Dolores Claiborne (33 page)

He says, “I’m pleased to inform you that, aside from a small bequest to The New England Home for Little Wanderers, you are the sole beneficiary of Mrs. Donovan’s will.”

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and all I could think of was how she’d caught onto the vacuum cleaner trick after awhile.

“You’ll receive a confirming telegram later today,” he says, “but I’m very glad to have spoken to you well before its arrival—Mrs. Donovan was very emphatic about her desires in this matter.”

“Ayuh,” I says, “she could be emphatic, all right.”

“I’m sure you’re grieved at Mrs. Donovan’s passing—we all are—but I want you to know that you are going to be a very wealthy woman, and if I can do anything at all to assist you in your new circumstances, I would be as happy to do so as I was to assist Mrs. Donovan. Of course I’ll be calling to give you updates on the progress of the will through probate, but I really don’t expect any problems or delays. In fact—”

“Whoa on, chummy,” I says, n it came out in a kind of croak. Sounded quite a bit like a frog in a dry pond. “How much money are you talkin about?”

Accourse I
knew
she was well off, Andy; the fact that in the last few years she didn’t wear nothing but flannel nighties n lived on a steady diet of Campbell’s soup and Gerber’s baby-food didn’t change that. I saw the house, I saw the cars, n I sometimes looked at a wee bit more of the papers that came in those padded envelopes than just the signature line. Some were stock transfer forms, n I know that when you’re sellin two thousand shares of Upjohn and buyin four thousand of Mississippi Valley Light n Power, you ain’t exactly totterin down the road to the poorhouse.

I wa’ant askin so I could start applyin for credit cards n orderin things from the Sears catalogue, either—don’t go gettin that idear. I had a better reason than that. I knew that the number of people who thought I’d murdered her would most likely go up with every dollar she left me, n I wanted to know how bad I was gonna get hurt. I thought it might be as much as sixty or seventy thousand dollars ... although he
had
said she left some money to an orphanage, and I figured that’d take it down some.

There was somethin else bitin me, too—bitin the way a June deerfly does when it settles on the back of your neck. Somethin way wrong about the whole proposition. I couldn’t put m‘finger on it, though—no more’n I’d been able to put m’finger on exactly who Greenbush was when his secretary first said his name.

He said somethin I couldn’t quite make out. It sounded like
blub-dub-a-gub-area-of-thirty-million-dollars.

“What did you say, sir?” I ast.

“That after probate, legal fees, and a few other small deductions, the total should be in the area of thirty million dollars.”

My hand on the telephone had started to feel the way it does when I wake up n realize I slep most of the night on it ... numb through the middle n all tingly around the edges. My feet were tinglin, too, n all at once the world felt like it was made of glass again.

“I’m sorry,” I says. I could hear my mouth talkin perfectly well n perfectly clear, but I didn’t seem to be attached to any of the words that were comin out of it. It was just flappin, like a shutter in a high wind. “The connection here isn’t very good. I thought you said somethin with the word
million
in it. Then I laughed, just to show how silly I knew that was, but part of me must’ve thought it wa’ant silly at all, because that was the fakestsoundin laugh I ever heard come outta me—
Yar-yar-yar,
it sounded like.

“I
did
say million,” he said. “In fact, I said
thirty
million. And do you know, I think he woulda chuckled if it hadn’t been Vera Donovan’s dead body I was gettin that money over. I think he was
excited
—that underneath that dry, prissy voice he was excited as hell. I s’pose he felt like John Bears-ford Tipton, the rich fella who used to give away a million bucks at a crack on that old TV show. He wanted my business, accourse that was part of it—I got a feelin that money’s like electric trains to fellas like him n he didn’t want to see such an almighty big set as Vera’s taken away from him—but I think most of the fun of it for him was just hearin me flub-dubbin around like I was doin.

“I don’t get it,” I says, and now my voice was so weak I could hardly hear it myself.

“I think I understand how you feel,” he says. “It’s a very large sum, and of course it will take a little getting used to. ”

“How much is it
really?”
I ast him, and that time he
did
chuckle. If he’d been where I coulda got to him, Andy, I believe I woulda booted him in the seat of the pants.

