Before either Janet or Kim could move toward her, Cora's hands dropped back to her sides. With a long sigh she relaxed into her pillows, her eyes closing as if she'd fallen into a deep sleep.
Her breathing stopped.
Then, in a flash so brief Kim would never be certain it had actually happened, she sensed the light in the room had changed, muted into a golden glow that suffused the air.
Beautiful, she thought. So beautiful.
"I'll take Molly's cross," Janet said quietly as she led Kim toward the door a moment later. "When she's old enough, we'll give it to her together, and tell her where it came from."
Kim barely heard the words, and as she was leaving, she turned to look back.
The soft, serene light had vanished as utterly as if it had never been there at all.
The golden glow-like her aunt Cora-had gone and now the room seemed dark and cold.
So cold it made Kim shudder.
CHAPTER 5
I'm so sorry, Mr. Conway." The sympathetic expression in Beatrice LeBecque's eyes and the genuine sorrow in her voice told Ted what had happened far more clearly than the woman's words. He hadn't been too surprised when Jared came back into the reception area only a few minutes after he'd left with his mother and sister. Nor had his aunt's reaction to his son surprised him; indeed, it was her desire to see Jared at all that had caught him off guard. "Don't take it personally," he'd advised. "It doesn't have anything to do with you. It has to do with the fact that you're a male."
"If she's got a problem with men, how come she married your uncle?" Jared asked, relieving his father of Molly, who'd been squirming uncomfortably in Ted's lap.
"You got me on that one. Who knows? Maybe it was Uncle George killing himself that soured her in the first place. Anyway, she sure never got over it."
They'd fallen silent then, Ted leafing through a magazine as the last vestiges of his hangover finally lifted, while Jared played a game with Molly, the rules of which seemed far clearer to the toddler than to her big brother. When the phone on Bea LeBecque's desk rang, both of them looked up, sharply. Now even Molly was silent, sitting quietly on her brother's lap.
So, the old lady was finally gone. Ted tried to analyze what he felt:
Grief? How could you feel grief for someone you'd barely known, and from whom you'd never heard a friendly word, let alone a kind one?
Loss? Of what? Certainly not family, since he had no memory of ever having seen his aunt anywhere but here. The only family he knew-had ever known, really-was Janet. Janet, and their children.
Sympathy? A little. At least Cora Conway was finally released from whatever had tortured her for so long. And he felt relief. Relief that the ordeal was finally over. A twinge of guilt stabbed at him as he realized that most of the relief he felt was for himself rather than for his aunt. He tried to tell himself that he had no reason to feel guilty, that if she'd tried to be even halfway decent to him, he'd have come to see her more often, tried to do more to make her life a little easier. Except that now, with his hangover finally gone, he knew the truth: he could have ignored her treatment of him, could have risen above the invective she had poured over him. She'd been old, and ill in her mind as well as her body.
He'd ignored her very existence.
And now she was dead.
No loss, no sorrow, no sense that something valuable was gone out of his life.
Just guilt.
Well, at least I can take care of her now, he told himself. With his head finally clear-at least of alcohol-Ted's talent for organization, which had made him so good at his job before he'd started drinking, came to the fore, and he began making a mental checklist of things that would need to be dealt with.
As it turned out, though, all the arrangements had been made long ago. "She had some very good days, you know," Bea LeBecque explained as she gave him the letter in which all of his aunt's plans were laid out, and to which she'd attached the receipts indicating that Cora had paid her own funeral expenses in advance. "Really, all you need to do is contact Bruce Wilcox." The name meant nothing to Ted. "Your aunt's attorney," the receptionist explained. She picked up the phone on her desk and dialed the lawyer's number from memory, then handed the receiver to Ted.
Ten minutes later, with Janet and Kim back in the reception area, Ted repeated what the lawyer had told him.
"There's some kind of trust," he explained. "I'm not sure I understand it, but this guy Wilcox says Aunt Cora ' tried to break it a long time ago, and couldn't."
Janet's eyes clouded. "Why did she want to break it?"
"Wilcox said she wanted to get rid of the house. But apparently that was the whole point of the trust-to keep the house in the family."
"So we've inherited a house?" Janet asked.
Ted shook his head. "What we've got, the way Wilcox explained it, is the right to live in a house."
They gazed at it in silence. Their eyes moved over the massive structure that stood amidst an acre of land so overgrown with weeds that it was hard to tell where-or indeed if-gardens might ever have existed.
Besides the enormous gabled building that was the house, there was also a large carriage house-big enough for half a dozen cars, apparently with some kind of apartment above it.
Though most of the windows of both buildings were intact, the paint had peeled away from the clapboard siding, and the smashed roofing slates that lay around the perimeter of the house testified to the water damage they might expect inside.
Vines, unchecked by any hand, had threaded their way through the great willows, oaks, and magnolias that dotted the property and were banked against the house itself. Tendrils were creeping toward the eaves, and had established a hold on one of the half-dozen gables that pierced the steeply pitched Victorian roof three stories above them.
But more than the broken windows, the fallen slates, the peeling paint, and the kudzu, there was an atmosphere hanging over the house-a dark melancholy-that all of them felt.
It was Molly who finally spoke. "Wanna go home," she said plaintively, her tiny hand clutching her mother's.
Janet lifted her youngest child into her arms. "In a little while," she promised. "We just need to look around first. All right?"
Molly said nothing, but stuck a reassuring thumb into her mouth and began sucking. For once, Janet made no effort to stop her.
"I wonder what the inside looks like," Ted mused, starting to pick his way through the tangle of weeds toward the broad front porch. The broken remnants of the ornate gingerbread trim that had once graced the eaves and posts of the porch now looked like the jagged remains of broken teeth surrounding the gaping maw of some dying beast.
"Is it even safe to go up there?" Janet fretted, tentatively following him. "What if the porch collapses?"
"It's not going to," Ted assured her. "They built these old places to last. The frame's probably oak." He stopped and considered the looming mass of the house, a few yards away now. "When you think about it, it's not in such bad shape, considering it's a hundred and twenty-five years old and no one's lived in it for the last forty years."
"It doesn't look like anyone's even been inside it," Janet replied.
Ted winked at Jared. "What do you think?" he asked his son. "You game?"
Jared's reply was to start ripping his way through the tangle, tearing vines from the railing and steps before gingerly testing the strength of the old wood. "Dad's right," he called back to his mother and sisters. "It's fine!"
Ted tried the keys Bruce Wilcox had given him, and found a fit on the third one. The lock stuck, and he had to jiggle the key several times, until he felt it twist and the bolt slide back. Then the latch clicked, and the door itself-a huge slab of ornately paneled and molded oak hung from four tarnished brass hinges-swung slowly open.