The Inheritance Read online

“No, not really. I’ve only been here twice before, briefly. I guess I can find Macy’s and Saks again, but …” She shook her head at the overwhelming prospect of shopping in this city.

  “I think we may be able to help you,” Mr. Henderson said. “I’ve taken the liberty of recruiting someone, a sort of guide for you. One of your new neighbors, actually. Melissa MacGraw. She’s about your age, and her family and the Randalls go back quite a way. She’s at her apartment in town now, and I called her and explained the situation. She was delighted. She said it would combine her two favorite pastimes: meeting new people and shopping. If anyone knows everything about buying clothes in New York, it’s Melissa. She’ll call you tonight.”

  Holly stared, smiling involuntarily at the man’s finesse. It was so smooth, what he’d done, and so kind. Not knowing her until an hour ago, he had no way of knowing whether she was up to this, the adventure she now faced. He hadn’t known if she was the sort of person who would be able to buy the proper clothes and accessories. For all he knew, she’d be completely stymied and make a fool of herself. So he’d provided a guardian, a young woman of unquestioned stock and presumably impeccable taste, to help her. Melissa MacGraw, whoever she was, was obviously to the manner born. Holly vaguely imagined a dull, rather homely rich girl who spoke through clenched teeth, all blushes and giggles and Bryn Mawr. But she’d know where to get the right clothes, and for that Holly was grateful.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said to the lawyer.

  He smiled. “It isn’t necessary. I work for you now, remember?”

  She shook her head. “What you’ve done—everything you’ve done—goes way beyond the employer-employee relationship.”

  He looked over at the picture on his desk again. “I’m just glad I can do this for Jim.” Then he turned his attention back to her. “So, tomorrow you can get whatever you need, and Thursday you’ll go to Randall. It’s quite a beautiful house, you’ll find. I hope you’ll be happy in your new life, Holly. Jim would have wanted you to be happy.”

  She was watching him closely again. “And—my mother? Would she have wanted me to be happy?”

  Gilbert Henderson blinked. He looked away a moment, then back at her.

  “I have no idea,” he said at last. “I only met her the one time, at the detention center, when you were born.”

  “Oh.” She looked from him to the photograph of him with her father. It stood on the desk beside the other framed picture. That one, she saw now, was recent: Gil Henderson as he looked today, his arm across the shoulders of a dark-haired younger man. His son, she supposed. This man had gone on from Yale to have a life as a father and a lawyer, but it had obviously been separate from his old friend, her father. Why didn’t he know Constance? she wondered. Why wasn’t he at least at their wedding? What had happened to the college friends? She was actually opening her mouth, forming a question, when the intercom buzzed on his desk.

  “Yes, Ms. Choi?”

  “Mr. Lawrence of the Tri-State Trust Bank is here.”

  He grinned and winked at Holly. Then he turned back to the intercom. “Show him in, please.”

  The woman in the black cape was standing at the fence on the edge of the cliff, staring out over the water, when the confusion came upon her.

  It happened to her frequently, more frequently than she would have admitted, had anyone ever asked. She had inured herself to the world’s disinterest, even its occasional derision. It was her lot, she supposed, and she did not question it. She had learned long ago not to assert herself in any way. Had the dark spell not clouded her mind this afternoon, she would never have dreamed of doing what she did next.

  This was her favorite place, this cliff, and she had been standing here for a long time, watching as the ominous clouds gathered above the Sound. She was thinking about the conversation she’d overheard this morning, the one that had struck fear in her and sent her running, gasping from the shock, out across the lawns. She’d been trying to control her terror, trying to sort it out in her mind, trying to decide what she must do. And she must do something, she knew. She must prevent this catastrophe from occurring. But, how?

  The conversation had been very clear. There was a woman in New York, a young woman named Holly Randall. And she was coming here two days from now, on Thursday. She was coming to Randall House to stay.

  She was the new owner of Randall House.