He told me again,
thirty million dollars,
n I kep thinkin that if my hand got any stupider, I was gonna drop the phone. And I started to feel panicky. It was like someone was inside my head, swingin a steel cable around n around. I’d think
thirty million dollars,
but those were just words. When I tried to see what they meant, the only pitcher I could make inside my head was like the ones in the Scrooge McDuck comic books Joe Junior used to read Little Pete when Pete was four or five. I saw a great big vault fulla coins n bills, only instead of Scrooge McDuck paddlin around in all that dough with the spats on his flippers n those little round spectacles perched on his beak, I’d see
me
doin it in my bedroom slippers. Then that pitcher’d slip away and I’d think of how Sammy Marchant’s eyes had looked when they moved from the rollin pin to me n then back to the rollin pin again. They looked like Selena’s had looked that day in the garden, all dark n full of questions. Then I thought of the woman who called on the phone n said there were still decent Christians on the island who didn’t have to live with murderers. I wondered what that woman n her friends were gonna think when they found out Vera’s death had left me thirty million dollars to the good ... and the thought of that came close to puttin me into a panic.

“You can’t do it!” I says, kinda wild. “Do you hear me? You can’t make me take it!”

Then it was
his
turn to say he couldn’t quite hear—that the connection must be loose someplace along the line. I ain’t a bit surprised, either. When a man like Greenbush hears someone sayin they don’t want a thirty-million-dollar lump of cash, they figure the equipment
must
be frigged up. I opened my mouth to tell him again that he’d have to take it back, that he could give every cent of it to The New England Home for Little Wanderers, when I suddenly understood what was wrong with all this. It didn’t just hit me; it come down on my head like a dropped load of bricks.

“Donald n Helga!” I says. I musta sounded like a TV game-show contestant comin up with the right answer in the last second or two of the bonus round.

“I beg pardon?” he asks, kinda cautious.

“Her
kids!”
I says. “Her son and her daughter! That money belongs to them, not me! They’re
kin!
I ain’t nothing but a jumped-up housekeeper!”

There was such a long pause then that I felt sure we musta been disconnected, and I wa’ant a bit sorry. I felt faint, to tell you the truth. I was about to hang up when he says in this flat, funny voice, “You don’t know. ”

“Don’t know
what?”
I shouted at him. “I know she’s got a son named Donald and a daughter named Helga! I know they was too damned good to come n visit her up here, although she always kep space for em, but I guess they won’t be too good to divide up a pile like the one you’re talkin about now that she’s dead!”

“You don’t know,” he said again. And then, as if he was askin questions to himself instead of to me, he says,
“Could
you not know, after all the time you worked for her?
Could
you? Wouldn’t Kenopensky have told you?” N before I could get a word in edgeways, he started answerin his own damned questions. “Of course it’s possible. Except for a squib on an inside page of the local paper the day after, she kept the whole thing under wraps—you could do that thirty years ago, if you were willing to pay for the privilege. I’m not sure there were even obituaries.” He stopped, then says, like a man will when he’s just discoverin somethin new—somethin
huge
—about someone he’s known all his life: “She talked about them as if they were
alive,
didn’t she. All these years!”

“What are you globberin about?” I shouted at him. It felt like an elevator was goin down in my stomach, and all at once all sorts of things—little things—started fittin together in my mind. I didn’t want em to, but it went on happenin, just the same.

“Accourse
she talked about em like they were alive! They
are
alive! He’s got a real estate company in Arizona—Golden West Associates! She designs dresses in San Francisco ... Gaylord Fashions!”

Except she’d always read these big paperback historical novels with women in low-cut dresses kissin men without their shirts on, and the trade name for those books was Golden West—it said so on a little foil strip at the top of every one. And it all at once occurred to me that she’d been born in a little town called Gaylord, Missouri. I wanted to think it was somethin else—Galen, or maybe Galesburg—but I knew it wasn’t. Still, her daughter mighta named her dress business after the town her mother’d been born in ... or so I told myself.

“Miz Claiborne,” Greenbush says, talkin in a low, sorta anxious voice, “Mrs. Donovan’s husband was killed in an unfortunate accident when Donald was fifteen and Helga was thirteen—”

“I know that!” I says, like I wanted him to believe that if I knew that I must know everything.

“—and there was consequently a great deal of bad feeling between Mrs. Donovan and the children.”

