167 "She Called to Claim Her Dead Father's Multi-Million Dollar Estate and Change the Locks—Only to Find Him Sitting in Her Kitchen Eating Breakfast, Exposing a Dark Family Conspiracy That Leads Straight to Prison"

By nine o’clock, my kitchen table looked like the forward command post of an invading army.

Dad had dragged his sheepskin-lined slippers across the linoleum three times to fetch his reading glasses, an extra box of butter crackers, and a legal pad covered in grease pencil from the glove compartment of his truck—the same truck Vanessa was currently trying to sell to a used-car dealer from Vincennes named Merle.

“She thinks she’s clever,” Dad muttered, licking the tip of a yellow pencil and making a neat little X beside a column of figures. “Always has. Ever since she figured out how to doctor her report cards with a red Bic pen in the eighth grade. Thought she was John Dillinger because she turned a C-plus in civics into a B-minus.”

“Why didn’t you stop her, Dad?” I asked, sliding a fresh mug of coffee across to him. My hands were still shaking slightly, the adrenaline of the morning’s phone call burning off into a dull, sour ache behind my sternum. “If you knew she was draining the account—if you knew she was waiting for you to die—why did you let her put those locks on the side door?”

Dad didn’t look up from his ledger. He took a slow sip of the coffee, his eyes fixed on the grain of the wood where the varnish had worn away near the salt shaker.

“A dog doesn’t learn not to raid the smokehouse by getting yelled at while he’s outside the fence, Nat,” he said softly. “You got to let him get his nose right up against the latch. You got to let him think the door’s off the hinges. Then, when he’s got both paws inside the lard bucket and his tail wagging so hard he can’t steer... then you drop the transom.”

He looked up, a slow, thin smile cutting across the wrinkles around his mouth—the same smile he used to wear whenever he had outbid the local lumber barons for a tract of standing timber down by the bottoms.

“Besides,” he added, “I wanted to see who she’d call first. Turns out she called the bank before she called the coroner. That’s my girl. Practical to a fault.”

“She called Harold, too,” I reminded him, pulling up my laptop to check my email for the quarterly budget reports I was supposed to be editing for my boss in Chicago. “She said Harold found you.”

Dad’s smile vanished like a match dropped in a bucket of wet sawdust. His pencil stopped moving.

“Harold Pike’s been my best friend since Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House,” he said, his voice dropping into that low, dangerous register that made the hair on my arms stand up. “We skinned our shins together in the gravel pit behind the old brickworks. We buried my first dog under the weeping willow by the creek. If Harold told her I was dead in my bed at four in the morning, one of two things happened: either Harold’s brain has finally turned to cottage cheese like his brother’s did before they put him in the home over in Marion... or Harold’s got a finger in this pie up to his elbow.”

The thought made the kitchen feel ten degrees colder. Harold Pike wasn’t just a friend; he was the institution of the town. For forty years, if someone died in Miller County, Harold was the one who drove out in the black Buick station wagon, sat at the kitchen table with the widow, poured a two-finger shot of rye from the bottle he kept under the passenger seat, and talked about the cost of bronze markers and pine boxes with the solemn dignity of a country parson.

If Harold was lying about a body—if Harold had signed off on a death certificate for a man sitting three feet away from me eating saltines and drinking Maxwell House—then something very old, very dark, and very rotten had taken root in the county while we weren’t looking.

“We need to go back,” I said, closing my laptop with a sharp snap.

Dad looked at me over the top of his half-moon reading glasses. “Go back? To the house?”

“To the county seat. To the courthouse. Before Vanessa gets the deed transferred into her name and sells the timber off the north ridge to that pulp mill in Terre Haute. If she’s got a lawyer already, they could have the emergency probate signed by noon.”

Dad reached out, picked up a butter cracker, and broke it deliberately in half.

“Let her try,” he said. “Let her walk into Judge Holloway’s office with a death certificate signed by my oldest friend and a body that isn’t there. Holloway’s a lazy son of a gun, but he’s not blind. And he hates Vanessa almost as much as I do since she tried to sue the county over the zoning variance for her drainage ditch.”

He stood up, smoothing down the front of his flannel shirt over his belly, and walked over to the window that looked out over the apartment complex parking lot. Down below, a gray delivery van was idling by the dumpster, its exhaust puffing white clouds into the crisp autumn air.

“We don’t go down there today, Nat,” Dad said, his back to me. “Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because if we drive down there now, Vanessa just starts screaming about imposters and elder abuse, and we spend three days in a holding cell while some county doctor tries to figure out if I’m senile or just stubborn.” He turned around, his pale eyes shining with a hard, cold light. “We let her sweat. We let her pay the filing fees. We let her hire that slick-talking real estate agent from Indianapolis with the hair grease and the leased Lincoln Navigator.”

He walked back to the table, leaned down, and tapped the legal pad with the blunt end of his pencil.