Clear And Convincing Proof. Kate Wilhelm
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but his arms were corded with muscles and his shoulders were very broad. She had thought his eyes were black, but now saw that they were dark blue, with pale lashes, pale eyebrows. His hair was straight, cut short, probably a dark blond, sun-bleached. Laugh lines at his eyes looked as if they had been drawn with white ink on a russet background.
“How did you just happen to come by in the nick of time?” she asked, moving to the table to sit down. He sat opposite her and sipped the tea.
“I always come this way or a block or two over. My place is behind that mall on Coburg, four blocks from here. I didn’t know you lived in this house. I thought it was vacant, going to ruin.”
“Well, it was going to ruin, that’s for sure. I inherited it from my grandmother.”
She talked about the shape the house had been in when she arrived, about teaching in Cleveland, the trip out. He was easy to talk to, and, she realized, she had been starved for male company. That was a surprise; she had been so tired by bedtime day after day that her thoughts of men had been rare, easily ignored. The few times she thought of Ron, her former fiancé, she had felt only satisfaction of being done with him, done with that endless, go-nowhere engagement. After the first date or two, there had never been any excitement in that relationship. She had never felt the least bit threatened or exhilarated, but rather an unexamined acceptance of her role in his life, one of accommodation to his twice-a-week need for sex. They had been engaged for six years.
“After I start teaching in the fall,” she said, “fixing up the house will go faster. I’ll hire someone to help out, repair or replace the roof, do a number of things.”
“Will you rent out the apartment? It is a separate apartment, isn’t it? I noticed the outside stairs.”
“It is. That’s way down on my list of things to get to. I haven’t even started on it yet.”
“Can I have a look at the upstairs?” he asked then. “See, I have a three-room apartment over by the mall, and the traffic’s getting worse and worse. I suspect that the owner of the building will sell out to a developer for a big box store or something in the coming year. I’ll be house hunting then.”
“It might be that long before I get things in shape upstairs.” She started to say that her plan was to fix up the house and sell it as soon as possible, but she didn’t.
“Let’s have a look.”
It was worse than the downstairs had been when she’d first arrived. She had cleaned out the refrigerator and left the door open, but had done nothing else. There were mats on the floor, rags and paper bags, fast-food boxes, pizza boxes, bottles, broken chairs and a wobbly table, and the whole place was horribly dirty. She was ashamed, humiliated to think that she owned it, more humiliated to think her mother had lived like this for years, until her death from a drug overdose.
Darren examined the apartment carefully, then nodded. They went back down to her kitchen. “Let’s talk rent,” he said.
“I told you, that’s last on my list.”
“Would $750 a month be okay? That’s more than I’m paying now, but it’s a lot bigger, closer to work and not being crowded by a mall.”
She poured more tea, got out ice cubes and shook her head. “Next year maybe.”
“I thought we might make a deal,” he said, accepting the freshened tea. He sat down again. “I could start cleaning it up and do some of the other things that need doing, like hauling away the trash, replacing the glass in those windows. In return I get a free month’s rent, and I get to park my truck in the garage. And have my son with me some of the time. He’s eleven and part of the reason I need more space.”
She stared at him, at a loss.
“I can furnish pretty good references,” he said, and then grinned.
“Oh boy, can you! I just hadn’t considered even trying to rent it yet, not for months and months.”
“Okay, think about it and let me know.” He drank more of the tea and put the glass down, then stood up. “See you at the clinic.”
“No, wait. What am I thinking? Of course, it’s a deal. It’s just so…so unfair for you. To have to clean up that filth, I mean.”
“My department. Don’t even think of it. Eventually I’ll want a key to the outside door. I’ll probably get started over the weekend. You just stay off that ladder, okay? I’ll get it painted along the way.” He held out his hand. “Deal,” he said. “We can get a rental agreement, whatever it takes, later.”
They shook hands, and for the first time in her life she fully understood the old expression: to touch a live wire. She knew that he went out to the porch, that he put his shoes on, waved to her and walked out of sight, but she had become immobilized by that touch. Abruptly she sat down and looked at her hand, opened it, closed it hard, opened it.
“Oh, my God,” she said under her breath.
4
“What it means,” Greg Boardman told Naomi on Thursday night, “is that it’s a legal tangle, a nightmare. When the court granted the power of attorney to Thomas, there was another document, a power of acceptance. Since Donna had a will, the court ruled that her intentions were perfectly clear, and the terms of the will had to be satisfied. Her shares will go to their kids when she dies. Thomas said that when they wrote their wills they were still trying to get the kids interested in the clinic, and had hopes that Lawrence, at least, would get involved. It seemed a good idea, I guess, to bequeath them shares. And now that old will is the determining factor in who will control the clinic.”
Thomas Kelso’s kids were middle-aged, and none of them, as far as Naomi could tell, gave a damn about the clinic. Lawrence was a molecular biologist at Princeton; the twin daughters were both married to well-to-do businessmen in Los Angeles.
“I thought Thomas had the authority to vote her shares, even to sell them,” she said.
“He does. But if he wanted to sell them, he would have to prove it was a real sale with a bona fide buyer. There would have to be an evaluation with a real market value, and then the proceeds of the sale would have to be used for her care, and when she dies, anything left over would go to the kids. He can’t sell them to me for a buck.” Very bitterly he added, “Thomas is beaten, and he knows it. He’s plenty pissed.”
“Not just Thomas,” she said after a moment. Greg’s craggy face was drawn and he looked tired. She knew he had not been sleeping well. His face always revealed his inner self: conflicts, concern, love, whatever emotion was uppermost was as visible to her as if written in script on his features. It was not only that he was close to his sixtieth birthday, she also knew, although that was a factor. Where he could go at his age was problematic. But he cared deeply about the work at the clinic. Everyone who went to work there and stayed cared deeply. Maybe that was a mistake, getting personally involved, caring so much. It was a disturbing thought. She pulled her attention back to what Greg was saying.
“He’ll try to get the power of acceptance changed, but it will take time, and if the judge doesn’t agree to the change, David McIvey will end up in charge.”
More and more often during the past few years Thomas Kelso had found himself pondering the unanswerable questions that he should have put behind him as a youth. When did life begin and, more important these past months, when did it end? Joyce McIvey had been brain-dead for forty-eight hours when they disconnected her life support; her body had resisted death for another forty-eight hours. When did she die? Brain-dead? Heart-dead? Which was the final death? When? If there was a soul, when did it depart? At the funeral service for Joyce, sitting apart from the family, he had regarded them soberly: David with his pretty little wife on one side of him, his two children on the other, Lorraine, his first wife, at the end of the row. The two wives and the grandchildren had all wept for Joyce, but David had been like a statue among them, untouchable, unmovable, remote.
Thomas