Darned if You Do Read online

  “Ms. Shipp?” Kassie said, moving to intercept the woman’s long strides.

  The woman stopped short. “Yeah—are you Ms. Christianson?” Her voice was thin with a hint of twang in it. The tone was, however, mild rather than assertive.

  “Yes. Could we sit down for a few minutes? I want to talk to you about your cousin, Mr. Riordan.”

  Valentina looked around at the various upholstered chairs and settees grouped in clusters around the large room. About half the groupings were occupied by one or more people. “Okay,” she said, and smoothly led the way to an unoccupied cluster of four chairs a few steps away.

  She sat down as gracefully as she walked—Kassie wondered if she was a trained dancer, or had been one in her youth.

  “How is he?” asked Valentina.

  “Doing well. The doctor thinks he’ll recover completely—but it will take time. His right leg was broken in two places, and he’s suffered some broken ribs as well. Plus he has a concussion, a bruised liver, and other internal injuries. He’s not a young man, but he was in good health before the accident. It’s just going to take some time.”

  “But he’s not going home anytime soon.”

  “No. He’s going to need some therapy on that leg. And . . .” Kassie hesitated, then plunged in. “I’m afraid his house is in very bad shape. He appears to be a . . .”

  “He’s a junker, right?”

  “Junker?”

  “He collects things. Like his dad, and his grandad. He buys things at garage sales, and will even take home things that other people throw out. Right?”

  “So you know about that. And yes, but it’s possibly worse than you think. Every room of his house is full of things he’s . . . collected.”

  “Oh yes?” But Valentina didn’t sound surprised.

  “That’s not all,” Kassie said.

  “No?” Valentina’s dark eyes looked directly at the social worker.

  “The house itself is in bad repair. It’s not just his bedroom—which is open to the elements where the tree came through. The kitchen and bathroom are infested with mold, and I believe the plumbing needs to be completely redone. Until it’s been fixed, Mr. Riordan will not be permitted to live in the house.” Kassie felt awful to be delivering such bad news; Ms. Shipp looked as if she had been struck in the face.

  But she did not erupt; instead, her eyes closed for about thirty seconds while she seemed to be struggling to absorb what she was hearing. Kassie wondered if she would change her mind about helping her cousin.

  “I’m sorry,” said Kassie at last, trying for a reaction.

  “Me, too,” said Valentina, opening her eyes. Then, typically, she went on the attack. “You’re his social worker. How did you allow the house to get into such a state?”

  “Well, for one thing, he absolutely refused to allow anyone to come inside the place. He said he had some valuable things in there and didn’t want anyone to know about them because he couldn’t afford to insure them. I didn’t exactly believe him—about having things of great value—but I wanted to respect his privacy. He’s a nice man, but . . . sensitive. I didn’t want to make him angry, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.” Kassie was ashamed, because the excuses she was offering were pretty lame. Sometimes—often, actually—it was her job to hurt some feelings. She had let Tom Riordan down. Perhaps if her caseload had been lighter, she would have paid more attention. But Mr. Riordan had been polite and sweet and only a little strange, so she’d been content to visit him as scheduled, only at a restaurant or in the library or at her office rather than in his home. “I’m sorry.”

  Valentina sighed, trying to cool her temper. She looked around the big room, glanced at the nearest television set hanging from the ceiling, then looked at Kassie. “What are you expecting me to do?”

  “What we’re hoping you will do, first of all, is talk to him. Tell him what his doctor has been trying to tell him, convince him that he really can’t go home right now because his injuries need more care, and because his home is not fit to be lived in.”

  Valentina looked at her some more and said, “What else?” Kassie almost smiled, because this woman was savvier than she’d hoped. Yes, there was more, or why had they summoned her all the way from her home in Muncie? They could have told her all this on the phone.

  “Well, something needs to be done about that house, but I don’t have the authority to do anything unless he agrees.” She held up a hand against an objection she was sure was coming. “Nor does the person in charge of his finances.”

