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The Kill Fee

Mira Books

Chapter One

"The whole idea of playing hearts, Sally," Uncle Percy quietly explains, "is to maintain one's composure while using a strategy to win."

I sigh as I glance across the card table at my mother and then over at my great-uncle's friend, Mrs. Milner, who offers me a friendly wink. Of course Mrs. Milner has like zero points against her while I'm teetering around with ninety-one, and Uncle Percy has just passed the ace and king of hearts and the queen of spades to me.

"You're just rotten, I tell you," I growl at Uncle Percy, picking up my cards.

Mother laughs, picking up her glass to sip a little wine.

It is Saturday night at the Gregory Home in Castle-ford, Connecticut. My great-uncle, Percy Harrington, is eighty-four years old, and after a serious fall three winters ago, decided to move here. It is a remarkable institution, the Gregory Home, first started in l936 by a wealthy industrialist to care for men and women in their later years. The endowment has been very well tended, and over the years the original mansion has evolved into something akin to a lovely feudal village.

The Gregory Home looms large upon a hill, lawns cascading beautifully down in front, and the interlocking buildings extend back and around, encircling to protect its vast network of common areas and residents' rooms, gardens and terraces, and most preciously, of course, its people. Today it can happen that a millionaire lives next door to a person of small means, and yet their quality of life will be indistinguishable. The only prerequisite to living in the Gregory Home, it seems, is to be nice. (As my mother always says, good manners will get you everywhere.)

Uncle Percy resides on the second floor - the party floor, he says - and after eating a light supper downstairs in the main dining room, the four of us moved up to the Turner Suite, where residents can privately entertain, to play hearts. My great-uncle is the only surviving Harrington of his generation. His eldest brother, George, was my father's father, the heir who married late in life, blew most of the Harrington family fortune and then blew his brains out in the pool house, leaving everyone somewhat at a loss about how to proceed.

For my father and grandmother, the consequences of my grandfather's behavior meant moving into a small rental house down the road before the banks foreclosed on the estate. For Uncle Percy, it meant watching the only company where he had ever worked, Harrington Fine Printing, abruptly slam the doors in the face of its longtime employees, cart off its presses and equipment and supplies piecemeal, and then auction the building itself in the bankruptcy courts. The huge redbrick building, with its large windows and decorative stonework, is now the home of twenty-four loft apartments. The only trace of my family that can be found is the name of my great-great-grandfather, Horace W. Harrington (the inventor of one of the earliest color-separation processes in printing), on the cornerstone.

Uncle Percy was never quite the same after the bankruptcy. Before the scandal and collapse of Harrington Fine Printing, he had been a rather dashing executive dandy of the old school, Mr. Rah-Rah Princeton, but afterward he became a quiet observer on the city side-lines. He had some sort of minor executive job in Hartford. His wife, it was said, couldn't bear children and so the couple drifted through life in their pretty, little house on Farm Hill Road, always pleasant, always the perfect gentleman and gentlewoman, but never the center of anyone's particular attention.

My father died more than twenty-two years ago, and it was four years later that Aunt Martha fell ill with cancer. Until then Uncle Percy had helped my widowed mother a bit financially, but the demands of his wife's care at home quickly curtailed that, and by the time Aunt Martha died six years later, Uncle Percy was mentally, physically and financially exhausted.

Uncle Percy was a proud man and when he said he was selling the pretty, little house to move into an apartment because, at his age, it was simply the wisest move to make, Mother believed him. But then, over time, Mother put it all together - the federally subsidized apartment, his never traveling, never buying new clothes, his car barely kept running - and realized that Uncle Percy had little or nothing to live on but his social security and the odd dollar he took in by addressing wedding invitations in his beautiful hand.

I'm still not sure how Mother convinced him to speak with Margaret Kennerly, the administrator of the Gregory Home. In Uncle Percy's day, the Harringtons were one of the largest benefactors of the Gregory Home, and certainly none of them had ever lived there. But after Uncle Percy's fall, it was evident that his health was at risk, and Mother and I ganged up on him about making a change.

We are so very grateful to the Gregory Home because since Uncle Percy moved in, he has come back to life in a way I never remember him being. Because, you see, living at the Gregory Home is really like living on a grand estate, which is exactly the way of life Uncle Percy had been brought up to expect. He is, in other words, after all these years, living in his natural element.

My mother, the former Belle Goodwin of Newport, often visits Uncle Percy. She also enjoys the atmosphere of the Gregory Home because it is reminiscent of a life that she, too, had been brought up to expect but was denied. Oh, yes, my father was a very good architect, and had, with his in-laws' help, designed and built Mother a beautiful home on the five-acre parcel of the old estate he had managed to hang on to. But then Daddy died so young, and so unexpectedly, and there Mother had been left with two small children and very little insurance. (She also had a brother draining her parents for all they were worth, but that is another story.)

No, I think, looking across the table at my blond (and gray) haired, blue-eyed, genuinely beautiful sixty-year-old mother, she has not had it easy, either.

"Who has the two of clubs?" Uncle Percy wants to know, snapping me out of my contemplations.

"I do," I sigh, tossing it on the table to start the hand. Sometimes I think I am Uncle Percy's favorite niece because I am his only niece.

After I get creamed and thrown out of the game, Uncle Percy asks if perhaps I can look at that letter he mentioned. I tell him sure, get up to pour myself a cup of decaffeinated coffee, retrieve the letter, settle back down at the table and look at all the commotion embla-zoned on the envelope. NO SUCH PERSON. RETURN TO SENDER. DECEASED. DEAD-LETTER OFFICE. The letter is addressed to Uncle Percy at the old Farm Hill Road address where he hasn't lived for years and years.

"Our new mailman brought it the other day," Uncle Percy tells me, playing a card. "Nobody seems to know where it's been all this time."

I open the letter. It's dated over two years ago.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Kill Feeby Laura Van Wormer Copyright ©2003 by Laura Van Wormer. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the...