The Rich Shall Inherit (72 page)

“And so you see, Mr. Lieber,” he’d finished, “why I believe I am Poppy Mallory’s heir.”

There was now no doubt in Mike’s mind that Orlando was Poppy’s great-grandson, but then why had Poppy not even mentioned her son in her will? All she’d talked about was her daughter. Had she cut Rogan out of her will because he’d run away and left her? He called Lieber in Geneva and told him the news.

Lieber wasn’t really surprised about Orlando. “I thought there was something about his story,” he said. “And there was a note attached to the will. I didn’t think it was important at the time—Poppy seemed like a dotty old lady who couldn’t quite get her thoughts together … I just assumed she was rambling. I thought it was someone in the lawyer’s office. It was for someone called ‘Rogan,’ telling him that she had written the will because he didn’t know about the daughter, in case she forgot later, because sometimes her memory defeated her. She’d said, I wanted to make sure she was taken care of too. But, of course, you will take care of that.’

“Of course,” Lieber added, “we can’t tell Orlando Messenger what we know yet, until we find the true story about the daughters, and if there is another heir, then the estate will be divided equally.”

Mike thought over what he had said and then he placed a call to Carraldo in Los Angeles.

There was one last notebook left to read, the one he hoped would give him the final answer to what had happened to Poppy, and who her daughter was. He thought about calling Aria to tell her, but decided he would wait until he knew for sure. Walking over to Luchay, he stroked the bird’s soft wing and the parrot stared back at him unblinkingly.

“Poor Luchay,” Mike said. “Poor boy. She left you, didn’t she, and she never came back.”

Mike walked back to the desk and pored over the notebooks again. When he was reading them, it was almost as if Poppy were here, in this room …. He felt now he really knew her.

1927, France

Poppy was alone again, at the farm at Montespan. It had been more than two years since Rogan had disappeared. Numéro Seize, rue des Arbres, was still shuttered and swathed in dust sheets, exactly as she had left it that night, and Simone told her that smart Parisians still mourned its passing.

“They say there’ll never be another place like it,” she told Poppy, “and they swear you’ll reopen it one day.”

Poppy shook her head. “Never,” she whispered. She had trekked the paths of her life a thousand times since that fateful night, telling herself that everything she had done had been done in order to survive. But she knew in her heart it wasn’t true; there was one other reason. All her life she had thought of herself as the girl in Angel Konstant’s shadow; finally at Numéro Seize, she had become Madame Poppy, one of the most courted and sought-after women in Paris, and one of the richest. Now she was just Poppy Mallory again, with a thousand acquaintances and millions of francs in the bank. And because of her false pride and her obsession to be rich she had lost the one thing that really mattered to her—the love and respect of her son.

If it hadn’t been for Netta, she didn’t know what she might have done. Netta had sold her business in Marseilles and come to live with Poppy at the farm. “I’m getting too old to go on playing the role of the gay madam,” she’d sighed, “I’m almost fifty. I’m tired of having to hold in my stomach and cover the gray in my hair with dye!”

“I don’t mind,” Poppy said, absently touching the new white wings at her own temples, “each white hair means it’s one day closer to the end.”

Netta stared to her, horrified. Poppy scarcely ate, she looked as thin and brittle as a reed. Her face had lost all its softness and her prominent cheekbones threw shadows into the deep hollows of her cheeks. But somehow, she looked even more beautiful. And her eyes still blazed with the same old intensity as she charted the moves of the dozens of private detectives she employed in cities around the world, searching for her son. Their weekly reports, each as blank of information as the last, already filled a dozen filing cabinets in her study.

When Rogan had first disappeared, Poppy had waited for him to come back, and when she realized he wasn’t going to come, she’d sought wildly for ways to find him. She’d thought of asking the help of the powerful men who’d patronized Numéro Seize and who had called her their friend, but even they would be powerless in this situation. She’d thought of going to the police, but that would have meant exposing herself and Rogan to a blaze of publicity, because she was a notorious woman and there would be no way to keep her secret. She had known at last that the only man who could find Rogan was Franco.

“But you
can’t
ask him!” Netta had exclaimed. “Once Franco knew he had a son, he’d never let him go!”

