Twelve Rooms with a View (37 page)

“You stole it, Len,” I said. He hadn’t called the cops yet, and I was starting to hope that maybe he wouldn’t. “Charlie said the kid needs the money. You just said yourself it’s valuable, and you took it from him.”

“Spare me the moral outrage, Tina; you’ve been doing nothing but taking things that don’t belong to you for months, and there’s always a good reason, isn’t there,” he noted, an amused sneer curling around the edge of his words. “You’ve got a criminal heart vastly more experienced than my own.”

“There’s nothing illegal about it. My mom—”

“You might also spare me the drivel about your mother, who by all accounts, including your own, you completely abandoned when she needed you most. Oh, by the way. I thought you looked terrific at that press conference over at Sotheby’s. Wasn’t that Sophie’s dress you were wearing? And her pearls, another lovely touch. Does it make you feel
more at home, since you’ve already stolen her apartment and her history, to be wearing her things as well?”

“They threw them away,” I said, trying to sound cocky, but my criminal heart was abruptly less sure of its footing. “They threw her away too.”

“And what do you think you know about that?” he asked, his voice hardening.

“What I don’t know, I’m learning fast,” I tossed back, hoping I sounded more secure than I felt. “Charlie brought that plant to you because she trusted you. She’s your own kid. You stole from your own kid.”

Len sighed in the dark. “Of course families betray each other, what would be the fun otherwise? Betraying someone you hardly know, it’s not even worth it really.”

“Was it fun betraying me?”

There was a kind of gleeful silence at this. “You are fun, actually,” he told me. “You’re so completely unmoored in the universe. And now you think you’ve found a home, only it’s someone else’s home, someone else’s apartment, someone else’s clothes, someone else’s life. You could just as easily try to understand your own lost mother or even your lost sisters, but that doesn’t attract you. You’re too busy coveting … us.”

“Is that why you’re trying to get rid of me now? Because I don’t belong? Because a place like this only belongs to the people who had it in the past? You’re as bad as everybody else in this stupid building, they just want things to stay the same because they own everything and they think that sharing is for losers. Well, you know what? You
don’t
own the Edgewood. Alison and Lucy and I are here fair and square.”

“Well, you’re not
here
fair and square, Tina, I caught you breaking and entering and trying to rob me. And while I find your philosophical musings about property and identity amusing, I suspect the authorities will not be in the least interested.”

“They’ll be interested in hearing what I have to say about that plant.”

“That
will
be interesting. How many times have you been arrested? I couldn’t really tell from what you said at that press conference. Does your record endear you to the police, make them trust you more? When you explain things to them, do they actually take your word for it?”

I didn’t even bother to answer that one. By this point my heart wasn’t pounding as hard; it wasn’t pounding at all, in fact. Len
was
having fun; there was no sense of urgency to any of this at all.

“What do you want, Len?” I asked him. “What’s the deal going to be?” For a moment one of the shadows shifted, and the barest reflection of the clustered purple lights picked up a hollow glint in his eyes, then slid back into the dark. His hand reached out and hovered over the
Madrigalis
like he was blessing it.

“If she could have made those seeds grow, don’t you think she would have?” he asked, musing. “She didn’t have the skill. That’s what she’s angry about. She brought me a boy, she brought me a seed, that’s all she brought. A seed is nothing but potential. The rest is mine.”

“She’s your daughter.”

“Don’t come back here, Tina,” he said simply. “That goes for Charlie too. My world is off-limits. You make her understand that. And maybe you’ll be allowed to stay.”

“Tell her yourself,” I said. “She’s right behind you.”

The purple glint, which was all I could see of him, shifted to one side, startled, and none too soon, as something long and sharp sliced through the space where Len had stood a fraction of a second before.

“Holy shit,” I said. “What the fuck!”

“Hi, Dad,” said Charlie, raising her weapon again. “Nice to see you.”

“Put that thing down. Jesus!” I said, really scared that she was going to give it another go. “What the fuck is that thing?”

