Free Smart House by Kate Wilhelm

noon. About one, isn’t it? But still, we did not say we would come for lunch. Will you have lunch with us somewhere? Maybe you could direct us.”
    Charlie raised his eyebrows at her, but she was already taking the young woman’s arm, steering her toward the rental car they had just driven up in. Lying like a trooper, he thought happily about Constance, and took Beth’s other arm; the three of them went to the car and got in.
    “I’d better go somewhere,” Beth said, between them on the front seat. “If I go back inside right now, I might kill Bruce, and that would really look bad for me, wouldn’t it?”
    “That would look bad,” Constance agreed. “What on earth did Bruce do?”
    “He accused me of killing Gary.”
    “Did you?”
    “No.”
    “I thought they all said the house killed both men,” Constance said.
    “They said it, but I don’t believe it. I guess Bruce must have done it, after all.”
    “You thought he did, and then you changed your mind, and now you think it again,” Constance said thoughtfully, as if they had discussed this before.
    “Yes. I couldn’t think of a reason before, but he just gave a reason, only he didn’t seem to realize it. Actually I don’t know this area,” she said then, looking at Charlie. “I don’t know where there are restaurants or anything else.”
    “That’s all right,” Constance said reassuringly. “We passed a lot of them on our way in. Charlie knows where to go. What was the reason Bruce just revealed?”
    She would get away with it, Charlie knew. She had moved in when Beth was practically in a state of shock; she had said and done exactly the right things at the right time, and this poor kid had no more resistance to her than he himself did. No sound escaped, but he was humming under his breath, listening to every word, and searching for a restaurant.
    “It’s pretty complicated,” Beth said after a brief hesitation. “I thought I understood it just a minute ago, and now it seems confused again. It has to do with the company and the way it’s set up.” She lapsed into a troubled silence.
    “I never studied economics enough to get a decent grasp of business affairs,” Constance said. “That’s a closed corporation, isn’t it?”
    “That’s it,” Beth said, and now her words came in a rush. “When they started it all, Bruce was still married to Binny. They got divorced a couple of years ago. Two kids, perfectly awful little monsters, all whining and smeary and clinging. It’s sad for Maddie, her only two grandchildren turning out to be monsters. Anyway, Gary couldn’t stand Binny, and no one else could either as far as I could tell, except Bruce, and that didn’t last. She isn’t very smart, doesn’t know anything about computers, or anything else, I guess. So when Gary was starting the company, he had Milton write up the articles of incorporation in such a way that no stock could be inherited in the case of death of the shareholder. He was terrified of letting someone like Binny get any shares, having any voice, input, he called it. You can’t just sell a share, either,” she added in an aggrieved voice.
    “So the shares of the deceased revert back to the company, which has to pay the estate the market value of them and then divide them up using a formula based on the percentage of shares they already own. The company has to buy back Gary’s shares, and Rich’s, now and redistribute them.”
    “But weren’t you named his primary heir?”
    Beth looked at Constance, puzzled, then nodded. “I don’t get the shares, that’s the point. They have to pay me their value, and they don’t have enough money. I think the courts will force a sale, or something of that sort. That’s my motive, according to Bruce.” She no longer seemed able to get from that to the reason she had found for Bruce to have done it. She frowned in thought.
    Charlie slowed down and clicked on the turn signal. He glanced at Constance; she grinned back,