After she had gone, I wheeled the briefcase to my conference table and started to take out the documents she had brought. There were a lot of them. It was just as well the briefcase was on wheels; she couldn’t have carried it very far. The documents were neatly organised in folders of various colours secured with rubber bands. She had written titles in matching coloured inks on the front covers. I arranged the folders into a number of piles, grabbed a pen and a yellow pad, and pulled myself up a chair. They were on my table now, and much as I tried to resist the feeling, it felt as though I had taken possession of them.
There were several large blue files containing newspaper cuttings and magazine articles. Some of them went back a long way. I didn’t go through them all, but there were several from the 1950s, and one or two were even older. The headlines suggested that, from time to time, family members had raised the question of the loan with their congressmen in different parts of the country. I didn’t try to read through everything, so what I am about to say might be a bit unfair. But while the politicians had made a few general comments about what a wonderful thing patriotism is, and what a good guy Jacob must have been, I couldn’t see anything to suggest that any of them had done anything tangible to help the family. Disappointing, but not too hard to understand, I thought. The repayment amount would have been a bit smaller back then, but it would still have been an eye-watering number, and any representative who suggested on the record that the government should repay it would have every reason to fear that it would come back to haunt him if he ever ran for higher office, or even if he stood for re-election. It occurred to me that if I took the case, I might have a similar problem with some judges.
There were numerous slim grey files containing photographs, many of them apparently taken during family reunions. They were of no immediate interest. I would have to go over them with Sam to find out who these people were, and whether we needed to deal with them. Like any group of people, no doubt the van Eyck family had its movers and shakers, some who acted as if they were more important than others, and some who actually were more influential than others. It would be important to know who was who, and what they were likely to think of Sam’s plan to sue the government.
Then there were various red and green files entitled ‘Research’. One of the green files also had the letters ‘LDS’ on the cover. I smiled. Good for Sam. I knew exactly what I was going to find before I even opened it. Kate Banahan, my wills and trusts professor at Georgetown Law, had clued the whole class in to this. There was, she insisted, no finer way to trace the ancestry of anyone in America, as you sometimes have to in a contested will case. Of course, today you can go to your computer and find any number of online sites for tracing your ancestry, but the LDS Church was in the business long before there was any such concept as online.
They go back to the days when records were made using quill pens and ink, and it might take you days, or weeks, to travel to where a record was kept. They started the Family History Library in 1894, and over the years they built up a huge collection of genealogical records from all over the world – registers of births, marriages, and deaths culled from churches and offices and the pages of family bibles and anywhere else they could be found —with the aim of enabling anyone interested in doing so to put together their own family tree. They have their own religious reasons for doing this, of course, which I’m sure make perfect sense to them, but the good news for the rest of us is that they have been open to sharing this vast treasure trove of information with anyone who needs or wants it. Originally, the only way of doing research was to go to the LDS library in Salt Lake City yourself and track down the documents you needed using the traditional card index system. But gradually the library began to travel via local family history centres, and increased its use of microfilm and microfiche, and now, of course, you can go online. The LDS collection remains the biggest and the best.
Sam had started with the first thing I would need to be sure of: that she herself was in fact a descendant of Jacob van Eyck. That wouldn’t have taken her long – it doesn’t take the LDS site long to go back 200 years – and she had printed out all the paperwork. There was no doubt about it. He was her ancestor. And then she had moved on. She had wanted to find out what else the site could tell her about her family. She had printed out a thick stack of records. But I didn’t try to look through them in detail because I was distracted by a handwritten note she had paper-clipped on top of them. The note was short and stark. I didn’t know whether she understood the significance of what she had discovered, but with my legal training it hit me full in the face.
Jacob van Eyck died intestate and without any surviving spouse or children. His three children died in infancy and, therefore, predeceased him. His wife and his parents also predeceased him. But he was survived by his seven brothers, all of whom had children.
