They bought Yoplaits and Pringles at a gas station, and Yale took over driving. He hadn’t driven much since he’d moved to the city, but he’d learned in high school, had even spent two summers delivering pizza in his father’s car—and once he figured out the clutch, everything was muscle memory. Cecily opened a folder across her lap and said, “What we’re hoping for is a flat-out bequest. She hasn’t given to the annual fund since 1970, and those were small gifts. Which, optimistically, might just mean she’s a bit of a miser. Sometimes those wind up being the largest bequests, for obvious reasons. If she’s not on top of her finances, we might aim for a percentage rather than a cash amount. People like that tend to underestimate how much they have. She thinks she has five million, leaves us one million, when actually she has seven point five, and twenty percent is a lot more.”
“But she was only—” Yale stopped, remembered to ask a question. “Why do you suppose the letter was only about the artwork?”
“It might just be what’s on her mind. Maybe she’s promised the money to her family, but doesn’t want to disperse the collection.”
She seemed to see this as only a minor inconvenience. Cecily must have been well practiced at cutting down the heirs’ chunk of an estate. It hit him that perhaps Fiona was in this old woman’s will. Hadn’t Fiona said that Nora had especially loved Nico? And wouldn’t it follow that she was fond of Fiona too?
Yale learned, as they drove, that Cecily had an eleven-year-old son and an ex-husband, a small apartment on Davis Street, and a degree from Skidmore. She didn’t ask a single thing about him in return.
When they reached Sturgeon Bay, at the bottom of the Door County spike, Cecily unfolded a giant Wisconsin map and pointed with a clear-polished nail to the two routes that climbed either side of the peninsula. “It looks like they meet again in Sister Bay, which is where we’re headed anyway.”
“What have they got up here?” Yale said. “What’s the big attraction?”
“Lighthouses, I think. Honeymooners.”
“It is beautiful.”
She snapped her head up and looked across Yale, out his window, as if she’d just realized where she was. “Yes. Very.”
“So, you’ll run the show?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Yale did mind, in principle. The letter was intended for him. But this was an issue of rank. And he’d wind up glad it wasn’t all about the art if the art proved forged.
He had chosen the western route, and Cecily directed him to County Road ZZ. “I wonder if they say Double Z,” she said. “Or just Z.”
“Or Zee-Zee,” Yale said. “Like ZZ Top.”
Cecily actually laughed, a small miracle. But then, as she watched out her window, he saw her shoulders tense, her face fall. These were not mansions. They’d driven past some large estates on the way, but now they passed modest farmhouses, small places set in big fields. Stunning, in fact, but not millionaire land.
They pulled up in front of a white house with a screened porch out front and a single gabled window upstairs. Hanging baskets of flowers, neat cement steps to the porch door. Two old Volkswagens sat outside a freestanding one-car garage in disrepair.
Cecily checked her hair in the rearview. She said, “We’re screwed.”
“Maybe she’s senile,” Yale said. “Could she be delusional?”
Before they reached the door, a young woman came out on the steps. She waved, not happily.
Cecily and the woman shook hands. This was Debra, the granddaughter, and she apologized that, although Nora was dressed and ready, the lawyer wasn’t here yet. She bore no resemblance to Fiona or Nico. Black hair, dark circles under her eyes, skin that was somehow both tanned and pasty. Maybe it was makeup, the wrong shade of powder.
They followed her through the screened porch and into a living room that reminded Yale of the house where he took piano lessons as a kid. Like his piano teacher, Nora had covered every inch of shelf and windowsill with carefully chosen objets—glass figurines and seashells and plants and framed photographs. The books looked read, and a stuffed record case abutted the fireplace. The couch back was frayed. This might have been the home of a college professor or a retired therapist, someone of relative means who didn’t put stock in pretentious furnishings. But it was not, no, the home of a