  “But I sure don’t, either.”

  “Not right now, you don’t. But there’s a way you can get the authority. It’s called an emergency conservatorship, and it’s a whole lot easier to get if you’re the next of kin. It’s a legal option, it needs to be done by a judge after a hearing. My understanding is that it can be done quickly, but the person to talk to about getting one is the man in charge of Tom’s trust. He’s an attorney named James Penberthy. His office is in Excelsior.”

  Again there fell a silence while Valentina studied Kassie’s face. Kassie tried to look as sincere and hopeful and friendly as she could, while Valentina successfully concealed what she was thinking.

  “Let me talk to Tommy first,” she said at last.

  * * *

  VALENTINA slipped into the hospital room feeling a little wary. She had not seen her cousin in years and wasn’t sure of her welcome.

  Tommy was asleep, or seemed to be. There was a big bandage on one side of his face, but she recognized him right away: the peaked nose, the dark freckles, the wide mouth, pursed a little in sleep. There was a deep crease between his thin, dark eyebrows; that was something new. Of course, he was somewhere around sixty-three, so it was time he got a few lines on his face.

  The covers on his bed were awry, exposing the huge, complicated bandage on his right leg. His foot was bare, the toes lumpish and the nails needing to be cut. There were bruises on his hands and arms, some of them scabby. He looked shrunken; he must have lost weight—or maybe not. He’d been a skinny kid so why shouldn’t he be a skinny old man?

  She approached the side of his bed, which was cranked into a half-sitting position. “Tommy,” she called softly.

  His nose twitched and he reached up to rub it, but his eyes stayed closed.

  “Tommy, it’s me, Val. Are you awake?”

  “Mph, yuh?” muttered Tommy. “Whosit?”

  “Me, Val. I’ve come to take care of you.”

  “Who?” The dark eyes opened and wandered around a bit before coming to look up at her. “Oh, it’s you, Val. I was just hopin’ you might come.” He swallowed thickly. “Can you take me home?”

  “No, you got to stay for a while longer. You were hurt bad by that tree falling on you.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, that ol’ tree did a job, all right. On me and my house. Say, Val, can you go out there an’ check on it for me? I got this feelin’ people been goin’ in there and messing with my things.”

  “You still living in that brick house your dad left you? Out in Excelsior?”

  “Well, sure, where else would I be livin’?”

  “How should I know?” she asked, sounding aggrieved—her default position when she didn’t know what to say. “You never write nor call.”

  “Ain’t got nuthin’ to say,” he grumbled.

  “That never stopped your tongue before!”

  “Now lookie here, you gonna get an attitude, you can just go away!”

  “All right, all right, let’s not get our jammies in a wad,” she said, gentling her tone. “’Cause now we do have something to say to each other. This lady I talked to, her name’s Christianson—”

  “I know who she is,” interrupted Tommy.

  Valentina bit down hard on her temper. “That’s right, you do. Anyway, she says your house is a mess, a big mess.”r />
  “How does she know? Say, she been in there?” His expression hardened.

  “Probably, probably. Or she’s been talking to the people who have.”

  “Who all’s been in there? They got no right! I keep my doors locked, how’d they get in?”

  “Well, how were they supposed to get you out of there? Climb in a window?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well . . . Anyway, so what? They don’t have to live in it. And it ain’t that big a mess. An’ there’s good stuff in there, valuable stuff!”

  “Really?” Valentina tried to turn a grimace into a smile. “That’s your opinion. Hers is different. And her opinion is what counts; she’s your social worker, your connection with the law, the person who’s supposed to be in charge of you. She says the house ain’t fit for human habitation, and that means they won’t let you move back in there until it gets cleaned up to meet their standards.”

  “Why’d she decide that? I thought she liked me. I thought she was on my side!”

