Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

if she thought the difference had significance. “What did he gain? The chance to buy up Delaunay’s collection, at least the part of it that he really wanted. That’s what he’s doing over in Scottsdale right this minute. Look, poor old Del hated Ellison. He wouldn’t have given him the sweat off … so according to Del’s will, Helen was to get it all. She was the closest family he had, that he cared anything about. Del’s own wife died years ago, and they were childless.”

      “You say he left all to Helen. His half-brother’s step-daughter.”

      “Yes. I don’t suppose she ever knew about the will. He was always nice to her but I don’t think she appreciated him very much. In some ways, I have to admit, Helen could be a snotty little bitch.” It was said much more in affection than in anger. Mary gulped beer audibly. “She was still a minor, only seventeen. So everything was to be held in trust. Right, Robby? And if Helen predeceased Del, or died at about the same time, which was the way things turned out, then everything in the collection was to be sold at auction, proceeds going to a charitable foundation Delaunay was setting up. Except—”

      Here Mary broke off with a sigh, an unexpected, hopeless sound. Miller was shaking his head again.

      “What?” Thorn prompted.

      Mary said: “The Verrocchio, that’s what. It’s really mine.”

      Miller said quickly: “I think Mary is quite right, I mean I believe what she tells me. But of course legally, again—”

      Mary interrupted him. “You see, Mr. Thorn, I lived there in the Seabright house for a couple of months before the night of the killings. And two weeks to the day before he died, Delaunay Sea-bright stood there with me in the midst of his collection, and told me that Verrocchio was mine. I didn’t know what to say, how to react. Then he got sick, and that meant there was a delay in making the gift official, and evidently he never mentioned it to anyone else before he died. Or if he did, no one is going to admit it now.”

      Thorn made no attempt to hide his doubts. “You say he simply gave you the Verrocchio.”

      “I know it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to believe, that anyone could be so generous. ‘This is yours now, Mary, I want you to have it.’ Those were his words.”

      “You told this to the police?”

      She glanced at Robinson Miller once more. “Yes. Or I tried. For all good it did me. We’ve never tried to file any kind of legal claim, since I have nothing to support it.”

      Thorn could not tell whether she was fantasizing or not He felt sure she was not simply lying. He asked, in curiosity: “What would you have done with the painting, Mary? If it had actually come to you?”

      Her laugh was surprisingly gentle. “Why, hung it over Robby’s Salvation Army sofa. No, I’d have sold it, of course. I would have hoped to be able to sell it to some museum, where everybody would be able to see it for a change … Del didn’t care for museums, you know, he thought they were more arrogant and greedy than anybody else. The people who run them … did you get a chance to look at the painting closely? It’s really so beautiful.”

      “I agree.”

      “I certainly wouldn’t have sold it to that creep who’s got it now. I’d have made sure he never got his hands on it, and I’m sure he knew I felt that way.”

      There was a little silence. “May I refresh your drinks?” Thorn offered.

      “You see,” Mary explained suddenly, “I got to know Del because I helped out his niece when she was a runaway. I met Helen in Chicago, when she was ready to give up being on the road. I was a kind of official social worker then.”

      “You were a nun,” her lawyer interjected.

      Mary gave him a glance. “I hadn’t taken my final vows. Anyway, I was able to help Helen get her head together somewhat. Delaunay appreciated that, and at his request I wound up living with them here in Phoenix for a couple of months. Helen’s parents came along too, at his urging. The old man was grateful to me for helping Helen, that’s all there ever was between us.”

      “I see.” Mr. Thorn considered Mary’s lush figure, the full veins in her throat. He was unsure whether he ought to envy the young lawyer with whom she was apparently living now, and/or feel regret on behalf of the dead old man who had been only grateful. There wandered into his mind the image, thin and dark, of the other attractive woman who had been at the auction room. Stephanie Seabright, mother and sister-in-law respectively of the two victims. A woman desperately wanting to be young, to start over, perhaps, somehow…

      Mary had paused for a full breath. “Excuse me, Mr. Thorn, but you’re not an American, are you?”

      “I am not. Though I have made my home in America for the past year. I like your—”

      “You see, we have in this country a very serious and tragic problem, of teenagers, some kids even younger, who find their homes, if you can call some of them homes, just completely unendurable. So the kids take off, hitchhiking or what have you, and quite a number of them, more than you’d think, wind up as murder victims. Nobody’s done a really good study yet to demonstrate how many.” Mary smiled eagerly, giving the impression she enjoyed either the lack of that crucial study or the prospect of reading what it would someday reveal. “The others, the relatively lucky ones, are sexually abused, robbed, molested. They wind up in jail, on dope, in prostitution.” Mary continued to smile. No doubt it was unconscious.

      Mr. Thorn said: “I see the problem. It is not a new one.” Several floors below his suite, a radio was softly playing a lament that concerned, if his old ears were to