didn't want the law to connect him with them, so he brought Melody to court with him and she said she was Laura's and Clay's aunt, and the four of them walked out together. Nobody cared, really; all the court wanted was to pass them on to somebody else.

So they were free. But the police had their pictures and fingerprints, and Laura dreamt about it for weeks: she had a record.

That was one of the reasons she finally told Ben she didn't want to help him anymore. She didn't want to be a thief; she wanted to go to college and make friends. She'd had some parts in school plays, and she thought she might like to be an actress—or anything, really, as long as she could be proud of herself.

They quarreled about it. Ben knew she felt bad about picking pockets; she always mailed wallets back to people after taking out the money because she hated thinking about them losing all the things inside: poems and recipes, scribbled addresses and phone numbers, membership cards, insurance cards, credit cards that were no use to her, and especially pictures of people they probably loved. When she told Ben she didn't want to steal anymore, he thought she was being sentimental, the way she was about wallets. But she'd figure out a way to make him understand that there was more to it, that she was really serious. She had to; she'd promised herself the Salinger job would be the last one she'd do. Ever.

'1 know you trust us," said Clay, still clinging to Laura's

Judith Michael

hand in the back seat of the car, "but we*ve never done a job in a place like this. What the hell do they want with all this space and light?"

Ben stopped the car a block from the guardhouse. "You're due there in five minutes. Keep your cool; just remember how we rehearsed it. And don't worry; you'll get hired. Rich people in sunmier houses are always desperate for help. I'll be right here, waiting for you."

"He isn't the one who has to go work for them," Clay muttered as the guard passed them through the gate and they followed liis pointing finger to a nearby cottage. "He just sits around while we plan everything and then he waltzes in and lifts what's-her-name's jewels and waltzes out. And we're still here."

*That's not true," Laura said hotly. "Ben won't do anything till we work out an alibi." She turned her back on Clay's scowl, and then kept turning, around and around, as she walked, straining to see as much as she could through the thickly wooded grounds. She caught glimpses of velvety lawns, the windowed bay of a house, splashes of color from flower gardens, a pond with a fountain, a greenhouse roof. The estate of six houses clustered along the ocean was bigger than it had seemed from the road, and much grander. Like a picture postcard, Laura thought: everything beautiful, with no tom-up streets, no graffiti, and no litter. "Anyway," she said to Clay, "we're not hanging around very long after he's done it; just a little while, so nobody thinks we're connected to the robbery."

"We're still here," Clay repeated glumly.

They reached the small stone cottage with flowered curtains at the window and slatted furniture on the front porch, and Laura swallowed hard. "Damn it, we've been through this a hundred times. I'm already jumpy, and you're making it worse. Ben knows what he's doing. And he's the one who's really taking chances: he could get hurt, or caught, and what could we do to help him?"