ain’t all, darlin’. Don’t believe it.”
“Dwayne Durbin, thy middle name is ‘paranoia.’”
“This grandmother hold the purse strings?” I nodded and he grimaced. “Tricky stuff, family inheritances. All kinds of strange things emerge when there’s big money involved.”
“It’s a question of sanity, apparently. Some of the family members think she’s losing it. Others aren’t so sure.”
“They’re the last group I’d ask for a recommendation on mental capacity.”
“One meeting…what can it hurt?”
Dwayne’s phone rang. As he turned to answer it, he said over his shoulder, “Read over your own report, Jane. And FYI: you counted up the current middle-agers wrong.”
“What?”
“Orchid Purcell had four children, not five.”
Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the driveway of my cottage at the west end of Lake Chinook. I parked in front of the shed-cum-garage as there’s no room inside it for my car. My landlord, Mr. Ogilvy, keeps god-knows-what within its faintly leaning, shingled walls. When it rains, I curse him. Today was so beautiful, a warm, glowing Indian summer afternoon, that I almost opened my arms and embraced it.
As soon as I entered my front door my pug, The Binkster, trotted toward me, her body wriggling like a contortionist. Her black mashed faced and bulbous eyes looked up at me expectantly and we exchanged kissy-face “hellos.” I’m getting really weird about my dog. She’d been thrust on me by the grace of my mother, who’d honored some shirt-tail relative’s request to find the little beast a home. I’d resisted for all I’m worth, but I must not be worth much because here she is. The Binkster, sometimes called Binky—which is enough to start the gag reflex, in my opinion—is a sweet-tempered, constantly shedding, stubby overeater with a serious bug-eye problem. However, I’ve grown way, way too attached to her. Whereas before I was looking out for Number One and holding my own, barely, now I was looking out for her as well. At night, this extra responsibility creeps into my conscious and my subconscious, too. I’ve woken more than a few times yelling at the top of my lungs at some imagined threat to my dog. This gets Binks going as well. Growling low in her throat from her little bed in the corner, she then jumps to her feet. She seems to sense my weakness in those moments and she makes a beeline for my bed, practically jumping into my arms and snuffling her way beneath the covers. I make faint objections which we both ignore.
Walking into the kitchen, I gave my refrigerator the obligatory check and was surprised and delighted to relearn that I’d purchased some groceries a few days back. Yes, yes. I’d been in a buying mood. I actually had sourdough bread and margarine and romaine lettuce. Almost a meal. There was a small carton of milk which I’d purchased for reasons that escape me now. I’m slightly lactose intolerant so I generally restrict my dairy to cheese. I drink my coffee black.
I slathered the bread with margarine, added the romaine, slapped another margarined slice of bread and bit in. I pretended I was eating roast beef. It’s not that I’m so poor I can’t afford it. I just can’t make myself pay the highway-robbery prices very often. I coulda used some cheese, though.
Binks set her chin on my leg and gazed up at me. This is a ploy. An effective ploy, actually. I gave her a smidgeon of my crust because I was too lazy to get up and find one of her doggy treats. Besides, I like to ration them out, and not just because of the price. Binkster’s supposed to be on a diet as she’s about as wide as she is long. Okay, that’s an exaggeration…but not by much.
While we both munched, my eye fell to my report on the Purcells. With Dwayne’s admonitions still rolling through my mind, I decided to remind myself what I was getting into. Tucking a last bite of sandwich into my mouth, I read:
Jane Kelly, Durbin Investigations
Purcell Family History
Mental illness runs in the Purcell family. Their history bears this out. When James “Percy” Purcell arrived in Oregon in the early-to-mid-1800s he came with dreams of building a giant city at the juncture of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. Other men joined in his vision and Portland was born, though Percy still managed to put his individualistic stamp on a lot of the city’s architecture. To this day more than a few buildings have scrolled “P’s” embedded into their stones and bricks.
Percy appears to have been sane enough (if you count marrying six times as sanity). Wives one and two died from unspecified diseases. Wife three ran off when she learned Percy was determined to leave Boston for Oregon. Wife four signed on in St. Louis as Percy was making his way west, then fell overboard to her death when the Purcell’s Conestoga half-slipped off its raft as it swiftly floated down the Columbia River. Percy himself, and apparently most of his belongings, made it safely to the new and frantically growing city of Portland, Oregon, in one piece. He spent the next several decades building up what has since become a huge fortune by buying up every scrap of real estate he could get his greedy hands on. During these years he remained determinedly single; some felt he was past marrying. But at the youthful age of seventy-two he took Wife #5 who promptly bore him two sons: Garrett and James Purcell Jr., his first and only children. As soon as Junior came squalling into the world, Wife #5 began hemorrhaging violently. She slipped into a coma and into the next world. Percy Junior was handed off to a wet-nurse whom Percy hurriedly married. Wife #6 tended to both Garrett and Junior.
I finished off the rest of my sandwich and set the plate on the floor for Binks. She inhaled the scattered, teensy pieces of leftover bread as I reflected on how much different life was now. A wet-nurse? No thank you.
By all accounts Wife #6 was thin, wiry, ill-tempered and nothing much to look at. Whether Percy loved his sons or not is unclear. He did not love Wife #6, however, and took to whoring around the riverfront bars. He died in the arms of a lusty Madam who went after his fortune tooth and nail. Percy, however, had the foresight to leave everything to his sons. Wife #6 jealously took control of the two boys and sought a share of the estate, but she could never quite get the money for herself. She was still immersed in a legal battle she couldn’t win when she was thrown from a horse, cracked her head on a stone and died at the age of thirty-nine.
By this time Garrett and Junior were in their teens. Always quiet and artistic, Garrett made it to his twenty-first birthday as a near recluse. But on that noteworthy day of his birth he walked to the center of the Steel Bridge, stood for a moment with his arms in the air and his face toward the heavens, then stepped into the Willamette River—some hundred feet down. Upon his death twenty-year-old James Purcell Jr. inherited everything. James waited ten more years before finding the woman of his dreams, Willamina Kersey. Willamina bore James a son and a daughter: James “Percy” Purcell the Third and Lilac Grace.
I surmised this, then, was the beginning of the whole flower thing.
Lilac was slow to develop and saw visions. James Junior and Willamina died in their midsixties, about six months apart from each other. Heart trouble in James’s case; a loss of interest in life in Willamina’s now that her beloved James was gone. Lilac Grace Purcell, unmarried and odd, moved into the family home where she spent the remainder of her life resting on a chaise longue, writing stories in a language of her own. She was in her forties when she died, eyes wide open, still on her chaise. The last words that she wrote—at least anything anyone could read—were prophetic: The End.
Weird, weird and weirder, I thought. Not a lot of happiness floating through the years.
Percy III inherited the entire Purcell estate. He also inherited his grandfather’s interest and savvy in real
