WHERE THERE'S A WILL, Chapter 1

-- Slightly condensed to essence of chapter.
CHAPTER I
Monday, July 14

“I made a video of the reading of the will, Peaches,” said my friend Marietta. “At least I got the others to agree to let me do that. I knew there must be some catch when I heard that Uncle Hiram left money to us.”

Even now, nearly ten months after the fact, her voice held wonder.

“Uncle Hiram hated my brother and me and all our kids. We were poor relations.” . . .

We were about to view canned memory. The words I’d hear would shock me--that’s what Marietta had said. Also we could replay any part of that tape about Uncle Hiram’s will that we felt we’d missed, even two or three times. Wonderful. Better, I admit, than the memory tricks that I collect. Those range from the method of Loci that Cicero used to remember his orations, down to my own systems for not losing my car keys. They are all in a book I wrote called: How to Survive Without a Memory, now in paperback. But I mustn’t let my mind wander.

Marietta plugged in the TV. “This room is still exactly as it was when my uncle died,” she said, as she began fussing with the set. “In fact, it’s mostly like it was when Uncle Hiram inherited the house from his first wife Amanda. He’s added that elaborate coat of arms in red and blue and gold. He said that was from the family of an English Earl we’re all descended from. He gave himself airs about that.”

A picture on the TV set came into focus. “Good!” said Marietta. “Here’s Ellington Foxworth, my uncle’s lawyer. I wouldn’t trust him for a minute. I think of him as the Fox.”

“Now that we are all together,” he said in rounded mellow tones like caramel sauce, “I will let your benefactor speak for himself.”

The Fox had a remote for the TV in his hand. I realized Marietta and I were going to see a tape within a tape. A box within a box. We were going to see and hear Uncle Hiram tell his heirs that now that he was dead, they’d get his money. Oh, the miracles of modern science.

He appeared on the screen sitting in one of the lion’s-claw chairs. Hiram was scrawny, dried out, partly bald. Inside his red flannel shirt and red plaid pants, he was a stick figure. But his eyes glowed feverishly in his wizened face. As if almost all of him but his spite had burned away.

He looked straight into the camera. “I have been aware,” he said breathily, “that you all have believed that I failed to make the most of my money, and let it turn me into an unpleasant old man.” He raised one wispy eyebrow. He smiled. His teeth were yellow. He pointed at the watchers with a gnarled hand that looked like it had been burned and healed and scar tissue held it claw-like. “You all believed I should have done wonderful things for you, and instead, I was a miser. Admit it. That’s what you thought, damn you.” He stuck out his chin belligerently.

The assembled heirs blinked and squirmed. This was evidently not what they’d expected, even from their Uncle Hiram. Wingate was clenching his teeth. He had sparkling white teeth in a broad mouth, and earnest eyes. Somehow that added up to good looks, perhaps because his lashes were so long and his dark hair curled in such a boyish way. He wore a serious coat and tie as if he hoped to sell only the best and most expensive real estate.

“Wingate looks like he’s going to burst and talk back,” I said. I should have kept my mouth shut. Marietta stopped the tape again.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Wingate would put up with anything in order to get that money. He’d made bad investments. He was scared he couldn’t pay his mortgage. You’ll see his fingers twitching for the cash. Wingate was extravagant”--tears came into her eyes--“but he was generous, and never mean.”

She swallowed hard and pushed the “play” button. Whereupon, her Uncle Hiram pointed at the camera and shook his finger. He must have imagined his family all assembled.

“Not one of you understood that money is hard to handle,” he accused. “It turns the people around you into gold-diggers.” He looked from one side of the screen to the other, as if taking in his relatives, the gold-diggers. “It makes your small mistakes be big mistakes in the eyes of the vultures who watch. It makes them watch. Look what money did to Howard Hughes, one of the richest men in the world.” His voice rose in protest. “His millions turned him into a hermit invalid.” He gripped the arms of his chair with those claw hands. “Probably without the best medical care. Perhaps it made him die sooner.” He glared as if the viewers were to blame.

“I’m going to let you find out what it’s like.” Uncle Hiram shook his fist. “I’m going to make you very rich!” He laughed in delight. “I wish I could be there to see just how you handle that, just what fools you make of yourselves. Because not one of you has the gumption to make the most of fifteen million dollars.”

The tape panned back to the heirs. They gaped. The young man next to Goldie gasped out loud. Marietta stopped the tape.

“We certainly hadn’t expected that much,” she said. “In fact, the way Hiram was talking he could have left it all to Planned Parenthood and the Red Cross. That’s Goldie’s son Brian who gasped,” she said with a sigh. “He was most stunned of all.” I hadn’t seen Brian since he was a pre-teen with a mop of red-blond hair. Brian the Lion--that nickname was a joke.

“Brian was too young to cope with all this,” she said. “He’s just eighteen. He wants to be a poet or a priest, except he can’t resist the girls.

