Where There's a Will

“So you did know about the ring?”

“Yes, sure, everybody knew about it.” He took off his black-rimmed glasses and gnawed on the temple piece, thinking hard. Without them, his face was oddly blank and defenseless. He didn’t have eyelashes, Gideon noticed. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right. Torkel must have left it there to fool everybody. Oh, this is too weird!”

“How come nobody mentioned it when we came back from Maravovo and said the body in the plane was Torkel?”

“Mentioned what?”

John sighed. “The ring, Axel.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I guess we forgot about it. It was ten years ago.”

“Did you?” John asked, sounding more like a policeman with every word. “You’re telling me that every single one of you forgot there’d been a ring?”

Axel thrust out his unforgivable chin. “Well, I sure did.”

“You, I can believe,” John said, relaxing enough to let a smile come through. “You were probably thinking about all those macro-nutrients in manure at the time. But the others...” What was left of the smile slowly vanished. “Something’s wrong, Axel. It didn’t happen the way everybody said. People haven’t leveled with us, and I don’t think they leveled with the police either. I’m hoping you’ll—”

Axel abruptly shoved his chair back and jumped up, raising a cloud of flour-like dust from the floor. “John, you’re...you’re pushing me.” He stamped around in tight little circles, whapping his hat—a blue tennis hat with the names of the Hawaiian islands on the band; the kind every ABC store carried—against his jeans. Dust flew with every whap. “I mean, I appreciate that you’re concerned, and I certainly appreciate what you’ve done, Gideon, but... look, no offense, but I really can’t see how any of this is your business, either of you. I don’t see why you’re so damn interested in this, and I don’t like it that you’re trying to get me to say something against my own family. I don’t know what Torkel did or didn’t do, but I can tell you that nobody here, nobody in this family, did anything wrong!”

He had let most of it out in one breath, his voice rising to a squeak, and now he gulped air, staring down at them, pop-eyed and agitated. There were tears in his eyes.

“Sit down, Axel,” John said calmly.

“I mean...it’s just that...you come here, you act like—”

“Sit down, Axel.”

“Well, I’m just—” Axel sat.

“Put your glasses back on.”

He knuckled at the corners of his eyes, sniffled, and put on his glasses.

John put a hand on his knee, an extraordinary gesture for him. “Axel, listen to me. You’re my friend, you have been for a lot of years. But more than that, your family has meant a lot to me. Torkel and Magnus especially, those guys really straightened me out, they taught me to...well, to grow up. The second best thing that ever happened to me was when Magnus fired me my first day on the job because I didn’t show up on time. The best thing was when Torkel hired me back. And Dagmar—she bailed me out of trouble a hundred times. She was the first one that told me I ought to go into police work, did you know that?”

“Of course I know all that,” Axel said uncomfortably, “and it’s not that I don’t—”

“So sure I’m interested. There’s trouble on the way, Axel, and if there’s some way I can help, I want to do it. We’ve just come from a long talk with a sergeant at CIS. He says—”

Axel’s jaw dropped. “The police? You told them all this?”

“Yes, we did. Fukida wants to reopen the case—”

Axel’s hand flew to his forehead. “Oh, mercy.”

“—but he’s not going to get on it for a couple of days. We said we wanted to talk to you first, and he said okay. So if you know something you haven’t told us—or didn’t tell the police back then—now’s the time to do it, trust me. You’re a lot better off—you’re all a lot better off—if you come forward with it now than if you make Fukida dig it out on his own. I know this guy, Axel. You don’t want to tangle with him. This is one hard- nosed sonofabitch, and he’s already ticked off.”

Axel had listened intently, growing mulish and frightened-looking. “But I don’t know anything! There isn’t anything to know!”

“We think there is,” John said. “For example, we think that Torkel was the one who set the fire, too.”

“You mean, to get away? To cover up the...the switch?”

Gideon thought he was going to deny it, to argue, but after a moment he nodded jerkily. “Okay. Okay, I see where you’re going with this. Maybe he did. Maybe that’s possible, I don’t know. I mean, how would I know? But I still don’t understand why the police would want to get involved after all this time. What difference does it make now?”

“Oh, I can tell you why it makes a difference,” John said impassively. “It makes a difference because a scam was perpetrated ten years ago, and the result of that scam was that you, your brother Felix, your sister Hedwig, and your sister Inge”—he was speaking very slowly now, emphasizing each word—“all inherited big, valuable chunks of land that shouldn’t have gone to you. If the truth’d been known about who really died first, it wouldn’t have happened that way. Torkel’s will would be the surviving one, and you’d each have come out with a few thousand bucks apiece, period. And the seamen’s home would be the one that was rolling in dough.”

“Oh,” Axel said wretchedly, “I see.”

“And listen to me now—if any of you knew about this—”

“We didn’t! I swear! The first I heard it was Torkel was after you two—”