“It’s a pruning saw,” Charlie informed me. “I’m going to murder my father with it.” And then she brought it down again, barely missing him a second time. Len leapt back, falling into a black mass of something fernlike and dense but not completely losing his balance. From what little I could see in the shadows of the obscured foliage, he stumbled to
one side, caught himself, and moved down one of the black paths that converged on this corner of the greenhouse.

“Your aim is not what it might be, dear,” Len called back to her. “There aren’t many who would have missed that chance.”

“Maybe I’m hoping to drag this out,” she countered. “It might be worth it to me to scare you a few times before I finish you off, you motherfucker.” I couldn’t see much of anything, but she was moving after him fast down that pathway, holding the pruning saw over her head as she aimed for her third try.

“Stop it, Charlie—man, come on, I’m a witness here!” I yelled.

“Don’t kid yourself, Tina, you’re an accessory!” she yelled back. I heard the blade swish through the night air again and make contact with something plantlike.

“Not even close,” Len hissed, and now he sounded as if he were on another path in a different direction. “Your mother will be so disappointed in you,” he observed with real pleasure. Charlie reappeared at my side, still swinging. I had to duck to stay clear of her.

“Mother will delight in every detail of this story,” Charlie reported back. She swung the pruning saw blindly now, cutting another swath through the unseen foliage in front of her. “Oh, sorry, Dad, I think I just took out your
Heliotropus syncathia
. How long did it take you to root that? Oh well, you can spend another three years nurturing that one instead of me. Ooops. You don’t have another three years, do you?” She swung the blade again, and I realized she wasn’t blindly slashing at all; she knew where every single plant was in that place, and she was aiming. “Oh dear. There go the Asiatic lilies. Too bad, they are so
pretty.”

“Stop.
Stop.”
This time Len’s voice came from directly behind me. I didn’t know where either of them was, but they did.

“I’m not going to stop, you fuckface!” she yelled, lunging yet again. And then, under her breath, to me, “Take it. Take it now. Get it out of here.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. While Charlie continued to destroy her father’s greenhouse, I grabbed the
Madrigalis
and stumbled back
the way I had come. Behind me, the sound of the falling blade continued, cutting down the forest with glee.

Twenty minutes later, Frank was still passed out on the floor when Charlie showed up at my door. “Thanks,” she said abruptly. She had a cut on her forehead, her hands were covered in dirt, and those spooky blue eyes were unreadable. She slipped by me and Frank and headed for the kitchen, knowing that was where I had stashed it.

“Look,” I said, pissed, following her. “I said I’d help you get your plant back. I didn’t say you should
kill
him.”

“Trust me, if I’d wanted to kill him, I wouldn’t have missed,” she informed me. She flipped on the lights and looked at the
Madrigalis
, which I had placed directly underneath its picture. “My god,” she sighed, “it really is beautiful.” She put her arms around the plain terracotta pot and lifted it carefully over to the sink. Then she took one of the leaves between her fingers and held it delicately toward the light, so she could get a better view of the one tiny bud hidden there.

“He got it to bud,” she said. “He really is … amazing.”

“You have to get that thing out of here right now,” I told her. “I’m serious. I can’t be seen as an accomplice to this.”

“Well, but you are very much an accomplice,” she noted, barely glancing my way. “I mean,
I
didn’t call
you
and say let’s go break into my dad’s greenhouse.”

“Did you tell him that? Did you tell him that I called you?”

“He doesn’t care. All he knows is that you crossed him.”

“He crossed me first,” I said, sounding like an eight-year-old. “Seriously, he was out there trying to get me kicked out of the building before I did anything. All I ever did was help him and he—he—”

“Don’t tell me about my own father,” Charlie said as she examined the leaves and stalks with care. “He probably wanted something out of you, and he got it, and then he wanted something else. He wanted the
Madrigalis
. And you saw me bring it to him. So he had to get rid of you, because you knew he had it, and he saw that as threatening somehow. And he was right,” she said, finally smiling at me. “You were a threat. You knew what he had, and you knew me, and you helped me take it
back. He was right to want to get rid of you.” She turned back to the sink and grabbed a small cup, filling it with water.

“So what’s he going to do now?” I asked.

