The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (3 page)

She parked the car on the street, then made a dash for the front door – the rain was descending in a cold spray, threatening to turn to penetrating sheets – and rang the doorbell,
then unlocked the door and went in as the two-tone chime echoed inside.

‘Ma?’

‘Through here,’ Iris called. Miriam entered, closing the front door. The hallway smelled faintly floral, she noticed as she shed her raincoat and hung it up: The visiting home help
must be responsible. ‘I’m in the back room.’

Doors and memories lay ajar before Miriam as she hurried toward the living room. She’d grown up in this house, the one Morris and Iris had bought back when she was a baby. The way the
third step on the staircase creaked when you put your weight on it, the eccentricities of the downstairs toilet, the way the living room felt cramped from all the bookshelves – the way it
felt too big, without Dad. ‘Ma?’ She pushed open the living room door hesitantly.

Iris smiled at her from her wheelchair. ‘So nice of you to visit! Come in! To what do I owe the pleasure?’

The room was furnished with big armchairs and a threadbare sofa deep enough to drown in. There was no television – neither Iris nor Morris had time for it – but there were bookcases
on each wall and a tottering tower of paper next to Iris’s chair. Miriam crossed the room, leaned over, and kissed Iris on top of her head, then stood back. ‘You’re looking
well,’ she said anxiously, hoping it was true. She wanted to hug her mother, but she looked increasingly frail. She was only in her mid–fifties, but her hair was increasingly gray, and
the skin on the backs of her hands seemed to be more wrinkled every time Miriam visited.

‘I won’t break – at least, I don’t think so. Not if you only hug me.’ Iris grimaced. ‘It’s been bad for the past week, but I think I’m on the mend
again.’ The chair she sat in was newer than the rest of the furniture, surrounded by the impedimenta of invalidity: a little side trolley with her crochet and an insulated flask full of
herbal tea, her medicines, and a floor-standing lamp with a switch high up its stem. ‘Marge just left. She’ll be back later, before supper.’

‘That’s good. I hope she’s been taking care of you well.’

‘She does her best.’ Iris nodded, slightly dismissively. ‘I’ve got physiotherapy tomorrow. Then another session with my new neurologist, Dr. Burke – he’s
working with a clinical trial on a new drug that’s looking promising and we’re going to discuss that. It’s supposed to stop the progressive demyelination process, but I
don’t understand half the jargon in the report. Could you translate it for me?’

‘Mother! You know I don’t do that stuff any more – I’m not current; I might miss something. Anyway, if you go telling your osteopath about me, he’ll panic.
I’m not a bone doctor.’

‘Well, if you say so.’ Iris looked irritated. ‘All that time in medical school wasn’t wasted, was it?’

‘No, Mom, I use it every day. I couldn’t do my job without it. I just don’t know enough about modern multiple sclerosis drug treatments to risk second-guessing your specialist,
all right? I might get it wrong, and then who’d you sue?’

‘If you say so.’ Iris snorted. ‘You didn’t come here just to talk about that, did you?’

Damn,
thought Miriam. It had always been very difficult to pull one over on her mother. ‘I lost my job,’ she confessed.

‘I wondered.’ Iris nodded thoughtfully. ‘All those dot-coms of yours, it was bound to be infectious. Is that what happened?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ Miriam shook her head. ‘I stumbled across something and mishandled it badly. They fired me. And Paulie . . . Remember I told you about
her?’

Iris closed her eyes. ‘Bastards. The bosses are bastards.’

‘Mother!’ Miriam wasn’t shocked at the language – Iris’s odd background jumped out to bite her at the strangest moments – but it was the risk of
misunderstanding. ‘It’s not that simple; I screwed up.’

‘So you screwed up. Are you going to tell me you deserved to be fired?’ asked Iris.

‘No. But I should have dug deeper before I tried to run the story,’ Miriam said carefully. ‘I was too eager, got sloppy. There were connections. It’s deep and it’s
big and it’s messy; the people who own
The Weatherman
didn’t want to be involved in exposing it.’

‘So that excuses them, does it?’ asked Iris, her eyes narrowing.

‘No, it – ’ Miriam stopped.

‘Stop making excuses for them and I’ll stop chasing you.’ Iris sounded almost amused. ‘They took your job to protect their own involvement in some dirty double-dealing,
is that what you’re telling me?’

‘Yeah. I guess.’

‘Well.’ Iris’s eyes flashed. ‘When are you going to hang them? And how high? I want a ringside seat!’

