Legacy (16 page)

“Well, you don’t have time to change,” she sighed. “You’ll just have to go as you are.” Dad had on a new suit, I noticed, and a pink op-art tie he would never have chosen for himself.

The restaurant was very crowded, and we had to wait for our table. Looking around at all the people in Cibo, groomed and gorgeous as show dogs on display, each one vying for attention by showing off their possessions—in Mim’s case, my father—I was suddenly bored by the grayness of it all. I looked at my dad, feeling a surge of pity and longing.

My dad had sacrificed everything he’d had to keep me safe after his world fell apart. If he really hadn’t cared about me, he could have made a new life for himself and left the horror of what had happened in Whitfield
and me
behind him forever.

But he hadn’t. That counted, no matter how frustrated and angry I got. Love counted.

I leaned over and kissed his cheek. It surprised him. For a moment, his whole face lit up. His mouth opened in the kind of stunned delight you usually only see in little children. I didn’t know it would mean so much to him.

“God, that took long enough,” Mim said as we were ushered to our table. “I could eat a horse.” She pushed the menu aside. “But I’ll have a salad.”

Dad and I exchanged a look. It meant nothing except that
across the ever-widening distance of our two universes, we still loved each other.

Mim consumed her salad, plus the lion’s share of three bottles of wine. By the time the bill came, she was extremely happy.

“I’ll miss you, Pierre,” she said to our waiter, clasping his hand. She also slipped him a fat roll of bills and, I think, her business card. “I’ll be leaving for Buttcrack, Nowhere, next week.”

The waiter clucked sympathetically. Dad looked appalled.

“Do you mean Whitfield, Massachusetts?” I asked, deadpan.

“Site of the next big Wonderland!” she shouted, raising her fist in the air. She tripped over her feet as she rose. Dad put his arm around her. She fumbled in her bag for a cigarette that dangled from her lower lip as we left.

“Yeah, Wonderland,” Mim said, lighting up as she slid into the backseat of the taxi.

“No smoking,” the driver said.

Mim took a drag, then tossed the cigarette out the window, but not before filling the cab with smoke.

“You should see the place where it’s going,” Mim went on. “Big old field, right in the middle of town. Waste of prime real estate, absolutely. It’s not even a park. No benches, nothing. Waste.” She flailed her arms in the air, striking every available surface, including my father and me. “But the worst part—the absolute
worst
—was getting rid of that voodoo queen who lives there. You know the one I mean?”

My heart felt as if it had exploded in my chest.

“Man! I mean,
Mon
!” She cackled. “I thought she was going to put the jambalaya curse on me when I told her to get out.”

“Hattie?” I squeaked. “You evicted Hattie Scott?”

Mim’s face contorted into a belligerent mask. “She was living there illegally, for God’s sake. And for God knows how many generations.”

“Did you at least pay her?” Dad asked.

“To get off land that she never paid a dime for? Get real. Hey.” She slapped the back of the cab driver’s head with her pocketbook. “Slow down. We’re almost there.”

The taxi screeched to a halt and the driver turned around, furious. “Look, lady, you don’t hit me, understand? You hit me, I’m gonna call the cops right here, I don’t care—”

“Oh, shut up,” she said, throwing a bunch of bills at him. Dad got out and ran over to Mim’s side of the car so that he could open the door for her. She spilled out of the seat like Jell-O in a silver fox coat.

“Sorry,” I said to the driver. It didn’t do any good, though. He was still pissed off, even though he was covered in money. I would have been, too.

I left the next morning, prematurely. I wanted to talk to Hattie. And my relatives. And Peter.

My father didn’t look me in the eye when I said good-bye. I understood. He knew what he was, what he’d become.

“See you, Dad,” I said. He nodded. He was wearing a Dior golf shirt.

“I’ll come up for the summer,” he said.

“If I let you,” Mim joked.

Sort of.

The kitchen equipment at Hattie’s was gone, leaving big stained areas on the floor where the oven, sinks, refrigerator, and dishwasher had been.

“She gave it all to the school,” Peter said. “Miss P’s got everything in the maintenance shed.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Hattie’s Kitchen, closing for good.”

“Closed and demolished,” Hattie said, coming down the stairs from her apartment.

