Cora eyed the tray with a flicker of interest. “There’s a TV tray behind the sofa there,” she said. I put the tray down on a lamp table and looked behind the sofa, where a wooden TV tray was folded flat. I pulled it out and set it up in front of Cora’s chair, put a napkin in her lap, and arranged her meager meal.
“You’d make a good waitress,” she said.
I poured myself a cup of tea and sat down and watched her take a few tentative spoonfuls.
“It’s good,” she said. “I didn’t think I was hungry, but I guess I am.”
For a few minutes, the only sound was the click of spoon against bowl and Cora’s faint slurping noises. She ate the entire bowl of soup and several buttered crackers before she pronounced herself full.
I removed the TV tray and poured us both another cup of tea. Her color was better now and her eyes had lost some of their stunned dullness.
I said, “Cora, do you know an attorney named Ethan Crane?”
“Well, I did, Dixie, but Ethan’s been gone now for a good while, a year maybe. Did you know him, too?”
“No, but his grandson called me today and asked me to stop by his office. It seems he has taken over Mr. Crane’s practice. His name is also Ethan Crane. Do you know the grandson?”
“No, I can’t say as I do. He’s taken over Ethan’s practice?”
“That’s what he said. He had a living trust that his grandfather had drawn up for Marilee. Do you know about that?”
She frowned. “A living what?”
“A trust. It’s a kind of will. According to the younger Mr. Crane, Marilee had two trusts, one for you and this other one that he talked to me about. Do you know about the trust she set up for you?”
“Oh my, yes, I know all about it. I have a copy of it. It’s personal, dear, so I won’t tell you what’s in it, but I won’t ever have to worry about running out of money.”
Her face crumpled and she sobbed quietly with her hands over her face. I waited, knowing that tears would come like that for a while, just spring out when she least expected them, as if there were a well of tears inside her that had to pour out on their own time. When she was cried out, I got up and got Kleenex for her from the bathroom and sat back down.
“Cora, the trust that Mr. Crane wanted to talk to me about was different from the one Marilee had for you. This one was for her cat.”
Cora stared at me wide-eyed. “Her cat?”
“The cat that I take care of when Marilee leaves town. His name is Ghost. She made this trust about a year ago, right after I started taking care of him. I didn’t know anything about it until Mr. Crane told me, but she put her house and car and everything in her house in this trust.”
Cora looked as if she was about to smile. “For her cat?”
I nodded. “For her cat. And she named me the trustee.”
Cora put her head back against the chair and laughed. Then she looked at me. “This is the truth? Marilee left her house and car to her cat?”
“It’s the truth.”
She laughed again, a girlish laugh of pure delight. “That’s Marilee,” she said. “Lord, that girl was always dragging home every stray cat she saw. She wanted to give a home to all of them, and some of them didn’t even want a home, they’d rather be roaming the alleys. But no, she couldn’t stand it, she had to take care of all of them.”
“It’s an awful lot of money, Cora.”
“Well, don’t worry about it, hon. Marilee must have trusted you to take good care of her cat or she wouldn’t have named you that whatchacallit.”
“Under the terms of the trust, when the cat dies, all the money that’s left goes to me.”
“And it should. Cats live a long time. You ought to get paid for all that time.”
“But I don’t want it, and I’ll get somebody else to take care of Ghost.”
She smiled at me with a new sparkle in her eyes. “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to figure out what to do with it when the time comes. And by that time, you might want it.”
“This doesn’t bother you?”
“Land no, it don’t bother me one bit. It tickles me, is what it does. You know, Marilee was a good girl. Lots of people might look at her with all the money she made and think she was something else, but she was a good girl, and her leaving all that to her cat just proves that she was. Now when I think of my baby, I won’t be thinking of how she ended her last minutes on this earth, I’ll be thinking that up to the very end, she was a little girl wanting to take care of all the cats in the world. A generous, loving little girl. That was my Marilee.”
I leaned over and patted her veined hand. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Cora.”
“I guess that’s true. We never had much, but I always gave what I had.”
Carefully, I said, “For such a young woman, Marilee acquired quite a lot.”
She nodded proudly. “She did, that’s a fact. Marilee always had a head for figures. When she started getting the money from the Fraziers, she wasn’t old enough to take care of it herself, and Lord knows I didn’t know how to handle that much money. We wanted to get away from the Fraziers, so we moved here and she went all by herself to Ethan Crane and got herself declared a grown-up. I don’t remember what he called it, but I signed some papers and he had her something-or-other removed through the court.”
“Disabilities of nonage.”
“I guess so. Anyway, after that she could handle all that money by herself, and she did right well. She bought us a house first off, a nice little frame house in Bradenton, and then we went out and bought everything new. New refrigerator and new stove and new beds and mattresses. Oh my, we had a time doing that. First time either one of us had ever had a whole houseful of new things. She spent over half of the first money she got on the house and furniture and a new car for herself and one for me. But the money was going to keep coming in, every year, you know, so Marilee would sit up every night studying about how to invest it.”
I did a bit of fast calculation of what half of a quarter of a million dollars invested twenty years ago would be worth today at 10 percent compounded interest, and my head got swimmy. If the same amount was invested every year for twenty years, the total value would be more than I could count. Even accounting for Marilee’s expensive lifestyle, she had made herself an extremely wealthy woman.
Cora was watching me figure it out. “When I die,” she said, “all the money she made goes to help other poor girls get an education or start their own businesses. Ethan Crane set it up that way for her.”
“I never realized,” I said.
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Marilee never forgot where she came from, or how hard it was for us before the money. I kept working for a couple of years, but she wouldn’t hear of it, and so I finally quit. It was about time, too, my ankles were going real bad. I haven’t worked a lick since, and Marilee’s always taken good care of me. She was a good girl.”
Feeling chastened and slightly guilty, I got up and washed the supper dishes. I wondered if I would have been half as responsible as Marilee had been if I had started getting a quarter of a million dollars every year when I was sixteen. Marilee continued to surprise me.
On my way home, I turned on impulse and drove around the curve to Marilee’s house. A white Jaguar sat in her driveway, and I pulled up behind it and got out. When I rounded the corner of the garage, I saw Shuga Reasnor at the front door, trying to unlock it. She looked around at me with a dark expression of frustration and resentment.
“Have you had the damn locks changed?”
I shook my head, all innocence. “Doesn’t your key work?”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with it! You must have a key, let me in. I need to get some of my things.”