The Inheritance Read online

  “Oh.” She continued to stare off at the empty docks in the distance, weather-worn and crumbling, a ghostly reminder of the bustling industry that had once been this town’s lifeblood. And the pretty inn, once the packing plant, now undoubtedly filled for approximately six months of the year with adventurous and invariably obnoxious New Yorkers who would roam the quaint village streets for photo opportunities and hire local men to take them out for day sails. She could imagine them catching the occasional fish, shrieking with amusement through their beer and martinis, while the silent former fishermen, now reduced to tourist guides, looked on. Another summer adventure, another wonderful story to tell friends back in New York, over dinner at Le Cirque. Any locals fortunate enough to have kept their fishing or packing or carting jobs when the Randall Fish Company had been swallowed by NaFCorp must have long ago moved away to the new upstate location, wherever that was. Those who remained probably took the tourists sailing, or worked in that inn over there, or manned the cutesy gift shops she’d passed on Main Street. Cunning driftwood centerpieces and charming bouquets of dried sedge and sea grass, twenty bucks a bunch.

  Her great-grandfather had done this. She remembered the expressions in the eyes of the local natives in the drugstore a few minutes ago, thinking, No wonder.…

  “Good morning, folks.”

  They both turned around, in the direction of the big, hearty voice. There stood a tall, lanky blond man in a dark blue uniform with brass buttons on the front. A badge over his left jacket pocket identified him as CHIEF. He was about forty, Holly decided, with brown eyes and a thick mustache the same dark blond shade as the hair above, which went well with his ruddy, wind-chiseled face. A seafaring face, the face of a fisherman.

  “Hi, Pete,” Kevin said. “Pete Helmer, Holly Randall. Holly, this is the head of the Randall Police.”

  “Such as it is,” Pete Helmer said, laughing and reaching out a big hand.

  Holly took it. “How do you do?”

  “Welcome to Randall, Holly Randall.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and they all laughed at the irony. “What do you mean, ‘such as it is,’ Chief Helmer?”

  “Pete,” he corrected.

  “Holly,” she replied.

  “Well, Holly, there’s just the three of us, don’t you know, myself and two overpaid, good-for-nothing deputies. Four, if you count old Mrs. Proctor, our secretary. Not that we’re called on to do much, mind you. It’s a quiet town.”

  She nodded, avoiding his eyes. He had a frank, penetrating gaze, a way of looking straight at her that was vaguely unsettling. She looked down at his left hand, noticing that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, then wondering why she’d noticed that. Disconcerted, still staring at his hand, she nonetheless produced a weak smile, grateful for the warm welcome from at least one of the townspeople.

  “It’s a very pretty town,” she finally offered, looking away from his hand toward the little harbor.

  Pete nodded. “That it is. I hope you’ll be happy at Randall House. If there’s anything the local constabulary can do for you, just give us a buzz.”

  “Thank you.”

  The chief glanced over her shoulder, raising a hand and waving to someone behind her. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I think old Tod Farley has another complaint. That’ll be, let’s see, the third one this week. He says one of the Delany boys has been filching his catch. Oh, well, it’s always something. See you around, Kev. Nice meeting you, Holly.”

  “Good-bye,” she said as he walked off toward the pier. Then she turned to Kevin. “What’s that about filching someone’s catch? Do the people around here still fish?”

  Kevin shrugged. “Some of them, like Tod Farley and the Delanys. They sell some to the Herringbone and keep the rest for themselves. Well, where would you like to go now?”

  She was staring off at the docks, watching the police chief trying to placate a wildly gesticulating elderly man. She smiled, thinking, I’m glad some of them still go fishing.…

  “Hello,” Kevin said.

  She blinked and returned her attention to him. “What? Oh—I guess back to the car. Let’s go through the Green first, though. It looks beautiful.”

  He nodded, and the two of them walked back the way they’d come.

