The Rich Shall Inherit (4 page)

Even though it was autumn, the California heat bounced off the Ventura Freeway, sending distorting little wiggles of trembling light across Lauren Hunter’s windshield, like ripples in a slow-moving stream. She swung the ancient Ford Mustang along the Encino exit ramp and headed down Ventura Boulevard, reaching automatically for a Kleenex to wipe the sweat from her forehead. A car without air-conditioning in this kind of California weather was the modern-day equivalent of Dante’s
Inferno
, and Lauren knew quite a lot about the
Inferno
—not only had she studied Dante’s work at Redlands High, but she’d been through her own personal version of hell, and sometimes she considered she would have been better off in the simple brimstone-and-fire version … but she had promised herself that she would try never to think of it again; that from now on whenever the events of the past few years came into her mind she would simply force them away. Of course, the psychiatrist had said she shouldn’t repress them, she should let out all the memories and fears. He’d said she should tell her story at the group-encounter sessions the way the others did, but Lauren just couldn’t. It was better nobody knew.

She turned the car off Ventura, making a quick left into the underground parking lot. Easing herself from the sticky heat of the plastic seat, she smoothed her short skirt over her slender legs. She pulled the shirt that had started out crisp and freshly ironed from her damp breasts, thinking disguestedly that she might as well have been sitting in a sauna. Feeling as limp as if she’d already done a day’s work instead of just beginning, Lauren slammed the car door without bothering to lock it—who would want to steal that old heap anyhow? She doubted they’d get fifty bucks for it. Dispiritedly she walked up the steps from the lot and headed for Denny’s Coffee Shop, where she worked as a waitress.

She knew she’d been lucky to get the job, but sometimes when she saw the young girls lunching together or just passing time having coffee, wearing cute workout clothes or Guess jeans and Reeboks, it made her even more aware of the difference between them and her. She envied their carefree lack of responsibility and
their chat about classes and clothes and dates. Her face had once been pert and eager just like theirs, but now these girls would never even consider her as part of their crowd. If they did glance at her, they saw only a worn-looking young woman with tired blue eyes and clean reddish-blond hair skewed back into a knot. Lauren might have been any age between twenty and thirty, but in fact she was only eighteen.

She washed her face and hands in the ladies’ room and tidied her hair, scarcely bothering to look in the mirror. She knew what she would see and she didn’t like it. There had been times when she’d thought that if it weren’t for Maria, she might have ended it all. But Maria, who could so easily have been said to have wrecked her life, was also her sole joy.

Lauren smiled as she thought of the baby; she was fourteen months old now and such a pretty little girl with round cheeks and the sweetest expression in her blue eyes, and she already had a cascade of thick dark curls. Of course, they’d told her the baby would have to be adopted or fostered, right away, but once Lauren had seen her and held her, there had been no question of giving her away. She was determined she would be loved. It had meant giving up her chance of college and instead getting whatever work she could, but she knew it would be worth it.

The cool vent from the air-conditioning relaxed her immediately. It was eleven-thirty and already the lunchtime crowd was pouring in, mainly men in business suits, jackets off and ties loosened, drinking coffee and talking deals. This was Hollywood and Lauren thought that most of them looked like agents or lawyers—or smart car salesmen.

She carried out her duties, serving efficiently and with a smile until two-thirty, when at last the crowd began to thin again. With a sigh of relief she began to tidy up her tables, arranging napkins and paper place mats neatly and setting the card with the day’s specials in the exact center. Picking up a discarded copy of the L.A.
Times
from the red plastic banquette, she tucked it under her arm. It would save her twenty-five cents, and she could read it later.

The day seemed even longer than usual and at four o’clock, when she finally left to pick up Maria, she felt exhausted. She would just have time to shower and give the baby her supper, then bathe her and play with her for a little while, before beginning her evening job as a cocktail waitress at a Valley nitery.

It wasn’t until much later when she’d finished her shift at
Teddy’s Barn for Night Owls and returned home sometime after two a.m. that Lauren finally had time to herself. She paid the baby-sitter, checked Maria and changed her, and then climbed into a washed-out nightshirt and poured herself a large glass of cold milk. With a great sigh of relief she propped her feet on a chair and unfolded the newspaper.

