The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,59

could have been costume stuff, but I saw two rings whose stones were, according to Mama herself, diamonds. And Mama didn't lie. One of them was her engagement ring.

It was perhaps a minute before they saw me. I said nothing myself; I was literally struck dumb.

Evelyn, the oldest, looking young in spite of the gray in her hair, with her hands full of old tens and fives, put aside by my mother over the years.

Sophie, counting through official-looking papers that might have been stock certificates or perhaps treasury bonds, her fingers speeding along like a bank-teller ready to cash out her drawer for the weekend.

And my youngest sister, Maddy. My schoolyard guardian angel. Sitting with her palms full of pearls (probably cultured, I grant you) and earrings and necklaces, sorting through them, as absorbed as an archeologist. That was what hurt the worst. She hugged me when I got off the plane, and wept against my neck. Now she picked through her dead mother's things, the good stuff and the trumpery, grinning like a jewel thief after a successful heist.

All of them grinning. All of them laughing.

Evvie held up the cash money and said, "There's over eight thousand right here! Won't Jack yell when I tell him! And I bet this isn't all. I bet - "

Then she saw Sophie was no longer looking at her, and no longer smiling. Evvie turned her head, and Madeline did, too. The color left Maddy's cheeks, turning her rich complexion dull.

"And how were you going to split it?" I heard myself ask in a voice that did not sound like my own at all. "Three ways? Or is Floyd in on this, too?"

And from behind me, as if he'd only been waiting for his cue, Floyd himself said: "Floyd's in on it, little brother. Oh yes indeed. Was Floyd told the ladies what that box looked like and where it was apt to be. I saw it last winter. She left it out when she was having one of her spells. But you don't know about her spells, do you?"

I turned, startled. From the smell of the whiskey on Floyd's breath and the dark tinge of red in the corners of his eyes, the tot I'd seen him drinking on the porch hadn't been his first of the day. Or his third, for that matter. He pushed by me into the room, and said to Sophie (always his favorite): "Evvie's right - there'll be more. That box is the most of it, I think, but a long way from the all of it."

He turned to me and said, "She was a packrat. That's what she turned into over the last few years. One of the things she turned into, anyhow."

"Her will - " I began.

"Her will, what about it?" Sophie asked. She dropped the papers she'd been studying to the coverlet and made a shooing gesture with her slim brown hands, as if dismissing the whole subject. "Do you think we had a chance to talk to her about it? She shut us out. Look who she got to draw up her death-letter. Law Tidyman! That old Uncle Tom!"

The contempt with which she spoke struck me deep, not because of the sentiment but because of the simple fact that I'd seen Sophie and Evelyn and Evvie's Jack laughing and talking with Law Tidyman and Law's wife Sulla not half an hour before. Best of friends, they'd looked like.

"You don't know how she got these last few years, Rid," Madeline said. She sat there, her lap all but overflowing with her mother's keepsakes and gracenotes, sat there defending what she was doing - what they were doing. "She - "

"I might not know how she got," I said, "but I know pretty damned well what she wanted. Wasn't I there with the rest of you when Law read her will? Didn't we all sit around in a circle, like at a goddamned seance? And isn't that what it was, with Mama talking to us from the other side of her grave? Didn't I hear her say in Law Tidyman's voice that she wanted that there - " I pointed to the plunder on the bed. " - to go to the town library and to the high school scholarship fund? In her name, if they'd have it that way?"

My voice was rising, I couldn't help it. Because now Floyd was sitting on the bed with them, one arm around Sophie's shoulders, as if to