“He won’t know Rogan is his,” she’d cried. “I’ll tell him I had another lover …”

“All Franco has to do is count,” Netta had said bluntly. “The boy is seventeen years old. Your only lover then was Franco.” Poppy contemplated the bitter irony of the truth. Things hadn’t changed. She still couldn’t tell Franco about Rogan and she could never tell Rogan who his father was.

She had pinned her hopes on the private detectives, recruiting more and more as the months passed with still no trace of him. “But he’s so distinctive-looking,” she said despairingly as the empty weeks slid by, “he’s so tall, six foot three, and he has this bright orangy-blond hair.”

“There are thousands of tall young men, madame,” they told her patiently, “and hair can be dyed, you know.”

Netta had gone back to Marseilles for a vacation. She was driving back to Montespan in her brand-new little sports car when it went out of control on the rainswept road and struck a tree. She was killed instantly. Grief-stricken, Poppy buried her friend in the crowded graveyard on a hill overlooking the harbor at Marseilles, wishing it could have been her instead. She had lost
her friend now, as well as her son—she felt as though the world was closing down.

The long winter months passed in solitude and unhappiness at Montespan, and for the first time she allowed herself to remember her daughter. She recalled the small baby she had held in her arms, her fuzz of fine blond hair and her soft pink-flushed skin, and she wondered what she looked like now. Twenty-eight years had passed, she remembered, shocked; the child would be a woman now. Suddenly she was racked with a desperate longing to see her. She paced the lonely, icy lanes around the farm, willing this strange new desire to go away. But it wouldn’t, and the next week she found herself on the train to Venice.

The city was timeless under the blue May sky, floating against a Canaletto horizon, just as she remembered it. The smart hotels had put out their summer awnings, gondoliers took tourists along the canals, and the little orchestra still played in the Piazza San Marco.

Poppy peered through Florian’s windows, half expecting to see Felipe waiting for her, and then with a feeling of déjà vu she took a seat at the same small marble-topped table, on the same red plush banquette, as the day she had met him. A young waiter served her iced tea, and she wondered what had happened to Carlo, the moustached old man who used to bring her chocolate
granita.
Felipe had told her he had come here as a child, that they knew him well…. It was ridiculous, she knew, but she couldn’t help asking … after all, wouldn’t Felipe have brought his own children here, the way he was brought as a child? “I wonder if you can help me,” she said to the young waiter. “I used to know a family who came here years ago, but we’ve been out of touch. I just wondered whether you knew them. Their name is Rinardi … the Baronessa Rinardi.”

He shook his head. “Sorry, Signora, I’ve only been working here a few months. But I’ll ask one of the other waiters if you like.”

He returned a few moments later with a gray-haired man who beamed at her kindly. “Ah, the Rinardis,” he exclaimed, clasping his hands across his white apron, “such an
exquisite
family, so beautiful the children. And the Baronessa … a great beauty! When the children were small she used to bring them here all the time, when they were in residence at the palazzo. But no more, I’m afraid. We miss them.”

“No more?” she asked. “But why?”

“I heard the Baronessa went back to America, Signora.” He shrugged. “It happens in the best of families … unhappiness … separation. Yes, the Baronessa had an
unhappy
face, even though she was a great beauty.”

“And the children?” Poppy asked, her voice quavering.

“The girls were charming, both so pretty in such different ways, one so volatile, one so quiet. And the boy is handsome, like his father.” He sighed. “Who knows, maybe the family will come back together again one day. If God wills it.”

“Maybe,” Poppy replied automatically. “Thank you, Signore.”

“A pleasure, Signora. Enjoy your stay in Venice.”

So Angel had a son, she thought, sipping her tea; she’d given Felipe his heir after all. And the two girls, one extrovert, one quiet—she could guess which one was her daughter. She stared despondently out of the window; she had been so sure she would see her, so sure she would
know
her immediately. But it was too late to bring back the past. And besides, Angel and her daughters were six thousand miles away in California. At the Rancho Santa Vittoria.

