Bennett Sisters Mystery, Volumes 1-2, page 5
That night Annie cooked mushroom-filled crepes, two colors of asparagus, and strawberry sundaes for dessert. She made Tristan laugh and help with the dishes while Merle forgot about the future, and the past, for an hour. Afterwards, curled up on the sofa in the cold living room, Merle told her sister about the will and the life insurance, about her chat with Harry’s lawyer.
Annie cocked her head. “Hold on. Troy Lester? Yalie with fat sideburns?”
“He’s bald now. You know him?”
“We spent one ill-fated year together. Met at a mixer. Remember those?” She shuddered. “He wore full Yale regalia, right down to his regimental socks.”
“What a turn-on. He was your boyfriend?” Gad.
She laughed. “We wrote to each other. We pretended faithfulness. Then he met some chick from Smith or Vassar and that was that.”
“You must have been crushed.”
“Devastated. Now. You and Tris. No starvation in the immediate future?”
“There are debts, his debts, and I won’t pay them. I can’t pay them.” She sighed.
“You’ll figure something out, Merle. You always do.”
Merle looked at her sister across the room. She wrapped a wool shawl around her shoulders. It was a struggle to bring the words into the air, but she made herself do it. “What if I told you he was — you know, dead to me. For a long time.” She was whispering.
Annie crossed her arms. “Are you saying that?”
Merle frowned. “I should have told you. I just — I hardly noticed.”
“You didn’t notice?”
Merle cringed, shrinking into the shawl. It sounded, it was, so lame. There were so many ways to fail in life, but she hadn’t had that much experience with failure until now. She’d always been buoyed by her family, her sisters, her choices. She’d never let herself fail. But now — she stared into her wine glass, horrified at the mess she’d made.
“I haven’t told anyone. But I —" She gulped a breath. “I didn’t love him. There’s some — something wrong with me.”
Her sister moved to the sofa and put her arm around her. Merle felt the tears rise in her throat. “Now listen, Merdle. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just the shock of all this. You’ve got some of the most productive years of your life ahead of you. You could get married again — god forbid. Or get an incredible new job doing something you love.” Annie got her a tissue and Merle wiped her eyes. “You have to open yourself to possibility.”
“Possibility? Now that worries me.”
“Because you can’t schedule it into your Day-Timer?” Annie smiled. “It’s the stuff that’s not on the calendar that’s most interesting.”
It seemed too late to change her internal workings. She was 49. Life inside the brain was fixed. Even if she wanted to change, which she wasn't really sure she did, how did you do that? How did you change who, and what, you were? She would just have to live with her calendar.
“I should have paid more attention. To him, or at the very least, to myself, to my lack of feelings for him. I’ve already forgotten what he smelled like. I can’t remember the last meal we ate together.”
“You had a good life together. You have a wonderful son. No regrets now.”
“Yes. I guess. I mean, I know. But — was I sleepwalking all those years? Why didn’t I wake up one day and say, this isn’t how I want to live my life? I mean, I’m fairly smart, aren’t I? Why didn’t I notice?”
“Let’s see. Skipped two grades, graduated from law school at twenty-one — ”
Merle smiled. “In the top quarter, as Mother always says."
Annie grinned. “ — In the top fucking quarter, partner by thirty. Wife, mother, housing rights crusader. You are an embarrassing overachiever.”
Their usual shtick. They buoyed each other. When one was down, the other sister lifted her up. No small matter, and she never forgot that, even if she didn't believe the shtick anymore. Annie’s opinion mattered, it always would. She cared, that was the important thing. Now more than ever.
“But why did I let him handle all the money?”
“You were too busy saving the poor from slum-lords? It’s not a crime. Millions of women do it.” Annie cocked her head. “You know what you’ve got, don’t you?”
“A financial nightmare? Acid reflux? An AARP subscription?”
