Casey was a rumpled child by comparison, a tomboy, a brat and a squeaky wheel. Not to mention the paraplegia, an attribute unlikely to be on his wish list.
She was defenseless, more so than ever. Susan would speak to him if she had to.
They dropped Casey at her apartment and headed to the office, where Susan would be introduced to the work of dismantling the business. T. had hired some kind of lawyer who specialized in charities. He was waiting for them.
“James,” said T., and she and the lawyer shook hands. “He’ll be helping with the transition.”
“Call me Jim,” he said easily, and held her fingers a little too long as his hand fell away. A good-looking man with a bit of a spare tire. She noticed the wedding ring.
Everything she owned was in the big house now, where she slept in an upstairs room. It featured the “horned beasts” of Africa; this theme was painted on a rippling scroll over the door. The horned animals were a water buffalo and a wildebeest, whose heads she’d taken off the brackets and piled beneath the sweeping curved staircase. Only the backdrop remained. The walls of the bedroom were painted diorama-style, long grasses growing up from the wooden trim along the floor and then, rising above them, the same flat-topped trees that were carved on the mansion’s front door.
The heads themselves, alone in her room at night, had been too much company. But she liked the murals. In the distance, beyond the trees and the grasses, flat giraffes grazed and a herd of rhinos hunkered down, waiting patiently to be taken as trophies.
There were eight bedrooms on her floor, each with a geographic theme lettered above the door. One was titled THE RAINFOREST, with stuffed snakes and parrots and a sloth. Another was labeled THE ARCTIC, with caribou and a white Arctic fox. Icebergs were painted on the walls of the Arctic, expanses of blue water and a pale sunset. A third sign read THE HIMALAYAS, where there were snow-capped mountains, a stuffed white and black cat, an otter, and something labeled HIMALAYAN BLUE SHEEP, which to her looked neither blue nor sheeplike.
She’d chosen her own room, HORNED BEASTS, for its large bay windows that overlooked the back garden, the glittering oblongs of ponds. She could see the thin flagstone walkways weaving between the ponds, the feathery sweep of willows. In the mornings she liked to stretch in front of the window, leaving behind her dusty canopied bed whose linens smelled of mothballs. While she stretched out her limbs the sun rose and filtered through the dirty panes in strips. Her boxes lingered unpacked, save for the clothes and the toiletries: organization was a goal she kept ahead of her, fixed at a safe distance. In the meantime she liked her old life fine inside cardboard.
When the landscapers came the first morning to start work on reclaiming the garden she noticed one of the crew, Ramon: he had a pretty, unlined young face and ropy muscles and worked in a plaid shirt that hung open over a tank top and silver crucifix. She wondered if he was illegal. She would welcome that for she was illegal herself, far more criminal than Ramon would ever be.
Increasingly she wanted to know about the old man, as she was coming to think of her great-uncle. In the big house he was a ghost that walked alongside. But the ghost had the vague outline of a croquet mallet, the player piano. She wished it would take human form. She wanted to picture him. And she wanted to find out about his mania for collecting, if he had hunted or merely gone shopping. It seemed necessary to know.
She tried to ferret out his personal belongings but it was not even clear to her which bedroom had been his; the house was sprawling and uncentered. She found only piecemeal evidence that it had ever had a live-in tenant—a few old dress shirts marked ARROW and VAN HEUSEN hanging on the dirt-caked banister of the attic staircase, their faded pinstripes in mustard yellow and orange; a cast-iron bootjack in the shape of a Texas longhorn.
In daytime the house had the character of a dusty labyrinth whose caretakers had vanished, but by night the dust receded and she felt the solidity of the walls. At night the house was more like a honeycomb, a thick-built hive with hundreds of compartments. She could nest there cushioned and unseen.
After a few days of looking she found a desk in the library that might once have been a minor center of operations. It was less than it should be in that role; all it held was yellowing bills and checkbook registers, bundles of letters and postcards paper-clipped together. But it was as close as she’d come, so that night she took the bundles to the kitchen and sat down at the table beneath a wall of fish.
The kitchen was mainly fish. She’d read in one of the old man’s books that most fish trophies were replicas, so she thought these were probably also fakes. They shone with an unnatural flare and their colors had the high-contrast brightness of plastic. There were the usual suspects, a trout, a bass, a marlin, but there were also odd-looking specimens with peeling labels beneath them that read like poetry—a deep pink fish with large eyes labeled BLACKBELLY ROSEFISH, an evil-looking dark creature with white eyes labeled GOLDEN POMFRET, a tiger grouper and a bowfin. She read beneath them with a bottle of wine at her elbow. The more she drank, the more dazzled she was whenever she looked up. The wallpaper was red and white and the fish on the walls were gray and blue and a lurid peach; their lines of contrast vibrated… in spidery writing on the back of a cruise-ship postcard from 1948 she read the words Lil and I are having a swell time. On a card from the Lincoln Memorial, The hotest place Ive ever been.
Now and then she had to get up, pacing with a letter in one hand and her wineglass in the other. The letters were impenetrable somehow; they gave her almost no information about the old man. But one of them she wanted to keep for herself anyway. It was written on delicate yellowing stationery and was from a diplomat in Indochina, marked Hanoi October 29 1945. The diplomat described a cocktail party for Ho Chi Minh.
Ho is a seasoned old professional revolutionary, has done time for agitation in French, Chinese and even Hongkong jails. He is amazingly pleasant and gives the impression of being a Chinese scholar type…
Further down the letter writer described a person called the Emperor of Annam, who had also attended the party. The Emperor is a very sophisticated gent, about 40 or 43, and looks much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah. He is said to be interested mainly in sports, chiefly hunting. There is wonderful shooting a couple of hundred miles from here. A hint, she thought, a clue, a piece, but then it went nowhere, for there was no further mention of hunting. She forgot what she was looking for, in the wine and on her empty stomach, and only wished that she was in that time, long gone, when there were those habits of politeness and a person might reasonably write much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah.
Then she was finished with the bundle of letters and there was nothing left but money. In a water-damaged register she found electricity and gas bills, even milk bills from the days when you could have it delivered, but most of the entries were illegible. There were a few invoices from travel agencies, which might have led somewhere if there had been enough of them, but in the end they yielded nothing of interest and she threw them away. The old man must have had photo albums, at least a box of curling old snapshots, she thought next, and started to search the library. But the task was too daunting.