  “She may or may not like you, but she’s on nobody’s side but the county’s, you ought to know that. None of those folks are your friends. You’re a job to her, not a friend, nor hardly even a real person. Her job is to make you behave, and you let that house get into a real state, she says, an’ that it’s got to be fixed. There’s a law against filling up a house with junk.” This was the hard part of Tommy’s problems. Of all the problems in the world she most emphatically did not want, an entanglement with the law was number one.

  “Well, how’m I gonna fix it when I’m laid up like I am?”

  Valentina leaned closer and smiled. “They’re gonna let me fix it for you.”

  Tommy fell silent for a few seconds, staring back into her eyes. “I can’t figure if that’s good or bad.”

  “Why, it’s good, Tommy, it’s real good! I’m family, right? I’ll make sure not to harm you or your things.” Val smiled as sweetly as she could. “Like they say, A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

  And Tommy bought it, if grudgingly. “Well . . . Okay.”

  “Good, that’s a good cousin. Now you can just relax and get yourself healed. I’ll go take a look at it and see what has to be done.”

  “You come back here real soon—like once a day—you hear me? Tell me ever single thing you’re doing out there. Don’t throw nothin’—nothin’—away without askin’ me first. I’m real serious about that.”

  “I hear you. And I promise, I’ll come over here to the hospital and tell you everything I’m doing. Okay?”

  Val wasn’t quite superstitious enough to cross her fingers behind her back. But she thought about it, hard.

  Chapter Seven

  VALENTINA sat behind the wheel of her shabby little car, thinking. Tommy’s house was in far, far worse condition than she’d anticipated, even after the description Ms. Christianson had given her.

  Most noticeable, of course, was the junk. Every single room in the two-bedroom house, including the bathroom and the basement, was overloaded with stuff. None of the furniture in the living and dining room was even visible, much less usable, under the burden of things. Of stuff. Most of it, at first look, was without value—broken, rusty, torn, parts missing, you name it; it seemed as if every item had some problem or another.

  But there were other problems that were not so obvious. There was a smell of mold, the kind that infests a house when there is water leaking inside the walls or under the floors. And there was visible mold on the wall tiles in the bathroom. When Valentina pressed a testing finger on a tile above the bathtub faucet, because it looked as if the grout was loose, the tile came off into her hand. Startled, she had dropped it and it broke into three pieces in the stained and dirty tub.

  But perhaps the worst thing she saw was on the outside of the house, which she noticed when she stood alongside it. (And why pink? she wondered. Why on earth did Tommy think pink was a good color for a house?) The wall was crooked and bulging out near the bottom about halfway along, the bricks pushed just noticeably out of place. Not by a lot, but it was definitely crooked. When she looked down the other side, she saw more bricks pushed out a few inches, again near the bottom. That indicated a problem that probably couldn’t be fixed with a little tuck-pointing. It was surprising that the house had not collapsed when the tree crashed into its roof.

  Val put her head down on the steering wheel and closed her eyes. What was she going to tell Tommy? She had promised him she’d make his house livable again. She had promised Ms. Christianson, too. But this house had far, far, far more serious problems than she’d thought, well beyond her abilities. Maybe beyond anyone’s abilities.

  She started up the car. She was just too tired to think clearly about this. She would go back to her motel room and go to bed. Maybe tomorrow, after she’d caught up on her sleep, things wouldn’t look so hopeless.

  * * *

  THE next morning, over breakfast at Denny’s, things still looked hopeless, but at least Valentina felt less dismayed. She had faced seemingly hopeless dilemmas before, and, somehow, she’d found her way through them. So there was probably a way through this one.

  She got James Penberthy’s office phone number from the telephone operator—there was still a directory service via phone, which was reassuring to a troglodyte like herself. He said he could see her today at eleven if she cared to come out to Excelsior.

  She did.

