Grandma's Funeral
Copyright© 2010 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 5: The Treasure
Two hundred people — the grieving, the furious, the strangers who’d wandered up for the free bar — turned as one from the dying woman in the wheelchair and ran, fanning out across the lawn and the reception hall and the smoking margins of the carpark, descending on every black plastic Bunnings crate in a fifty-metre radius, tearing the lids off, flinging out the hymn books and the urns and the spare everything, hunting a million dollars that did not exist, in containers that held nothing, on the word of a man who knew nothing.
Grandma sat in her wheelchair in the middle of the emptying lawn and watched them go.
And laughed.
Steph didn’t join the search.
There was no point. Grandma had already played her well enough for one day, and Steph knew, the way she knew her own name, that the money was a fantasy — that two hundred people were tearing open empty boxes after a thing that wasn’t in any of them. So instead of running with the herd, she walked the other way. Toward Grandma.
By the time she got there, the real lawyer had got there first — the actual one, the family lawyer, the man with the scorched and shit-streaked Tesla, who had drifted in out of the chaos to stand by the wheelchair with the weary patience of a man who has been trying to have a sensible conversation all day and has not once been allowed one.
“Well, Katherine,” he said. “You’ve had your fun. But I don’t think you really thought this through.”
Grandma’s head came up. “What. Am I in legal trouble, am I?”
She said it with relish, almost hoping. And the lawyer — who knew her, who had known her for thirty years — didn’t take the bait, because he knew that legal trouble was the one thing in the world Katherine Smith would be delighted by. He let it go by.
“No,” he said. “I mean you’ve as good as killed that man.” He nodded across at the fake lawyer, who was standing a few feet off, hunted and grey — and out past him, the three suited men were not at his back at all but out in the thick of the search, tearing through crates with more conviction than anyone, because they wanted the money most and so they believed in it hardest. “He’s standing right there. You sent those men after a million dollars that he hasn’t got, on your say-so. Look at them — they’re the keenest hunters on the lawn. And when they’ve torn open the last empty box and worked out there’s nothing, they are not going to shrug and go home. They’re going to come back to him.”
Off across the lawn, the search had found the catering tables.
Steph watched it happen — two of the cousins had spotted the crates under the trestle, the caterers’ own, and had grabbed them and hauled, and the whole table went up and over in a single magnificent arc, sandwiches and urns and the great yellow tray of snot blocks and the punch bowl all leaving the earth together and coming down across a ten-metre spread of lawn. Somebody was wearing the punch. Somebody else was on their knees in the wreckage already prising lids. The magpies, who had never left, descended on the new bounty with the air of creatures whose faith had been rewarded.
Not everyone was in the search. Susan had hold of Peter at the edge of the crowd, close, saying something — and then the two of them were walking, away from all of it, toward the cars. Steph half-saw it. But there was shouting from the other direction, the good kind, the kind with a story in it, and her eyes were already going. Two of the younger cousins had run into each other, like two blokes going for the same mark in a footy match, and they were both lying on the ground moaning.
But Grandma didn’t even look. The catering and the searching was nothing to her. So the fake lawyer, seeing that the woman who’d ruined him had no further interest in him at all, did the only thing left to a desperate man standing next to a real lawyer: he asked for advice.
“What do I — “ His voice cracked. “What am I supposed to do?”
The real lawyer looked at him for a few seconds, taking in the cheap suit and the grey face and the three men out in the search who would shortly be his problem, and gave him a genuine, considered, professional opinion.
“You’re in worse trouble than the fire engine,” he said. “But it’s not legal trouble. There’s no charge in any of this for you — you didn’t defraud anyone, you were defrauded. Your problem isn’t the law. Your problem is them, ” a nod out at the three suits ransacking the lawn, “and the law can’t help you with them, because they’ve got no legal claim either, which means they can’t sue you, which means they’ll do the other thing.” He turned back to the wheelchair, mild as milk. “Katherine. Was any of this signed? Did anyone put anything on paper? Who helped you?”
Across the lawn, in the reception hall, something was kicking off.
Steph caught it through the open doors — Trevor and one of the mafiosi, shoving each other over a crate, both with their hands on it, both refusing to let go. Trevor snarled something. The mafioso, affronted, produced his gun.
And Trevor laughed at him — laughed in his face, the way you’d laugh at a child waving a stick — and simply wrenched the crate out of his hands and turned his back on him. And Steph watched the mafioso’s whole body wind up to shoot — watched him actually start to do it, the gun coming up at Trevor’s retreating back — and then watched him glance, just once, out the window, at the long farmer’s rifle still standing harmless against the reception-hall wall where the old man had left it. And she watched him reconsider. Watched the maths happen behind his sunglasses: their guns are real, and there are a lot more of them than there are of me. He put the pistol back in his pocket and reached, sullenly, for the next crate in the pile.
“There’s not a scrap of paper,” Grandma was saying, behind Steph, with enormous satisfaction. “Not one. Nothing signed, nothing filed, nothing to find. But the money’s real.”
“Where did it come from?” said the lawyer.
Steph turned back at that — real? — surprised enough to take her eyes off the hall, which was why she had her back to it when the gun went off.
