Miz Starret rattled her copy of the will. “Mr. Vincent Rider and someone named Martha Poe.”
“Rider? I never heard of him. And Martha Poe? What was she doing at the house?”
“Perhaps she was helping your mother with the will.”
“Why the hell would she do that? Martha’s a nurse!”
“Really?” Mrs. Mank said. She had been so quiet that I had nearly forgotten that she was there. She was smiling in amusement. “I was under the impression Martha Poe was another girl lawyer—like Adele.”
Usually Mama remembered and kept track of her lies. That she had forgotten this one was a measure of her distress.
Mama hesitated a moment, then said, vaguely, “I believe Martha studied both medicine and law—at Huntingdon College—but couldn’t make up her mind which one to devote herself to—curing people or getting them off the hook.” She changed the subject. “And that other one, Rider—some stranger, stranger to me, anyway.”
“Mr. Rider is new to Tallassee,” Miz Starret said, “so perhaps you never met him. He deals in pianos. Evidently your mama asked him to assess a piano that she had in mind to sell. He is a respectable businessman.”
“Mama would never have two strangers, one of them a complete stranger, some piano peddler, witness such an important document.”
“Nevertheless, the witnesses both confirm that your mother wrote out the entire will, signed it, enclosed it with the pen in the envelope, and sealed the envelope.”
Mama lit a cigarette with quivering fingers. None of it made sense. It was all bad.
What Miz Starret told Mama next was very much worse. “Your son will inherit somewhat over ten million dollars from your mother.”
Mama snarled, actually snarled. “Mama didn’t have ten million dollars! Mama didn’t have anything like that! She bought her Cadillacs on time!”
“I tend to estimate low in such matters.”
“I am listening to a lie!”
“Then it’s not me that’s lying,” returned Adele Starret. “It’s U.S. Steel and AT&T and Coca-Cola that are lying when they tell me how much of their stock your mother owned.”
I waited for Mama to speak, to protest, to question, to prompt some mitigating response from Adele Starret. But she was rendered silent for a long moment. Cups clattered, the women sipped their coffee, Mama smoked.
Finally: “I want my baby boy. I’m his sole living parent. I only left him with Mama because he’s sickly and she could take care of him. I was always gone go back for him. He’ll surely be cheated out of his inheritance by that wicked old shyster Weems. Isn’t there something I can do?”
“You did sign him over to your mother, and she made the choice to assign his protection to Mr. Weems and Dr. Evarts. But certainly you can sue to regain custody. You have a good chance. Most courts would be sympathetic to a blood relative, let alone a parent, seeking custody of a minor in your son’s situation. Of course if you won, you would still have to work out some arrangement with Mr. Weems and Dr. Evart about access to his inheritance.”
“I was cheated once, and now I’ve been cheated twice,” said Mama. “First by the man I married, and then by the woman who gave me birth. It’s not up to you and me anymore, Miz Starret, because they both are dead and beyond our reach.”
Miz Starret ignored the theatrical declaration to proceed to the practical. “What day did you leave Tallassee?”
“I didn’t leave. My own mama hounded me out of town. The day Mama died.”
Miz Starret’s voice became impatient. “What day of the week did your mother hound you out of Tallassee?”
Mama finally got what she meant. “Thursday. I know it was Thursday because there was a brand-new wheel of butter on the table Wednesday night, and the butter-lady comes on Wednesday morning, and there wasn’t any left the night before.”
“So it was Thursday, the twenty-fourth of the month,” said Miz Starret.
“Yes. Thursday the twenty-fourth.”
“Thursday, the twenty-third,” said Miz Starret pointedly, “is how she dated the will. Either your mother got the day of the month wrong, or else she got the day of the week wrong.”
“What damn difference does it make? Mama couldn’t even remember my birthday and on Thursday she was always thinking it was Friday.”
“Here’s the damn difference it makes,” said Miz Starret, sounding like a real lawyer. “If she made out the will on the twenty-third and just got the day of the week wrong, then she was probably sane, and you are out of luck.”
Mama sat up straighter. “But if she got the day of the month wrong, that means she wrote the will on Thursday, the day she lost her mind and went out buying up every umbrella in town. And if she was crazy when she made out the will, then—”
“Then we can contest it,” Adele Starret said with great satisfaction.
Thirty-nine
ADELE Starret must have noted the discrepancy in the date when she obtained the will. She might have told Mama at once. But she didn’t.
Mama was instantly invigorated. Mamadee might be dead but Mama could still fight her, with no possibility of Mamadee retaliating down the line. Once the money was hers again, Mama would not only be returned to her rightful station in life—rich—but would have Ford back.
Mama was ready to whip Miz Starret off the verandah to her automobile, so urgently did she want the woman lawyer to get started.
Miz Starret was not so easily moved. She had something else on her mind. “We haven’t talked about a fee for my services yet.”
“I’d give you a million dollars, Miz Starret, just to see justice done, but as you see I have been robbed blind twice already in the past year, and I don’t have a penny to my name,” Mama said.
“I understand that, and I’m willing to wait until we come to the resolution of the case. Lawyers do it all the time. We call it a contingency fee.” Miz Starret continued, “My fee will not be a million dollars. I’ll satisfy myself with fifteen percent of whatever may be the total of the estate that eventually comes to you.”
After a pause, Mama spoke. “That seems a lot to me.”
“I regret to say that I never bargain,” said Miz Starret.
She stood. Miz Verlow and Mrs. Mank came to their feet a fraction of a second later.
“Thank you, Merry Verlow,” Miz Starret said. “It was a pleasure to see you again.”
“Give my love to Fennie,” returned Miz Verlow.
“Thank you, my dear,” Mrs. Mank told Miz Starret in a grim tone that was just short of an apology.
Mama was too agitated to react coherently.
Adele Starret reached the verandah steps before Mama caught up with her.
“Miz Starret!” Mama lowered her voice but her words tumbled out breathlessly. “I thought you said fifty percent. I thought you meant half! Of course you get your fifteen percent!”
“Fifteen percent!” Mrs. Mank said, from just behind Mama.
Mama jumped. She hadn’t noticed Mrs. Mank following her. Or Miz Verlow, for that matter.
Clutching the dropped pen, I crept after them, beneath the verandah, until I reached the steps. The skirt there gapped a little, to allow the ascent of the steps, and I was still small enough to slip out, and into the shadows, without being noticed. Quietly I emerged from the shadows to sit on the bottom step, as if I had been there all along.
“Normally,” Mrs. Mank said, “my friend Adele wouldn’t take a case like this at all. She was considering it only as a favor to me. Even when she takes on such cases, cases with much more likelihood of success, she’d take twenty-five percent at the very least, and her usual rate is a full one-third of the estate.”