I sat down hard on the concrete patio still holding Mother’s hand. I almost pulled her back out of the chair.
“You have got to be kidding!”
Mother was a woman of steel now.
“No, darling, she is not kidding. There is nothing even remotely amusing about this. William left three million dollars to Ernest Dibber.”
“This is just not fair!” cried Cassie. “Gran, that’s your money! It doesn’t belong to some stupid stranger!”
“Let me see the letter, Cassie.”
She passed it over to me. I read quickly through the opening legal preamble and got to the meat of the letter. William had left each of his three cousins five thousand dollars. He left his old friend, Joe Parks, ten thousand and a Methodist seminary five hundred thousand. He bestowed thirty thousand on Mother. There was no mention of me, Velvet, or Cassie. That hurt. The remainder of the estate, the house and all the contents, including my great-grandmother’s table, he left to his “dear friend, neighbor, and caretaker, Ernest Dibber.” The estimate of the remainder of William’s estate, the stocks and bonds, and the contents of fifteen different bank accounts, was well over three million dollars.
We sat very quietly for a moment or two while the news sank in, and then we all started to talk at once.
“I can’t believe William had.…”
“My God, I don’t understand how.…”
And Cassie was still on, “Son of a bitch!”
Then we were quiet again. I looked at Mother and saw the unbelievable. I do not think I had seen her cry more than one tear since the copious amount she shed when my father died, but she was doing so now and with a vengeance. Suddenly I felt like a frightened little child. There was nothing I could do but reach out and take her hand. Cassie was equally stunned.
“Don’t you cry, Gran! You’ll see! I’ll get that creep if it’s the last thing I do,” she promised.
Mother wiped her eyes on one of the linen luncheon napkins.
“You don’t understand, darling. I’m not angry at that dreadful man. I’m angry at William!”
“But why, Gran?”
“Because he was a millionaire three and a half times over and he made my darling Abigail live a pauper’s existence, that’s why!”
She stood and paced up and down the patio.
“She had to mend and scrape and do without, and all the while he was counting dividends and interest in his miserly little head. Can you imagine how she must have felt?”
She stopped behind Cassie’s chair and gripped the back so hard her knuckles stood out like ivory knobs.
“When Abigail died, I went through her closet trying to find a decent dress in which to bury her. I found nothing but rags. I had to dress her in something of mine because I wanted her to look nice.”
She shook her head sadly.
“How could the man to whom she devoted her entire life treat her in so shabby a manner? How could William make his wife live in such abject poverty for so many years and then turn around and make a millionaire out of that obnoxious neighbor? William must have been out of his mind.”
The tears started to make their way down her cheeks again.
“If you all will excuse me I think I’m going to lie down for a while. I’m suddenly very tired.”
“Of course, Mother. Will you be okay?”
She nodded her head and walked slowly back to the house. Cassie ran ahead of her and opened the screen door to the porch. She gave her grandmother a swift embrace and ran off toward the lane that led to the back field.
I sat alone on the sunny afternoon patio with my thoughts whirling. Maybe a nap was the best thing when your brain was on overload. But I knew I could never sleep. Who would have ever suspected something like this? Certainly none of us could have imagined it, not in a million, not in three million years. That would be a year for every dollar. Wow! I thought, that is a lot of money. How does a man get that kind of money? Especially a man like William who was so quiet and unassuming. He had only held one job. He had never traveled outside of the state. When his parents went to visit relatives in Germany, William was in school and declined the invitation to accompany them.
That must have been it! He must have inherited a good deal of the money from his parents. I had heard him tell stories about his father, a good stout German who had come to Louisville with his family in the 1800s.
His grandfather was a successful merchant who opened several dry goods stores. When William’s father decided to strike out on his own, he had purchased a barge and gone down the river selling whatever the farmers needed. After meeting a Scottish farmer’s pretty daughter, he married her and settled down. The small coalmining town where they lived had neither dry goods store nor bank. He furnished both for the next few decades.
According to what I could remember of William’s stories, it was his mother’s thrift as well as his father’s success at making money that made their life so comfortable. She had sustained them during difficult times, most notably when the bank went under during the depression.
William had grown up in that little mining town, and when he showed no real talent for merchandising, his father sent him to school to study bookkeeping. He came back and worked for the bank for the rest of his life.
Ernest Dibber was the young man William trained to replace him at the bank when he retired. Dibber was a tax specialist, too. He’d probably prepared William’s taxes: the only other person in the world to know how much money William really had. My neck started to prickle as the hairs stood on end. There was something really wrong here!
I heard the screen door slam shut and looked up to see Mother coming back outside. She looked more disheveled than I had ever seen her and more distraught than I thought possible.
She knelt in front of me and clasped my hands tightly in her cold fingers.
“Paisley,” she whispered hoarsely. “Paisley, don’t you see? Ernest Dibber was the only person who knew about William’s money. Now that money is all his. I think he coerced William into writing that will and then murdered him! Maybe, he even.…”
I managed to cushion her head from the hard concrete as she sank slowly and gracefully down in a dead faint.
Chapter Four
Mother’s regular physician, Ed Baxter, was recovering from open heart surgery, and the only other doctor in town, a younger man named Winston Wallace, was taking his calls. I explained my concerns about Mother to his nurse, and the doctor came out within the hour. After staring much too long at Cassie as she returned from her walk in the field, her tee shirt clinging with sweat, he allowed himself to be hustled into Mother’s bedroom.
She sat propped up in her bed wearing a soft lavender cashmere bed jacket. Her face was very pale but she had managed to comb her hair and make herself presentable. She held her chin up and smiled, knowing that everything that happened here would be gossip in town tomorrow.
Mother was angry at me for calling the doctor, but at the same time I could tell she was a little frightened and needed some reassurance that all was physically well.
I have to admit that Dr. Wallace seemed to know his business even though I could not stand his condescending manner. He gave Mother a quick but professional examination. Her heart, blood pressure and pulse were all checked and pronounced to be normal. Then he sat beside her for awhile talking softly and asking her questions about her health. After a few minutes, he patted her hand and stood up. He carefully adjusted his jacket and then his trouser pleats. I’m sure he thought, as he preened in front of us, that he was a handsome figure of a man. His clothes were obviously expensive but just this side of flash instead of class. A shiny, gold Rolex hung grandly large on his right