‘Ma.’ Miriam looked at her mother with mingled affection and exasperation. ‘It’s not that easy. I think
The Weatherman
’s owners are deeply involved in
something illegal. Money laundering. Dirty money. Insider trading too, probably. I’d like to nail them, but they’re going to play dirty if I try. It took them about five minutes to come
up with cause for dismissal, and they said they wouldn’t press charges if I kept my mouth shut.’

‘What kind of charges?’ Iris demanded.

‘They say they’ve got logfiles to prove I was net-surfing pornography at work. They . . . they – ’ Miriam found she was unable to go on speaking.

‘So were you?’ Iris asked quietly.

‘No!’ Miriam startled herself with her vehemence. She caught Iris’s sly glance and felt sheepish. ‘Sorry. No, I wasn’t. It’s a setup. But it’s so easy
to claim – and virtually impossible to disprove.’

‘Are you going to be able to get another job?’ Iris prodded.

‘Yes.’ Miriam fell silent.

‘Then it’s all right. I really couldn’t do with my daughter expecting me to wash her underwear after all these years.’

‘Mother!’ Then Miriam spotted the sardonic grin.

‘Tell me about it. I mean, everything. Warm a mother’s heart, spill the beans on the assholes who took her daughter’s job away.’

Miriam flopped down on the big overstuffed sofa. ‘It’s either a very long story or a very short one,’ she confessed. ‘I got interested in a couple of biotech companies
that looked just a little bit odd. Did some digging, got Paulette involved – she digs like a prairie dog – and we came up with some dirt. A couple of big companies are being used as
targets for money laundering.

‘Turns out that
The Weatherman
’s parent company is into them, deep. They decided it would be easier to fire us and threaten us than to run the story and take their losses.
I’m probably going to get home and find a SLAPP lawsuit sitting in my mailbox.’

‘So. What are you going to do about it?’

Miriam met her mother’s penetrating stare. ‘Ma, I spent three years there. And they fired me cold, without even trying to get me to shut up, at the first inconvenience. Do you really
think I’m going to let them get away with that if I can help it?’

‘What about loyalty?’ Iris asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘I gave them mine.’ Miriam shrugged. ‘That’s part of why this hurts. You earn loyalty by giving it.’

‘You’d have made a good feudal noble. They were big on loyalty, too. And blind obedience, in return.’

‘Wrong century, wrong side of the Atlantic, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

Now Iris grinned. ‘Oh, I noticed that much,’ she conceded. ‘No foreign titles of nobility. That’s one of the reasons why I stayed here – that, and your
father.’ Her smile slipped. ‘Never could understand what the people here see in kings and queens, either the old hereditary kind or the modern presidential type. All those paparazzi,
drooling after monarchs. I like your line of work. It’s more honest.’

‘Harder to keep your job when you’re writing about the real world,’ Miriam brooded gloomily. She struggled to sit a little straighter. ‘Anyway, I didn’t come around
here to mope at you. I figure I can leave job-hunting until tomorrow morning.’

‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right?’ Iris asked pointedly. ‘You mentioned lawsuits – or worse.’

‘In the short term – ’ Miriam shrugged, then took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I guess I’ll be okay as long as I leave them alone.’

‘Hmm.’ Iris looked at Miriam sidelong. ‘How much money are we talking about here? If they’re pulling fake lawsuits to shut you up, that’s not business as
usual.’

‘There’s – ’ Miriam did some mental arithmetic – ‘about fifty to a hundred million a year flowing through this channel.’

Iris swore.

‘Ma!’

‘Don’t you “Ma” me!’ Iris snorted.

‘But – ’

‘Listen to your old ma. You came here for advice, I’m going to give it, all right? You’re telling me you just happened to stumble across a money-laundering operation
that’s handling more money in a week than most people earn in their life. And you think they’re going to settle for firing you and hoping you stay quiet?’

Miriam snorted. ‘It can’t possibly be that bad, Ma, this isn’t wiseguys territory, and anyway, they’ve got that faked evidence.’

Iris shook her head stubbornly. ‘When you’ve got criminal activities and millions of dollars in cash together, there are no limits to what people can do.’ For the first time,
Miriam realized with a sinking feeling, Iris looked worried. ‘But maybe I’m being too pessimistic – you’ve just lost your job and whatever else, that’s going to be a
problem. How are your savings?’

Miriam glanced at the rain-streaked window.
What’s turned Ma so paranoid?
she wondered, unsettled. ‘I’m not doing badly. I’ve been saving for the past ten
years.’