The bang was enormous in the enclosed room and it stopped the entire funeral. Steph spun round. Everyone in the reception hall had frozen mid-ransack, two dozen people locked in place trying to work out what had just happened and where — and none more frozen than the mafioso himself, who was standing very still with a strange expression, looking down at his own jacket. As Steph watched, he put one finger through a fresh hole in the pocket.
He forgot to safety it, she thought. He had it loose in his pocket and he forgot to safety it, the absolute idiot. And the second thing she thought, watching everyone in the room turn slowly in place: nobody can see where the bullet went. Not one of them. Not even him.
“Your grandfather’s account,” Grandma said, behind her, conversational, as if a gun had not just gone off forty feet away. “For one of his little enterprises. The one nobody in this family ever knew about — they hadn’t the first idea, the innocents.” A dry rattle. “But his associates knew. Those clowns out there in the suits. And when George died, the idiots never thought to take the dead man off the account. And I can sign for him. So I did. Withdrew the lot. Perfectly legal — their own money, handed to me through their own laziness.”
The lawyer laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of him.
And in the same moment Steph saw the mafioso, and then Trevor, both go down — feet shooting out from under them, both of them hitting the floor hard. It took her a second. Then she saw the soap. A great spreading slick of it across the lino, glugging out of a punctured catering drum, because that was where the bullet had gone — into the dishwashing liquid — and now there was detergent across the entire floor, and the mafioso had cracked his head going down, hard, and lay there blinking at the ceiling.
Old Col walked over, unhurried, his rifle left where it stood, and took hold of the mafioso by one ankle and dragged him bodily out the door onto the grass, the way you’d drag a stuck calf. “Right,” he said. “Give us the gun. Before you do yourself an injury.” And the mafioso, shaken, concussed, soap-soaked, sat on the grass and let the old man reach into his pocket and lift the pistol out of it like a parent confiscating a toy. Col turned it over, sniffed the barrel, shook his head. “No wonder it went off,” he said. “Carrying it loose in there with your keys and your bloody nunchucks and God knows what — something in there’s pushed the trigger. You don’t keep a loaded gun in a pocket full of stuff, you bloody fool.”
The whole lawn had stopped to watch. Even the searchers, for a moment.
Then the real lawyer turned back to the wheelchair as though nothing had happened at all.
“I’m not sure you’ve thought this through, Katherine,” he said. “What happens to the family. After.”
“They learn better.”
“Right. But the girl —” and here he glanced at Steph, standing close now, included whether she liked it or not “— the girl didn’t say everything, did she. There’s a piece she left out. What was it she didn’t say?”
Grandma’s mouth shut like a trap. She wasn’t going to give it to him.
The lawyer looked at Steph instead, one eyebrow up. Asking.
Steph shrugged. There was no reason left to protect any of it. “About Peter and Susan,” she said. “I took that one to the police.”
He nodded slowly. Not surprised. “I wondered,” he said. “I did wonder about that one, and I noticed that they’ve gone. Which means you told her.” And then, half to himself, working it through the way a man works through a will, “So. Katherine. What happens now, then. Susan goes down for that, in time — and Peter — and with the two of them out of the way...” He looked up, and something landed in his face, and he said it plainly, almost gently: “Amy ends up in charge. Doesn’t she. Of the money, and the family. That’s where this all lands.”
Steph had been half-watching the search converge, by now, on the church itself — the ruin, the most likely place, where else would you hide a fortune — a knot of the boldest of them, two mafiosi among them, picking toward the smoking doorway. But what the lawyer had just said reached in and grabbed all of her attention at once.
Amy? Really?
And Grandma — Grandma was just as surprised. Steph saw it cross the old face, the thing she had not once seen there all day: a beat where Katherine Smith had not seen it coming.
“Oh, ” Grandma said. Quietly. As if a small unpleasant fact had been set in front of her.
Out at the church, the firies had had enough, and lifted their hoses, and shouted a warning at the idiots crowding the doorway — but they’d just shut the water off to reset, so the threat was empty, and the searchers, family and mafiosi together, pushed carefully past them into the ruin, which was mostly flattened anyway, picking through the hot black wreck of it for money that had never been there.
Steph stopped watching them. She’d had a thought, and the thought had Michelle in it.
She caught Michelle’s eye across the lawn and gestured her over.
While she waited, the lawyer was still turning it over with Grandma — Amy, the supermarket, the lending, the whole cabal, that’s who comes out on top of this — and Grandma had gone quiet in a way that wasn’t like her, and the search tore on, and the embers settled, and Michelle came picking across the grass with her eyebrows up.
“Grandma,” Steph said. “I want you to see something.”
And she took Michelle’s face in both hands and kissed her, properly, the whole thing, in front of the wheelchair and the lawyers and anyone on the lawn who cared to look. Michelle went still with surprise for about half a second — and then, because she was Michelle, because she was entirely without shame and game for anything, she got into it.
Steph broke the kiss and turned to Grandma, who was staring.