She looked tired and thin. The mischievous smile that had always played round the edges of her mouth was gone, replaced by deep furrows. “Will you come in for a cup of tea, Katy?” she offered.

I’d never been upstairs before. She’d decorated the place with a strange but beautiful combination of New England severity and Caribbean whimsy. The ceiling was painted to resemble a blue sky. The doorways were strung with tiny
shells that clacked when someone walked through. Some of Eric’s toys were strewn on the floor amid the piles of boxes that were already sealed and stacked.

“Where will you be moving?” I asked Peter as Hattie was getting the tea ready.

“We’ve rented a house near New Town,” he said. “It’s cheaper there.”

“I’ve been here a long time,” Hattie said, returning with a tray. “In 1989 I came back to Whitfield from St. Croix with my skin and next to nothing else . . .” She shook her head slowly, looking into a distance that was hers alone. “That was Hurricane Hugo,” she said with a sigh. “That devil wind blew the roof off my house, then reached in and took my boy Dando into the air like he was a stick doll. Where he landed, no one knew. Might still be flying in the thin air, for all that.”

I was stunned. “You had a son?” I stammered.

“And a husband. After the hurricane moved on, he went into Christiansted to help pull out people trapped in fallen buildings. He was shot by a looter,” she said calmly. She sipped her tea. “So this thing, this Wonderland . . . This is nothing.”

I could feel the air fairly crackle with her unspoken emotion.

I drank my tea quickly. “But this place is yours,” I said at last. “Gram says it’s always been in your family.”

“For more than three hundred years. I just don’t have a document to prove it.”

“I don’t suppose the Historical Society was any help,” I said.

“Oh, the Historical Society doesn’t know squat,” she said, dismissing the organization with a wave of her hand.

“We don’t even need a Historical Society in Old Town,” Peter added. “Everyone here’s still living in the past.”

We all laughed at that, so loud that Eric woke up in the next room and started to wail.

“Oh, me and my big mouth,” Hattie said. “Now, you two keep it down.” She got up and left the room.

“I never knew Hattie had a son,” I whispered.

Peter nodded. “She doesn’t talk about him much,” he said. “She grew up here, right in this house. But she met this guy in college. He was from the Caribbean—”

“I’ll thank you not to be telling my life story like it was your property, Mr. Shaw,” Hattie broke in, leaning against the doorjamb.

“Oh. Sorry, Hattie.” Peter blushed.

She gave him a sour look. “Was there anything special you were planning to tell our guest about me?”

“No, ma’am.”

She shifted her guilt-inducing gaze toward me. “And was there anything special you wanted to know about me? Because if there is, I am the person you should be asking, not him.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I know I should have let it go at that, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Actually, there is something,” I said.

Hattie took a step into the room, her arms folded across her chest. “Yes?” The look on her face was that of a dare. A double-dog dare.

I swallowed. “I was just wondering how you could be forced to leave a place where everyone knows your family has lived for so long. I mean, if there was a deed, it would be hundreds of years old. There must be a way around that.”

She sighed. “No, honey,” she said, “I’m afraid there isn’t. It’s just the law. If you got no deed, you got no land. The Shaws have been paying taxes on it, so that makes it theirs. Probably some smart lawyer somewhere along the line came up with the idea to pay those taxes. And the Shaws always had more money than God, anyway, so they never missed that money. Turned out to be a good plan.”

“For them,” Peter said.

Hattie sat down heavily. “That’s a fact. When I came back here after the hurricane, old Jeremiah Shaw came round to tell me I had to pay him rent to stay here. I said my family’s been here since before the Constitution, same as his, but old Shaw, he must have been weaned on a pickle, not a spark of nothing in him. He said he’d have to charge me rent because he paid the taxes.” She picked up her voluminous hair and hoisted it over the back of her chair like a curtain.

“So you paid him.”

“I did. And that made me a tenant in the eyes of the law. Oh, it worked out fine for all this while. Jeremiah didn’t mind when I opened the restaurant here. And to be fair, he never even raised my rent. But when he sold the property, it meant I had to close down and clear out.” She smiled ruefully. “Didn’t even come here himself to tell me. Wonderland sent some stone-hearted hussy with a piece of paper and a fancy pen.”