She hurried from Florian’s to the office of Thomas Cook Ltd, travel agents. There was a ship, they told her, the
Michelangelo
, leaving Genoa for New York in three days time. Poppy booked a passage quickly before she could change her mind. She was going home at last.

1927, California

Poppy had ridden out to her old childish spy-place, up on the hill overlooking the Konstant House. The horse she’d rented from a local stable grazed contentedly nearby and the steady tearing of grass mingled with the twitter of the birds and the whirring of the cicadas.

She had gone to the Mallory House first, and found only a charred ruin. She’d waded horrified through the tangled waist-high grass that was once a lawn, and she’d sat once again on the broken front steps, remembering, with a familiar sinking feeling in her stomach, how she used to watch and wait for Jeb to return. She remembered the scary, blind old Indian in the adobe kitchen, and the dark anonymous room that had been her mother’s, and her own desolate nursery that was full of shadows and fears when her father didn’t come back. She recalled the shiny grand piano in the drawing room and the toys in the cupboard that she’d had to leave behind when she and Jeb began their trek around the cities, chasing a poker game; and she felt the same old terror of being alone and abandoned.

The Mallory House had never been a happy place, but it would have been hers if Jeb Mallory hadn’t gambled it away; she would have had something real to give Rogan, instead of having to invent a past.

The only part of the house still standing was the adobe hut that had been there for two hundred years. Its foot-thick clay walls blocked out the sounds of the birds, and the sunlight barely filtered through the small high window onto the dusty floor. Closing her eyes, Poppy could see herself as a small child, holding her breath so the old Indian wouldn’t hear her as she stole a hunk of the flat Indian cornbread. She’d been so afraid that the old man would catch her. Even now the place quivered with disturbed emotions, with feelings
of loneliness and sadness … and of death. With a little cry of fear she ran from the musty adobe room, gulping the fresh air and pushing her way eagerly back through the tangled weeds. She turned instinctively to look at the hill, rising gently behind the ruined house. There were no poppies growing there.

She had taken the familiar shortcut to the Konstant House, automatically stopping at her old spy-place, just the way she had when she was a child, drawn there every day like a magnet to watch that magical, beautiful, happy family, yearning with all her heart to be a part of it.

It looked just the same, its white walls gleamed, its flowers bloomed, its fountain sparkled, and its red-tiled roofs glittered in the sun. Men were still working in the gardens and Arabian ponies still pranced in the paddock. And beyond that, the Konstant land stretched as far as the eye could see.

Poppy sank to the grass, her knees clasped under her chin, lost in her dreams. Suddenly a tall, gray-haired man hurried down the steps and across to the old barn. Her heart pounded and she thought she would faint as she recognized Greg. Of course he was older, but except for his gray hair he hadn’t changed. He was still the tall, slender, handsome man she remembered. The man she had called her brother—the man she had found out too late she loved. A few minutes later Greg drove back into the courtyard at the wheel of a marine-blue Packard. His voice, as he called to someone to hurry up, sent remembered tremors of pleasure and pain through her, and she bit her lip to stop from crying out to him. Then a pretty woman ran down the steps, fanning herself with her big straw hat and laughing, and Poppy knew this must be his wife.

“Melissa, why are you always late?” she heard him complain.

“I suppose that after all these years I’ve just given up even trying,” she laughed, climbing into the car.

“Come on, boys!” Greg yelled, hauling bags and valises into the trunk, and Poppy’s heart jumped as three teenage boys hurtled down the steps. These were Greg’s sons, the sons who might have been hers. They looked so like him, except the youngest one, dawdling behind; he was like his grandfather, Nik. “Hurry up, Hilliard,” she heard Greg complain. And then behind them, walking slowly down the steps, came Angel! Poppy remembered the last time she had seen her … but the hair that she remembered as being moonlit blond seemed even fairer, and with a shock she realized Angel’s hair was now pure white.

There was a flurry of good-bye hugs and kisses as they piled into
the car and drove off. Angel waved them good-bye, and Poppy strained her eyes for a last glimpse of Greg and his sons. She felt again the old familiar pang of envy; she was back where she had started all those years ago, on the outside looking in. She had never really been part of the family after all. It was still only a dream.