“His sister Lil is the one next to him, looking pleased. She thought she could handle this fine. She’s always been determined to get what she wanted from the day she was born and yelled to be fed every two hours.”

Yes. Lil with the strong will. I remembered she kept winning contests.

“Please,” I said, “let’s finish the tape and then talk.”

“I’m sorry,” Marietta said. “I watch this and my thoughts swirl. But I just want to say one thing. There was just one member of our family who was mature about all this. Thank God for my nephew Richard. How can Rich and Goldie be cousins and be so unlike each other? There he sits in the chair on her left and she’s grinning like a fool and he is solemn as the Pope. I think he knew from the first minute that millions would change our lives in ways we couldn’t even imagine. Rich agrees with me that this whole money thing is just surrealistic. Beyond belief.”

Well, he was a high school teacher. That should sober anyone.

“All right, all right, back to the will,” Marietta said. She clicked and her Uncle Hiram came back to life, angry eyes and all.

“You’ll destroy yourselves,” he sneered, “and then you’ll know how hard it is to be as rich as I was. And to get no help at all from those who should care.”

For a moment I thought the tape had stopped running again. Then I realized that Hiram had finished his spiel from beyond the grave. And from the heirs, I was hearing a stunned silence.

After a dramatic pause, the Fox read out the exact terms of the will. First, a strange provision. In order to inherit, the heirs had to agree to travel together to the English village where the Earl had lived, the Earl with the coat of arms on the wall, “...and see your heritage. See that I had noble blood and so do you. You have to do this within a year of my death, or lose my money, and you have to return together on the Ocean Queen. That’s the cruise ship where my Amanda and I spent our honeymoon. Where we were happy before we discovered she had leukemia. If you take that trip perhaps it will dawn on you what I lost, the sweetest girl in the world.”

The heirs squirmed, so who cared about the Earl? Who cared about the old miser’s honeymoon? They were waiting for the good part. But next came a provision that if any heir should die within a year of Hiram’s death, half of that person’s share would be divided among the other heirs, with the remaining half going to his children, if any. How strange when they were all relatively young and healthy. They squirmed more. Next came a cash bequest: $10,000 to Hiram’s housekeeper, Annie Long.

Then the Fox smiled. “Now as to you folks here . . . .” As Hiram had said, each heir got about fifteen million dollars. The house he left jointly to them all to dispose of in any way that they all agreed upon. By now, I was getting the feel of old Uncle Hiram and I could see the house bit was a joke. He didn’t think they could agree on anything.

And yet, except for Uncle Hiram, I liked this family, especially Marietta--I’d known her best and longest. Her family wasn’t cold-hearted. They were just ordinary less-than-perfect folks. Or so I thought.

On the tape, Winnie smiled. That was Wingate’s daughter, about 30 years old, and dour. She did good deeds and made herself see the best in people in a kind of a belligerent you-should-do-this-too way. She smiled and said, “I guess we misjudged Uncle Hiram, even if he does talk that mean way. We should be grateful to him.”

“Poor girl,” Marietta commented. “She isn’t very smart about people.”

“He did leave you fifteen million dollars each,” I said dryly.

“Fifteen million dollars,” I heard Brian the Lion say in that soft, wondering voice of his.

“To make us miserable,” crowed Wingate’s gravelly voice. He stood up and jumped into the air and let out a rebel yell--Wingate the dignified real estate man. “Miserable,” he cried, and then he began to laugh. There was something catching about his laugh, or maybe the family were all in shock and a little bit hysterical. First, Goldie, the jewelry gal--I was sure I heard it clank as she laughed. Then a child-like “hee-hee,” which must be Brian the Lion. Finally a chorus of “ha-ha-ha”s, so infectious that as I watched those taped laughers I began to laugh too. So did Marietta, though her eyes stayed sad and she kept catching her breath, struggling to stop. We couldn’t help roaring with belly laughter. We shook till we almost fell out of those solid dependable chairs. We laughed till our throats hurt.

Marietta turned off the tape to put us out of our hysteria. “It sucks you in,” she said, “the sound of it gets you. Like having your feet tickled, only much worse. Even when we know we need to be serious and wise.”

“I understand,” I said. “You need to find out what really happened. ”

“You’re my friend,” Marietta said. “You won’t just tell me, like the law did, that there aren’t enough clues to be positive there was foul play. You’ll help me find out what happened.” She paused, tears came to her eyes, and she blew her nose. I went to her and put my arm around her.

“Because one thing is sure,” Marietta said. “My brother Wingate, who was afraid of heights, who stayed away from heights, fell or was pushed off a mountain overlook two weeks ago, and died. Two weeks ago, at nine o’clock in the morning.” She was trembling hard. “And I believe that Wingate’s death was somehow caused by Hiram’s will.”