She had circled the number seven twice, which suggested that, even without legal training, she thought this might be important. She was right, I was sure of it. I was assuming that the law in Pennsylvania when Jacob died in 1812 would be the same as it is in Virginia today. That may sound like a big assumption, but the law of Pennsylvania and the law of Virginia both grew from the roots of the English law, and the law of succession moves slowly. It doesn’t get a lot of public attention. No political careers are made by promoting reform of the law of wills or intestacy. So the law of succession evolves mainly by way of judicial interpretation and meanders through time, like a tranquil river feeling its way gently through a flat, peaceful landscape. Unlike some other areas of the law, the law of succession can remain essentially unchanged for centuries.
I would have to call in to the Georgetown Law Library to verify it, but I had no real doubt about what I would find. Jacob had left no will. In the absence of a surviving spouse or child, each of Jacob’s seven (circled twice) brothers would have been entitled to inherit from him in equal shares under the law of intestate succession. As would, in succession, his brothers’ children, and those children’s children, and so on for more than two hundred years. All their descendants alive today would be potential plaintiffs in the action Sam wanted to bring against the government, and there would have to be thousands of them. This would have to be a class action, and if we ever called a meeting of the class we would have to rent somewhere like Yankee Stadium.
I suppose all that should have been obvious to me as soon as she explained the case to me. She couldn’t be the only surviving descendant of Jacob van Eyck. But somehow, my mind had not wandered to the question of how many living members the family tree might have. If all of them were equally entitled to a share of anything we recovered, they would all be entitled to a say in how the case was conducted, and on what terms, if any, it could be settled. I had just unfurled another huge red flag. How long I remained in my reverie before Arlene interrupted me, I’m not sure.
‘Hun, y’all need anything? ’Cause I’m outta here. I’m fixin’ to take Bubba to get doctored.’ Arlene is from Lubbock, Texas.
She is a single mother. Bubba is her ten-year-old son, and apparently it is already written in the stars that he is destined to play wide receiver for Texas Tech. She moved from Lubbock about two years ago, after Larry, her then husband and Bubba’s father, finally revealed to her from the bottom of his whisky glass that he had gambled away the last dollar they had between them, and that the matrimonial home was about to be repossessed to repay his debts. In addition, he added almost as an afterthought, he had lost his job. He had coached high school football, teaching ninth and tenth grade biblical studies as his contribution to the children’s academic development. But now, school board and parents alike had concluded that the example he set to the young of the town was no longer satisfactory.
Somehow, via a complicated family connection, Arlene ended up in Arlington, and one day she ended up in my office begging for a job, as if her life depended on it, which in a sense it probably did. She had no prior experience of running a law office, and the references she brought from her local library and her vet’s office, where she had worked previously, were no more than formally complimentary about her organisational skills. But there was something about her. I took a chance. I gave her the job, and I have never taken a better decision in the practice of law. Within two weeks, she had the office humming like a well-oiled machine. We never missed a date for a court hearing or to file a pleading; our paperwork was impeccable; the clients received their bills promptly and they paid them promptly.
There’s something else, too. She joined me about two months before the Week. When the Week hit and I closed the office, I paid her what I could afford to tide her over, which wasn’t enough, and released her, feeling sure I would never see her again. She owed me nothing. But on the morning I reopened she was there, waiting for me at the door at eight o’clock, and she has been with me every day since. And for that I will love her forever.
‘No, thanks, Arlene, I’m good. Go. Is Bubba OK?’
‘Oh, sure, hun. He’ll be fine. He pulled something in his leg going up for a high pass in training last week. I just wanna be sure he ain’t fixin’ to do any real damage if he trains this week. His coach says it’s just a little strain, nothing ice won’t fix, but you know me and coaches. I never can quite trust them any more.’
I laughed. ‘I know. Get out of here. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She looked down at the mass of paper on my table.
‘What did Lily Langtry want? Are you gonna take it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘It’s a debt collection.’
‘A debt collection? That must be one helluva debt.’
‘It is. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.’
‘Will you tell me before you decide?’
‘You know I will.’
‘Well, all right, then. Don’t stay here all night, y’all.’
That was the night the dreams started. To this day, I cannot begin to describe the vivid impression the dreams made on me, or explain the detailed recall I had of them when I awoke. They even surpass the horrifying reality of my nightmares after the Week, and they remain with me today.