I’d known that, too. I remembered people remarkin on how quiet the kids had been when they showed up on Memorial Day in 1961 for their usual summer on the island, and how several people’d mentioned that you didn’t ever seem to see the three of em together anymore, which was especially strange, considerin Mr. Donovan’s sudden death the year before; usually somethin like that draws people closer ... although I s’pose city folks may be a little different about such things. And then I remembered somethin else, somethin Jimmy DeWitt told me in the fall of that year.

“They had a wowser of an argument in a restaurant just after the Fourth of July in ’61,” I says. “The boy n girl left the next day. I remember the hunky—Kenopensky, I mean—takin em across to the mainland in the big motor launch they had back then.”

“Yes,” Greenbush said. “It so happens that I knew from Ted Kenopensky what that argument was about. Donald had gotten his driver’s license that spring, and Mrs. Donovan had gotten him a car for his birthday. The girl, Helga, said
she
wanted a car, too. Vera—Mrs. Donovan—apparently tried to explain to the girl that the idea was silly, a car would be useless to her without a driver’s license and she couldn’t get one of those until she was fifteen. Helga said that might be true in Maryland, but it wasn’t the case in Maine—that she could get one there at fourteen ... which she was. Could that have been true, Miz Claiborne, or was it just an adolescent fantasy?”

“It
was
true back then,” I says, “although I think you have to be at least fifteen now. Mr. Greenbush, the car she got her boy for his birthday ... was it a Corvette?”

“Yes,” he says, “it was. How did you know that, Miz Claiborne?”

“I musta seen a pitcher of it sometime,” I said, but I hardly heard my own voice. The voice I heard was Vera’s. “I’m tired of seeing them winch that Corvette out of the quarry in the moonlight,” she told me as she lay dyin on the stairs. “Tired of seein how the water ran out of the open window on the passenger side.”

“I’m surprised she kept a picture of it around,” Greenbush said. “Donald and Helga Donovan died in that car, you see. It happened in October of 1961, almost a year to the day after their father died. It seemed the girl was driving.”

He went on talkin, but I hardly heard him, Andy—I was too busy fillin in the blanks for myself, and doin it so fast that I guess I musta known they were dead ... somewhere way down deep I musta known it all along. Greenbush said they’d been drinkin and pushin that Corvette along at better’n a hundred miles an hour when the girl missed a turn and went into the quarry; he said both of em were prob’ly dead long before that fancy two-seater sank to the bottom.

He said it was an accident, too, but maybe I knew a little more about accidents than he did.

Maybe Vera did, too, and maybe she’d always known that the argument they had that summer didn’t have Jack Shit to do with whether or not Helga was gonna get a State of Maine driver’s license; that was just the handiest bone they had to pick. When McAuliffe ast me what Joe and I argued about before he got chokin me, I told him it was money on top n booze underneath. The tops of people’s arguments are mostly quite a lot different from what’s on the bottom, I’ve noticed, and it could be that what they were
really
arguin about that summer was what had happened to Michael Donovan the year before.

She and the hunky killed the man, Andy—she did everything but come out n tell me so. She never got caught, either, but sometimes there’s people inside of families who’ve got pieces of the jigsaw puzzle the law never sees. People like Selena, for instance ... n maybe people like Donald n Helga Donovan, too. I wonder how they looked at her that summer, before they had that argument in The Harborside Restaurant n left Little Tall for the last time. I’ve tried n tried to remember how their eyes were when they looked at her, if they were like Selena’s when she looked at me, n I just can’t do it. P’raps I will in time, but that ain’t nothing I’m really lookin forward to, if you catch my meanin.

I
do
know that sixteen was young for a little hellion like Don Donovan to have a driver’s license—too damned young—and when you add in that hot car, why, you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Vera was smart enough to know that, and she must have been scared sick; she might have hated the father, but she loved the son like life itself. I know she did. She gave it to him just the same, though. Tough as she was, she put that rocket in his pocket, n Helga‘s, too, as it turned out, when he wasn’t but a junior in high school n prob’ly just startin to shave. I think it was guilt, Andy. And maybe I want to think it was
just
that because I don’t like to think there was fear mixed in with it, that maybe a couple of rich kids like them could blackmail their mother for the things they wanted over the death of their father. I
don’t
really think it ... but it’s possible, you know; it is possible. In a world where a man can spend months tryin to take his own daughter to bed, I believe anything is possible.