She was in the middle of a giant bite of the almost-cold slice of pizza she’d picked up for her supper on the way home, when she noticed the black-bordered ad.
Search for an Heiress
… What magic words, Lauren thought wistfully, surely everyone wanted to be an heiress! She scanned the rest of the ad quickly and then sat back, a puzzled frown between her brows. Her own middle name was Mallory—Lauren
Mallory
Hunter. Her heart beat faster as she remembered that her mother had always said it was a family name … but more than that, she felt sure that sometime, somewhere in the vague past, she had heard about
Poppy Mallory.

Mike walked slowly through aisles in the County Records Office inspecting the high wooden shelves filled with oversize leather-bound books, each numbered by a year. There was just a single slender book for the year 1880, and those for the earlier years were even thinner—a reminder of how recently the area around Santa Barbara had been settled. Dust bounced from the brittle, yellowed pages, floating in the beam of sunlight that penetrated the high window as he leafed through the volume until he found the entry. It was written in spidery old-fashioned script, faded to a mocha brown.

He leaned back in his chair with a pleased sigh. At least now he knew where Poppy had been born, and where she had died—and the names of her parents. He flipped the pages of the record book, scanning the previous entry idly.

He turned back the page, checking …. Yes, he’d read it correctly. There were
two
girl children, born within a few weeks of each other and living on the same ranch. Then surely the families must have been close; the children would have played together, maybe they’d gone to school together, as young girls they might have shared the pain and joy of growing up, shared their secrets …

With a triumphant thud Mike slammed the book shut and replaced it on the shelf. Quite by chance, he had found a clue. Now he was sure that there was someone right here in Santa Barbara, a daughter, or maybe a grandchild, of the Konstant family, who would know about Poppy Mallory. As usual in his business, he knew the simplest method was the best. All he needed to do was look in the telephone directory under the name “Konstant”!

Hilliard Konstant was cool and a little edgy on the phone. “I don’t see many people these days,” he told Mike, “and I don’t see any good reason why I should see you, young man.” It was only when Mike mentioned that he was an author in search of a story that his attitude warmed up. “A book you say? About the Konstants?”

“The Konstants
and
the Mallorys, sir,” Mike added hastily.

“Be here this evening at five. Do you know your way to the ranch?”

“I imagine it’ll be hard to miss,” Mike replied, envisaging unbroken acres of pasture. He was wrong.

The wide Rancho Road, cambered to drain the heavy spring rains, split through the middle of sprawling housing developments on what had once been the Rancho Santa Vittoria. Walled tracts with names like Vittoria Oaks and El Rancho revealed glimpses of pretty suburban houses and neat lawns. Occasionally there was the massive spread of an ancient oak or the remains of a hazelnut thicket, or a hundred yards or so of split-rail fence around a paddock with grazing ponies, as a reminder that in Poppy Mallory’s day, all this had been acres of pasture, with cattle and sheep, and real cowboys.

Mike drove the rented Suzuki four-wheel-drive through the endless winding suburban avenues until the paved road ended suddenly at the crest of a hill, changing into a single blacktop track bordered on each side with old poplars, so tall, they looked
to be scraping the bright blue sky. A wrought-iron arch bore a sign
THE RANCHO SANTA VITTORIA
and the brand
NK
.

After half a mile the drive ended in a courtyard in front of an old white hacienda, with a riot of clematis and bougainvillaea spilling from its verandahs. A blue-tiled fountain sprayed sparkling arcs of water into the quiet sunlight and a Japanese gardener glanced up curiously, bowing to him before returning to his labor of love in the flower beds. As he walked to the house Mike noticed that everything was well kept; the grounds were immaculate and the worn terra-cotta tile steps had been polished until they shone like lacquer. The front door stood open, and as he peered inside a masculine voice called testily,

“Come in, come in. It’s Mr. Preston, I assume?”

