The Nature of My Inheritance (4 page)

“Hi there, Liam,” the reverend said in a very
different, louder, more carefree tone of voice.
“Give me a minute here, son,” and with that he and his companion, who decidedly looked away
so I could no longer see his face, went outside
together, not saying a further word in front of
me.

I smelled something was up. And if a smell
could be deafening, that’s the smell I heard. For
one, it wasn’t like him not to introduce me. He
brought me up to be more polite than that, and
even if I didn’t always measure up, not by a long
shot, wasn’t it somewhere in the Bible that it
was the parent’s job to teach by example?
Maybe not, but damned if this whole episode
didn’t made me nervous as a turkey on Pilgrim’s
day. It didn’t help that when my father
came back inside, he acted as if nothing out of
the ordinary had even happened. Well, I figured,
I had my secrets—ah, Amanda, I wonder
if you knew how devoted I was to you back
then—and I guess he had his. Just that those
men didn’t look like contractors here to discuss
church repairs or even local businessmen offering
loans or help or what have you. They and
their cars were not, I believed, from our particular
backwaters. Crocs from a different swamp,
or I’m an alligator’s uncle.

Back home, I wondered if the men at the
church had anything to do with my parents’
after-dinner wringing of hands. Beyond offering
to look for a job and assuming they’d let me in
on what was happening when it suited them,
there was nothing I could do. So what I did was
nothing, and put the matter out of my mind. My
little brother Drew would ask me what was up,
but I’m sorry to admit that I kept him as much
in the dark as the progenitors kept me. I reassured
him, my arm over his bony shoulder,
which he disgustedly shook off, that just as they
had persuaded me—not even slightly—that all
was well, he should be persuaded, too.

“Kemosabe,” I said, to his annoyance, “Life’s
tough. Chill, my man.”

He ran upstairs to his bedroom and I didn’t
blame him. I knew more than he did, but because
of that fact, I was even more confused
than he. As I recall, I went up to my room, too,
shut and bolted my door, and played on my
Xbox all night. I hesitate to provide the name of
the game, as it’s not one I am proud of, but for
partial disclosure, let it be said that pixilated
blood was lost, virtual limbs were separated
from their host bodies, and mayhem and madness
blanketed the screen. In a healthy way, for
sure. Getting my angst out, I suppose one could
assert. Getting some balance back in my life.
Sort of.

Rewind now back to present. My dad is dead.
My brother and I are fatherless. My mom’s a
widow. The First Methodist church has no minister.
Winter’s coming. None of these are even
slightly good things. I liked it better when the
reverend was around and I could be a friendly
pain in his neck and my mom could feed him
his meat, vegetable, and starch every evening,
and our little corner of the world thrived on its
trivial routines. At the same time, hard as it was
to wrap my tired and meager brain around it,
thanks to my father’s bequest and the literary
nougats I discovered inside those dusty Bibles, I
was worth well over a million dineros. If there
was ever such a thing as a silver lining on a
cloud, this was it. Not even silver, a gold lining.
I kept everything to myself but wondered why
my dad, looking as haggard as our threadbare
sofa, wasted so many evenings worrying about
church finances when he had to have known
that any one of these books would have bought
him a new organ or paid for his steeple repairs.
I wanted to shout “We’re rich” to my mom and
brother at the top of my lungs, but I knew I
needed to stay calm, remain as stupid as I looked
until I got a better handle on how my pater acquired
these rare books and why he had been so
worried about money during the last months of
his life.

Whether from concern or lenience or distractedness
or all three, my mother allowed me
one last day home from school. I had told her I
was feeling a little better, cough cough, but as it
happened, a soaker of a rainstorm had settled
in, driving the last leaves out of their trees and
hammering against the window panes. If it had
been nicer outside, she probably would have
made me go. But since the weather was rotten
and it was a Friday, anyway, she gave me a pass.

“Monday means you’re back at it, though,”
she warned while stirring the hot oatmeal she
was cooking us for breakfast.

“No problem,” I said, sitting in my robe at the
table, trying to appear chipper and under the
weather at the same time. “And I’ll get my
makeup work going as soon as I can.”

Oh, I was a regular valedictorian.

