“It’s gonna change your life forever, Dar. I mean, think about it. Okay, I realize his methods—” she narrowed her eyes for emphasis “—rot, but the game show metaphor isn’t all that far off. You’re loaded. Think about all you and Jack can do. Mike can go to that snazzy math academy you’ve been eyeing for all these years.”
Kate had hit the nail on the head. “That’s just it, Kate. Mike can go to Simmons Academy now. But Mike could have gone to Simmons Academy all along! Dad knew how much we wanted him to be able to do something with his math skills. He knew we couldn’t afford to do it. How could he just sit there and not help if he had all that money lying around?” It was unkind, but it was spilling out of Darcy and she didn’t care. “One point six million is enough for three lifetimes Kate, and he knew he didn’t have much more time. He’s known for two years. Why, why, why did he feel he had to keep it from us? And you know what? I don’t even care about the dollar signs, I care that he kept such a big, huge, important thing from me. From me! I could change his bedpans but I couldn’t be trusted with his finances? Why keep secrets now, of all times?” Darcy crossed her arms. “It hurts. It hurts a lot.”
“It rots.”
“Yeah, it rots all right.”
Kate kicked her legs out in front of her and giggled just a bit. “But at least it rots all the way to the bank.”
God bless Kate. Darcy knew she’d done the right thing in telling her. She bumped Kate playfully with her shoulder and sighed.
“You have no idea why he’d do this? Hide this from you?”
“Not one. Not a one.” Darcy stuffed an entire graham cracker in her mouth.
“Well, at least now I understand why you weren’t in any hurry to open that box. You’ve got a license to be gun-shy on this one.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You know, Dar,” said Kate, pulling up one knee to sit facing Darcy on the bench, “you’re forgetting something.”
Darcy turned to look at her friend.
“What if the why is in the letter?” she offered. “What if it’s not a time bomb, but an explanation? Mr. Lawyer Guy said you were to open the box shortly after your dad’s death, right?”
Darcy nodded, her brain straining to put the pieces together. What if there was some kind of reasoning, some explanation in the letter? Darcy wasn’t sure she was ready to see it. But another part of her began to give in to the curiosity. Knowing why would help the coping process a lot more than chocolate graham crackers.
“You know what?” Kate offered suddenly with a smirk. “I was wrong. We don’t have enough chocolate to deal with this. It’s gonna take a whole gallon of Graeter’s mint chocolate chip to cope with this baby.” She began gathering up the food and wrappers. “And on the way, you can tell me what Jack said about all this.”
Chapter 2
The Twelfth of Never
“Four more spoonfuls and then I’ll open it. I’ll save the rest of my ice cream sundae for the aftermath.” Darcy was feeling better bit by bit.
Kate counted down Darcy’s spoonfuls and added a drumroll to the last one for effect. There, in the front seat of Kate’s car in Graeter’s Ice Cream Parlor parking lot, she took a deep breath and pulled the lid from the box.
Kate was right. It did look ordinary. She didn’t know if she expected some hand to come out and grab her like something from The Addams Family, but it looked tame enough. She started with something safe, like the coins.
“Gold,” Darcy said as she pulled one from the wax paper envelope that held it. “From Africa. At least I think it’s gold—it’s heavy enough. I’ll have to take them someplace to have them appraised. Dad told me he got these when I was born.” There were four of them, two pairs of different kinds. Okay, safe enough. Nothing shocking there. Good. She laid them gently back into the box.
The first Bible was soft and worn, the aged leather flaking off a bit in her hands. It was a woman’s bible, with swirly lettering stamped on the elegant beige of the cover. Her mother’s. Darcy realized she’d never seen her mother with it. She imagined it tucked in a nightstand drawer next to a velvet jewelry box and hankies.
Mom. Her death in 1982 seemed like ages ago now. As a shy seventeen-year-old, it had been so hard for Darcy to come to grips with the automobile accident that had taken her mom’s life. Actually, it hadn’t taken her life, just made her give up on the life she had until it ebbed right out of her.
Maimed.
Darcy had always thought that was an odd choice of words for people to use. Her mother’s left hand looked just as it always had, but it was rendered lifeless. Limp and useless. Her mother had survived all the other bumps and bruises, and had lived for years after the accident, but never gave a hint of ever recovering. Or even wanting to. Clara Hartwell had been a violinist, and life without a left hand didn’t seem worth living. “But it’s just a hand,” Darcy remembered thinking, even arguing with her mother.
All arguments, all pleading, all encouragement had proved as useless as Clara’s fingers. It had been a hideous, awful time.
“Mom’s,” Darcy offered to Kate, surprised by the lump in her throat when she spoke. “I’ve never seen it before.” She ran her hands through the impossibly thin pages, fingered the faded red ribbons that were meant to mark pages. Each ribbon left a pale-pink line on the page it had sat in over the years. Darcy ran her fingers across the monogram gracing the bottom corner before she laid it back in the box.
She recognized the second Bible. Hard-bound, it was tattered and dirty. This was the small Bible her dad talked about carrying through the war. The one he carried for years until he wore it clean out and Darcy gave him a new one for his birthday. Thumbing through it, Darcy saw hundreds of tiny scrawled notes in the margins. Names of people. Question marks and exclamation points with arrows to particular verses. “Harry—forgive him” was one, with an arrow to a passage in Luke which read “But he who hath forgiven little loves little.”
Darcy looked up. “Dad’s.”
Kate said nothing. There wasn’t anything for her to say, really. Except maybe “So, open the letter.” Darcy was glad she didn’t say it.
There it was. Sitting in the corner of the box. Small and thick, with “Darcy” in her father’s handwriting on the front. His handwriting the way it used to be, before his letters got sloppy and shaky from weak hands. This penmanship was strong and careful.
Darcy felt Kate’s hand on her shoulder. “You know, if you want to be alone, I could go get more ice cream or something. Maybe you need to do this in private.”
Darcy swallowed hard. “No. I think I need you here. I’m not going to read it aloud or anything—at least not yet, but I don’t think I want to do this by myself. You just sit over there and polish off that fudge, okay?”
“Got it.”
“Okay. I’m gonna do this.”
“I’m right here, kiddo.”
Darcy