“I want you to know,” Steph said, “that I screw whoever I want. And I don’t care who knows. There’s nothing there for you to hold. There never was.” She let that sit. “And you’re going to tell them — all of them — that you’re ashamed of yourself. That you offered to pay me a million dollars to stand up there and do your dirty work, and you’re sorry.”
She watched exactly what Grandma thought of that cross the old grey face, and pressed on before it could turn into speech.
“Because if you don’t,” Steph said, “I’m going to explain to every single one of them what this was really about. That it was a scheme to take Susan down so Amy gets the keys to the family. That you didn’t burn the family down out of some grand reckoning — you did it to settle who runs the money. Just like Susan. Just like all of you.” She leaned in. “I’ll make you small, Grandma. I’ll make you one of them.”
And she watched it land, and she knew — the way she’d known the money was fake, the way she knew her own name — that she’d found the one thing Katherine could not bear. Not legal trouble. Not the family’s hatred. That. To have the masterpiece cheapened into a squalid little power-grab. To be made ordinary. To snatch, out of the very jaws of her victory, a grubby and forgettable defeat.
She had one up on Grandma. For the first time in her life, and probably the only time, Steph was holding the winning card, and they both knew it.
Grandma looked at her for a long moment, the grey face unreadable. And then she gave a single small nod. Terms accepted. No argument, no haggling, no last cruelty — just the nod, from a woman who had spent sixty years knowing exactly when a deal was a deal. She would do it. She would stand up, or sit up, in front of all of them, and say the words. Steph had won.
The real lawyer, beside her, gave a small nod of his own. Respect, plain and unmistakable. Well done.
Then he turned, businesslike, back to the wheelchair.
“Katherine,” he said. “Where is the money?”
“I didn’t give it to any of this lot,” Grandma said, and her eyes went, with contempt, to the fake lawyer hovering at the edge of it all. “Least of all that idiot.”
The mafiosi came back first.
They came back from the ruins of the church singed and blacked, soot to the elbows, one of them — the soap one — still wet, all three of them empty-handed and furious, and they came back in time to hear the tail end of it. I didn’t give it to any of this lot. The money’s real. The fake lawyer never had it.
And behind them the family was drifting back too, the whole exhausted herd of them, because the hunt was over — they’d torn open every box in the district and the district’s worth of ash besides, and there was no money, there had never been any money, and they were coming back to the wheelchair defeated and filthy and trying to understand.
But enough of them had heard it. The money’s real, and Grandma’s got it, and the lawyer never did. And they believed it — not because anyone had proof, but because it was, finally, the most rational explanation for the entire insane day. Of course Grandma had the money. Grandma had everything else. Grandma had faked her own death and burned down a church and run them all ragged; of course the million was real and of course she had it. It was the only story that fit.
“Grandma,” somebody said, with something almost like awe. “You’re just evil.”
And Steph, watching, saw exactly what that word did to the old woman in the wheelchair. Saw it land like a blessing. Evil. The crowning of her whole day — not sick, not confused, not poor old thing, but evil, deliberate, a force, a dark queen on her dark throne. Grandma sat a little straighter. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to her in years.
And then the two mafiosi who still had their guns — desperate now, broke, humiliated, out of every other idea — raised them, and pointed them at the dying woman in the chair.
“Tell us, you old bitch,” one said, his voice cracking. “Where is our money.”
And Steph saw it all arrive at once, saw the shape of the thing complete itself, and understood: this is it. This was the last drama and the biggest of the whole enormous day, the thing the entire afternoon had been building toward — Katherine Smith, held at gunpoint, the absolute centre of a life-and-death moment, two hundred witnesses, the guns out, the demand made. Grandma’s crowning glory. It was all about her. It was exactly, precisely, the death she would have written for herself.
The family burst out laughing.
Because — these idiots. These absolute clowns, these costume gangsters who’d been disarmed like a child and shot a tub of dishwashing liquid and got dragged out by their ankles, were now pointing their little guns at a half-dead old woman in a wheelchair, over money that two hundred people had just spent an hour proving did not exist. It was the funniest thing yet. It was hysterical.
“Oh, put them away, ” someone called, wheezing. “Honestly.”
“You’re going to shoot her? Look at her! Save you the ambulance!”
“Stop being absurd, the pair of you, before one of you gets hurt — you’ll get hurt, I mean, not her —”
And the two mafiosi stood there with their guns out and the entire funeral laughing at them, and it was so completely not the response a man expects when he points a gun at someone that they simply froze, the threat curdling in their hands, no idea at all what to do next.
And Steph saw Grandma’s face.
Saw the deflation. Saw the crowning moment — the gunpoint, the drama, the whole afternoon’s grand finale arriving exactly on cue — taken away from her, laughed off, reduced to one more bit of farce in a day made of farce. Held at gunpoint and not even that could make them take her seriously. Not even her own murder would they grant the dignity of believing in. The dark queen, pointed at by guns, and her court was laughing.
“Save me,” Grandma said. Small. To no one. To Steph, maybe.
“Nah, Grandma,” somebody said cheerfully. “Reckon the idiots can have you. Although —” and it was old Col again, the rifle-man, with a put-upon sigh “— I suppose I’ll have to go and get my gun. Again.”
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