  Just before the veil fell over her eyes, the terrified woman in the cloak was thinking, No! She can’t come here. She mustn’t come here! If she does, she might be …

  The thought, disjointed as it was, was never completed. At that moment her vision faded, and she stared out over the Sound, not seeing it. Then, as in a trance, she slowly turned around and focused her unseeing eyes on the mansion in the distance.

  And she began walking toward it.

  Her pace quickened steadily as she approached the house, and the hood of her cloak fell back, unleashing long tresses of jet black hair that floated out behind her. Her breath was coming in little gasps, and her pale hands were clenched together at her bosom. By the time she reached the front steps, she was running. Up the steps she flew, heading for the front door. She did not stop when she arrived at it, did not so much as hesitate. She threw open the big oak door and glided silently into Randall House. Had she been conscious of her actions, she would not have been here, not in a million years. It was the one place in the world she avoided.

  What happened next was never very clear to her, even after she had regained consciousness, after she had been told what she had done. She did not remember it.

  Mr. Wheatley, the butler, was the first person in the house to get to her. He was in the library across the entry hall from the living room, restocking the bar with Mrs. Randall’s favorite red wine, when he heard the shrieking and the first crash, which was followed almost immediately by a second one.

  He later reported his actions: he ran to the open doorway of the living room and froze, startled, staring at the cloaked figure standing beside the open breakfront, her pale arms and black hair flying, watching in incomprehension as she pulled display plates and figurines from their shelves and hurled them at the far wall. Another crash, and another. One pretty Dresden shepherdess, Miss Alicia’s favorite, actually struck a portrait and shattered. It was this that galvanized him.

  He threw himself at the shrieking young woman, knocking her to the floor. As he shouted for help, he grasped her flailing arms and pinned them down. The woman struggled mightily for several moments, but he somehow managed to keep her where she was. He was an old man, and she was amazingly, inhumanly powerful, and he wondered how he was able to do it. Only then did he realize that he was actually sitting on her, and that several other people were crowding into the room behind him. And he at last became aware of what the young woman on the floor was shouting. Her voice was high-pitched, frantic, echoing from the walls all around him, filling the room with her madness.

  “She can’t come here! She can’t come here! Please, God, don’t let her come here! She has to be stopped! Don’t let her come here!”

  Then Mildred Jessel, the housekeeper, was helping him to his feet. He rose slowly, painfully, and moved aside to allow Mrs. Jessel to kneel beside her daughter.

  “Dora! Dora! Stop this at once, do you hear me? Stop it!”

  Still lying flat on her back, Dora Jessel blinked, coughed, and stared up at her mother.

  “Wha—?” she murmured, blinking around at the strange room and the stricken, concerned faces of Mr. Wheatley and the cook, Mrs. Ramirez, and the maid, Frieda. “Mother? What happened? Where—where am I?”

  She was lying on something sharp, a sliver of broken glass, but what on earth was she doing here? And where was she? There was more broken glass on the floor all around her, and she was apparently in a large room with pale blue walls, perhaps a living room. Yes, it was a living room, the living room of—

  She sat bolt upright on the floor.

  —Randall H
ouse!

  Her mother was reaching out for her, attempting to take her in her arms and comfort her, when Dora Jessel, still disoriented, looked past her at the face of the person who had just that moment arrived in the living room doorway. She froze, staring into those eyes. The eyes of the Devil.

  Slowly, deliberately, she opened her mouth, filled her lungs, and screamed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Arriving

  “Well, it’s a start,” Missy said. “You can get everything else you’ll need later.”

  Holly smiled at her new friend, wondering what else she could possibly need, and reached for another shopping bag. This one was from Ralph Lauren on Madison and Seventy-second, one of three bags from that place alone. She glanced around the pale blue carpeted floor of the bedroom. Fifteen bags in all, crammed with boxes of dresses, sweaters, blouses, skirts, slacks, shoes, boots, and lingerie.

