Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

Her lips moved very slightly, stretching almost into a smile. “I did. Of course I did.”

“You did.” Josh heard the man swallow. “So. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ Was that it?”

“Something like that. And you’ve been both, haven’t you, Raymond?”

“Many more years as the one than the other,” he said, and his wariness came more harshly into his voice.

“That’s true. Only a few years of being a friend. Back at the beginning.” She said the words, and the man’s confirming silence flowed up to drown the conversation.

Josh felt uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure what he was witnessing, but knew he didn’t want to know. He put the last of his tools into his toolbox, shut it, and latched it. Mrs. Reid had been a good customer, and he knew he couldn’t just stand by if the stranger became rude or aggressive. He spoke into their silence, his voice too loud and his affability sounding false. “Well, if you’re satisfied, Mrs. Reid, I’ll call it a day and head for home. Got a cat to feed, you know.” He glanced at the man and added, “Unless there’s something else you need before I go. Anything else you want me to do?”

She looked at the man before she brought her gaze back to him. “No, Josh, I think you’ve done everything I need. I’m satisfied.” She looked at the stranger again and added, “How about you, Raymond? Are you satisfied?”

The man was quiet for a moment and then said, “I think I am. But I don’t understand why.”

“You don’t understand why you are satisfied? Come, Raymond. I thought this was what you longed for, all these years.”

“It might be. But what I don’t understand is why you are doing it? And why you sent me a letter. Unless you wanted to me to witness it?” The last words came slowly, even more reluctantly from him.

She lifted one slim shoulder in an elegant shrug. “Because it finishes it, I suppose. Because I thought it would give you pleasure. Give you, perhaps, a sense of something finished.”

She stepped off the porch then and came down the path. The stranger made a small sound in his throat. But Josh carefully unlatched the gate and went to meet her. He’d recognized the fat envelope she carried. It would be the final payment for his work, in cash, just like before. As he took it from her, she smiled and then her mouth worked oddly, as if there were something she wanted to say. She swallowed hard and turned away from him abruptly. As she walked back toward her house, she spoke without looking back at him. She crossed the dry moat and stopped briefly on the other side. No bridge, she’d specified. Strange, but that was what the customer wanted, so that was how he’d built it. “Turn on the water for me, so the stream runs, before you leave. And shut the gate behind you when you go, will you?”

“Of course.” He was a bit hurt by her abruptness but decided it probably had something to do with the stranger at the gate. The man hadn’t even tried to come in, hadn’t even greeted her, really. And she hadn’t asked him in. Must be some very bad history between them, he decided, and resolved he’d see the stranger on his way before he left. He left the path and knelt in the dirt to find the spigot for the stream. He’d set it into the ground, along with the switch for the pump. It was only accessible from this side. She’d have to cross the running water if she wanted to turn it off. He’d pointed that out to her once, to be sure she understood. She’d just looked at him and then said quietly, “That’s part of the plan. Build it that way, please.”

And he had.

He opened the fiberglass hatch on the protective box and reached in to turn open the valve and then flick on the pump. Within minutes, the pipe hissed. He heard the gurgling as water filled the race. When the water reached the level, he heard the auto shutoff kick in, and then the quiet hum of the pump that would keep the water circulating. “Works perfectly,” he said in satisfaction. He stood up and was surprised to see that Mrs. Reid was still standing on the porch, watching him. He could not read the emotion on her face. Regret? Resignation?

When he glanced at the gate, the stranger was still standing there. His face was a complete contrast to the widow’s. The satisfaction was unmistakable. Josh felt a surge of revulsion for the fellow. What was the matter with the man? She was just a woman alone in the world, obviously consumed with her grief for her husband and beset with an irrational fear. The stranger stared at her as she stood alone, backlit by her porch light, as if his eyes could never drink enough of the sight. With both hands, he gripped the iron gate. The moment Josh stepped through it, he said, through gritted teeth, “Please, allow me.” And he shut it with a clash of iron against iron that abruptly sounded to Josh like a weapon clashed against a shield. Behind him, he was startled to hear Mrs. Reid give a low moan.

When he turned to look at her, she was staring at them both, her face white and both her hands clasped over her mouth.

The stranger spoke, his voice gentle and his words harsh. “I hope it takes a long time, Doria.”

She spoke through her muffling hands. “I loved him, Raymond. I loved your brother just as much as you did. I was clumsy. He was my first and it didn’t end for him the way I’d planned it would. But I loved him. Loved him more than life itself.” Her voice shook.

“And you call what you have now a life?” Raymond suddenly roared at her.

Her voice trembled as she replied. “No, Raymond. No, I don’t. It’s not life. And I don’t want it anymore. Without Adam, it’s not worth having. It took me years to realize that, and even longer to figure out what to do about it. But now I have. And I’ve given you the last thing that I have to give to anyone. Satisfaction.”

“Damn right you have. Satisfaction.” The man’s voice was thick with it, cold with righteousness.

It was too much. He couldn’t leave her standing there with this man threatening her from outside her gate. “Look, you, whoever you are, you’re frightening her. I think you’d better leave.”

“I’ll be glad to. But I haven’t frightened her. She’s done that to herself. There’s just one more thing I want to do for her before I go.” With both his hands, he unfastened the silver chain and the tiny crucifix it bore from around his neck. He watched Mrs. Reid as he slowly wrapped it around the gate catch and then fastened it.

“That’s not going to work,” Josh pointed out quietly to him. “She’ll have to undo it each time she wants to open the gate. I understand you think it might keep vampires out, but . . .”

“It will work just fine,” Raymond Reid said as he picked up his canvas satchel. He looked older than he had a few moments before. As if he’d finished some task and no longer needed to force a vitality he didn’t have. “Son, she won’t be opening that gate. And she didn’t have you build all this to keep vampires out.”

Raymond gave a final glance to the lone figure standing so still on the porch. He bent to pick up the canvas satchel. The top had come open and a mallet had fallen out of it. Laboriously, he picked it up and put it back inside. He turned his back on both of them and walked toward his rental car. He didn’t turn his head as he spoke. “It’s to keep a vampire in.”

Sometimes that single sentence that heralds the approach of a story doesn’t come at two in the morning or when I’m mowing a lawn. Sometimes, in the midst of a discussion with a friend, someone will say something so succinct and so true that the pieces of a story just start falling into place around it.

I think that many people assume that being a writer brings me into contact with all sorts of interesting people. And that’s true. But wondrous to tell, the majority of fascinating people I’ve met have intersected with my life in other ways. Last summer, an extraordinary natural philosopher was part of the crew putting a new roof on my house. I spent several afternoons outside, listening to his random observations as he fastened roof tiles down on my house. Marty the junkman, who used to come by our old place to see if we had any scrap metal for him, was a fountain of stories from the Depression era. A random encounter that delivers a person like that to my life is like beachcombing and finding a little treasure chest.