Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

roses—Mother’s favorite, never mine—had arrived with a card that said simply, “Happy birthday. Michelle.”
    I heard daily reports about Michelle from Kevin. She’d moved into his apartment temporarily. He was careful to tell me that she was using the bedroom and he was on the couch. At night he heard her moving about, and when he woke at odd hours he always saw light under the bedroom door. She ate almost nothing. Poor Kevin thought he was witnessing a simple display of grief, and I couldn’t tell him how much the girl he loved was concealing.
    At our next meeting, Michelle sat two chairs away from me at a conference table in the McLean office of David Waterston, Mother’s attorney and executor. Waterston, a lean blond man in his late fifties, sat across from us. Next to him was Annette King, the glossy and severely professional woman he’d found to handle the house sale.
    My sister spoke only to the lawyer, never so much as glancing at me for agreement or clarification. I might as well not have been present. She looked even worse than Kevin had led me to expect. Always thin, she’d lost weight noticeably since Mother’s death and now approached gauntness. Heavy makeup under her eyes didn’t quite hide the dark circles.
    I tried not to stare at her, fastening my gaze instead on the table before me. Sunlight cut through the blinds and lay in slashes across the gleaming oak surface. I felt like a fraud, discussing my inheritance from a mother who wasn’t my mother. I tried to imagine how the discreet and scrupulous lawyer would react if I sprang the truth on him.
    I snapped back to attention when I realized he’d asked me a question.
    “Is this arrangement all right with you as well as your sister?” he repeated. “Your mother’s secretary handling the closing of her office? She’ll disperse the case files of those patients who have found other doctors, and destroy the inactive files.”
    As if recalling the distant past, I remembered when I thought Mother might have a file about me in her office. But no, she wouldn’t have committed such secrets to writing.
    “That’s fine,” I said.
    Except for a gift of $10,000 to Rosario, Mother had left her estate of more than a million dollars to Michelle and me, evenly divided. When we became adults she’d put our names on the title to the house so that part of our inheritance wouldn’t be delayed when she died. Michelle and I had protested at the time, telling her we refused to think about her death when she was barely fifty. Now her foresight meant we could put the house on the market quickly.
    Waterston had taken the real estate agent on a tour of the property the day before. She’d come to this meeting with a suggested price and a long list of things that would have to be done to Mother’s perfect house to make it marketable.
    Annette King, probably in her forties, had sleek chin-length hair of an unnatural shade of blond and wore a crimson linen suit and lipstick to match. She made me think of a gaudy Christmas ornament. I watched her long fingers dance over the papers and legal pad she’d arranged before her, and wondered if her red-painted nails were real or fake.
    “My thinking is that I should hold off showing the property to locals,” she said, her voice crisp and impersonal. “I’d like to avoid any pointless showings to people who just want to satisfy their curiosity. And I’d rather not answer a lot of questions. So until people forget, I’ll limit showings to buyers coming in from out of the area.”
    Until people forget. Some people never would, not even strangers to whom we were no more than names in the newspaper and on TV. People who’d never met us probably discussed our messed up lives, speculated about us. They would remember.
    Ms. King tapped a nail on her legal pad. “As you’ve requested, I’ll arrange the repainting and so on, and handle all the contractual matters. You won’t have to be involved except to approve the final price once we’ve got an offer.” She ran the tip of her tongue along her brilliant red lower lip. “But before we can get started, we do need to have an empty house.”
    Her eyes darted from me to Michelle and back again.
    “What do you want us to do?” I asked Waterston.
    He sat forward, adjusted his tie and cleared his throat. “The house is yours now, but the contents are part of the estate. If you like, we can schedule an estate sale as soon as we have permission from the probate