As it turned out, it was a good thing I stayed
home that day since I had almost as many visitors
as Amahl. Not three friendly kings but two
men showed up unexpectedly, one in the morning,
the other midafternoon.

I was upstairs documenting books when I
heard the doorbell ring. Quickly replacing a slim
volume by Samuel Taylor Coleridge back in its
biblical hiding place, I cinched my robe, slid into
my slippers, went downstairs, and opened the
door. The detective, Reynolds was his name,
stood there looking every bit the street thug
once again, if this time showered and smelling
of fresh talc. And, as before, I took his casual appearance
to be a sign that he was good people,
somebody I could maybe trust. Not that I was
in a trusting mood.

“Hey, Liam,” he said, as the chilly outside air
blew around him and right through me.

“Hello, sir.”

“Your mom in?”

“Not right now,” I said with an unfeigned
sneeze.

“Well, as it happens, I wanted to talk to you,
too,” he went on. “I see you’re home sick,
though. I can come back another day if that’s
better.”

I should have said yes, but the words, “No,
that’s okay, come on in,” flew out of my mouth
instead.

We sat down in the living room. I knew the
polite thing to do would be to offer him some
of my mother’s leftover coffee, given what a
cruddy day it was outside, but kept my mouth
shut. Sure, I kind of trusted him, but there was
no need for me to roll out too big of a welcome
mat. Besides, I didn’t want him or anybody else
messing with my inheritance. Money aside, I
had gotten very possessive of my books just as,
or so I’d started to believe, my father had.

Reynolds was speaking about how he was still
on the case regarding my dad’s death. “I seem to
be the only one in the department who isn’t
convinced it was a hundred percent accidental.
Coroner ruled it accidental. Prosecutor’s office
sees nothing in it for them to pursue a trip-andfall.
I got no leads, just a nagging hunch. Looks
like it’s only you and me thinking there might
have been foul play,” as he summed it up, an
awkward smile very briefly complicating his
face. Smile gone, he asked, “You still thinking,
like the last time I saw you, that your father was
the victim of a crime?”

“Maybe,” I said, less sure now if the reverend
wasn’t the perpetrator of one, too, since I knew
he hadn’t enough dough on the up and up to
acquire even one of the rarities hidden inside
those Bibles upstairs, sharing shelf space with
my innocent smut.

“You sounded a lot more sure the last time I
dropped by.”

I shrugged, feeling almost as guilty as if I had
killed him myself.

“Well, since I’m here, let me ask what I asked
your mom the other day. Have you had any visitors
or phone calls that are out of the ordinary?”

Black sheep atheist though I styled myself, I
thought the better of lying to a cop, even one
who, like Reynolds, was nonchalantly dressed
like a homeless man in fifty cent’s worth of
threads from Goodwill. Somewhere behind his
rumpled sweater and ripped jeans there was a
badge lurking, and my personal brand of anarchism
only went so far.

“A guy did call looking for my dad. Didn’t
know he was dead, I guess.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“Nope. And when I asked him his name and
number, he hung up on me.”

“You didn’t tell him your father was deceased?”

“Not my job.”

This made Reynolds smirk a little. “Figured
he might give you a clue if you played dumb, eh?
Smooth thinking, Liam. One of these days you
might want to consider going into my line of
work. Better watch out for my job.”

I didn’t want to insult him by saying that I’d
rather be a blind garbage man with brain cancer
and no legs than a police officer, so I said instead,
“Well, the fish wasn’t biting.”

“You know what reverse dialing is? You try
that?”

“I tried, but it was blocked.”

“I have a question for you, Liam,” Reynolds
said, shifting subjects as he shifted on the sofa,
and his voice also shifted to a more buddybuddy
tone. “After your dad died, we looked
through some of his records at the church just
to see if anything was suspicious. You know, to
see if he’d gotten any hate mail or stuff like that.”

“No way,” I said.

“You’re right. We didn’t find a thing. Your father
was very well liked.”

All this hollow pitter-patter was now making
me antsy. It was my last day with the house all
to myself and I still had a dozen Bibles left to
open and catalogue, and though I didn’t dislike
Reynolds, he was getting on my nerves. I waited
for him to finish whatever was on his mind.