  Penberthy’s one-man office was on Water Street, the main street of the little town. There was a long, narrow reception area—no receptionist—and the room he worked in featured old-fashioned wood paneling, with the usual bookshelves filled with tan and maroon bound volumes. A watercolor painting of ducks flying over a marsh was the only decorative touch.

  Mr. Penberthy was a man of indeterminate age with light brown hair cut short and intelligent blue eyes. His smile was pleasant, his handshake firm. He wore a business suit of conservative gray wool and a light blue silk tie. He did not offer Valentina coffee but sat down behind his plain wooden desk and got right to business.

  “You are related by blood to Mr. Riordan?” he asked.

  “Yes, his father and my mother were brother and sister. They’re both gone now. His mother and father divorced, and she moved away, abandoned Tommy when he was ten or eleven. Remarried, I think, but then she kind of disappeared. I don’t know where she might be.” She paused to take a breath. “I’m Tommy’s closest relative—in fact, as far as I know, I’m his only blood relative.”

  “I see. That would make you his next of kin, as he has claimed.”

  “That’s right. My mother, his aunt, committed suicide nine years ago.”

  “Oh, how sad,” said Mr. Penberthy, though he appeared more shocked than sorrowful. He looked at her as if to encourage her to go on.

  “She thought she had cancer,” Valentina said. “I don’t know where she got that idea. Almost certainly not from a doctor; she was always scared to go to a doctor, afraid of what he might find wrong with her. My dad had left her right after she had me, and all she ever told me about him was that he was like a rat abandoning a sinking ship. I never could figure out what she meant by that—” Valentina pressed her lips together in an effort to stop herself from talking some more. Surely Mr. Penberthy did not need to know all this about her family history!

  He continued to look at her with interest, but she nevertheless stayed silent to see what he would say.

  “What you’re telling me is very helpful, I think it gives me some insight into Mr. Riordan’s personality.”

  Valentina shot him a hard look. Was that some kind of slam? she wondered.

  But Penberthy continued, oblivious to her concerns. “Mr. Riordan is an interesting man, intelligent about some things and clever with his hands. He tells funny stories. I’ve enjoyed our conversations.”

  “What does he do to keep himself busy?” Valentina asked. “
Has he got some kind of job?”

  “Not a regular job. He often volunteers for town projects, such as our annual fall festival, Apple Days, and our summer festival, Art in the Park. He works hard, though once he feels he’s done enough, he will vanish from the scene, usually without notice. There is some . . . lack of follow-through in him, an inability to make long-term plans. I believe the current jargon would have it that he is ‘behaviorally challenged.’” He looked inquiringly at Valentina again.

  She nodded. “He was an odd kid, and he grew into what my mother called a queer duck. But without a mean bone in his body.”

  Penberthy nodded back. “Yes, that sums him up in my estimation, too.”

  “So what are we going to do about him?” Valentina asked.

  “I’m afraid the responsibility to solve this problem will fall primarily on you.”

  “Tommy isn’t going to appreciate my help, you know.”

  Penberthy hesitated, then said with an apologetic smile, “I’m afraid we’re counting on that. Those of us permanently responsible for him need to stay on his good side. By pushing off this difficult, but temporary, task onto you, we can stay in his good graces, and you can go home and get away from his wrath.”

  “So it’s okay with you that Tommy will hate me for the rest of his life?” There was a bitter tone in her voice.

  “I don’t think that will happen. He’ll be angry with you for a while, but when he gets his house back, cleaned up and in good order, a house the city cannot condemn, it will occur to him that you did him a great big favor.”

  Exasperated, Valentina threw her arms wide. “Have you seen that house?”

  “No, he didn’t allow me into the place. In fact, as far as I know, he didn’t allow anyone into the place.”

  “I’m not talking about the inside, which is a filthy and unsanitary pigsty,” Valentina said. “I’m talking about the outside. It’s not just the mashed roof, either. The walls are crooked, bulging near the ground. That’s probably caused by a serious problem with the foundation. Go over and have a look at it, Mr. Penberthy!”