Janice Carter - The Inheritance

TIME TO TURN OVER, Roslyn thought, and bake the other side. She flung an arm across her eyes, shielding them from the glare of a Caribbean sun that penetrated even through closed lids. Her mouth was so dry. She tried to move her lips but they were stuck together. A tall frosty drink. Had to be somewhere close, she thought. At my elbow. Her eyes blinked open.

Not the Caribbean, she realized at once. Sunlight streamed from the window opposite the bed she was lying in. Roslyn slowly flexed the fingers of her right hand, thick and lifeless from lack of circulation. She rotated her head gently on the pillow, scanning the room and wondering for a brief but scary moment where on earth she was.

The decor of the room helped fix the setting—chintz everywhere and clunky dark wooden furniture. Gilt-framed portraits of people in various periods of dress were arranged on one wall papered with tiny purple violets. Two pastoral landscapes hung on the opposite. The double bed she was sprawled in had once been painted white. A long time ago, she decided, craning round to view the wrought iron headboard, slightly chipped and splashed with dots of rust.

Plainsville, Iowa. Not the Caribbean at all.

Roslyn struggled to raise herself onto the thick feathered pillows beneath her head. Doing so, she knocked the night table with her left elbow and the two empty miniature Bourbon bottles clinked onto the floor. Roslyn winced at the noise, and her head fell back onto the pillows, banging against the iron bed frame.

She raised a hand to rub the tender spot. The travel alarm clock propped against the lamp on the night table indicated nine o’clock. Back in Chicago, she’d have been hard at work for an hour.

Suddenly the complete emptiness of the day loomed before her. She was in a small Midwestern town, a place she’d never even heard of until last week, lying in a strange bed in someone else’s house. She’d committed herself to staying five days and didn’t have the least idea what she would be doing here.

Roslyn groaned, wondering how she’d gotten herself into such a ridiculous situation. What little she knew about Iowa came from grade school geography. She recalled green undulating hills, flat lands and farms. Lots of farms. She only hoped Plainsville contained a good bookstore and coffee shop.

She groaned again, then stretched, raising her bare arms above her head and wrapping her hands around the curving loops of the headboard behind. The patchwork quilt fell away, exposing the silky top of her sleeveless ice-blue nightgown. No wonder she’d been shivering all night. Flannel was definitely a must for Plainsville, Roslyn decided, even in late April. But the wash of sun spilling over her and onto the hardwood floor was inviting. She flung off the quilt and swung her legs over the side of the bed.

A heavy thud from outside stopped her cold. Roslyn looked over to the window. She hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains the night before, guessing there were no neighbors close enough to be spying on her. She padded across the room reaching the long rectangular window just as a man’s head popped into view.

Roslyn stepped backward, one hand automatically covering her mouth and the other vainly attempting to sling back the spaghetti strap of her nightgown. The man outside the window grinned and waved a hand. Roslyn noticed then that he was standing on the top rung of a ladder. Suddenly he raised a fist clenched around some kind of tool which he tapped against the window frame.

Roslyn swung round to the bed, grabbed the quilt to wrap around her and ran from the room. She took the stairs two at a time but when her bare feet thumped onto the floor at the bottom of the staircase, she stopped. She didn’t know the layout of the house. God, she didn’t even know if there was a telephone. No. Wait. The note from the secretary mentioned something about a phone call. But where the heck…?

She pivoted left, then right. The size of the house daunted her. Better to aim for the front door, straight ahead. She snapped the dead bolt and pulled hard. Last night’s storm had left behind puddles. Roslyn shoved her feet into her pumps lying where she’d kicked them off last night and rushed onto the veranda.

She clipped down the slick cement steps onto the narrow strip of sidewalk that curved toward the rear of the house. Roslyn marched along the path, barely noticing the sunlight bouncing off damp patches of grass, puffing sprays of mist into the morning air. She heard voices ahead and as she came around the corner of the big frame house, she saw two men—one lounging against the bottom portion of a long aluminum ladder and the other scrambling down the rungs.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she snarled at them.

HE GUESSED right away who she was. Ida’s lawyer had called from Des Moines over the weekend to say that the niece—great-niece?—might be visiting for a few days to check the place out before deciding to move in or not. He hadn’t dreamed she’d come so soon.

All the rain they’d taken over the last four days had got him to thinking that he hadn’t cleaned out the gutters and eaves troughs after the winter. Last fall he’d noticed a few weak spots in the old copper troughs and had dictated a mental note to himself to repair them for Ida. So he’d persuaded Lenny to come along and hold the ladder for him while he cleaned out the troughs. He was still chuckling when he plunked a foot onto the grass at the base of the ladder.

“Should’ve seen the look—” he said when a vision whirled around the end of the house.

She looked even better in full sunlight, he thought; her hair a swirl of reds and coppers burnishing out from her pale face like an electrified halo. And the face. The white skin translucent enough to reflect hints of spring all around them. He could paint that face! Though, he swiftly amended, not with that particular expression on it.

He held up both palms, dropping his trowel onto the ground. “Sorry about that, Miss. Uh…I was just about to clean out the eaves troughs—”

“The eaves troughs?”

Either she’d never heard of an eaves trough or she found his explanation ridiculous.

“I used to work for Miss Ida Mae. Well, we were friends, too. Anyway, I did a lot of odd jobs for her and after the rain this week, I thought I’d better get at those—”

“Eaves troughs.”

He stopped then, realizing that the glint in her eyes had more to do with anger than sparkles from the sun. He wondered if his own embarrassment was as obvious as it was starting to feel because she stared at him until he imagined he’d been the one caught parading outdoors in a nightie instead of her.

Then her gaze abruptly shifted, zigzagging from a point behind him, to the ladder, to Lenny, back to him and finally, to the tools lying on the grass.

“J.J.’s Landscaping and Garden Center,” she muttered. Obviously she’d noticed his truck.

“That’s me—Jack Jensen. And this is my nephew Lenny, who’s helping me out today. And you must be the niece.”

She seemed to be in a daze. “The niece?”

“Ida’s niece—or is it great-niece?” Jack turned to Lenny. “Is that what she’d be called? Great or grand?”

Lenny gave him a look as mystified as the niece’s, and Jack swore at himself for babbling.

“Jack Jensen?”

Jack and Lenny both turned back to the woman. Disbelief was all over her face.

“You mean, you’re the other beneficiary?”

Jack wasn’t certain of the insinuation in her voice but he caught Lenny grinning at it. “Yeah, I guess that’s right. And you would be Miss—”

“Baines,” she said. “Roslyn Baines.” She stuck out her right hand, releasing the quilt she’d been clutching. It dropped to the ground.

The nightgown shimmered in the sunlight, its filmy blue fabric undulating against her long slender legs and body like ripples in a mountain stream. Jack and Lenny looked down at the ground. There was a fluttering sound as Roslyn swooped to retrieve the quilt. When they both dared to raise their eyes, she was heading toward the front of the house.