  This was the haul from yesterday, not counting the belted Florentine leather coat, the two evening dresses, and the suit that were being altered to fit her. These last items would be delivered to Randall House in the next few days. She looked over at the white wool coat with the fleece-lined hood that lay so casually across the bed, thinking about the strapless, low-cut royal blue satin evening dress and matching pumps that would soon be sent along. She shook her head in wonder: for the coat and that gown alone, she had paid what one would normally pay for a modestly priced car.

  Now, in the bedroom, Holly and Missy had finished packing the treasure trove into five new Louis Vuitton suitcases and a brass-studded steamer trunk, which were now shut and standing ready near the bedroom door beside the shabby American Tourister she’d brought from California. This contained faded jeans, sneakers, a pantsuit, the plaid coat, and her one good evening dress. Holly stared at the contrast of the old luggage and the new, smiling, realizing yet again that her life would never be the same.

  Melissa MacGraw—Missy, as she insisted on being called—was a pleasant surprise in a day chock-full of pleasant surprises. Far from being the plain, bucktoothed, simpering cliché Holly had envisioned, she was a strikingly pretty Scotswoman with lovely russet-colored hair. She was considerably smaller than Holly, but she laughingly insisted that Matthew, her fraternal twin, had claimed all the height and weight their parents could muster. There was a generous smattering of freckles on her fair skin, and her hazel eyes were definitely her most arresting feature.

  Holly had been amazed by her energy. She’d arrived here for breakfast at eight-thirty yesterday morning, and then she’d immediately whisked Holly off to Fifth Avenue. The light snow that had followed the rain the night before did not slow her down. The next twelve hours were a blur to Holly: Saks, Bergdorf Goodman, Donna Karan, Aquascutum, Ralph Lauren, Bally of Switzerland, and two or three shops on Madison bearing the names of designers Holly didn’t know. But Missy knew them, and now Holly owned at least two items from each of them. The brand-new credit cards were presented at each place, and Holly noticed the reactions of everyone in the shops, even the department stores, when they saw the name Randall. Her selections were boxed and bagged and silently, smilingly taken away for delivery to the apartment.

  Perhaps the most interesting event yesterday, Holly now reflected, was lunch. In the middle of the whirlwind invasion of shops and stores, Missy had taken her to the Polo Bar and treated her to a delicious meal. Payback, she’d laughed, for Holly’s having allowed her to live vicariously through someone else’s shopping. It had been over grilled chicken salad and white wine that the other woman had enumerated a few salient points about her new destination.

  “Two things you have to remember about Randall,” Missy had announced. “One: practically everybody is rich. Two: most of them are rich thanks to your great-great-grandfather, old John Randall. He came to America from England not long after the Civil War. He was a fisherman in Dover, where the industry was awfully crowded, and he decided he’d have a better chance over here. He started out up in Mystic, with a small fleet of boats. Later, he got the idea of drying and smoking and packaging, and he bought up several hundred acres near Greenwich to build a plant. He also built the house on the point for himself and his wife. By the time he died, the business had grown a lot. His son, the original James, took over the running of things.

  “The town of Randall sprang up around the Randall Fish plant. Workers, mostly, but the managers and executives built big houses nearby, too, including my great-grandfather. When the National Food Corporation made an offer to buy the Randall Fish Company, old James managed to turn it into a merger. He died shortly after World War Two. His son—your grandfather, James Junior—got the corporation in on the ground floor of the frozen food industry, specifically frozen fish. Later, when NaFCorp went public … well, everybody got rich, including my family, but nobody more than your family. So, that’s how a lot of frozen cod and herring got us both where we are today!”

  Holly laughed politely, holding back the question she was burning to ask, presenting Missy with another one instead.

  “What is it like in Randall now?” she asked.