“Come on, Merle. Repeat after me. Case of courage —”
The Bennett girls’ code, first a joke from the summer they took golf lessons, an experiment that didn’t stick, then a solidarity hand-smack between sisters. When all else failed, they had each other. Even when they didn’t get along, even when they didn’t talk for months, if disaster struck there was a shoulder to cry on. When they had a fight with a husband or got divorced or somebody died or got expelled or lost a job, or any other crap that life threw your way from time to time, the sisters had each other. Sometimes Merle forgot, but it was only a matter of time before one of her sisters reminded her.
“Come on now. We’re together. Case of courage,” Annie repeated. Merle held out her fist. Annie whacked it, then they reversed.
“Bucket of balls,” they crowed.
* * *
When she tried to sleep that night, Merle had too many thoughts. She reminisced about Dr. Farouk’s pills, swirling in the toilet. She got up and went back to Harry’s office. Dumping all the files into a corner, she cleared the desk. Behind the chair was the McDonald’s bag full of stuff from the safe deposit box. She'd been putting off looking at it, afraid there might be some grim secret about Harry, something that would make her feel even worse about her loveless marriage.
Documents, photographs, passports. The usual stuff. She relaxed, pawing through it. Harry's passport had expired three years before. He never traveled, why bother. A stack of folded papers, the deed to the house, the marriage license. Also, a large, yellow, brittle envelope. She looked at the documents and set them aside.
Inside the manila envelope were old photographs and more papers. She’d never seen these photos. Harry’s parents, Marie-Emilie, small and fair, Weston, dark-haired, squinting into the sun. Harry looked so much like his father: thick, wavy hair, sturdy chin, barrel chest. Only names on the back: ‘Wes and Emilie.’ The house in the background had brick walls, hollyhocks, mullioned windows. Could this be Long Island? No, she'd seen that house, it was clapboard. This must be the house in France. It looked peaceful and sunny, a cottage from long ago when things were simple.
In the photograph Weston wore a wide-collared shirt, Emilie a flowered dress, her hair in a quaint sausage roll above her forehead. Gone for so long: fifty years. It would have amazing to have known them. Maybe she would have understood Harry more, loved him more. Things couldn’t really have been simple then. Not right after the war.
A photo of Harry at three or four, sitting on a tricycle in front of a ranch house. Probably after they moved back here. Maybe the last one his mother took of him. Dark curls, fat cheeks, the vacant toddler stare. Then, a school portrait from the late fifties, Harry in a school uniform, a serious expression, eyes glassy, his hair slicked down. He looked, well, not very happy.
In crackling old envelopes she pulled out two death certificates, for Weston and Marie-Emilie. So they were actually gone, there wouldn’t be any surprise visits. What a silly thought.
Merle opened a sheet of paper. The blank, engraved letterhead with Weston Strachie’s address in Levittown had a large, rusty skeleton key taped to it with stiff old cellophane tape. Now this was mysterious. Maybe Weston had a sense of humor beyond the grave. No writing, nothing to identify the lock the key would open. A trunk in the attic? A grandfather clock? The house in France? The thought kept coming to her, that house, what it might be like. She would never see it. Why was she imagining what color the shutters were, whether there were flowers like in a Monet painting? She’d been to France once, a college trip in the summer, and never forgot the sunshine.
The amazing light. As opposed to this dark, depressing house. She put her chin in her palm and sighed. Oh well. With the new revelations about Harry's financial genius she had to be even more practical than usual. Her sister Francie had found somebody who did international property law. Merle had an appointment with him to start the process for selling it.
Also in the big envelope was a battered gray menu from a restaurant with three curled, dry wine labels hooked to it with a rusty paperclip. Souvenirs of their life in France, she supposed. The menu was in English while the labels were from French wineries.
Two packets of envelopes remained. The first were yellowed, thin envelopes with faded, spidery script, surrounded by brown string. The tiny stamps were peeling, and French. They were addressed to Marie-Emilie at the house in Levittown. Pulling out the letter from one torn envelope, she tried to read the script, faint as it was. The blue ink was barely legible. The postmark was December 1954. The other two envelopes were similar, postmarked 1955, all of them after Marie-Emilie and Weston were dead. She held one up to the lamplight. French, it seemed. She could make out a few words but her French was mediocre at best. She would get it translated, one of these days.
