“Where the hell have you been?” We stood in Dylan’s living room. “I was ready to come looking for you; ring that damned bell again and try to think of something else to say.”
I pulled the file out from under my shirt and threw it on the coffee table. It stuck to my skin and I had to peel it off me. “Visiting the family burial plot. After you left I had to say something, so I asked where the plot was and she took off around the house to show it me. I didn’t even know it was on the grounds.”
He pulled something out of my hair. “In the woods again? You kept your clothes on this time, I hope?”
I put my hand to my forehead, “Ah, be quiet. She showed me where she was going to put Nick. Across the plot from her parents that are buried on top of one another. She’s got it all planned out. So why did you go outside? You were supposed to stay in the foyer so I could hear your voices.” I sat down on the sofa and picked up the file.
“She opened the door and walked outside. She was trying to get rid of me, end the conversation. What was I supposed to do?” He sat next to me. “I’m not ever doing that again. I was trying to think of something to say. The idea for a plaque downtown seemed pretty good. So after all that, what did you get?” he asked.
I opened the file and sat back on the sofa. A letter from Nick dated June 2nd was on the top. It was handwritten on plain copy paper; the writing scrawled and hasty. I read it quickly. As my eyes scanned the words I felt the file slip from my lap and land in a heap on the floor. Dylan leaned over and picked it up. He straightened the papers and read the letter.
He looked over at me. “I’m sorry, Mackenzie.”
I had a lump in my throat. Every time I felt like I was beginning to accept what happened, there was something else to slap my face. Cora, apparently, had found out where we were living and sent Nick a picture of James in an envelope as a greeting card of sorts. She sent it to our house. I tried to think back but nothing stood out in my mind. I wouldn’t have paid any attention to an envelope addressed to Nick. Nick had written this letter back to Cora in June. This past June. He must have written quickly.
‘Mother”, it read, ‘You found me. Dad is long dead. He knew the truth in the end and I guess it killed him. Can you live with that? I have learned to. I can’t take his money though. Partly because I don’t deserve it and partly because it’s connected to you in so many ways. I’m never coming home. You’d have to kill me first. According to my lawyer, marrying prevents and essentially ends any control you may have had over me, alive, incapacitated or dead. I married the perfect woman. She accepts me despite everything and she doesn’t ask a whole lot of questions. Leave us alone. Finish your life in peace or it will be hell for all of us.’
He left it unsigned. She sent him a picture. He sent it back with a note. And he never said a word about any of it to me. Why would he when I never asked any questions? I was perfect all right. Perfectly stupid. I put my head down and tried to think. That’s why he’d become so distant and unreachable those last few months. He’d received this picture of his missing brother in an envelope from his mother whom he hadn’t seen in fourteen years It must have shook him up, his past sneaking up on him that way.
“He said in his note, ‘according his lawyer’. What lawyer?” Dylan didn’t answer right away. I looked at him. “Dylan, what lawyer?”
He turned slightly to face me. “Mackenzie, I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you this back when we were at my father’s house. I wanted to. It was all in his files. Letters back and forth.”
“What, Dylan?” I felt tears burning in the corner of my eyes. I knew it was going to be bad.
I didn’t want Dylan to see me so upset so I kept my head down but he knew. He pulled me to him and put his arms around me. “My father was involved in this from the beginning. He knew where Nick was the whole time. It makes sense when so much money was at stake. You can’t just have a party go missing. He was his lawyer and almost surrogate father. He advised Nick on every area of his life, so it seems.”
The phone card I had found in his wallet that day. That’s how Nick had communicated and assured that the numbers would never turn up on our bills. He had been talking to his lawyer.
“They met here in Philadelphia and Portland. He took care of everything. Apparently Nick was concerned that his mother would track him down and try to exert some control over him if something happened to him. Like if he had an accident and couldn’t take care of himself, if he was hurt, or dead…” He stopped talking. “She was next of kin. He wanted to legally end the possibility that his mother would take control. My father advised him that the easiest way to circumvent that was to marry. You and Nick were friends at the time and my father sort of encouraged him to start a relationship. Marriage takes precedence. That and he got a solid will into place.”
“He married me because of his mother?”
“I’m sure that’s not the only reason.” He said it fast. It didn’t matter how he said it. The truth was the truth. The final slap in my face. Once my tears started I couldn’t stop. It was like I was coming to terms with the whole thing at one time. I put my head against his chest and cried. Dylan didn’t say anything. He just rubbed my back until I was finished.
I pushed myself back, wiped my face with my hand and picked up the file again. The rest of it contained all of the personal information on Nick that his mother would ever need. Our home address, his work address, our phone number, basic personal information on both of us. She knew who I was and where I worked. I felt sick. When I’d written her that note, she knew who I was all along and she probably knew exactly how Nick had died in the accident.
