An old recluse, Marley thought.
His eyes held on the brass marker beside the delivery entrance. The metal was slightly green with mold, but he could still make out the number: 341 Vanderling Boulevard. And the name: Vanderling.
No less. Same name as the rigidly restricted, old-family subdivision itself.
He saw a light flare in an upstairs window. It burned briefly, while the old woman returned to bed. Then the house was once more in stygian gloom — except for the single candle burning behind the tall, arched window downstairs.
The next evening, in a brief lull between periods of greasy-water-to-the-elbows, Marley mentioned to the chef, “Who’s the old biddy in 341, right down the boulevard?”
“Wassa mat?”
“Curious, that’s all. Wondered if she ever comes to the club for dinner. Bet she once did — sweeping like a princess royal.”
The chef had no imagination or curiosity whatever. “You gotta time to yap-yap-yap, the mop, she’sa waiting.”
As Marley drove home that night, he slowed the car to a crawl at 341 Vanderling Boulevard. No ghostly figures tonight. Nothing, except the still-life of a gloomy old mansion, the firefly of a candle glowing behind a front window. He wondered how many nights a candle had burned there, and why.
The next day he arrived at the country club half an hour early. He sauntered over to the ivy-grown pro shop, fifty yards from the old-English motif of the main clubhouse. The gnarled, leathery old man — Lemuel, he was called — was coming from the barn where groundskeeping equipment was housed. In luck, Marley thought. Lemuel had spaded, clipped, mowed, pruned, planted for more years on the golf course than anyone could remember. His and Marley’s paths had crossed occasionally when Lemuel, taking old-employee privileges, would come through the rear door of the kitchen and fill a plate and retire to a stool in the far corner to chomp his meal. Marley rather liked the old cuss because nothing or nobody, including the chef, fazed Lemuel.
Today, in the shadows of the pro shop, Marley said his most pleasant hello, and Lemuel paused, wiping his creased, weathered face with a huge red bandanna. “How goes the pearl-diving?”
“Greasy,” Marley said, “like always. How about a Coke?”
Lemuel flicked surprise through sun-bleached brows. He and Marley had often spoken pleasantly enough, and they shared the unspoken bonds of menial jobs, but this was the first time Marley had extended such an invitation.
“Why not?” Lemuel said.
They went in, bought their drinks, and retired to the outside bench behind the pro shop, rules forbidding their presence on the veranda that overlooked the front nine.
Marley wasted a brief minute chatting about an inconsequential, the weather. Then he said, stretching the truth a bit: “Had a hairy experience night before last. Old lady in a white nightgown walked right out in front of my car. Happened on the boulevard, at 341.”
“Must have been Atha Vanderling,” Lemuel said, killing half his Coke at a swallow.
“Vanderling? You mean, one of the original Estate tribes?”
“Last Vanderling left. Not a living creature to leave all them millions to.”
Marley shifted on the hardness of the wooden bench. “I guess you know plenty about the Estates and the people.”
“Been here since the day they redid the back nine and put in the long practice tee.” Lemuel winked knowingly. “I could write a book. Sure as hell could.” He sighed. “’Course nobody wants to hear about folks in the Estates the way they used to be.”
“Sounds interesting to me. Say... why don’t we meet here at the pro shop tomorrow a little earlier? We’ll chew over some old times.”
The prospect brought a nod of pleasure. “If the greenskeeper don’t have me chinch-bugging on the front nine,” Lemuel said. “Can’t think of nothing I’d like better. I’m around from sunup to sundown six days a week.”
Cultivating Lemuel as a brain to pick, Marley in the next few days pieced Atha Vanderling into a composite from the old man’s gossip. Awkward and painfully shy when she was young. A very sensitive girl who’d known she was dense and not at all pretty. But the Vanderling money had provided specialists, to tutor her, correct the bucked teeth, design clothing that enhanced the bony figure. She was sent to ballet, riding, diction lessons. She was travelled in Europe. She was provided a debut. Money had worked a small miracle; even so, Atha had emerged into young womanhood as a plain-jane wallflower.
When she was in her barrenly lonely mid-twenties, she met Guthrie Linyard, a social hanger-on who was summer guesting with a neighbor of the Vanderlings. He set about wooing her, and the love-starved young woman’s response had been blindly overwhelming. No one could get through to her. Her belief and faith in Guthrie were fanatical. He truly loved her, not her money, and she loved him.
The couple announced their engagement and were given the usual round of parties. The rapturous young simpleton flew to Paris to buy part of her trousseau.
Came the day of the wedding, and Guthrie vanished, leaving her in white satin, a bridal bouquet in her hands, a spectacle before the eyes of people she’d known all her life in the crowded church.
“Atha’s pappy, as you may have guessed,” Lemuel said, “finally turned the trick with Guthrie Linyard the morning of the wedding. Folks talked about it a long time. Old man Vanderling went into the church ante-room where Guthrie was all set to go in cutaway coat and striped trousers, and made his final offer. If Guthrie showed up at the altar, the old man was drawing a new will, cutting Atha out. Otherwise, there was a side door so’s a man could slip out quietly and here was a package containing fifty thousand dollars cold cash, travelling money.”
“And Atha never married?”
“Atha,” Lemuel said, “was never far from the brink, first place. Atha went stark, staring crazy. Started right there at the altar, her beginning to sob and finally running out in her wedding gown and veil, up and down the streets, looking to see if Guthrie had been hurt in an accident, screaming his name. When she learned what had really happened, she closed in on herself, like an oyster locking its shell. They spent plenty on her, in fancy asylums, and her pappy was never the same afterward. Finally, Vanderling money had done all it could. They were able to bring home what was left of Atha. She never went out, had no friends, although she could talk and act like she had good sense. But she was convinced that some day Guthrie would come back. The best doctors in New York and Vienna couldn’t get that idea out of her head. And while her years melted away, she stayed on in the old home place, after her parents died, lighting a candle in a window every night and waiting for Guthrie to return.”
Marley didn’t as yet know how he would use the information; but his experience and instincts clearly told him that he was on the brink of something big, perhaps the biggest con of his life, the one that would set him up for all his years to come. The toughest part of any con was to locate a mark. The best of con men (the category in which Marley automatically included himself) sometimes went for months without using their talents because the right situation wouldn’t show itself.
The expiration of his parole came and went, its impact shunted aside by the thoughts that suffused Marley of an old crazy woman worth millions.
“I guess,” the bohunk of a parole officer said grudgingly, “you’ll swim out of the greasy dishwater and head for parts unknown.”
“I rather like the Estates,” Marley said.