A Comedy of Heirs (14 page)

“Remember the ancestor I told you about that killed his wife because he didn't like the way she cooked?” I said. My mother nodded. “That is so far removed that it doesn't really bother me. Most people have an ugly little thing or two on their family tree. It would be strange if you didn't have something like that hanging on your tree. It's part of finding out who you are and where you come from. But this one is different.”

“Because it's so close to you,” Mom said. It wasn't a question. She understood.

“Yeah, and because everybody I ever trusted lied to me about it.”

“If they've all lied, there can be only one reason.”

I looked at her. She gave me that wide-eyed-doe look. She wanted me to say what she was thinking, but I couldn't this time, because I wasn't sure what she was thinking. Most of the time I either know or I'm close enough that we can play this little game. This time, I truly had no idea. “What?”

“All of them wouldn't be ashamed of this. If they are all lying about it, it's because one of them did it.”

“Gee thanks, Mom,” I said. Sheriff Brooke was within fifteen feet of the car now. “I'll talk to you more about it later.”

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think so. This whole week has been really stressful and then I find out this. What else could happen?”

“Don't ever say those words,” my mother said with a serious look. “I'm not superstitious, but one seems to invite trouble when one speaks those words.”

“Gee thanks again, Mom,” I said. “See you later or in the morning. Whichever.”

Sheriff Brooke got in the car, but not without giving me one of those I'll-talk-to-you-later type of looks. I stepped away from the car and waved to them as they pulled out of the parking lot.

It's because one of them did it.
It seemed no matter what I did, I kept coming back to that. One of my beloved, my trusted, killed Nate Keith. I breathed in deeply, relishing the snow smell in the air. It was going to snow again.

I was tired. My eyes burned in their sockets and my legs felt like they weighed thirty pounds apiece. This pregnancy seemed to just wear me out and make me tired. No morning sickness or anything like that. Just total exhaustion. Today had been a grueling day. Five or so hours at a library that was forty minutes away, dinner with fifty people at Del Pietro's and now I had to carol for two hours. It would most likely be midnight before I got to bed. It wasn't like I'd worked eight hours on my feet, but research time can be mentally taxing.

I still had to tell my mother that I was pregnant. I'd imagined just how I was going to tell her, hoping with all hope that her reaction would be like I'd imagined it. Happy, rejoiceful, supportive. My mother didn't take to well to change. It was part of the reason her relationship with the sheriff puzzled me. She was severely set in her ways, and sometimes a good thing could actually depress her.

One good thing that had come from imagining telling my mother about this baby was the fact that I was becoming more used to the idea of the baby. It wasn't just a blue stick at the doctor's office anymore. I could imagine pink pudgy toes and dimpled hands. When it's the size of an egg, it's so hard to imagine the living, breathing baby that will eventually be born.

I was going to have a baby. I was going to be a mom. Again.

“Hey, Torie!” Rudy yelled from across the parking lot. “Come on, we've got to get singing before it gets too late.”

I walked over to my husband and the group of people standing around him. I smiled up at him and he instinctively kissed me. It was time to sing.

Seventeen

“Oh, Christmas tree, Oh, Christmas tree…” we all sang. My left hand held Rachel's and my right hand held a candle. She sang her little heart out. Snow had begun to fall and I couldn't believe our luck at this seemingly perfect moment.

The crowd of my family snuggled in together and in front of the Murdoch Inn. Eleanore and Oscar and the few guests that weren't my family members stood at the door to hear us. Other people on the street had come to their front doors to hear us, too. Uncle Curtis's deep baritone voice surrounded me like a warm glove from behind.

Aunt Charlotte often mentioned that Uncle Curtis was sort of homely but his voice is what had made her notice him. I don't think he was homely. He was just sort of plain looking, punctuated by absolutely no outstanding features at all and a semibald head. He couldn't even be bald all the way.