I took the coin out and handed it to him. He turned it over in his hand and then dropped it on the coffee table. He pulled a sheaf of papers from the bottom of the file and opened them up. They had been folded in thirds and looked worn with time. I wiped my face and looked at him.
“What is it?” He continued to read, turning pages as he went.
“Wills. Bradford’s and Edward Monroe’s,” he mumbled.
“Anything interesting?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He was engrossed. His face became flushed. I got up and went to the kitchen to make coffee. Fifteen minutes later I returned with two mugs and put one in front of him. He was still reading. “What is it?” I asked.
Dylan stopped abruptly and took a sip from his mug. “This is crazy.” He said finally. “This will was done in two parts. The first part was dated Nineteen-fifty. Before her marriage. The will stipulates that a grandson had to be conceived as a product of the union of Cora and Bradford within five years of the date of the marriage for the will to be valid and probated.
“And what if there were no children?”
“The business holdings would be turned over to a William Atkins. He was the CEO and held the second majority of the stock in the company at that time. The personal holdings would be dispersed between two cousins on his father’s side. The house and contents would be sold and the money left to his mother’s sister’s children.” He looked up at me.
“And Cora would be out?”
“Literally out. She’d have no money, no house, nothing. But given that this condition was met, Cora’s father left all the joint family business holdings to Bradford alone. The bulk of his personal holdings were to be held in trust for the grandchildren. The second part was added in Nineteen seventy-two.”
“After the children were born?”
Dylan nodded. He studied the papers in front of him. “All the bills from the property were paid by the trust but Cora had no direct access to it.”
“But…”
He held up his hand. “Wait there’s more. The holdings were to be divided between the two grandchildren and the trust dissolved when they reached the age of thirty-five, but not evenly. He wanted James to get a full eighty-five percent.”
“And Nick would only get fifteen percent?”
Dylan nodded. “Unless something happened to one of them, then the other would inherit the bulk of the estate.”
“And again, he cut Cora out completely?”
“No, she got an allowance. And the house. Like I said before, he left all his business interests to Bradford but his personal assets minus the house were estimated to be approximately three hundred million dollars at the time this was done. The allowance was a percentage of the interest on that, but she had no access to the estate itself. You have to remember she had no bills either. No mortgage, taxes, upkeep, nothing. Everything was covered by the estate so she only had to pay personal expenses.”
I put my head down. “I never thought I’d say this, but poor Cora. Imagine the pressure to conceive a child under those conditions? She only had five years or she’d lose everything. And what if she only had girls? Where would she have gone? And then she does exactly what her father wanted her to do and he still leaves her out?”
“She obviously never had her own attorney look at this. Parts of it are completely invalid. You can’t use a will to force certain life decisions, like marriage and children on someone. It isn’t legal. Her father knew this, I’m sure but counted on the fact that Cora was unsophisticated and wouldn’t challenge him. This will was just a way to blackmail her.”
“So, she followed his wishes, marrying Bradford, never knowing she would have gotten the money anyway? That’s horrible.”
“Yes, very manipulative. I’m sure there was an actual valid will probated after his death that Cora didn’t know about. There had to be. Something similar that left his money in trust for the two grandchildren. Business interests to Bradford, if I had to guess.”
“But why didn’t Edward Monroe want his grandchildren to inherit evenly?”
“That’s the question. He put in the appropriate legalese. It says, and I quote, “This is not because of lack of love or affection but because Nicholas will be amply compensated and will stand to inherit from his parents upon their passing.” End quote. If the two grandchildren had both lived, Nick might have had a harder time trying to contest this. It’s hard to say.”
“What does that mean?”
“When you make out a will that distributes assets unevenly like this you have to give some sort of reason, whatever it is. It makes it much harder to contest. What Edward Monroe was trying to say, it seems, is that he felt Nicholas would be compensated by his parent’s estate. He would get the house and contents or business interests after Bradford and Cora died. At least that’s the reason he put in writing.” We were both quiet for a few minutes drinking our coffee.
“Maybe he was trying to make up for how differently Cora treated them?” I said.
Dylan shrugged. “Nick would have inherited everything. In only a few years.” He looked at me. “Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. That money his father left to him would be nothing.”
I laughed. “That’s what Klara Heinz said, it was crumbs.” I had a thought. “Klara Heinz told me that Cora was really upset when Bradford’s will was probated because he left that money to Nick. But Nick was getting all his grandfather’s money so why would it bother her?”
“Bradford’s money bought him seventeen years of freedom.”
“What?”
