I couldn't tell whether it was the number of zeros on the check or the leftover apple cider I'd reheated for breakfast that was making me dizzy. I went with the cider because it was a problem I could throw out. Behind me, twelve pounds of Bichon Frise rendered her verdict on the morning with one wet snort, the kind a dog uses when she does not approve of your judgment, your breakfast, or, possibly, the entire shape of your day.
My ex-father-in-law had dropped dead on a Tuesday and made me a millionaire on a Thursday. He hadn't done it because he liked me, but to ruin his son's morning. That was the long-game spite I respected in a man. I read the lawyer's letter for the fourth time. The first three had been for accuracy. This one was for the pleasure of it.
The check sat on my kitchen table like an unwelcome relative who had arrived early and meant to stay. I had been staring at it long enough to count the zeros twice, miscount them once, and decide that the lemon curd in the back of the refrigerator had better be retired before it organized a coup.
The kitchen at six in the morning was a small inventory: one cold coffee, one ticking radiator that knocked when the temperature dropped below twenty, one Bichon Frise pretending the embroidered cushion under her was a throne and not a hand-me-down from my mother's sewing chair, and me, in a robe my mother, Martha, had given me in 1987. It had lived in the back of my closet until there was no way I could gracefully get out of wearing it. One night when Dut had tied one on, I snagged it off its hanger and wrapped myself in it, like a suit of ugly armor. It worked. I calmed down, and he went out to a bar to maintain his buzz. The result was that I felt safe, and now it was my favorite piece of clothing.
I caught my reflection in the dark window over the sink and put a finger to the piece of hair that had gone independent overnight, because vanity is a young woman's hobby and I had given it up, and because the kitchen window does not lie about a woman who has not slept.
You've been staring at that thing long enough to memorize it. Either burn it or do something useful. Preferably something that involves my breakfast, Kenzie sent.
I looked over my shoulder at her. Twelve pounds of opinion in a white fur coat, dark eyes set deep enough to suggest she had been reading the room since 1926 and had not been impressed since 1932.
"Your breakfast is in your bowl, Your Majesty. That is, if you're not too lazy to waddle over there and check."
I'm conserving energy. It's called being sophisticated. Also, I prefer Your Royal Highness. We've discussed this, she sent.
"We haven't discussed this."
We're discussing it now. Keep up, she sent.
The laugh came out before I could stop it, which was a relief, because the kitchen had been the wrong kind of quiet since the certified-mail envelope had landed against the inside of the door at five fifty-two. I have always been a woman who laughs first when nothing else is working, a habit I inherited from my father, along with his soft heart and his deep, abiding distrust of any man who wore a pocket square he had not earned.
I picked up the letter again. Lawyers have a way of writing important news in the same flat voice they use for parking violations, and Dut II's lawyer was no exception. Pursuant to. Hereby given to you per the terms of the estate. Subject to verification. The Latin equivalent of a shrug, delivered on cream-colored stock at fifty cents a sheet.
But the name on the bequest line was not flat. Dut Steeplepuss II had left his money to his former daughter-in-law instead of to his son, and I respected the work.
That's a lot of zeros. Even for a Steeplepuss. Do you think there's a catch? she sent.
"There's always a catch with that family."
Present company included? she sent.
"Baby Dut isn't a catch. He's a cautionary tale I haven't finished telling yet. Possibly a Lifetime movie. I'm holding out for the right director."
The thing about the start of a plan is that you don't always know it's a plan when you write it down. Sometimes you write a word on a yellow pad, and the word writes the rest of your life around it while you're refilling the coffeepot.
I had not yet noticed that this was happening.
Kenzie had. Kenzie noticed everything and almost never told.
❧
My hands knew where they were taking me before my brain caught on.
I drove south out of town along the gravel road that hooked toward the lake, past the property where the Brennan farmhouse had stood before the 1943 fire that nobody had explained to me as a child and that nobody intended to explain to me now. The Yugo rattled in solidarity, the way old cars do when they understand the assignment. The radio was stuck on a station that played Patsy Cline if you tapped the dashboard in the right spot. I tapped. Patsy obliged with the patience of a woman who had been singing to dashboards for sixty years and had not yet been thanked.
Sixty acres. Pine and scrub oak sloping toward Lake Michigan on the west side, butting up against the state forest on the east, with a frozen creek in the northeast corner. A stone foundation in the clearing where the farmhouse had been. At the western edge, where the land dropped toward the water, a stretch of private beach the locals had been pretending wasn't there since 1944.
I parked at the gate and stepped out into snow that came over my boots. Kenzie watched from the passenger seat with the dignity of a queen who had decided not to inspect the cellar personally.
Take a picture. I'm staying with the heater, she sent, then lifted her snout and looked the other way so I couldn't gesture her out of the car.
I left the engine running for her and trudged the path trespassers had broken in over the years. Hunters, kids, the occasional surveyor with bad shoes and worse judgment. The snow held their footprints in layers, like sediment, the way Whiskey Pines holds everything else. Nothing is forgotten or thrown away; everything is visible if you bother to look.
I stood at the lip of the bluff longer than the temperature recommended. My eyes watered, which I blamed on the wind off the lake. The wind, which has been the chief co-conspirator of every woman who has ever stood at the edge of a Lake Michigan bluff and pretended not to be crying, did not argue.
On the way back to the car, I cut across the clearing where the old foundation lay. The snow was deeper there, drifted against the stones. I would not have noticed the disturbance if my boot had not gone through.
Six inches of snow over a patch of bare, freshly turned earth.
Crouching, I pressed my glove against the soil. It was loose. Not frozen the way the rest of the parcel was frozen. Somebody had broken this ground within the last two days. A small square, maybe a foot across, dug and refilled and powdered over with snow that had not had time to set.
Hunters did not bury things in February. Surveyors did not bury things at all.
I straightened. The pendant at my collar warmed against my skin, which was its own kind of opinion, and the kind of opinion my grandmother's emerald had been issuing for ninety-nine years, whether anyone was prepared to receive it.
The wind shifted. Behind me, the gate creaked. I had latched it on the way in. I was sure I had latched it.
I had not.
Or somebody had unlatched it after me.
Roxie. Get in the car, she sent. There was no humor in it. When Kenzie stopped being funny, I had learned to listen.
I walked back to the Yugo without looking over my shoulder, which took more discipline than I will ever admit out loud. I did not run. The snow knew the difference. So would whoever was watching.
Closing the driver's door, locking it, putting the car into gear, I let myself look at the rearview mirror only after my hand was on the shifter, my foot was on the brake, and the engine was already in conversation with the cold.
Tire tracks on the gravel road behind me. Fresh. They had not been there when I drove in.
Somebody had followed me onto the Brennan parcel.
And somebody had been there before I arrived.
Roxie Maxx
