The Nature of My Inheritance (8 page)

Back home, I got busy. The Bibles were already
in a half a dozen weary boxes that had
come from the church way back in the dark
ages. A couple had maybe housed quart bottles
of grape juice for all I knew, but their labels had
all peeled off so the boxes were nondescript, old,
and, I hoped, untraceable. I slipped contractors
bags around them, to keep any rainwater off and
to make them all the more anonymous. Like
some criminal, which I suppose I was in fact, I
made myself more anonymous too, by putting
on my father’s very unhip clothes, including a
plaid sports jacket that was so hideous even he
had never worn it. Up and down our street there
were, as almost always, zero signs of life, but I
made quick work of it anyhow. My heart heavy
as a cobblestone, my eyes welling and blurred, I
loaded the boxes into the trunk of my car—my
mother still used the old wagon to ship herself
to and from her lousy job, so I used our other
one, another junker I had bought with my socalled
lottery winnings that was good for getting
from here to nearby there and nothing more.
Our pathetic village library was too close to my
neighborhood for comfort—I had considered
the town dump, but terrified as I was about getting
caught I couldn’t bring myself to desert my
precious trove there—so I drove a few hamlets
over to a larger town, traveling through rolling
terrain highlighted by ruined farmhouses and
sad swayback horses standing in mucky fields.

At one point, seeing I was driving erratic as
hell, I had to pull over to catch my breath and
try to calm down. I sat there, muttering an apology
to my father, and gazed out at one lone red
horse that stood nearby, chewing away, his jaw
zagging sideways, his big chocolate eyes trained
warily on me. He looked like a mythic sage who
had lost his train of thought. When I found myself
starting to apologize to him, too, I snapped
to, thinking, You have no choice here, Liam, no
free will. Get this done already.

The library might as well have been a mortuary.
Lights seemed to be on but there were no
other signs of life. I parked in back of the building,
a yellowish brick structure which, like my
father’s old church, had seen better days. Underneath
a rusting metal eave at the top of a short
flight of cement steps, I stacked the boxes against
the rear door, which looked to be a delivery entrance.
Let me confess that I fought back tears
as I looked at the black plastic-wrapped boxes
piled there, feeling like a bereft parent who was
deserting a newborn on the doorstep of a
church or police station, abandoning the child,
one whose care and upbringing were beyond the
realm of possibility, to the mercies of strangers
and fate.

Head downcast and hands in pockets, I
walked away from my trove with more grief
than could ever be written down and printed in
some damned book. As I climbed into my car
and turned on the ignition, I leaned my forehead
against the steering wheel and felt a breach
had opened in my heart that I knew would
never mend, a wound that meant I was losing
my father all over again. But I was a man now,
soon to be a husband, maybe even a real father
one day, a father who would never abandon his
kids, and to be a man meant sometimes you had
to leave certain things behind with the hope that
better things lie ahead. That’s what I was telling
myself, like some fool idiot saying a prayer, until
I heard a knock on the car window that caused
me to jolt upright in the car seat with the violent
abruptness one experiences when waking from
a nightmare.

I turned to see my father peering in at me, his
face so very familiar with a look both furious
and—how could this be?—friendly. My dead father viewed through the shimmering and unsteady
lens of my tears, my father who I then
recognized was in fact Reynolds staring in at me,
his hoodie cowling his visage like a demonic
monk. Stunned, speechless, I saw him flick his
fingers toward his chest, that vintage gesture
used by cops to indicate, Would you mind stepping
out of your car, sir?

Defiant, or so I hastily tried to be, knowing
my eyes must be ringed pink and wet, I rolled
down the driver’s side window, saying nothing.

“So, Liam,” he said, after glancing to his left
and right before he rested his forearm on the
door. “What’s the word?” The playful frown on
his unparted lips and the way he tilted his head
with the cocky confidence of one in full Machiavellian
control boded nothing but trouble.
Once my friend, or so I had naïvely believed,
Reynolds had developed a knack for asking
questions that left me speechless.

I had no word for him, I realized. “I’m not
sure what you mean,” I ventured.

“Well, let me try to help you out. What I
mean to say is, I was wondering what’s in those
boxes over there?” he asked, snapping his head
back in the direction of the library while continuing
to level his unblinking gaze at me.

Any joy or sadness I had experienced that
day, from proposing to Amanda to the necessary
decision to abandon my trove, came to a quick
terminus. I swear I could literally feel the blood
drain from my face.

Reynolds was still speaking. “Don’t you want
to get a receipt from the librarian if you’re going
to make a contribution of books? It’s tax deductible,
you know.”

With one last pathetic grab at saving the situation,
I said, “I don’t make enough money to
need a tax deduction. Was just thinking they
could use some Bibles.”

“Well, that’s interesting, Liam. You know
why?”

“No, why?”