Dylan dropped the papers on the coffee table and turned to me. “Don’t you see? He wouldn’t get his grandfather’s money until he turned thirty-five. His father gave him access to the money when he turned eighteen. That’s seventeen years that Nick wouldn’t have to worry about money. It would have held him until he got the rest of it. His father was giving him his freedom.”
I chewed on my finger. “So who gets all the trust money now?”
“Cora, by process of elimination. If no grandchildren remained it would go to their offspring,” he glanced at me, “if you and Nick had had any children it would be held in trust for them until they reached the age of majority” I swallowed and looked down, “but since that isn’t the case…you’re not pregnant?”
I looked up and laughed. “Umm, No. I’m not.”
“With no offspring it would go to Bradford, then Cora.”
“It kind of makes it suspect that James disappeared, doesn’t it? He was supposed to get most of the money, for whatever reason, and he disappears only a year after his grandfather dies.” I glanced over at Dylan.
“So what are you going to do now?” he asked.
“Get me a Bible. King James version.”
“Assuming I have one. Let me look.” He got up and went upstairs. He came down ten minutes later, book in hand. “Shocking, I know.”
I flipped through to the Book of James and read the first passage that Nick had underlined. Then when desire has conceived it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death. I read it out loud. “What do you think it means?”
“You’re asking me to interpret the Bible?”
“No, maybe when Nick underlined these passages they were referring to something else. It’s the Epistle of James. He was locked down in the tunnels with the Bible, maybe he was trying to say something about his brother.”
“Or maybe he was a Bible nut like his mother.”
“Uh uh. He wasn’t. And it was only the Epistle of James that was marked this way. Don’t you think it’s strange? You should have seen it; every teeny bit of space in that chapter was marked and doodled.”
“What’s the next one?”
“If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food and one of you say to them ‘depart in peace, be warmed and filled’ but do not give them the things that are needed for the body, what does it profit.” That was the entire passage. Parts of it had been scratched out in Nick’s Bible. We both looked at each other.
“Go on, read the next one.”
I flipped through the pages. “Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth eaten. And I can testify to the moth eaten part after spending hours in the damned closet.”
Dylan’s fingertips were pressed together. “I hate to hear the next one but go on.”
“Wait, I have to find chapter five, verse six. Nick had destroyed it in his book.” My finger scanned down the page and stopped. “You have condemned, you have murdered the just, he does not resist you.” Neither of us said anything. The words blurred in front of me. “5:6. James 5:6. It was written on that card I found in Nick’s things. In an envelope. He was going to mail it to someone.” I jabbed the page. ‘It makes sense now. He was using shorthand. A message he was going to mail to his mother?”
His eyes were large. “You’re not going back to that house. We’ll go get your stuff now. You can stay here with me until you’re ready to go back to Maine.”
I stood up and went into the bathroom. The tears started again and I needed to be alone for a few minutes. When I came out I prepared myself for a fight.
“Sleep in Samantha’s room if you don’t want to stay in the same room with me, that’s fine, but there’s no reason on earth for you to go back there.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to be with you. That has nothing to do with it but I need to go back.” I reached out to put my arms around him but he pushed me back.
“Don’t do that. You’re trying to confuse the issue.”
“There’s a few things I want to do and I need to be in the house.”
“You keep saying that. You need to be there for how long?”
“Do you understand that if I walk away now, I’ll never have answers. All of this has been for nothing.”
“And what do you propose to do to get answers?”
I couldn’t look him in the eye. “Find James’s room, maybe look in the files again, I have a key now. Go back to the cemetery.”
“Alone? What happened to distracting Cora? You’re just going to start looking around by yourself? It’s enough, Mackenzie.”
I didn’t answer him. I had my hands on my hips and I chewed the corner of my mouth. He waited for me to back down but I couldn’t. Finally he turned around and went upstairs and slammed the bedroom door.
I went out back and sat on the glider. It was cold out and I had no coat on. I hugged myself and tried to think clearly. After a half an hour, when my bottom felt like it was frozen to the seat I got up and went inside. I went down the hall and opened Samantha’s door. She was sound asleep. Hesitating slightly outside Dylan’s door, I took a breath and opened it. He was standing at the window and didn’t turn around. I walked up behind him and put my arms around him and pressed my face against his shoulder blades. We just stood like that for what felt like ten minutes before he turned around to face me.
“Don’t fight with me, Dylan.”
“Stay here with me tonight. Go back tomorrow during the day if you want.”
I wanted to say no, and leave and hope that we could make up the next day but I couldn’t. Before I could say anything he kissed me and within thirty seconds I had changed my mind. We stayed up most of the night, and scavenged cold chicken and beer from the refrigerator somewhere around three. We didn’t fall asleep until light started coming in the window.