“Well, since there really is no criminal investigation
still going on—like you, I’ve got the day
off—I don’t have any legal right to ask you this
and doubt if I could even get a judge to issue a
search warrant, but I’m wondering if your dad
had an office in the house here, as well as in the
church basement?”

“Not really,” I said, relieved. That was a pretty
long windup to a slow pitch, and I was bracing
myself against the possibility he was going to ask
about my Bibles.

“I was just thinking that since you and I are
the only ones who think there might have been
wrongdoing involved, that if I could go through
his desk at home—”

“Well, my mom’s the one who did all the
bookkeeping and I guess you could have a look
at her stuff if you thought it was important. I
doubt she’d care.”

“If it’s not a lot of trouble,” he said. “I don’t
want to impose.”

“No problem,” I told the detective, grateful to
accompany him to the downstairs family room,
a corner of which doubled as my mom’s study,
because it led him to a part of the house that was
in the opposite direction of my trove. Besides,
even though he didn’t really have any right to
riffle through her papers, as he himself conceded,
my mother, of all people, had nothing to
hide. As I led the way down, I heard him breathing
a little heavily behind me, and thought to
myself he needn’t be so excited about all this
since I knew there was nothing to be found that
would assist in his investigation. And yet, while
I stood there shifting weight from one foot to
the other while I watched him go through her
files, I found myself feeling a bit annoyed that
I’d allowed him access. What if he did find a
misplaced piece of paper that might betray the
existence of the rare books hidden upstairs? On
top of that, long minutes were ticking by that
might better have been spent doing my internet
research.

I was right, however. He discovered not one
thing worthy of pursuing further.

“I knew it was a long shot,” he said, clapping
his palms down on his knees where he sat on my
mother’s swivel chair, and rising to go. “I really
appreciate your time and trust, Liam.” As we
headed back upstairs, he added, “We probably
should keep this to ourselves, if that’s all right
by you.”

“No reason not to,” I said, having no intention
of telling my mom anyway.

At the door he thanked me again, requesting
that I get in touch if anything developed that I
thought he might need to know.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” I assured him, then
hacked out a cough that was almost as fake as
my brother’s had been a couple of days before.

“You take care of that cold, you hear?” he
winked, handing me his card before sliding on
his raincoat and leaving. I watched through the
front door window as he lit a cigarette while ambling
down our walk, then neatly tucked the
match back into his pocket rather than toss it on
the long wet grass that could have used one
more mowing before the snow started.

That’s one sharp hombre, I recall thinking.
Don’t want to find myself on the wrong side of
his good graces. Bad for health. The fact was,
since the reverend didn’t keep a separate office
at home and they found nothing among his papers
at church, I’d figured there were no papers
to be found, period. That this assumption would
prove to be way wrong was probably what got
me started, in my tender middle teens—
Amanda, how I missed having all my spare time
to think of you and you only—on my first ulcer.

Why wrong? Because less than an hour later,
having discovered a 1843 first edition, first issue
of Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
with hand-colored
illustrations by John Leech, and another
early sixteenth-century Aldine title by Lucretius
that needed more research but looked promising,
I opened one of the last of my smuggler’s
Bibles to find not a rare book but a sizeable stash
of cash, about thirty grand, and a bunch of
handwritten notes. The tidy wad of barely-circulated
hundreds, held together with rubber
bands, I put back where I found it, my fingers
gone a tad numb. The notes, however, I spread
out on my bed with utmost care. I knew what I
had stumbled on even before I started combing
through the receipts to sort out which ones went
with which books.

Hurrying, I glanced at the treasures inside the
remaining Bibles, jotted down my own notes
about their authors, titles, dates, and so forth,
then moved the trove of Holy Books into some
boxes where I used to store my childhood
comics before I sold most of them for enough
to cover my Xbox acquisition. I cleared out the
back of my disorganized warehouse of a closet,
carefully stacked the boxes there, and proceeded
to hide them under layers of wrinkled clothes,
sports equipment I never used, a sleeping bag,
piles of stuff it would take a team of archaeologists
to dig out. The only Bible I kept out, besides
the one my preacher father actually used to read
when he wasn’t busy hoarding high spots of
Western culture, was the one with the cash and
paper trail in it.