“Victoria,” Gerry says, “get my mother’s executor on the phone.”
*
THE EXECUTOR for Gerry’s mother’s estate is an old family friend, a lawyer who had lived on their street. Perhaps not the best way to choose one’s lawyer, but no harm had come to Gerry’s mother by conducting her affairs that way. Tom Abbott is a sweet, gentle man and Gerry had often wished he were his father. But even as a child he could see there was no spark between his mother and Tom.
“I think I’ve untangled things,” he tells Gerry later that afternoon, their third call of the day. “Your father died in June and left a will, dated 2015, in which he bequeathed everything to your mother. ‘Everything’ isn’t a lot—about two hundred thousand dollars, although she would have qualified for his social security, which was more than hers. Because his will was still in probate when your mother died, his bequest to her rolls into her estate. The money will be put in escrow and go to you when your mother’s estate settles.”
“Why was there a claim against it?” Not his most pressing question, not even close, but the best he can manage for now.
“Here’s where it gets a little complicated. Gerry—your parents never got a divorce. Your mother could have asked for one on grounds of abandonment or adultery, but she chose not to. When they separated, in the 1970s, divorce law was far more restrictive and your father may have believed he couldn’t initiate the action. Maybe he didn’t want to because, without a formal dissolution of the marriage, there would be no official orders about child support. Anyway, his second marriage, as a consequence, was never legal. And in 2001, he left that woman, just moved out and on. I don’t know why you assumed he was dead—”
Because my mother told me he was. “I’m not sure, either.”
“But he had no legal obligations to his common-law wife. Kids were long grown. Then he dies and leaves what he has to your mother. His ex challenged the will. They had been together almost forty years, after all. But common-law spouses don’t have standing in Ohio and, even if she did, his will is legal unless she can prove undue influence, or that he wasn’t of sound mind when he made it. He was free to leave everything to your mother and now it goes to you.”
“I’m not sure I want it,” Gerry says. Blood money. No, not blood money. Bloodless money. Guilt money.
Or—is it possible that his father and mother loved each other? Is that the part of the story he missed? Is that why his first novel had hurt his mother?
“You can give it away, once it’s yours, which should be by this fall. Donate to some cause in your mother’s name. Maybe it’s chump change to you, but it’s enough to do some good in the world.”
It’s enough, Gerry thinks, to cover my losses in transfer taxes and the like if I decide to sell this place sooner rather than later. If he leaves this apartment once he recovers—who would blame him, who would find it suspicious? The apartment tried to kill him, after all. The floating staircase was like a mouth that tried to devour him whole, the whale to his Jonah. There would be almost a kind of poetic justice to his father’s money covering the losses he would incur on all the taxes and real estate fees.
He has recorded his conversation with Tom on his smartphone, informing him, as Maryland law requires, that he is doing so. He then asks Victoria to transcribe it for him, something she grumbles about, but she is his assistant, after all.
That night, Gerry sleeps better than he has in some time. That is, he sleeps well until 2:11 A.M., when the phone by his bed rings and he picks it up and hears a female voice.
“Gerry? Gerry? I’m sorry I haven’t called for a while.”
“No,” he says. “No, no, no.” The calls had stopped after Margot, there aren’t supposed to be any more calls. He had removed the recorder that the private eye recommended. The obvious answer is the obvious answer.
“We need to talk, Gerry.”
The voice sounds different, or does it? Slightly more syrupy, but maybe that’s his brain, struggling for consciousness. He is so foggy tonight, he feels as if he’s swimming through sludge.
“Aileen!” he bellows. “Aileen!”
She comes up the stairs, moving quickly by her standards, huffing and puffing. “What’s wrong, Mr. Gerry?”
“Please check the caller ID on the kitchen handset.”
She grabs the kitchen phone from its cradle. “I must have dozed off, I didn’t hear it ring.”