The Golden Goose Read Online Free Page B

can be incompletely dead.”
    â€œAtta girl, Peet,” her brother Twig sneered. “Any more than you can be slightly pregnant.”
    â€œPlease,” Peet said haughtily. “I don’t like people who use risqué language.”
    â€œYes, Twig,” sniffled Aunt Lallie. Now that Uncle Slater’s veritable decease had been established to her satisfaction, she had her dainty handkerchief in her outsize hand and was punching at her eyes with it. “And your uncle lying up there dead.”
    â€œWhat am I supposed to do, sob?” snarled her nephew. “It was damn inconsiderate of him to kick off, Aunt Lallie—as if you didn’t know it!”
    â€œWell, it’s true a man Slater’s age ought to have taken better care of himself,” wept Aunt Lallie. “After all, he did have a responsibility to his family.”
    â€œLook,” said Brady. “Dying was his own business. But that will he left—that’s our business.” He added in gloomy afterthought, “Some business!”
    â€œHow much am I going to get?” asked Peet with a trace of anxiety.
    â€œEnough to keep you in clothes,” growled Brady, “which, considering how little you need for that purpose, doesn’t comfort me a damn bit.”
    â€œPeet,” said Twig, “do you think you can add five—the five of us—to the seventeen outside O’Sheas? Don’t bother, it’s twenty-two. You heard Uncle Slater. How much of a slice can you expect from a pie cut into twenty-two pieces?”
    â€œThat was mean of him,” Peet said angrily.
    Aunt Lallie broke off in mid-sniffle. “I just thought. Let’s break the will! It isn’t as if Slater were in his right mind. If he had been, he’d have left his entire estate to me. After all, I’m his sister.”
    â€œI have news for you, Aunt Lallie,” said her nephew Twig with a certain malevolent enjoyment. “I’d rather have one twenty-second of a sane uncle’s estate than nothing of a crazy one’s. So I’m prepared to fight. Right, Brady? You with me?”
    â€œI guess so,” said Brady glumly, “though it would have been a lot simpler if he’d left everything to Prin. Then we could all have stayed on here on the old basis, just as if Uncle Slater hadn’t died at all.”
    Prin wondered if that were true, or if she would have thrown them out to shift for themselves. But she supposed that in the end she’d have permitted them to stay, for it was Uncle Slater’s money, and Uncle Slater had observed the family tradition that no O’Shea was expected to work seriously at anything, or to starve as a consequence of not doing so. It would have been a moral obligation. Prin sighed and stirred, ashamed of herself. What was she thinking? She was as bad as the others, speculating over the material considerations while Uncle Slater grew progressively colder and stiffer upstairs, like the dinner he hadn’t been able to come down to eat.
    At that moment the doorbell began to ring petulantly. It was automatic for Prin to get up to answer it, since no one else paid the least attention and Mrs. Dolan was in her room deaf to everything but the biff-bang cowboy show she was raptly watching.
    The annoyed finger on the bell belonged to Dr. Appleton, who came in carrying a black bag, although what for—under the circumstances—Prin couldn’t imagine. Dr. Appleton looked very much put out, as if Uncle Slater had played the worst trick of all on him. He was at least seventy, but he moved like a young man—or a gnome, Prin thought, for he was short and stocky and quick and sly and his face was full of bristly gray hair.
    â€œWhere is Slater, young woman?” Dr. Appleton demanded. He had a voice like a gnome’s, too—high and clear, a piping sort of voice with a snap in it.
    â€œHe’s up in his room, Doctor,” said Prin,