The Twelfth Child (Serendipity #1)(49)

“A piece of paper?”

“Yes.” A tear was sliding down the side of Destiny’s cheek. “At the time I was so upset at the thought of her leaving me, that I wouldn’t even look at it. ‘I don’t want to hear about you dying,’ was what I told her.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing much. She told me that her dying was a God honest fact and whether or not I listened to what she had to say; it was still going to happen. Miss Abigail put that paper in the nightstand drawer, and said whenever I was ready to face the truth; I’d know where to find it.”

“Was it witnessed or notarized, anything like that?”

“Poor Abigail was flat on her back by then, besides I didn’t need any notary stamp to make me believe what she wrote. If she wanted it to be, that was good enough for me.”

“You suppose I could take a look at that paper? It might help clear things up.”

“Sure,” Destiny said and took Detective Nichols right over to my house.



I wish Destiny would have looked at what I wrote that day. She would have seen that my handwriting had become illegible. She could have brought someone in to witness what I’d said so it would later be believed. Being dead is easy enough to deal with, but dying was a painful process that racked my bones and addled my mind. That day, lifting my arm to write felt like trying to move a mountain, not a single word came easy and time after time the pen slid from my fingers and scratched its way across the paper. I was a weary old woman looking through tired eyes and I saw only what was in my heart; although I believed those words told how Destiny should have everything I owned, the writing was nothing more than chicken scratch.



“This is it?” Detective Nichols said when she handed him the piece of paper. After that he started in with a new barrage of questions about who my doctor was, how she got hold of my car, and whether or not she had taken any other money from me.

Destiny was never the least bit devious, so she sat there and told him everything, where the bank accounts were, how she handled things and took care of my finances, and how she laid me to rest.

“Oh, so you had complete control of her money?”

“Not so much control,” Destiny said, “I just paid the bills and stuff.”

“Missus Lannigan made the decisions?”

“Mostly, she told me ‘you decide’ and I did.”

Detective Nichols was scribbling away in that notebook of his. “The red Thunderbird in your driveway, that’s your car?”

“Yes.”

“It looks new.”

“It is. I just bought it a month ago.”

“Weren’t you driving Missus Lannigan’s car?”

“Yes. But, I cried every time I got in it, because it reminded me of how much I missed Miss Abigail, so I traded it in and bought a new car.”

“Oh. So she signed the transfer papers before she died?”

“I handled the paperwork, but she told me to do it. Miss Abigail’s bursitis was acting up that day – anyway, she said sign the papers for her and I did. But, she knew about it. She even gave me money for the insurance.”

“Wow, that’s some friend! She just gave you her car?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“So I could drive her places.” Destiny replied, as if this was a fact so obvious it hardly warranted an answer.

“Wow,” Detective Nichols repeated and stretched his neck toward the front window to look out at the Thunderbird. “That’s a great car, but I’ll bet the finance charges cost a fortune!”

“I didn’t buy it on time. I used to do that, buy things on the installment plan, but Miss Abigail said it wasn’t practical because you end up paying almost twice the original cost. Now I pay cash for most everything I buy.”

“That’s great,” Detective Nichols said like they were having some kind of friend-to-friend conversation. “Where’d you get enough money for that Thunderbird?”

“I took it out of what Miss Abigail left me.”

“You mean according to that handwritten paper?”

“Yes. Miss Abigail’s will. She wrote that so I’d get the money.”

“Her estate has never been probated?”

“Probated?”



I could tell Destiny was getting in over her head because the longer she talked, the more questions Detective Nichols had. Still, I figured he was a fair man and sooner or later, the truth would find its way to the surface.

After he left, the detective drove back to the station house and started to write up a report. He took out the list of items Elliott claimed were stolen and started making checkmarks alongside those things he had seen at Destiny’s house. When he sat down to work, Tom Nichols shook his head back and forth, like he was puzzling over some worrisome thing stuck in his brain.

The next morning he was standing outside the door when the Middleboro Savings Bank opened. For two hours he sat there counting up every check that Destiny had written against my accounts. He spoke to Martin Kroeger, the new Branch Manager who two years ago replaced Harvey Brown, the Manager I’d been dealing with since the day I moved to Middleboro. After that he talked to two of the tellers, both of which I had never laid eyes on – of course, they said Destiny was the one who made all of the withdrawals. “What about deposits?” he’d asked, and they told him those were made by electronic transfer.