Chapter 3 - The Paperwork of VengeanceMom stared at me as if I had suddenly grown a second head.
“Her?!” Mom shrieked, pointing a long, red-nailed finger directly at my face. “She was five years old when she came here! She hasn't contributed a single penny to this property! She’s a glorified waitress at the local diner! You can't leave a six-hundred-thousand-dollar estate to an uneducated, abandoned brat!”
“Careful, Margaret,” Jonathan warned, his tone instantly dropping into an icy register. “You are currently standing on private property belonging exclusively to the woman you are insulting. And if you continue to raise your voice, I will have the two sheriff's deputies parked at the end of the driveway step inside and execute an arrest for felony breaking and entering.”
Dad turned his head toward the front window. Through the rain-streaked glass, the faint red-and-blue glow of a cruiser’s light bar flashed against the pine trees at the edge of the property line.
Dad’s knees actually buckled. He grabbed the back of a armchair to steady himself. “Jonathan... please. You’re my cousin. You know what these people will do to me if I don't come up with liquidity by Friday. They’ll take everything. They’ll put me in prison!”
“You should have thought about prison before you defaulted on federal payroll withholdings, Richard,” Jonathan said without a shred of sympathy. “Arthur knew exactly what you were doing. He followed your business dealings for years. He knew you were skimming corporate funds to pay for Chloe’s private equestrian lessons while he was selling his old carpentry tools just to buy Clara’s winter coat.”
Tears burned behind my eyes, but I forced them back. I remembered watching Grandpa hide his medicine bottles in the back of the pantry so I wouldn't see how expensive his prescriptions were. I remembered him wearing the same patched boots for six winters straight so I could go on the eighth-grade field trip to Washington, D.C.
All while my biological father was stealing from his own employees to maintain a fake lifestyle in Connecticut.
“This trust is fraudulent!” Mom screamed, her face contorting into an ugly, desperate mask. “Arthur was eighty-two! He had mild cognitive impairment! We can prove undue influence! Clara manipulated an old man in his final years to steal my husband's lawful birthright!”
Jonathan actually laughed. It was a dry, amused sound that echoed through the cold hallway.
“Undue influence?” Jonathan pulled a thick blue document from his briefcase. “Margaret, Arthur didn't just draft a standard trust. He spent $35,000 of his life savings hiring the top forensic estate litigation firm in New York to bulletproof every single clause in this agreement.”
Mom froze. “He spent... how much?”
“Thirty-five thousand dollars,” Jonathan repeated, holding up the heavy bound document. “He underwent three separate, independent psychiatric evaluations certified by the Chief of Neuropsychology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He videotaped his execution depositions. He filed state tax disclosures that paid off every single potential municipal lien against the parcel. He spent four years and every penny he had left in his private accounts to build a legal fortress around Clara.”
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Jonathan looked at my mother with absolute, unyielding coldness.
“Arthur spent his final years making sure that when you inevitably came back like vultures to tear his meat from the bone... you wouldn't find a single loose thread to pull.”
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