Jonathan Kellerman - Silent Partner

“Someone pays them mind,” I said. “Five hundred dollars a month.”

She gave a hand-in-the-cookie-jar look. “I beg your pardon.”

“I saw their bankbook. Sitting on top of the dresser.”

“On the dresser? What am I going to do with those two? I’ve told them so many times to keep that book hidden, tried to get them to let me keep it at my place. But they think it’s some kind of symbol of freedom, won’t part with it. They can get really stubborn when they want to. Jasper, especially. Did you see those wax-paper windows on their shacks? After all these years, he still refuses to have glass installed. Poor Shirlee freezes in the winter. Gabe and I have to bring down piles of blankets, and by the end of the season they’re mildewed beyond repair. The cold doesn’t seem to bother Jasper. Poor thing needs to be told to come in from the rain.”

She shook her head. “On top of the dresser. Not that anyone from around here would hurt them, but that’s a lot of money to advertise. Especially for two defenseless innocents.”

“Who sends it?” I asked.

“I’ve never been able to find out. It arrives, like clock-work, on the first of every month, posted from the central depot in Los Angeles. Plain white envelope, a typed address, no return. Shirlee has no clear concept of time, so she can’t say how long she’s been receiving it, only that it’s been a long time. There was a man- Ernest Halverson- used to deliver the mail until he retired in ’64. He thought he remembered envelopes arriving as early as 1956 or ’7, but he’d had a couple of strokes by the time I talked to him and his memory wasn’t perfect. All the other old-timers are long gone.”

“Was it always five hundred?”

“No. Used to be three, then four. It went up to five after Sharon left for college.”

“Thoughtful benefactor,” I said. “But how could they be expected to handle that kind of money?”

“They couldn’t. They were living like animals until we began taking care of them. Wandering into town every couple of weeks with two or three twenty-dollar bills, trying to buy groceries- they had no idea how to make change or how much things were worth. People are honest here; they never took advantage.”

“Wasn’t there curiosity about where they were getting the money?”

“I’m sure there was, but Willow Glen folk don’t pry. And no one realized how much money they were hoarding. Not until Sharon discovered it- thousands of dollars wadded up under the mattress, or just loose in a drawer. Jasper had used several of the bills for art projects- drawing mustaches on the faces, folding them into paper airplanes.”

“How old was Sharon when she made the discovery?”

“Almost seven. It was 1960. I remember the year because we had unusually hard winter rains. Those shacks were originally built for storage, with only a thin cement pad underneath, and I knew they’d be hit hard, so we went over- Mr. Leidecker and myself. Sure enough, it was dreadful. Their plot was half-flooded, boggy, the dirt running off like melted chocolate. Water had perforated the wax paper and was pouring in. Shirlee and Jasper were standing knee-deep in mud, scared and totally helpless. I didn’t see Sharon, went looking for her, and found her in her shack, standing on top of her bed wrapped in a blanket, shivering and shouting something about green soup. I had no idea what she was talking about. I took her in my arms to warm her, but she kept shouting about soup.

“When we got outside, Mr. Leidecker was pointing, all wide-eyed, at bits of green paper stuck in the mud and washing away in the flood. Money, lots of it. At first I thought it was play money- I’d given Sharon some board games- but it wasn’t. It was real. Between Mr. Leidecker and myself, we managed to salvage most of it- we hung the wet bills over our hearth to dry them, put them in a cigar box and kept them safe. First thing after the rains stopped, I drove Shirlee and Jasper down to Yucaipa and set up the bank account. I sign for everything, take a little out for expenses, make sure they save the rest. I’ve managed to teach them a little elementary math, how to budget, how to make change. Once they finally learn something, they can usually retain it. But they’ll never really understand what they’ve got- quite a tidy little nest egg. Along with Medi-Cal and Social Security, the two of them should be comfortable for the rest of their days.”

“How old are they?”

“I have no idea, because they don’t. They have no papers, didn’t even know their birthdays. The government had never heard of them, either. When we applied for Social Security and Medi-Cal, we estimated their ages, gave them birthdates.”

Miss New Year’s and Mr. Christmas.

“You applied when Sharon left for college.”

“Yes. I wanted to cover all bases.”

“How did you come up with Sharon’s birthdate?”

“She and I decided on one, when she was ten.” She smiled. “July Fourth. Her declaration of independence. I put 1953. I got a really good fix on her age from the doctor I took her to- bone-age X-rays, teeth, height and weight. She was somewhere between four and five.”

She and I had celebrated a different birthday. May 15. May 15, 1975. A rare splurge for dinner and dancing and lovemaking. Another fiction. I wondered what that date symbolized.

“Any possibility,” I asked, “that she was their biological child?”

“Unlikely. The doctor examined all of them and said Shirlee was almost certainly sterile. So where did she come from, right? For a while I lived with the nightmare that she was someone’s kidnapped baby. I went down to San Bernardino and checked six years’ worth of papers from all around the country, found a couple of cases that sounded possible, but when I followed them up, I learned that both of those children had been murdered. So her origins remain clouded. When you ask Shirlee about it, she just giggles and says Sharon was given to them.”

“She told me it was a secret.”

“That’s just a game with her- playing secret. They’re really just like children.”

“What’s the prevailing theory about how they got her?”

“There really isn’t one. Mind you, the doctor wasn’t absolutely certain Shirlee couldn’t conceive-‘highly unlikely’ was the way he put it. So I suppose anything’s possible. Though the notion of two poor souls like that producing something so exquisite is…” She trailed off. “No, Alex, I have no idea.”

“Sharon must have been curious about her roots.”

“You’d expect her to be, wouldn’t you? But she never really went through any identity search. Not even during adolescence. She knew she was different from Shirlee and Jasper but she loved them, accepted things the way they were. The only conflict I ever saw was the summer before she left for college. That was really hard for her- she was excited and frightened and tremendously guilty about abandoning them. She knew she was taking a giant step, and things would never be the same.”

She stopped, bent, picked up an oak leaf and twirled it between her fingers. The sky between the trees was darkening. Unintimidated by city lights, the stars were burning pinholes through the blackness.

“When’s the last time Sharon visited here?” I asked.

“A long time ago,” she said, making it sound like a confession. “Once she broke away, she found it very painful to return. That may sound callous, but her situation was unique.”

We walked on. The schoolroom windows shone through the dark: butter-colored rectangles. We hadn’t gone far, had been walking in circles.

“Her last visit,” she said, “was in 1974. She’d just graduated from college, had been accepted to graduate school, and was moving down to L.A. I threw a little party for her at my house. Mr. Leidecker and the boys wore starched white shirts and matching ties, and I bought new outfits for Shirlee and Jasper. Sharon arrived looking lovely, a real picture. She brought gifts for all of us, a handmade wooden checkers set for Shirlee and a tin of fancy colored pencils from England for Jasper. She also gave them a graduation picture- full cap and gown with an honors tassel.”