The last small packet of papers was wrapped in a rubber band which broke as she slipped it off. The deed to the apartment on Twelfth Street: she stared at it for a minute before she realized what it was. Harry said he’d sold the apartment five years before, so this was just an old copy — or was it? He moved on, to that crappy little studio near the Exchange for when he stayed in the city. She remembered him being vague about the price of the Twelfth Street apartment, and who he’d sold it to. Or maybe her memory was just vague. She stared at the deed a long time.
He told her he sold it, she was sure of that. Five or six years ago. But where had the money gone? Down his options rabbit hole with all the rest, no doubt.
Chapter Eight
Monday morning. The Legal Aid Society offices at 128th & Madison. The list of appointments ran through her mind. She felt a jump in her step. It was good to be back.
Noisy, chaotic, piles of papers everywhere, the smell of unwashed clothes and hope: a little bit of heaven. Merle was immediately swallowed up in correspondence, filings, briefs, arguments, disputes, and rulings. By the time she looked up staffers were back from lunch. She kept working, making one pile to take home, another to give the new fellow starting next month, another for cases that needed attention this week.
Most of the critical cases had been taken over, rather too ably, by Laura Crandall, the current law fellow. She’d taken to tenant rights like she was born to it. Her hard work made it possible for Merle to take two and a half weeks off without feeling single mothers, disabled veterans, and the illiterate would be living on the streets. Laura reminded Merle of herself, twenty-five years ago, energetic, idealistic, full of crusading fervor — not to mention attractive, articulate, smart, and her whole life ahead of her.
“I’ve set up a workshop with the Tenants Council, on improving communication with your landlord,” Laura said, checking things off on a pad. “The new fellow starts Monday so she can help with that. Also I’ve started inter-borough lunches with Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. Once a month, brown bag thing, no big deal but we kick around ideas. The first one is Friday.”
Filing away those details in her head, Merle scanned email correspondence, trying to get rid of a backlog the size of the Britney Spears Fan Club. “Who is the new fellow?” she asked.
“Oh, she’s fantastic, from Harvard Law. She’s been clerking in Brooklyn and before that for the Second Circuit. Her name is Nina Cortez.”
“Latina? Good.” Merle frowned over Laura's shoulder at the receptionist, standing in the doorway.
“Someone to see you. She said it was personal. Should I send her back?”
Laura got up. “I’ll come back later.”
Merle turned off her monitor. Probably a courtesy call from someone she’d helped over the years. Mabel Siddons, maybe, who had been evicted and sued for back rent because she couldn’t read the notices for renewing her Section 8 certificate — or anything else. Or, Tanya, living on the street with her baby until they found her an apartment and government assistance. Every so often someone would come by and tell her they had found a job, graduated from trade school — or needed money.
The visitor stepped into the open doorway, glancing at the nameplate. Merle didn’t recognize her. She was thirty-ish, with blond hair to her shoulders. She wore a black suit with a blue blouse and heels, and could have passed for a thousand other professional women in the city.
In other words, not a client. Merle stood. “Can I help you?”
The woman smiled slightly, her eyes darting around the office, but didn’t speak.
Merle said, “Sorry. Do I — have we —?”
The woman clutched a black briefcase on a long strap over her shoulder. “My name is Courtney Duncan. I am — was — a friend of Harry’s.”
“Oh. Sit down.”
“I just wanted to say how sorry I am. That he — ” Her face flushed. “I couldn’t make it to the funeral.” She half-turned to the door. “My — my condolences to your family.” And she was gone. Merle stared at the spot she had vacated, blinking.
Laura returned. “Who was that?”
“A friend of Harry’s. Or so she says.”