The cool tiled hall seemed gloomy after the bright sunlight, but still it would have been impossible to miss Hilliard Konstant—even though he was in a wheelchair. He was well over six feet, with the shoulders of an ex-football player. His sparse white hair had been combed carefully over his balding crown, and his pale blue eyes beneath their bristling white brows seemed to look into the distance beyond Mike, as though he were already impatient for him to leave.

“Come on in then, hurry up …” Hilliard said crabbily, wheeling himself through a pair of oaken doors into his sanctum. “I expect you’d like a drink while you tell me why you’re wasting my time.”

Books filled the walls from floor to ceiling, and some—obviously a valuable collection of ancient volumes—were locked safely behind glass doors. A fire burned in the enormous stone grate even though the evening was warm, and over the mantel hung a portrait of a tall, broad-shouldered young man with wheat-blond hair and Hilliard’s pale eyes. He had his arm around a pretty Spanish-looking woman whose laughing dark eyes twinkled mischievously.

“I know, I know what you’re thinking,” Hilliard said irritably. “Of
course
I look like him. He’s my grandfather—Nikolai Konstantinov—and that’s my grandmother. He was Russian and she was Mexican—an extraordinary combination, don’t you think, for that era? It was painted about 1885, I believe.”

He handed him a small glass of dry white sherry. “Manzanilla,” he said, watching eagerly as Mike took a sip. It was wincingly dry and Hilliard cackled with laughter as Mike closed his eyes, coughing. “It’s not a drink for pansy-boys, but it’s
better than all your fancy whiskeys. That—and a glass or two of good wine with supper—are among the last few pleasures left to me.” He fixed Mike suddenly with a pale blue stare. “Exactly what is it you want to know about the Konstants?”

Mike ran a hand apprehensively through his rough dark hair; Hilliard Konstant was a tough customer. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I’m a man in search of a story. There was an ad in the L. A.
Times
today—some lawyer in Geneva is searching for Poppy Mallory’s heirs ….”

“I wondered when you’d get round to telling me,” the old man commented dryly. “I can tell you this, Mr. Preston, there’s not much I know about the Mallorys that you couldn’t find out from the Santa Barbara Historical Society. The two families were friends. More than that—they were partners. But the Mallorys disappeared from here long before my time. I never asked why, I thought they’d just died off—the way we all do. I’m the last of the Konstants, y’know. We were never a good ‘breeding’ family. What there was of us have mostly perished in wars—World War Two, Korea, Vietnam—my own son died there, and
that
killed his mother. I’ve been alone ever since. No, no,” he said anticipating Mike’s question, “it wasn’t a war that did this to me, it was a stupid, knuckleheaded horse. I was playing ‘rancher,’ you see, filling in my time here … after it had all happened.”

The old man stared through the window at the view across the valley. “Sometimes I wonder, if my father hadn’t sold off the ranch, what my life might have been like? I loved animals as a boy, loved riding horses, mending fences, playing cowboys for real … of course, all this was so big then—it was still a real ranch. It was only as I grew up that it became just a big backyard.” He smiled approvingly as Mike finished the manzanilla. “Acquired the taste yet?” he asked with a grin. Without waiting for a reply he turned his chair abruptly. “Come with me,” he commanded.

He stopped in front of a pair of framed documents hanging in the hall. Mike could see that one was written on cracked yellow parchment in the same sort of elaborate spidery writing as in the books recording the births at the Records Office.

“That is the original title deed to the Rancho Santa Vittoria. It amounted to just fifty acres. Exactly what we’re left with now! Ironic, isn’t it? You know the old saying—rags to rags in three generations?” His laughter had a hollow ring as he added, “Not that it matters anymore, when I die this’ll all go to my grandmother’s
family, the Abregos. There’s dozens of ’em out there somewhere.” He waved a hand vaguely across the valley. “Rich as Croesus too. Of course, they don’t need it—except maybe for family sentiment.” He coughed impatiently, as if to hide an emotion he was loath to let Mike see. “Now this,” he said, pointing at the other framed document, “this is the original partnership agreement between Nik Konstant and Jeb Mallory.”