‘There’s my girl,’ Iris said approvingly.

‘I put my money into tech-sector shares.’

‘No, you didn’t!’ Iris looked shocked.

Miriam nodded. ‘But no dot-coms.’

‘Really?’

‘Most people think that all tech stocks are down. But biotech stocks actually crashed out in ninety-seven and have been recovering ever since. The bubble didn’t even touch them.
People need new medicines more than they need flashy websites that sell toys, don’t they? I was planning on paying off my mortgage year after next. Now I guess it’ll have to wait a bit
longer – but I’m not in trouble unless I stay unemployed over a year.’

‘Well, at least you found a use for all that time in med school.’ Iris looked relieved. ‘So you’re not hard up.’

‘Not in the short term,’ Miriam corrected instinctively. ‘Ask me again in six months. Anyway, is there anything I can get you while I’m here?’

‘A good stiff drink.’ Iris clucked to herself. ‘Listen, I’m going to be all right. The disease, it comes and it goes – another few weeks and I’ll be walking
more easily again.’ She gestured at the aluminum walking frame next to her chair. ‘I’ve been getting plenty of rest and with Marge around twice a day I can just about cope, apart
from the boredom. I’ve even been doing a bit of filing and cleaning, you know, turning out the dusty old corners?’

‘Oh, right. Turned anything up?’

‘Lots of dustballs. Anyway,’ she continued after a moment. ‘There’s some stuff I’ve been meaning to hand over to you.’

‘“Stuff.”’ For a moment, Miriam couldn’t focus on the problem at hand. It was too much to deal with. She’d lost her job and then, the very same day, her
mother wanted to talk about selling her home. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not very focused today.’

‘Not very – ’ Iris snorted. ‘You’re like a microscope, girl! Most other people would be walking around in a daze. It’s not very considerate of me, I know,
it’s just that I’ve been thinking about things and there’s some stuff you really should have right now. Partly because you’re grown up and partly because it belongs to you
– you might have some use for it. Stuff that might get overlooked.’

Miriam must have looked baffled because Iris smiled at her encouragingly. ‘Yes. You know, “stuff.” Photograph albums, useless things like Morris’s folks’ birth
certificates, my old passport, my parents’ death certificates, your adoption papers. Some stuff relating to your birth-mother, too.’

Miriam shook her head. ‘My adoption papers – why would I want them? That’s old stuff, and you’re the only mother I’ve ever had. You’re not allowed to push me
away!’

‘Well! And who said I was? I just figured you wouldn’t want to lose the opportunity. If you ever felt like trying to trace your roots. It belongs to you, and I think now is
definitely past time for you to have it. I kept the newspaper pages too, you know. It caused quite a stir.’ Miriam made a face. ‘I know you’re not interested,’ Iris said
apologetically. ‘Humor me. There’s a box.’

‘A box.’

‘A pink and green shoebox. Sitting on the second shelf of your father’s bureau in the attic. Do me a favor and fetch it down, will you?’

‘Just for you.’

Miriam found the box easily enough. It rattled when she picked it up and carried it, smelling of mothballs, down to the living room. Iris had picked up her crochet again and was pulling knots
with an expression of fierce concentration. ‘Dr. Hare told me to work on it,’ she said without looking up. ‘It helps preserve hand-eye coordination.’

‘I see.’ Miriam put the box down on the sofa. ‘What’s this one?’

‘A Klein-bottle cozy.’ Iris looked up defensively at Miriam’s snort. ‘You should laugh! In this crazy inside-out world, we must take our comforts from crazy inside-out
places.’

‘You and Dad.’ Miriam waved it off. ‘Both crazy inside-out sorts of people.’

‘Bleeding hearts, you mean,’ Iris echoed ominously. ‘People who refuse to bottle it all up, who live life on the outside, who – ’ she glanced around –
‘end up growing old disgracefully.’ She sniffed. ‘Stop me before I reminisce again. Open the box!’

Miriam obeyed. It was half-full of yellowing, carefully folded newsprint and elderly photocopies of newspaper stories. Then there was a paper bag and some certificates and pieces of formal
paperwork made up the rest of its contents. ‘The bag contained stuff that was found with your birth-mother by the police,’ Iris explained. ‘Personal effects. They had to keep the
clothing as evidence, but nobody ever came forward and after a while they passed the effects on to Morris for safekeeping. There’s a locket of your mother’s in there – I think you
ought to keep it in a safe place for now; I think it’s probably quite valuable. The papers – it was a terrible thing. Terrible.’