* * *
Tristan had his counselor appointment Monday afternoon but didn’t go back to school. He pecked away on a paper for his history class and the Dylan Thomas essay, and watched a lot of television. Annie went home on Tuesday. Merle worked long, satisfying days to clear the backlog of cases and slept soundly, from exhaustion, every night. She looked at the old photos once, and the obituary, then put everything into the manila envelope. On Thursday afternoon she took the subway to Brooklyn to meet the property lawyer Francie had recommended.
Hoffmann Suisse International’s brownstone sat mid-block among residences in various phases of renovation and decay. As she pushed through into their reception area the smell of bread baking made her smile.
The receptionist’s desk sat empty so she lowered herself into a hard, modern chair padded in purple velvet. She picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune as a stylish woman with a European up-do returned and ushered her into the lawyer’s office.
Ramon Sauvageau stood, smoothed his tie, and shook her hand. He wore a gray suit with a white shirt setting off his tan and black hair slicked back in an outdated Wall Street look. His accent was soft, indefinable. On the corner of his desk sat a small vase with three perfect pink roses. The receptionist returned with coffee and a plate of warm pastries. Merle chose a square cookie. The buttery crumbs melted in her mouth.
“Now. The inheritance,” he said, looking at her under his thick eyebrows. “Under French law all children of the deceased, as well as the spouse, inherit equal shares of property, no matter what the will says. Am I correct that you have just one child, a son?”
“Yes.”
“So you and your son will each inherit half of the house and land. Then there is the issue of inheritance tax. It is probable that because the house was held for so long by your late husband that the tax will be lowered substantially. We will work with the French government on that on your behalf.”
“But there will still be inheritance tax?”
“It is the way.”
“Has someone been to the village?”
“My contact in Toulouse.” He moved his coffee aside. “This village, Malcouziac, is small, with some services, a small grocery and tabac, that sort of thing. Medieval with some of the old walls.”
“How small?”
“Three hundred. More in the summer when people go to their vacation homes. Not an unpopular area for summer people.”
“Good. I’ve decided to sell it.”
“Very good. We can help you with all the details. I should warn you, it may not be quick.”
“I heard these small cottages were sought after. Lots of British in the Dordogne, right?”
“But yours has had no one in it for many years —”
“Fifty.”
He frowned. “If you will indulge me, I’ll read you what Monsieur Rancard reports.” He put on wire-rimmed glasses. “‘House sits on the street, approximately twenty feet of frontage. Wooden shutters, paint gone but solid, on all windows and door on the front. House is constructed of local yellow stone in fair condition. A seven-foot wall of stone surrounds the building, including a large rear yard. An alley provides access. Some signs of water damage and mortar in need of repair on both house and wall. Tile roof needs work, tiles missing, birds flying in and out. Possible interior damage from the hole.’”
“He couldn’t get in?”
“One moment. He continues: ‘Location at edge of village, adjacent to destroyed fortress wall, is desirable except for wall debris along the street, with excellent southern exposure and windows which face the many vineyards and hills.’”
“That shouldn’t be difficult to sell.”
He held up a finger. “'Shutters on the street padlocked from inside, on first and second floors. Attempt to open door shutter with bolt cutter brought gendarme and neighbors. A Madame Suchet across the street informed me that someone lives in the house. The local gendarme confirmed this. Said occupant has paid the ‘taux occupier’ — this is the tax a renter must pay to the state each year — they paid ‘the taux occupier’ dutifully and on time for ten years.’”
“Someone’s been in the house for ten years?”
“But not legally, madame. ”
“A squatter.”
“Who has made all believe that the house belongs to her, even to lawfully paying her tax.”
“The house isn’t recorded in her name, is it?”
“It appears, no. She has no legal claim to the property.”
“Did Harry pay taxes on the property?”
Sauvageau handed her the sheet with tax figures for the last twenty years. “When he was 21 and came into his trust he paid the back taxes. He kept up the payments. That will strengthen your claim. With a house unoccupied for so long, it is not unusual to have a squatter.”
