CERTIFICATE OF MARRIAGE
NEILL PALMER AND MARY KWINAULT
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
“You trashed my house for this?” Kateri held up the paper.
Lilith lunged across the room, reached for the certificate.
Kateri pulled it back, fended her off with a sharp elbow to the rib cage. “My father and mother were married? He married her? Why?”
Lilith doubled over, gasped. “He said he loved her.”
“He said … he loved her? My mother? Mary?” The whole world was falling apart around Kateri’s ears, all the perspectives were changing. She didn’t know how to put the pieces back together.
“He had clearly lost his mind.”
Kateri weighed how much force to put into the next blow to Lilith’s rib cage. And head, chest, face … But she wanted information and she couldn’t get it if Lilith was unconscious. “How did you find out?” She lifted the paper. “About this.”
“Father told me.” Lilith straightened up. “He told me he married your mother. He told me he loved her. I asked where the marriage certificate was, and he said he hid it.”
“What did he hope to accomplish by telling you … any of that?”
“He was in pain. On medication. He said someone needed to know.”
“Deathbed confession? How human of him.”
“I suppose.” Lilith clearly did not see the humor. “I knew I had to find it before … before disaster struck. I sat down and I thought. Thought about his last days and his last words and I knew … I knew somehow he’d managed to send it to you.”
“Why do you care? Why would anyone care except me? I’m the one who … who’s suddenly legitimate.” Was she? Kateri wasn’t sure that a child born of bigamy was legitimate. Hey, maybe Lilith was no longer legitimate.
Kateri grinned.
“Why do I care? Your mother … and my father. He was a respected man of the community. He didn’t love my mother, but at least she had her position as his wife.” Lilith glared as if Kateri were guilty of every kind of crime. “And then you. You! We found out about you. So unlike him. Such a lack of control on his part. When you came to live with us, I was in high school. Do you know what my friends said? About me having an Indian sister?”
“Native American.”
Lilith kept rolling. “Out of control. Savage. Without the slightest smidgeon of civilization or education. I was humiliated.”
“You’re holding a grudge about what happened in your high school? That was more than twenty years ago!”
Lilith went into her martyr act. “You have no sensitivity to my finer feelings.”
“Finer … feelings!” Kateri sputtered. “You … you locked Merry Byrd and me in the basement and left us to die!”
“Don’t exaggerate. It was only a couple of days.”
“You didn’t let us out. We figured out how to get ourselves out.” Kateri reined in her temper. “This is squabbling. This is stupid. How did you get in here? Into my house?”
“That’s not important.”
“I promise it is.”
“I may have helped myself to a key while we were at the quilting group.” Lilith managed to sound lofty, as if she had managed some noble mission.
Outraged, Kateri shouted, “You stole my back door key? Sure. Why not? You trashed my house. You trashed Rainbow’s house. You think nothing of breaking and entering. Why would you stop at stealing?” She took a breath, calmed herself and in a reasonable tone asked, “What did you think I was going to do with the marriage certificate?”
Lilith grew deadly calm, looked down, removed a piece of lint from her sleeve.
Illumination struck. Kateri smiled in the moment of revelation. “You thought I would challenge his will.”
“There is money involved,” Lilith pointed out.
Kateri felt herself descend to the level of out-of-control savage without the slightest smidgeon of civilization or education. “I don’t want his dirty money.”
“Of course not,” Lilith mocked. “You’re too noble for that.”
“Let us be clear here. I didn’t know there was a marriage, much less a marriage certificate. I didn’t know I had the paperwork.” Kateri realized she was shouting again. “And even if I had known, I wouldn’t have handed it over to you.”
“Why not?” Lilith wore that tucked-in lips, snottily superior I told you so expression. “If you’re not going to challenge the will, why wouldn’t you give it to me?”
“Because you never asked for it.” Kateri found herself flapping the certificate at Lilith. “I knew when you showed up here you were up to something, but you never told me what. Why is everything in your family so shrouded in secrecy? ‘Don’t look in the attic, Kateri.’ ‘Don’t touch the raven, Kateri.’ ‘Don’t look at the books in the library, Kateri.’ It’s like some stupid game you’re always playing and I can’t figure out the rules.”
With that laser focus that marked Lilith’s personality, she asked, “Will you give me the marriage certificate?”
“Why should I?”
Lilith reached into her purse, pulled a pistol, a Glock 43 and pointed it at Kateri. “Because I said so.”
Kateri wavered between scornful laughter and sheer terror. This was the woman who had shut two little girls into the cellar and left them to die. At the same time, her hair was perfectly groomed, her makeup was flawless, and she held the pistol limply, negligently, as if the weight hurt her wrist. But …
Looking up into those cold blue eyes, Kateri decided that terror was the logical emotion.
What she didn’t count on was her own overwhelming wave of fury. “You bitch. If you had ever asked, I would have given you this. I would have thrown it at you to get it out of my house. But oh, no. Like everything else in your family it’s all games and guessing and sneaking around and hiding the truth.”
“We’re your family, too.”
Kateri gestured widely, ridiculously. “I came into that Baltimore mansion too late to learn all that crap.”
“You learned more than you think. Do you think you could have succeeded as you have if you had remained here your whole life, dealing with an alcoholic mother, a lackluster education and all the lowered expectations of being raised on a Native American reservation?” Lilith knew exactly how to strike at the truth, at Kateri’s pride. “I don’t think so. I went out to your rez. That place is a cesspool.”
The rez was poor, disheartening, but to hear Lilith describe it as a cesspool made Kateri want to slap her—and made her want to cry. “The reservation is the land the government didn’t want and used to keep Natives Americans imprisoned. What did you think it would be like?”
“You people should … you should do something to improve yourselves.”
Kateri noted she was no longer part of Lilith’s family, but you people. “We are improving. Every day we’re improving. Now, we’re building a casino.” False bravado. She didn’t approve of the casino. But if it would improve her people’s finances …
“That’s immoral. Do you know how those casinos operate?”