The Rich Shall Inherit (83 page)

Her blue eyes met his anxiously and he thought how lovely she was, and how fortunate he was to have known her; she and her
father had been like a breath of fresh air in his life. “I’m sorry about Orlando,” he said at last.

“I didn’t know he was Poppy’s great-grandson,” she whispered. “Mike told me.”

“Orlando never had the evidence; it was Mike who found out.”

“And I’m not the heiress after all,” she said.

“It’s not important now,” Carraldo whispered. The pain was in his chest again, its iron bands were crushing him. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and he closed his eyes, breathing rapidly.

The green zigzag line on the monitor was jumping wildly and Aria glanced at it in alarm. “I’m tiring you,” she said, gripping his hands, “you mustn’t talk anymore.”

After a while when he seemed easier, she said, “I came to thank you for saving my life, but words don’t seem enough to repay such a debt. I’ve thought it over, and if you still want me, I’d like to marry you.”

His pained dark eyes smiled at her.
“You
are like your father, after all, Aria,” he said gently.

She sat for a long time, just holding his hands in hers until he seemed to be sleeping, and then, bending over him, she kissed him gently on the lips, before she left.

Antony Carraldo suffered a massive heart attack moments before dawn the next morning, and before the sun rose, he was dead. Many hundreds of people attended his funeral, though few mourned him. But there were tears of true sadness on Aria Rinardi’s face as she placed a girlish posy of lily of the valley, baby’s breath, and tiny cream rosebuds on his grave.

Mike opened the bottle of champagne with a satisfactory pop and Lauren hurried to hold the glass under the overflowing stream. “We can’t waste it,” she said, laughing, “it tastes too good.”

“Plenty more where that came from,” he said. “Who do we toast first? Maria? Poppy Mallory? Or you?”

She put her head on one side, considering. “None of them,” she decided finally. “We toast you, because without you, I never would have found out the truth—about Maria, and about myself.”

“Then we’ve got to toast Maria too,” he argued, “because she gave me the clue. Once I understood Helena’s strange behavior was due to her deafness, I realized that was probably what had puzzled me about Maria. I could see the intelligence in her eyes, there seemed nothing wrong with her intellect, and yet she was so silent. I called you and you told me the doctor had confirmed her deafness. Then I remembered Helena had the Mallory family name, and I thought about the names in your family Bible … it didn’t take long to track down the evidence, births, deaths, marriages—I just started with you and worked backward to her daughter.

“Angel had said in her letter that the people who adopted Helena’s baby were named James, and they lived in Ventura County, here in California. They’d told Angel they would call her Mary, and her middle name would be Mallory. Mary Mallory James. It didn’t take long to track it down after that.

“Maria-Cristina was killed in World War II, driving an ambulance, and Helena, who’d become a recluse, died years later. That’s when Aria got the parrot. If she’d lived, then there would
have been some family continuity, and all this wouldn’t have been such a mystery. Still, it gave me an opportunity to know Poppy Mallory,” he added thoughtfully, “and to tell the truth, it’s an opportunity I wouldn’t have missed. Poppy was a woman who lived by her heart rather than her head, and when it all went wrong, she glued the pieces back together somehow, and just carried on.
Indomitable
, that’s the word I’d use to describe Poppy.”

Lauren looked at him, her blue eyes serious. “This toast should be to Poppy,” she said, raising her glass.

“To Poppy,” Mike said. There was a silence and then he said, “So, now we’ll drink to Miss Lauren Hunter, the Mallory heiress.

Lauren sighed. “I think I’m going to need quite a lot of champagne,” she said, “because it’s sobering thinking that now I own all that valuable real estate, and all those millions.”

“You’ll have good advice,” he told her. “Lieber will take care of that.”

“There’s one thing I know I want to do with it, though,” she said. “Remember you told me that if the money was his, Pierluigi had wanted to set up a foundation in his sister’s memory? To help homeless young people and see that they get to college? I’d like to use some of those millions for that purpose. I’d like it to be called the Poppy Mallory Foundation. We could have special scholarships in Claudia’s name.”

“That’s a fine thing to do, Lauren,” he said quietly.

She shrugged. “I was one of those unfortunate young people myself, until last week.”

They watched Maria, playing happily with her Christmas teddy. “I know her hearing problem is serious, but the doctor hopes that after the operation, she’ll regain at least part of it.” Lauren looked at him hopefully. “He tells me she’ll be able to talk, and with lip-reading, she’ll be fine. I’m just happy it wasn’t anything worse.”

“And what are
your
plans?” he asked, meeting her eyes.

“Maybe I can go to Stanford after all,” she said eagerly. “I thought I’d buy a house nearby and I’m hoping they’ll let me live off-campus, with Maria. I’ll be able to afford to hire a nanny for her now, and to pay for her medical care.” She sighed, looking at him gratefully. “Poppy Mallory will never know how much I appreciate her gift—because that’s what it is, really. I didn’t do anything to deserve all this money.”