  Old Tod Farley was in high dudgeon again. Pete Helmer grimaced inwardly as he nodded at the shouting man, thinking that nobody’s dudgeon was higher than Tod’s. Especially when he’d drunk his breakfast, which, judging from the fumes, was apparently the case. Pete took a step back from him, nodded some more, and sighed, thinking of Holly Randall.

  She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. More beautiful than Carol, the former Mrs. Helmer, who’d been Miss Randall High some twenty years ago and was considered the catch of the town.

  Well, Pete had caught her, and a fat lot of good it had done him. Carol was off in New Haven now, where she’d lived for the last six years with their two boys, whom Pete rarely got to see, and her new husband, the bank manager. Another police widow, refusing to have anything to do with her former husband but taking a third of his weekly paycheck just the same, thank you very much. Oh, well …

  Holly Randall, he thought. Holly. Nice name. It made him think of Christmas. Not the lonely, gray holidays of the last few years, but the ones before, the Christmases of his childhood and the early years with Carol and the boys. Holly.

  He nodded again at the vociferous Tod and turned his head to watch Holly Randall walking away up the side street with Kevin Jessel. Yes, he thought with another sigh. Beautiful.

  He decided to keep an eye on her.

  It happened a few minutes later, shortly after they arrived on the Green. Looking back on it in the next few days and weeks, Holly would wonder at it, replay it in her mind. She even began to have dreams about it.

  She walked back down Main Street, Kevin at her side, looking in the various shop windows and asking him about the library and the churches and the restaurants they passed. Kevin was apparently only too happy to be her tour guide. He kept up a cheerful narration of everything they saw: the library was small, but Mrs. White knew how to find any book for you; the diner was okay, and the Italian restaurant was actually very good; the churches kept up a friendly rivalry, with Father O’Brien and Reverend Ellsworth constantly struggling to secure the larger congregation. Of course, if you were Jewish, or anything else that wasn’t Catholic or Methodist, you had to drive a fair piece to find places of worship. Typical small town.

  Holly smiled at his observations. Yes, she thought, it really is a typical small town, and very New England. Or, at least, what she had always imagined when she’d thought of New England. Thornton Wilder and Norman Rockwell. Now it was her town, too, as different from southern California as it was possible to be.

  She was thinking just this as they came back into the square and strolled through the corner entrance into the Green. The sidewalks here were in an X-configuration, merging at the wide space in the center where the bandstand stood. This was an elevated, round structure of wood and wrought iron, with several rows of park benches on all four sides, facing in. There were other benches here and there, off among the trees and well-tended shrubbery on the grass. The trees were bare now, but Holly imagined how they would be in spring and summer, forming large patches of shade on a sunny afternoon.

  As they arrived at the bandstand, Holly noticed something else about the park, something she hadn’t seen from the street. Off to the side of the big, open-air building was a life-sized statue made of some heavy, dark metal on a granite pedestal. It was the figure of a man, his left arm at his side, the right extended out in front of him as if he were pointing, indicating something off in the distance. She glanced over at the figure without much interest, then away, then quickly back again, feeling the breath catch in her throat.

  She stared, and she would later remember that the small, growing sense of surprise she experienced very nearly prepared her for what was to happen next. Slowly, as if in a tranc
e, she turned from Kevin and walked over to the statue. She regarded the strong, stern face of the man, felt the power in his torso as he pointed off toward whatever it was that he saw. Then she lowered her gaze to the brass plaque below him, set into the base. She was suddenly aware of the cold, aware of the slight sound as Kevin came softly over to stand beside her.

  The plaque read:

  JOHN WILLIAM RANDALL

  1858–1932

  Looking Ever Forward

  Her gaze rose to the powerful face again. She stared some more, feeling something of the force of him, thinking, This man was my great-great-grandfather. He started the Randall Fish Company and founded this town. He’d built Randall House for his wife.…

  She blinked and turned to Kevin. “What was her name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “This man’s wife,” she said, pointing.

  Kevin smiled. “Alicia.”

