Eureka’s hair was damp from her shower after her run that afternoon. The team did a six-mile loop through the Evangeline woods on Thursdays, but Eureka did her own solitary loop through the university’s leafy campus.
“I can’t hardly bear to look at you.” Maureen clicked her teeth, eyeing the damp ombré hair Eureka flicked to the right, making it harder for her aunt to see her face.
“Ditto,” Eureka muttered.
“Baby, that’s not normal.” Maureen shook her head. “Please. Come by American Hairlines. I’ll give you a real good do. On the house. We’re family, aren’t we?”
Eureka looked to Dad for help. He’d drained his coffee cup and was staring into it as if he could read its dregs like tea leaves. From his expression, it didn’t look like the dregs had anything nice to predict. He hadn’t heard a word Maureen had said, and Eureka envied him.
“Can it, Mo,” Uncle Beau said to his older sister. “More important things going on than hair. We’re here about Diana.”
Eureka couldn’t help imagining Diana’s hair undulating softly underwater, like a mermaid’s, like Ophelia’s. She closed her eyes. She wanted to close her imagination, but she couldn’t.
Beau was the middle child. He’d been dashing when he was younger—dark hair and broad smile, the spitting image of his father, who, when he’d married Sugar, had acquired the nickname Sugar Daddy.
Sugar Daddy had died before Eureka was old enough to remember him, but she used to love looking at the black-and-white photos of him on Sugar’s mantel, imagining what his voice would sound like, what stories he would tell her if he were still alive.
Beau looked drained and skinny. His hair was thinning at the back. Like Diana, he didn’t have a steady job. He traveled a lot, hitchhiked most places, had once somehow met Eureka and Diana on an archaeological dig in Egypt. He’d inherited Sugar and Sugar Daddy’s small farm outside New Iberia, next to Brooks’s house. It was where Diana had stayed whenever she was in town between digs, so Eureka spent a lot of time there, too.
“How you getting on at school, Reka?” he asked.
“All right.” She was pretty sure she’d failed her calculus quiz this morning, but she’d done okay on her Earth Science test.
“Still running?”
“I’m captain this year,” she lied when Dad lifted his head. Now was not the time to divulge that she’d quit the team.
“Good for you. Your mama’s a real fast runner, too.” Beau’s voice caught and he looked away, as if he were trying to decide whether to apologize for having used the present tense in describing his sister.
The door opened and the lawyer, Mr. Fontenot, strode in, squeezing past the buffet to stand before them at the head of the table. He was a slope-shouldered man in an olive suit. It seemed impossible to Eureka that her mother could ever have met, much less hired, this man. Had she picked him out at random from the phone book? He made no eye contact, just picked up a manila folder from the table and flipped through the pages.
“I did not know Diana well.” His voice was soft and slow, and there was a little whistle in his ts. “She contacted me two weeks before her death to file this copy of her last will and testament.”
Two weeks before she died? Eureka realized that would have been the day before she and Diana flew to Florida. Was her mother working on her will while Eureka thought she was packing?
“There isn’t much here,” Fontenot said. “There was a safe-deposit box at the New Iberian Savings and Loan.” He glanced up, thick eyebrows arched, and looked around the table. “I don’t know if y’all were expecting more.”
Slight shakes of heads and murmurs. No one had expected even a safe-deposit box.
“Away we go,” Fontenot said. “To a Mr. Walter Beau De Ligne—”