“You don’t want none of that,” was all he said.
As far as inheritances went, Harold had worked for Boeing for nearly forty years. He never discussed his finances with me, but I assumed he had some money stashed away.
Looking down at the paper a second time, I said, “I can’t believe this is still in the family. He never mentioned it.”
“Well, it’s yours now,” Mark said with a grin.
It was the farm Harold grew up on in Missouri.
It belonged to him.
And now, it belonged to me.
I knew a bit about the probate process from when my parents died, but Mark the Lawyer explained things to me like I was a seven-year-old with a learning disability.
I listened politely, but my thoughts kept wandering to the farm. Harold had told dozens of stories about growing up on the farm in Missouri, each story more Rockwellian than the last. Waking up at the break of dawn to milk the cow. Cleaning out the chicken coop. Feeding the pigs. Skipping school during the fall harvest.
For my thirty-fifth birthday a few months earlier, my sister sent me a couple of coloring books. When I first opened the package, I thought it was a gag gift, another of my sister’s hilarious pranks. Turned out, she was serious. Evidently, adult coloring books were all the rage.
The coloring books sat unopened for many weeks, but then one day I started flipping through one. Then I started coloring. It’s hard to admit, but for the next week all I did was color.
My favorite of all the pictures was a farm scene. Barn, tractor, fence with a rooster, a cow, a horse, a couple chickens. I was so proud of it that I hung it on the refrigerator.
I found myself glancing in the direction of the picture as Mark continued to prattle on. I think he could sense my preoccupation and attempted to wrap it up. “Anyhow, it will take a few months until the property is legally yours.”
I nodded, then asked, “Do you think his kids will contest the will?”
“Possibly, but the will is ironclad. They won’t have a leg to stand on.”
“How much did they each get?”
“The nursing home bills and the property taxes on the farm cut into his nest egg some, but after everything is squared away, they’ll each get a nice chunk.”
“And the farm?” I asked.
He smirked as if to say, there it is.
I was tempted to tell Mark that my parents had left my sister and me a sizable inheritance, enough money to go see Hamilton every day for the rest of our lives.
I didn’t.
“One point four million,” he said. “And that’s low. In the late eighties, early nineties, Harold probably could have gotten two million for it.”
“When did Harold inherit it?”
“His father passed away in 1985. His mother and both his sisters were already dead. Neither sister had any offspring.”
I nodded.
It appeared our interaction was over and Mark made his way toward the door. He took down my cell phone number and promised to keep me updated on any developments.
As he was grabbing his umbrella, I asked, “Do you know if anyone is living on the farm right now?”
“No one legally. Harold rented the land out from 1985 until the early 2000s, but no one has been there for over a decade.” He gazed at me, then asked, “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason,” I lied.
I’d never been to the Midwest.
I was born in Seattle and spent the better part of twenty-six years there. When my parents died, Lacy, my kid sister, was a junior in high school. The next year, she got a full athletic scholarship to Temple—she was a star swimmer—and the two of us moved to Philadelphia.
Job-wise, the move couldn’t have come at a better time. As a second-year detective with the Seattle Police Department, I beat a suspect to within an inch of his life—don’t worry, he deserved every last kick, punch, and purple nurple—which resulted in the city being sued for $7 million. To complicate matters, I slammed my partner’s face into his locker when he defended the scumbag.
Sorry, Ethan.
R.I.P.
I thought these two events should have resulted in me getting a promotion, possibly even my own TV show, but instead, I was sent packing.
While in Philadelphia, I began consulting with the FBI’s Violent Crime Unit helping them track down several serial killers and even cracking a few cold cases. Everything was going great until one day when Lacy got dizzy at swim practice. Two weeks later, the verdict was in: multiple sclerosis.
The day my parents died was hard. That day was harder.
A year later, Lacy and I ended up in Maine.
Lacy revitalized her spirit and I, well, I chased a serial killer, got shot twice, fell off a cliff, drowned, then died. But like Jon Snow, I came back from the dead.
The case in Maine put me on the map. I couldn’t go ten feet without someone telling me I looked like that douchebag detective on the cover of Time magazine. That’s because I was the douchebag detective on the cover of Time magazine.
Two years ago, Lacy moved to France, and I moved back home to Seattle.
Wolves.
Just saying.
So, I’d done a good job of straddling the United States. West Coast, East Coast, then West Coast. But I’d never been to the Midwest.
According to Google, the drive was two thousand miles and would take me thirty-one hours.
Years later, someone would ask me why I drove there that day. And I would tell them the truth. I was all out of coloring books.
Chapter Two
About the time a small ceremony for Harold was being held at a church opposite the nursing home, I was stopping at a gas station in eastern Washington to fill up my dad’s fifteen-year-old Range Rover. I bought a blue Powerade, a couple bags of Cheetos, some beef jerky, and two Mr. Goodbars, the latter of which I was craving since thinking Mark the Lawyer had been there to sell me