The next song was “Joy to the World.” The song that can get stuck in my head and be there for a week. We all moved up along River Point Road with the river on our right. The water looked like black oil slithering south, swallowing up all the big fat snowflakes that fell into it.

Then I heard somebody say, “What is that?”

We all kept singing. I am fairly short and was surrounded by people so I couldn't really see what was going on. A few voices trailed off and people were beginning to walk over to the river. I'm not sure what to call that feeling you get, when you know something, and you have no real way of knowing it. But, I knew something was wrong. I made my way through the ten or so people in front of me dragging Rachel close behind me.

In the Mississippi, facedown, was a body. “All right, everybody back!” I heard Rudy yell. “Go on.”

“Damon,” I said. Damon, who stood about three people from me, walked over, staring at the body in the river the whole time. “Run up the road to my house. The sheriff is there taking my mother home. Tell him to get down here.”

“Who is it?” I heard somebody ask. I think the voice was my cousin Wendy's, but I couldn't be sure. “Is he dead?” another voice asked.

“Okay,” Rudy said. “This is nothing for children to see. Everybody go back to our house or to the Inn or a restaurant or something.”

I was frozen, looking into the water at the body that floated there. “He could have floated for miles,” Rudy said to me. He knew what I was thinking. He knew I was wondering if it was anybody that I knew. “Why don't you take Rachel and Mary home.”

“No,” I said. I looked around and saw Aunt Sissy standing by a fire hydrant. I walked over with Rachel and now Mary. “Could they stand back here with you, or would you take them up to Pierre's bakery for a goodie or something?”

“Of course,” Aunt Sissy said. “I don't want to be here when they pull him out, anyway.”

Aunt Sissy walked up the street. She'd make a left at the next street to get to Pierre's. Damon had run up River Point Road to my house, which was only two or three blocks away.

It might as well have been forty miles because the four minutes that it took to get the sheriff creeped by as we watched the snowflakes getting smaller. I thought I could actually hear them landing on the ground and the normal soothing lap of the Mississippi River seemed to echo in my ears. Finally the sheriff pulled up to where we stood by the wharf. He'd called the paramedics and everything from my house. It was another eternity before the EMTs got there. The whole time we all stood around trying not to say the obvious. One of us would say something like, “I haven't seen so and so in a few days.” And then change the subject again real fast until one of us would say it again with a different name.

The one person that I'd seemed to forget about and hadn't noticed that he wasn't at the dinner this evening was Uncle Jedidiah. I thought it strange, though, that none of his offspring had asked where he was or mentioned where he was. The EMTs pulled the body out of the water and, unfortunately, I was right. It was Uncle Jedidiah Keith. The bottom fell out of my stomach and a cold sweat broke out along my back.

Oh my God.
That was my uncle lying there in that freezing cold water! Tears rose to my eyes and froze on my cheeks as they fell. “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

Rudy was instantly beside me with his arm around me. “It's all right,” I heard his voice say.

“Oh my God,” I muttered. “It's Uncle Jed…”

“I know,” Rudy soothed. “I know.” He held me close as I turned my head and sobbed heavily into his coat. I couldn't tell you what anybody else's reaction was. I couldn't even tell you who else was present. When I gained control of myself I took a good long look at the stretcher with my uncle's body and a white sheet draped over it. I doubted I'd ever forget this.

It had stopped snowing.

Eighteen

I sat at the kitchen table shoving a piece of banana cake with cream cheese frosting in my mouth as fast as I could. My eyes were swollen and my nose wasn't quite finished running from the crying fit I'd just had at the discovery of my uncle's body in the cold Mississippi River. My mother sat across from me, filling my glass of milk as fast as I drained it.

“I just can't believe it,” I said with a slight hiccup.

“Just calm down,” Mom said. “We don't know what happened yet.”

“He's dead,” I said. “That's what happened.”

“Just wait until Colin gets back before you go and convince yourself that evil play is at hand. Okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “You're right. But, I still can't believe it.”

“What're the plans for the rest of the reunion?” she asked.