“Let’s just say it found the right person, after all,” Mike said, smiling at her. “Funny thing, you know, Lauren, I was just thinking how much I like it here in California, and about maybe getting a house myself. Poppy gave me a legacy too—a book—and California’s as good a place as any to finish it. Maybe we’ll be neighbors. And whenever you can shake off those eager young college guys, maybe you might have dinner with me, now and again?”

“I’d like that,” Lauren said, her blue eyes shining, just the way Poppy’s must have when she fell in love, all those years ago.

Even now, when she was an old lady, alone in this gaudy, ornate Italian villa far from her childhood California home, Poppy could remember seeing the flowers she was named for the very week she was born. Of course, they’d always told her it was impossible, that an infant so young couldn’t even see. Yet that same field, curving upward into the hills behind the old adobe house, had been plowed the following autumn and sown with barley for winter feed, and after the storms the graceful California poppies had never grown there again. How else, then, could she know them so well, unless they were imprinted on her memory?

If she closed her eyes, she could feel the floating, weightless sensation of being in her mother’s arms, and smell the faint sweet fragrance of her skin as she waded, knee-deep, through the sea of blossoms. She remembered being held perilously forward to share her mother’s pleasure at the sight of hundreds of heart-shaped petals scattering on the breeze like scarlet silk butterflies. And she could recall their deep, purple-black hearts and the golden fluff of pollen on the stamens as clearly as she knew her own mirror-image.

It was a story she would repeat often to Luchay. As she had grown older she’d talked to the parrot only about her
happy
memories, but then Luchay already knew her life story.
He knew all her secrets.

She rarely spoke to the women who came from the village to clean the villa—all its thirty-two rooms filled with the curlicued gilded furniture she despised … “All red plush and tassels,” she’d say to Luchay, cackling with self-mocking laughter. The women saw to her wants and prepared her solitary meals; and she supposed they stole from her, but she didn’t really care—they
probably had a dozen mouths to feed at home. And now, at the end, there was only her. A lonely old woman who was so very tired today, so tired, she might just take a little nap and dream her old dreams, hoping she could finally exorcise them. And then, just maybe, she might never wake again.

The tall foreigner stopped his car by the mossy stone pillars with their crumbling peacocks. He pushed the rusty iron gates tentatively, but they refused to open more than a crack. The villa was barely visible among its tangled greenery, and squaring his shoulders resolutely, he walked down the overgrown drive.

Hurrying up the front steps, he rang the bell, thrusting his hands into his pockets and pacing across the portico like a man undecided whether or not to change his mind. He took the newspaper clipping from his pocket and looked at it again. “Mallory,” he read, “at the Villa Castelletto, Veneto, Italy. Poppy, in her seventy-seventh year. Ever loved and missed by her friend, Franco.” There was the sound of footsteps on the marble floor and then the door was opened. An old peasant woman, her head swathed in a black shawl, peered through the crack.

“Che desidera?”
she demanded.

He told her he wanted to know about the woman who used to live there, he was a long-lost relative. He needed to know, he said, where she was buried.

The woman stared hard at him for a moment, her beady black eyes assessing him. Then slowly she opened the door. He peered past her into the gloomy hallway; the curtains were drawn and the mirrors were draped in black. “It’s a pity you’re too late for the funeral. She’s buried in the graveyard by the village. The man came and took care of everything. He and I were the only two at the funeral. If you’d come earlier,” she added chattily, “then there would have been three. Then the lawyer took the parrot away, they say he gave it to someone … I don’t know who. All I know was it was the only thing she loved. Poor lonely soul.” She crossed herself, muttering a blessing, as he turned away, and he walked quickly back down the drive.

“It’s a pity you are too late,” the woman called after him shrilly. “Madame never had any visitors … it would have been nice for her …”

The graveyard had four walls stacked with neat whitewashed tombs. Each had its saint or Madonna or a figure of Christ on the cross, and each was dotted with photographs of the dead
person and a jar of flowers. In the center of the graveyard were several larger and more elaborate tombs and he walked around inspecting them, reading each name carefully; but none of the baroque edifices surmounted by spires and angels was Poppy’s resting place.

He found it at last in a sunny corner by the far wall, just a simple plot, bordered in pinkish marble with a plain headstone with her name and the date of her birth and her death.
In Loving Memory
, it said. And on the grave lay a fresh gardenia plant; its dark green leaves were waxen and shiny, and its heady-scented flowers as creamy and smooth as new milk.

Rogan ran his hands wearily through his graying hair, staring down at the grave. After a few moments he walked quickly from the graveyard and without once glancing back, he climbed into his car and drove away.

ELIZABETH ADLER is the bestselling
author of
Sooner or Later, Now or Never,
The Secret of the Villa Mimosa
, and
other internationally acclaimed novels.