  She nodded and turned back to the statue. Of course, she thought. Alicia. Years later, her granddaughter, my great-aunt, would bear her name.…

  But first she and old John, this man, would have a son, James. It was he who built the fish company into an industry, and he who merged it with the National Food Corporation, making the Randall family one of the richest in the country. But, in making himself rich, he had turned this lovely place into a ghost town, a marginal tourist trap, a shadow of its proud, industrious former self.…

  As she later remembered it, she was mulling over this thought when she turned at last from the graven image of her imposing forebear.

  And froze.

  They were standing on the sidewalk on the opposite side of Main Street, perhaps fifty yards away. A woman, about thirty, and a little boy no more than ten. Holly looked first at the woman: pretty, slender, blond; then her gaze moved slowly down to the child: pretty, slender, darker than his mother. The two of them stood quite still, so still that she actually had the fleeting impression of a photograph, or of the statue she’d just been contemplating. And they were both staring directly at her, into her eyes.

  Then she noticed the others. Two old men were sitting near the woman and the boy, on a bench in front of the barbershop, one with a cigarette and the other with a pipe. They, too, were watching her.

  It was very quiet in the square, unnaturally so. Holly was suddenly, acutely aware of this, and of the complete lack of any movement whatsoever. She could hear the sound of her own breathing, feel the blood throbbing in her veins. Slowly, with a vague but growing sense of unease, she looked over to her left. Two women on the walk near the entrance to the dress shop, still, suspended, staring. And, close to them, a teenage boy and girl; lovers, perhaps, holding hands. Staring.

  She turned her head to her right. An elderly woman stood on the sidewalk over there with a poodle on a leash, and a young woman about Holly’s age stood near them. Even the dog was motionless, regarding her. She turned around to look behind her. There, on the opposite sidewalk beyond the bandstand and the statue, some six or seven others, watching her. She could feel the eyes, the naked intensity of their silent gaze boring into her, violating her. And, most of all, she was aware of the awful stillness of this oppressive, claustrophobic, four-sided, freeze-frame tableau.

  When the hand suddenly clamped down on her shoulder she actually jumped, emitting a startled little sound somewhere between a squeak and a sigh. She turned toward Kevin, into the big, solid, reassuring bulk of him, and sagged against his chest. His other arm came up to steady her.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered.

  She nodded, mute, dazed, aware of the welcoming warmth as he placed one arm across her trembling shoulders. Then he picked up the drugstore shopping bag and moved her gently forward. One step, then another. Three. Four. They were walking now, gaining momentum, toward Main Street and the parking lot. And by their movement the spell was broken.

  The tableau dissolved. The woman with the little boy reached out to take his hand, and they moved away down the sidewalk. The two old men resumed their smoky conversation. The two women turned and entered the dress shop. The young lovers laughed and embraced. The poodle ran off, dragging his mistress behind him. Several cars materialized, moving in various directions about the square. In that long, long walk across the Green, Holly began to hear the sounds: voices and barking and a steeple bell as it began to toll the hour, followed immediately by the identical clangor of its rival across the street. There was even soft music coming from somewhere, from the direction of the diner. A popular rock ballad, probably from a jukebox.

  By the time they crossed the street to the car, her breathing and her pulse rate had returned to normal. He handed her in, closed the door, and went around to the driver side. She sat there, staring forward through the windshield, acutely aware of the numbness in her arms and legs. She was grateful for his polite silence as he steered the car out of the lot onto Main Street, in the direction of home.

  Home, she thought. Randall House.

  Then, as the car swiftly and silently put distance between them and the town, she thought of her mother, not Mary Smith but Constance Randall. She thought of Constance, and she thought of old James, the statue’s son. They, the two of them, were the reasons for what had just occurred in the square. They were responsible. Constance and old James: the one had murdered her husband, and the other had murdered the entire town. And she, Holly, their progeny, was a living reminder of their shame. Constance and old James.

  She thought about them for a long time. As the car approached the massive gates of Randall House, she finally broke the silence. She actually managed to produce a smile for the handsome man beside her, the strong, kind man who had firmly moved her away from the scene of her ordeal. When she spoke, he did not reply, but merely smiled and nodded in what appeared to be understanding.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She could see from the way he smiled and nodded that he did not really understand why she was thanking him. She wasn’t certain she fully understood it herself.

