The Twelfth Child (Serendipity #1)(82)
“Well?”
“Everything in William’s estate went to his sister Abigail. There was a cash account valued at one-hundred-sixty-seven thousand and a bunch of personal effects.”
“That’s it?”
“Far as I can tell.”
“Any securities? Bonds? Real estate holdings?”
“None listed.”
“Thanks,” Charles said, a smile curling the corners of his mouth. “Please send me a certified copy of the transfer.”
Shortly after that, Charles placed a call to the Blackburn County Courthouse and asked to speak to the Property Registration Office.
The telephone rang seven times before a woman answered, “Justine Tyler.”
“Miss Tyler,” Charles said, “I’m trying to ascertain the details of a property transaction that took place in Chestnut Ridge, Virginia. The seller was William Lannigan and the buyer a land development company.”
“What was the date of sale?” she asked.
“Sometime within the last ten-fifteen years.”
“You want me to search fifteen years of records!”
“It’s quite important,” he said.
After a fair bit of grumbling, she agreed to research the transaction, but warned that he shouldn’t expect a call back before late afternoon.
When Charles hung up the receiver, he went back to the list of Lannigan descendents – which now totaled one-hundred-forty-seven. One by one, he called them and asked about their relationship with the late William Lannigan, Senior. He found forty-six grandchildren, eighty-three great grandchildren, seventeen thrice removed cousins, and one elderly gentleman who could recall that his grandma’s maiden name was Lannigan, but couldn’t say for sure that she was a direct descendent of William. Charles added his name to the list anyway – what was one Lannigan more or less when they were already stacked up like firewood.
It was almost five o’clock when Miss Tyler called to inform Charles that the property in question had been sold to Malloy Brothers Development in nineteen-seventy-nine for a price of one-million and three-hundred-eighty thousand dollars. Charles made note of the purchaser’s name, the date and the amount, then he sat there doodling a picture of a million-dollar bill with wings. It seemed highly unlikely that Abigail Lannigan’s brother, a man who by all other accounts lived rather conservatively, could run through a cool million in nineteen short years.
From on high, I was watching as Charles sat there scratching his head and puzzling over where the money had disappeared to. Pity, I thought, my leaving behind such a mess. Here, I’d spent biggest part of my life filing things away in their exact proper spot, and then I leave with something as important as this hanging like a loose garden gate. I knew exactly where those bonds were, but I was the only one, which didn’t do anybody a speck of good since I was dead and buried.
The trial started six days later, in a small courtroom at the far end of the hall on the second floor of the County Courthouse. During the process of jury selection, Hoggman, who was no longer belching, rejected nine potential jurors, eight of those women, five young enough to perhaps be sympathetic to Destiny. The lone man rejected by Hoggman had once been robbed by a visiting nephew.
Charles rejected a grandmother who didn’t think it possible for a young person to be friendly with an older woman without some ulterior motive. He also rejected an accountant who was firm on things being either black or white. His third and final rejection was that of a man who claimed his mother had been swindled out of her entire life savings by an unscrupulous nursing home attendant.
After twelve jurors and two alternates were seated, the trial began in earnest. The Judge addressed the jury first and clarified, item by item, the written instructions they had received. The plaintiff’s side then presented their opening statement. Hoggman strutted back and forth in front of the jury box for almost an hour, huffing and puffing about how he could prove that Destiny Fairchild had embezzled funds which should rightfully belong to Elliott Emerson, the Lannigan heir. “Almost one million dollars,” he said, waving his arms about as if to demonstrate the vastness of the amount, “is missing from the original estate of William Lannigan, and we will show ample cause for believing it to be in the possession of the defendant, Destiny Fairchild.”
Charles McCallum’s opening statement took just over fifteen minutes. He told the jurors that this was a case of a greedy relative crawling out of the woodwork and trying to take over that which was never intended to be his. “Had Miss Fairchild been callous enough to leave Abigail Lannigan’s bedside to have the dying woman’s handwritten will notarized,” Charles said, “I would not be standing here.”
At that point Judge Kensington called for a recess for lunch.
That afternoon Elliott was the first to get to tell his side of the story. Of course, he laid it on thick about how he’d been devastated because Destiny didn’t let him know that his favorite aunt had become bedridden. Ha, I thought. If he’d known I was on death’s door, he’d have come to call with a bottle of arsenic in his pocket. Anyway, he sat on that stand and lied so convincingly that even I almost got to believing him. Several times, he buried his face in his hands and shook as if he was sobbing, but knowing Elliott, he was yanking a hair out of his nose to produce some crocodile tears.
Hoggman’s questions were not the did-you-or-did-you-not variety; instead he prefaced everything with a preamble which pictured Elliott in the most favorable light. “As a devoted nephew,” he’d say, “interested only in your aging aunt’s welfare, did you suspect that the defendant was interfering with your family relationship?”