Now it was my turn to blush. Mim strikes again.

“She offered me twenty-five hundred dollars if I promised not to give any interviews to the press.” She guffawed. “Imagine that!”

“Did you take it?”

“Not exactly.” The corners of her mouth were starting to
dance again. “The interview was cut short when a tarantula crawled out of her pretty blonde hair and down her pretty pink nose.”

The three of us roared with laughter until Hattie shushed us.

“Well, anyway, the upshot of it all,” Hattie said, wiping her eyes on the hem of her apron, “is that we’ve got to get out of here, and fast. So get these boxes moved over by the door, Peter. And be quick about it.”

We both got to work on the boxes. “Wouldn’t want to interfere with the big Wonderland Egg Hunt,” he muttered.

When we were done, I leaned against an empty bookcase, thinking. “Are you sure there ever was a deed?” I asked.

He held out his hands in a
got me
gesture. “There probably was,” he said. “Even in colonial times, people kept accounts about property ownership.”

“And that deed, if it exists at all, would be in the name of Shaw?”

“That’s what old Jeremiah claims,” Hattie said.

“But we don’t know which Shaw, right?”

Peter screwed up his face. “What are you getting at?”

But Hattie understood. She stood as still as a statue, her mind zinging along the same lines as mine.

“Who is Jeremiah in relation to you, Peter?”

“My great-uncle, I think.” He thought about it. “No, my great-grandfather’s brother. Would that be a great-great-uncle?”

“I don’t know. Was your great-grandfather older than Jeremiah?”

“Oh, yeah. Much. They had different mothers. I could check, but I’m pretty sure Jeremiah was younger by more than twenty years.”

“So, as the oldest son, your great-grandfather would have inherited the property, not Jeremiah, right? He, then your grandfather, then your father, then you.”

Peter’s eyes widened. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “You think I might own the Meadow.” He chuckled. “I wish that were true. Unfortunately, there’s one little hitch. The Shaws disinherited me.”

“Jeremiah Shaw disinherited you,” Hattie broke in. “But your father left you and Eric everything he owned.”

“Whoa. My father wasn’t the big moneymaker in the Shaw family. ‘Everything he owned’ comes down to two houses, and Hattie sold one to pay Eric’s medical bills.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “If the deed belongs to you . . .”

Suddenly he got it. “I could stop Wonderland.”

The room rang with the silence.

Hattie was the one to break it. “Useless talk,” she said flatly. “Prescott Shaw spent a lot of time preparing his will. If the Meadow was yours to inherit, that will would have said so.”

Peter frowned. “But he may not have even thought about it,” he said. “No one ever imagined the Meadow would be sold. The deed might still be in the house.” He turned to me. “The one that’s still in my name. We didn’t put it up for sale because we didn’t want cowen to move in.”

“It’s in Old Town?”

“Right on Front Street,” Peter said.

“Now, stop getting all excited over the house,” Hattie said. “It’s unlikely that there’s anything of value there besides the furniture. Prescott never even lived in that old place. No one has, for decades.”

“He kept it up, though. That was in his will—”

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Hattie shook an angry finger at him. “Don’t you even think about going there. If that place isn’t condemned, it ought to be.”

Eric screamed again. Hattie clucked in exasperation. “Katy, sweetie, I surely do appreciate your company, but we’ve got a lot to do here.”

“I understand,” I said. “I’ll be going.”

“Thanks for stopping by.”

“I’ll help you move when the time comes,” I said. I turned to Peter. “Walk me to my bike?”

“My pleasure,” he said.

“Peter!” It was Hattie.

“Just a second, okay?” He motioned for me to wait.

He took longer than I’d thought. I was about to let myself out when Peter came back into the living room. Eric was still screaming. He opened the door and led me out, signaling me to keep quiet.

Outside, he took a folded-up piece of paper from his pocket. “Eric just drew this,” he said, unfolding the paper.

It was a mass of color, brilliant oranges and reds and yellows, so real I could almost feel the flames they depicted.

“Fire,” I said needlessly. “The third harbinger.”

“Are you surprised?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Me neither.”

I folded up the drawing and gave it back to him. “Do you think the deed might be in that old house you were talking about?”