“Nothing right away,” she said. She took Len’s gardening gloves that he had left there and slipped them on deliberately. “Tomorrow or the next day, I don’t know.”

“What did you do to him?” I asked, a little worried.

“It’s not what I did to
him,”
she responded. “It’s what I did to his plants. You can do a lot of damage with a pruning saw if you’re not careful. And I wasn’t.” She pulled the leaves off one of the tiny branches carefully, and then squeezed the stalk between her fingers. A sticky white sap appeared. She studied it for a moment, then dipped the stalk into the water and let it soak.

“Oh, you know, that’s not—you know, I was trying to
help you,”
I said.

“Well, you did,” said Charlie. “You helped me a lot.” She rummaged around in the stack of miniature gardening implements on the shelf above the sink and carefully selected one of the fertilizing needles.

“Look,” I said, finally sick of her and her cool disinterest in the mess she had made for me. “I did this thing, for you and that kid. I was trying to be nice, and you just, you—you’re as bad as he is.”

“You have no idea how bad he is,” she stated. “I do.” She placed the fertilizing needle in the water.

“Then why did you even bring him that plant?” I said. “Why did you ask him for help in the first place? Why did you trust him?”

She looked over at me, unimpressed. “I know a lot of talented botanists, but he is the only one who could have gotten those seeds to grow,” she said, finishing her task with the needle. She touched the slender, glistening leaves of the
Madrigalis
and smiled with a cloudless and perverse delight. “He’s right, I never could have done it.” She picked up the plant and headed out the door. “Don’t touch those things without gloves on,” she called back to me. “That sap is really quite toxic.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about until the next morning, when I glanced into the kitchen and understood what she had been doing while we talked. She had fed her quickly improvised solution from the sap of the
Madrigalis
into the irrigation system. Every tray of moss was dead.

I
T WAS KIND OF NICE TO SEE OLD
S
TUART
L
ONG
. I
HADN’T LAID EYES
on the guy since the day we buried Mom, and there he was, sitting patiently in Ira Grossman’s glamorous waiting room, looking like a friendly egg. He was reading a magazine, something financial and boring.

“Hey, Mr. Long,” I said.

“Hello, Tina,” he said, smiling with real pleasure. “It’s been a while.”

“Yes, a lot has happened,” I agreed, sitting next to him. “What are you doing here, do you have business with Ira?”

“I’m giving a deposition,” he informed me.

“Oh, so am I.”

“Yes, I presumed so.”

“Lucy and Alison are doing theirs tomorrow. They kind of didn’t want me anywhere near the whole deposition thing in general? So we had to sign all these docs saying Lucy was the administratrix. That’s the word, right?”

“I think it’s a fine word.”

“Anyway, they all decided that she should be in charge because I’m kind of a loose cannon, but now I have to give a deposition anyway.”

“Sometimes it happens that way.”

“I can’t really follow it all that well. I pretty much just show up whenever they tell me to and do what I’m told.”

“Very wise.”

“It might be if I really pulled it off. Frankly, I understand why they’d rather keep me under wraps. I keep trying, over at the Edge, to be, you know, a good representative of the family, but it’s not going as well as it might.”

“Really?”

“Is that a surprise?” I asked.

“No,” he said, closing his magazine carefully and setting it back on the table. This is the thing I find curious about lawyers. Even when they want to talk to you, they don’t say very much. Mr. Long was clearly happy to see me and more than willing to talk to me while we waited to be called into our respective depositions; it’s not like he was trying to ignore me so he could read his magazine. But he really wasn’t going to say anything extra. After a moment I got embarrassed and decided to keep this going.

“Are you here for our case?” I asked. “I mean, I assumed you were, but maybe you’re here on somebody else’s case.”

“I’m here on your case.”

“Did I hear that the Drinans were suing you? I think Lucy told me that.”

“Their lawyers have suggested it, certainly. It would be part of the case they need to build around the earlier wills.”

“What kind of a case?”

“It’s just one among several arguments they might make. That perhaps I was lax in probating Mrs. Drinan’s will. The
first
Mrs. Drinan.”