  He stood in the drive near his front door, gazing up through the trees at the lights of Randall House. It was early evening, and he had just finished dinner with Dora and his father. Now Da was comfortably seated in his favorite chair near the fireplace in the living room, a blanket over his knees, and Dora sat near him, knitting. His mother was up at the main house, seeing to Holly’s meal.

  Holly. He’d thought of little else all afternoon, ever since he’d dropped her off at her front door and she’d leaned over toward him and brushed his cheek lightly with her lips. Then she’d smiled, gotten out of the car, and run lightly up the steps and into the house.

  During the drive home, she’d broken their silence only once, to say, “Thank you.”

  Those two words, and the sudden, tingling thrill of her lips on his cheek moments later had stayed with him for the rest of the day. All through the trip to the supermarket with his mother and Mrs. Ramirez, and the workout at the health club in Randall, and dinner. Everything else about the afternoon was a blur, essentially meaningless. He remembered only those lips, that smile, that thank you.…

  Now the long night seemed to stretch before him, and he wondered what he should do with it. There was a bar at Randall Inn, and another one on Main Street that had a pool table. He knew most of the guys who hung out there—hell, he’d grown up with most of them. He could shoot some pool with his pals. Or there was always Greenwich, not too far away. There were clubs there, with women. Rich Greenwich girls …

  No, he decided. Not tonight. Not after those lips, that smile, that thank you …

  She would be in the dining room now, still smiling and making light conversation with the strangers who were now her family. Chicken Kiev, he’d heard Mrs. Ramirez tell his mother, with rice and broccoli. White wine in crystal goblets, shimmering in the candlelight. Then coffee and Mrs. Ramirez’s famous Key lime pie. Later, perhaps, she would join Mr. and Mrs. Randall in the library for their nightly card game. Then she would go upstairs, to the big four
-poster in the master bedroom.

  He imagined her there, and he tried to imagine himself there with her.…

  He blinked, and the distant lights of the house snapped back into focus. From somewhere off among the trees he heard a sharp bark, followed by a faint whistle. He smiled. That kid from the village, Toby, he thought. Toby and his dog love the forest, not to mention the horses in the stable. They always seem to be hanging around. Oh, well …

  The night was cold: it was time to go inside. With a last, longing glance up at the main house, Kevin went back into his own home, to the warmth of the fire and the quiet company of his family. And as he went he thought, Holly.…

  Holly was not thinking about Kevin Jessel; not at the moment, anyway. She had other things on her mind.

  They were in the library, she and John and Catherine, but they were not playing cards. She and Catherine sat beside each other on the couch facing John’s chair. The rich aroma of John’s cigar permeated the room, not at all unpleasantly, as she’d have expected, but, rather, the opposite. She figured, correctly, that this was the most expensive cigar to which she’d ever been exposed. Catherine smoked cigarettes, and Holly found herself staring at the rather peculiar way she held them, cupped in her right hand, almost invisible from view. She’d never seen anyone do that.

  For the past hour, John had been filling her in on family history. Well, mostly his own history, with a smattering of references to other family members, her father among them. But it was clear that most of John’s adult life had been lived away from Randall. Europe, the Caribbean, even South America. He’d knocked around the world, he’d said, several times. When Holly observed that it seemed as though he’d been searching for something, he laughed and shook his head. Not searching, he said. Waiting. Now he realized that he’d spent his entire life waiting for Catherine.

  To give them their due, John and Catherine tried several times to change the subject, to get Holly to talk about her own life. But she merely smiled and shrugged, murmuring something noncommittal about the difference between the Coachella Valley and the real world, and directed the conversation back to them. Where had they met? How long had they known each other before getting married? Where was the wedding in Paris? She wasn’t really interested, but at least it kept the focus on them rather than her, which was what she wanted. She didn’t want to talk about herself to these people. Not yet. Maybe not ever.