After Ethan and Nicole left, Jack turned off the ringer on his desk phone. Voice mail could pick up for the afternoon.
Jack recognized some of the names on Nicole’s list. He’d been passing time crawling around in the old files for months now. Though he didn’t recall anything noteworthy in the folders he’d flipped through so far, Jack printed the list Nicole had e-mailed from her iPad and labeled three columns so he could track which files he found, which names were missing, and whether there were any documents that matched Nicole’s specification: wills, birth and death certificates, transfers of property. He was sure that at some point in the history of the law practice, the files were in alphabetical order. But the files Nicole asked about were old and, through the decades, were moved further and further out of the way of active work. Jack had discerned little order to the way they were stored other than where they seemed to fit the available space in a box or drawer.
Nicole’s list included nearly forty names. So far Jack had uncovered twenty-three folders. One held the incorporation documents for a business that no longer existed, and a handful of others were straightforward real estate purchases of homes that most likely had changed owners several times since. These Jack set aside.
The rest were thicker folders reflecting clients who must have used the services of Morris and Morris, and their predecessor, on a regular basis. Two of these Jack recognized as ancestors of clients he had inherited with the practice. He read both files carefully, along with several more. Jack expected to find wills, and he did, but nothing more complicated than spouses leaving their worldly goods to each other, and no worldly goods out of the ordinary.
The piles on his desk grew as Jack sorted files and made checkmarks on the printed list. Before he was finished he would double-check the names for whom he found no files.
Jack reached for another tattered file, this collection of documents in an expanding file with a narrow cord wrapped around a clasp to fasten it closed. When Jack touched the cord, it crumbled in his hands. Lacking sufficient clear space on the surface of the desk to lay out the elements of the file, Jack carried the brittle case to the space he called the conference room even though so far he hadn’t held a conference within its walls. The table and six musty chairs were relics of Morris and Morris. When it came to the least public space of the suite, Jack had lost the budget war for remodeling dollars to his wife’s agenda for the new powder room. He slid the papers out of the expanding jacket. Even as dated as they were, he could quickly recognize the types of documents and sorted them swiftly.
And then one seemed to stick to his fingers. Jack scanned the first page then flipped to the next one. And the next.
This could be it.
Jack pried off the old blue legal backing paper and carried the pages to his desk, where the printer on his credenza also functioned as a scanner. He certainly wasn’t going to give Nicole Sandquist the original. The scanner rattled into service, and Jack began placing the fragile pages on the glass one at a time until he had an electronic version of the entire document.
Next he picked up the phone and dialed his home number.
“Gianna,” Jack said when his wife answered, “I think it’s better if you don’t wait dinner for me.”
“Jack, you might as well come home at least long enough to eat.”
He steeled himself against her protests. “I had a walk-in client this afternoon with a time-sensitive matter. I’ll make a sandwich later.”
“How late will you be?”
Jack fingered the thick document. “I’m not sure.”
“All right. Brooke is right here. She wants to talk to you.”
Jack glanced at the photograph of his three children that sat on his desk. The faces of Colin and Eva were obscured by the corner of a stack of folders, but Brooke’s face smiled out at him from under the clutter.
“Hi, Dad.”
Brooke’s lilting voice cheered him even on the phone.
“Hi, sweetheart. Sorry I’ll miss dinner.”
“Just don’t forget about tomorrow.”
Jack mentally rustled through recent domestic conversations to find the one that related to tomorrow and his youngest child.
“The puppy trainer,” he said.
“Right. I have to go right after school, and you promised to take me.”
“I remember.”
“And I need to practice face painting before Saturday. Can I practice on you?”
Jack was glad Brooke wasn’t there to see his face grimace at the thought of little balloons or ponies adorning his cheeks.
“It’s washable, right?”
“Don’t be silly, Dad. Of course it’s washable. It’s not a tattoo.”
“Well, then, maybe one little practice spot.”
They said good-bye, and Jack reached behind him and extracted a fresh yellow legal pad from the credenza and took a new pen from a drawer. He printed the scanned document—he wouldn’t mark up the original—and leaned back in his leather chair.
Before Jack finished the first paragraph, he was making notes.
By the end of the first page, he saw through the legalese to the relevant details.
By the top of the third page, Jack knew this wasn’t a routine old will that had been executed long ago and lost its relevance. Otherwise Nicole Sandquist wouldn’t be looking for it.