“As far as I'm concerned, it's over. We're all going to be at a funeral instead of a dinner at the KC hall. How can we go on and celebrate and stuff?”

“Well, you might want to ask his kids what they want to do. They may want to have the kind of wake where people party instead of moping.”

I just looked at her.

“Well, you never know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

Aunt Sissy had come back already and I'd put my girls to bed without telling them what had happened. Aunt Sissy didn't feel well so she went upstairs to my bedroom and lay down across the bed. Rudy had walked me home and then gone back with the sheriff.

“Why couldn't it have been Ruth?” I asked.

“Victory!” my mother snapped. “Don't you ever say something like that.”

“I can't help it,” I said. “Uncle Jed was a fun-loving drunk. He never did anything to anybody.” All right, I felt bad over the statement I'd just made, but at the time I said it, I meant it. Actually, now I felt really, really bad. If something happened to her now I was going to just be convinced it was because I said it. My family wrote the book on how to feel guilty about everything. I can feel guilty about something that has nothing to do with anything.

My mother gave me her best I'm-ashamed-of-you look. Funny how that worked, because now I felt all ashamed of myself. “Sorry,” I muttered. “I … I just feel so bad. I feel responsible because this happened in my town. I feel responsible because this happened at the family reunion that I was hosting. I feel guilty because I wonder if any of the stuff I was digging up on Nate Keith had anything to do with this … I just feel so many things. And none of it is good.”

“That's perfectly natural,” Mom said.

“It is? Is it natural to immediately feel guilty over everything?”

“Are you okay?” Mom asked.

“I think … well, actually no. I'm pregnant,” I spit out.

“Tell me something I don't know,” she said.

I stared at her with sheer astonishment. “What? What do you mean, tell you something you don't already know? What do you mean? Just … how … what do you mean by that?”

“You go almost twenty hours a day. The past two weeks you're nodding off at eight
P.M
. unless you have to go somewhere. You have a glow about you. You've been acting strange, aside from the fact that you've got fifty people who are related to you within a five-mile radius—and they are all relatives of your father's. If it were my family you wouldn't be so nuts. But you've been acting strange. The night Rudy smashed his nose, he was acting strange. You went to the doctor and yet you never told me what the results were. I just figured it out. Mothers know these things,” she said with a big sigh.

“I hate you,” I said.

“No you don't,” she said and filled my glass up again. “You wish you could be just like me.”

“You're insufferable.”

“So anyway,” she said smiling from ear to ear. “Congratulations. Where are you gonna put it?”

“God, I don't know. We could do a room addition. We've got the money from Rudy's bonus last year,” I said.

I scraped the last bite of cake off my plate, making sure to get all the icing on the edge and savoring the richness of it. My mother always knew everything. That is so irritating. Plus she's so darn smug about it.

“Well, I'm getting married,” she said.

The banana cake seemed to get hung right there at the part of my throat where pills and stuff always get stuck. I gulped down the milk and swallowed hard. I coughed a little and then just stared at my mother. She didn't say a word. I got up and walked to the living room and then came back to the kitchen. I started to speak and couldn't.

Married? Married. I assumed she meant she was marrying … God, life is just not fair.

I walked over to the back door and scratched my head. Then I came back to the table and sat down and looked at her again. She hadn't grown any horns or anything, so as much as I could tell, she was still my mother. I took my dirty dishes to the sink and set them in there a little too roughly.

I went back to the table and looked at my mother again. “Did somebody do a Vulcan mind meld on you?” I asked.

“That wasn't exactly the reaction I was expecting,” she said.

“What about Sean Connery?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“I thought you were gonna marry him?”

“He's already married.”

“That never stopped you from saying it before.”

Flashing that get-real look at me, she crossed her arms and tilted her head, then fixed an expectant stare at me. Okay, she'd told me congratulations. She had been happy for me. I should do the same thing for her. I didn't want to, but I should. “Congratulations,” I said.