The Heir Affair

say, barely—it seemed as if she was afraid that anything above a crawl would get her in trouble. She paused and squinted at us before looking down at a paper in her hand.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“Hmm,” Cilla said. “Probably someone Freddie knows.”
Her tone was way too casual. “Is he seeing someone?” I asked.
Cilla gazed into the middle distance, as if doing math. “Seeing someone can mean one thing to one person…”
“Another party planner?” I asked, glancing again at the archway. The woman had apparently read her map correctly and was gone. “Good to know Freddie is back on his game.”
Gaz interrupted by tromping down the stairs. “What’s the holdup? Aren’t you the least bit curious what Great-Auntie Georgina’s got in her foyer?”
“Cilla was telling me about Freddie’s latest,” I said. “Or not telling me.”
Gaz brightened. “Hannah? She’s a peach. Loved my vindaloo aaaaah,” he said, wringing a hand that Cilla clearly had just pinched. “But, I have no idea who you’re talking about. Fancy a crumpet? I wonder if Georgie Girl’s toaster still works.”
“I wonder if her dishes are even clean,” Cilla said, following him.
I lingered. I’d never known Freddie to be a model of discretion. Had he asked Cilla and Gaz to keep their mouths shut? Does that mean this is serious? That’s kind of soon, right?
I knew Freddie wasn’t mine; I’d chosen Nick, and I loved Nick. But what I had not chosen was this new world in which I knew nothing about the inner life of a person who meant so much to me. It had begun to feel like we’d crossed a bridge away from him that had started to crumble and might not hold up long enough for us to get back across.
I shook my head as if to evict the thought and walked into the house. My house.
I’d like to say I was instantly captivated by the enchanted, opulent majesty of Apartment 1A. (My unofficial biographer Aurelia Maupassant would’ve written exactly that, if she hadn’t hung up her pen after my recent behavior all but invalidated her slavishly inaccurate prose salad The Bexicon.) In reality, the first thing that greeted me was a stale, musty odor. Georgina had died about a decade ago, and obviously no meaningful efforts had been made to open a window.
“I can still smell her last cigarette,” Bea said, scrunching her nose.
Cilla wrestled open a heavy drapery and, with a grunt, got it back under the control of the gold rope whose job it had once been to restrain it. Daylight coursed into the rectangular foyer, illuminating a hallway to my right, and a grand, curving wooden staircase in the far corner of the room. It was shabby—the deep forest-green wallpaper was peeling in places, the checked marble floor was scuffed and dirty—but it was undeniably impressive, from the two gilded cherub sculptures flanking the carved double doors directly ahead of me, to the sweeping crystal chandelier hanging perilously over our heads like the Phantom of the Opera’s would-be murder weapon. It was centered over Georgina’s monogram, set in gold in the floor, sullied only by a moderate coating of dust.
“I don’t understand,” Gaz said, poking at the cherubs.
“You’re telling me,” carped Bea. “Who wallpapers a room one color? Just paint it.” She whipped out a notebook and started jotting down ideas. “That will be the first to go, after that ghastly logo in the floor.”
“Who hired you?” Gaz asked.
Bea shot him a withering look.
I took a fuzzy leopard-print coat out of a front hall closet and held it up against myself.
“No one ever talks about Georgina,” I said, looking down at it and wondering where she got it, where she wore it, whether it ever saw the light of day. “I feel rude manhandling all her private stuff.”
“She’s quite dead. She’ll never know,” Bea said. “Let’s get cracking.”
She threw open the double doors to reveal a massive formal living room with a thick, powder-blue fabric covering the walls. The four of us got to work pulling back those draperies, too, exposing enormous windows that looked out onto the park. Though the dimensions of the room were gracious, it felt claustrophobic because Georgina had been, charitably speaking, a bit of a hoarder. It was crammed to the edges with bric-a-brac: a ceremonial plate from the Netherlands; ceramics painted with the vista of a Tuscan village; a didgeridoo propped up in the corner next to a grand piano, both of which Cilla immediately banned Gaz from touching; a ceremonial mask that looked to have been carved out of ivory (“No, no, no,” Bea tsked at it, scribbling furiously); two enormous Asian urns that came up to my knees; and countless crystal animal figurines, the likes of which you might win at the county fair. The rug was big and Persian, the couches were wood-and-velvet Louis XV–style antiques, and the coffee tables were pocked with drink rings and cigarette burns.
Even the walls hadn’t escaped her overdecorating. I noticed a Magritte, several exquisite landscapes, and a small but disturbing Dalí (“She hung this on purpose?” Bea screeched). Presiding over the room: a massive oil portrait of the coronation of Georgina and Eleanor’s father, King Richard IV, with “God Save the King” on a plaque on the bottom of the frame. God hadn’t listened; Richard fell off a boat and drowned a year later.
“Cor,” Cilla breathed, gawking at the sheer number of paperweights and collectibles cluttering an impressive oak desk that sat in one corner near an equally big smoke-stained fireplace. It still had ashes in the grate, as if someone had simply carried Georgina’s body out of the building and locked the door. “This whole place is like a badly curated museum. I wonder if any of this was cataloged when she died.”
“It must have been, right? Otherwise why would they even let us in here?” I yanked the trunk of an elephant lamp. Nothing happened. “One of you could waltz out of here with this under your coat and no one