  Missy shrugged. “Well, the plant was torn down years ago, so the town changed. Now we have three distinct groups there: the old upper-middle-class group of onetime Randall executives, which includes my family; the former plant workers, who now have other jobs, I guess; and the new people. The rich New Yorkers who did the suburb thing in the fifties and sixties. The richer they were, the farther out of the city they got. Larchmont, Greenwich, Darien; all those places. Randall was particularly attractive, a picturesque little waterfront village just across the border from New York, with lots of rolling hills nearby that would be perfect for big houses. So now we have fresh blood, a brand-new upper-class enclave. And a lot of their kids are our age. I went to school with them. You’ll be meeting as many of them as I can talk into coming to Randall House—with your permission, of course.”

  “What do you mean?” Holly asked. “Why would you have to talk them into it?”

  Missy blushed and looked away. “Sorry, that slipped out.”

  Holly reached for her wineglass, staring at the other woman. “You’re referring to my parents, aren’t you?”

  After a moment, Missy nodded.

  So, Holly thought. This is it, the subject I wanted to bring up in the first place. She leaned forward.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Melissa MacGraw summoned the waiter and asked for more wine. When the glasses were refilled, she took a deep breath and looked directly at Holly.

  “Okay,” she said.

  And she had told her.

  Now, as they packed the last of the bags, Holly looked over at her new friend, grateful for her honesty. Thanks to Missy, she was better prepared for what she would find in her new home. She was now, as a result of her grandfather’s will, the principal heir of a once highly regarded family whose reputation had been sullied by scandal. The local gentry had stopped coming around, and her great-aunt Alicia had lived out the final years of her life in relative seclusion. There had been no parties at Randall House in a long time, and the family was not included on many guest lists. It was difficult to believe; it seemed so old-fashioned, somehow. But there it was.

  As she led her friend out of the bedroom for lunch in the dining room, she made a silent vow to herself. She, Holly Alicia Randall, was going to change all that. If she was to join this family, share in its great fortune, she was going to bring something into it. She would meet the local families, get to know them, and improve their opinion of the Randalls.

  It was, she decided, the least she could do.

  Almost exactly at the time that Holly was making this decision on Central Park South, one of her new relatives at Randall House was making a similar one. She sat in the rarely used office on the ground floor of the house, at the big oak desk from which her husband’s grandfather had once run the family business. Occasionally she would pause to sip her coffee and gaze out the window at the snow that fell softly on the lawn
. Then she would pick up her pen and continue writing, carefully copying the words from the etiquette book that lay open beside her notepad.

  John and Catherine Randall request the pleasure of your company at a birthday party for their niece, Holly Randall, on Christmas Eve, December 24.…

  There was a little smile on her face as she wrote. This would be her first act as a hostess at Randall House, and she was certain that most of the one hundred fifty people she planned to invite would attend. The scandal was twenty-five years old now, a quarter of a century. Besides, even the die-hard snobs would not be able to resist the chance to meet the new member of the Randall family. Oh, no: she was counting on their curiosity to overcome their reserve.

  She would hire an orchestra, and extra help, and she had already placed a call to Madge Alden, the most sought-after caterer in Greenwich. There would be a great tree, twelve feet high, near the bottom of the staircase in the Great Hall, as in the old days when the Randall Christmas party had been the social highlight of the year in this part of Connecticut. Of course, Emily and Alicia had entertained three or four hundred guests at a time, or so she’d been told, but that was long ago. This party would be smaller, perhaps, but it would be memorable.

  On Christmas Eve, she and John were going to show the world how happy they were, how proud they were of Holly, their new relation.

  After Christmas—well …

  She smiled again as she finished writing out the invitation, and glanced at her watch. There would be plenty of time to drive into town now, to the stationery shop on Main Street. Gilt-edged cream card stock, she decided. Then back here, to get ready for Holly’s arrival. At four o’clock, she and her husband would be standing at the top of the front steps before the house, waving as the car came up the drive. The servants would be there, too, organized by Mrs. Jessel. Everyone would be smiling, welcoming the young woman into their midst. And no one would be smiling more than John and herself. They would appear to be the two happiest people in the world.