“Because I was just thinking that I myself
could do with reading the Bible more often.
Working in my field, I encounter so many bad
guys that sometimes I feel they have a negative
influence on me. I worry now and then that I
might turn into a bad guy myself if I don’t watch
it. Some Bibles might be just the thing. Some remedial
reading, isn’t that what it’s called?”

I waited. His frown rose into a half-smile
now.

“Let me ask you a question, you mind?”

My engine was still idling. I thought if I just
dropped into gear I could end this puzzling discussion here and now. But did I really want to
go to jail on the same day that the love of my life
had accepted my proposal of marriage?

“My strong impression, watching you from
afar—or, well, maybe not from so afar as you
might think—is that you like those Bibles, even
need those Bibles, as much as I do. I also suspect
that you know far better than I do about how to
mine them, if I can make a little pun, for their
true value. Being the son of a preacher, and all,
I mean. You agree with that, in principle?”

I squinted and nodded.

“Which is not to say I haven’t been given alms
now and then to keep prying eyes, so to speak,
at bay. And I was happy to oblige, you know,
even way back when, until I began to realize, not
long before your father passed, what a pittance
was being tossed my way.”

Was I hearing right? I wondered. Was I just
witness to a confession?

“I don’t know about any of that,” I said.

“Well, that’s all right, you don’t really need to
know more. But look here, meantime. What do
you say we get those boxes out of the wet
weather, throw half of them in the back of my
car”—and he gestured across the street behind
me toward the vintage white bathtub Porsche
parked there; I suppose I should have been more
horrified than I was—“and the other half in
yours, and get out of here before whoever is supposed
to be running this silly library comes back
and claims your donation. We can work out any
details about our Bible studies later. What say?”

“Do I have any choice?”

Reynolds paused just a fleeting moment before
answering, “None that I can think of, offhand.”

Back home, after disposing of my pater’s eccentric
clothes and burying my remaining half
of the trove in the back of my helter-skelter
closet, not even bothering to see if I ended up
with the Voltaire or the Shelley, the Donne or
the Pindar, I opened an account at Amanda’s
bank with my so-called lottery winnings. Time
had come for me to confess to my fiancée I’d
been lucky scratching tickets over the years. She
forgave me in the car, driving over to tell my
mother the happy news of our betrothal, but
also was practical enough to realize the money
represented a nice nest egg with which to start
our fledgling marriage. I swore—not on a stack
of Bibles, no, but I meant it anyhow—that I
would never gamble again. Both god and the
devil, gamblers themselves, could verify I
haven’t, if only they existed.

For a handful of months after that encounter
with Reynolds, a blessed oasis of time, nobody
named Claude called me, or Harrison, either.
The Claudes I didn’t much miss, but one day,
feeling a nostalgic longing to hear Harrison’s
voice, see if he was all right, see if any more
books might be coming my way—
our
way, if
one counted Reynolds—I called him from the
anonymity of a pay phone downtown. It rang a
few times before a recorded message came on
and a monotone disembodied voice told me
this number was no longer in service. My fellow
congregants in the religious order of literary
rarities had disappeared as if they had never
been more than a crazy figment of my imagination.
This hiatus soon enough came to an
end. One day, a colleague of Harrison contacted
me to say he had something either I or Harvey—
Claudes were now known as Harveys, to
me an equally preposterous moniker—might
find of interest. Were it up to me and me alone,
I would have respectfully announced my retirement
and bowed out. But I had other mouths
to feed than my own and, in all honesty, my
bibliophilic malady might have been driven by
fear into remission, but I could not fairly claim
to be cured of it.

Reynolds showed up periodically, asking me
if I had read any good books lately and, out of
habit or lunacy or simply to remind me he held
the dangerous upper hand, inquired if I’d had
any contact from anyone suspicious, anyone
who might have been involved in the reverend’s
death. Some days I told him I hadn’t and that
seemed good enough for him. On other days, I
let him know that indeed I’d had a visitor, a fellow
book lover, and handed him an attaché case
containing either money or, if he liked, a new
acquisition—or should I say, rather, deacquistion.
Amanda, who knew nothing about any of
these activities, of course, thought it was kind of
Reynolds to take time away from his demanding
job to stay in touch with me, and even come to
our wedding, which took place on a sunny Saturday
afternoon in my father’s beloved old
church. It was not her problem that I had become
his minion, as it were, one who secretly
chafed at the bit and bided his time.

And speaking of time, I had to wonder how
many months or even years might pass before
the good detective, my objectionable colleague,
might make a fatal misstep on a staircase somewhere
and plunge, a look of malign astonishment
frozen on his face, to the unforgiving floor
at the bottom. If and when it happens, will he
even have time to curse my name, or my father’s?
No, I think he will not. His end is foretold
in the Bible, after all, in Leviticus and elsewhere,
and just because I remain at heart an unbeliever,
I recognize that it is a book that holds many
valuable truths and worthy mandates.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Bradford Morrow

Cover design by Frances Lassor

978-1-5040-2744-1

Published in 2015 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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