The Inheritance Read online

  They reached the Kvelsdro House, went inside, and were soon seated at a table overlooking Bressay Sound. For the next hour, David’s eyes were opened to the complexity of the circumstances facing him, and the reality of his own powerlessness to change them.

  27

  The Journal

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Loni had scarcely found a moment to herself since stepping off the plane on her return from Scotland. After a whirlwind afternoon catching up with Maddy, to the dinner date with Hugh yesterday evening, then nonstop again at the office today . . . she was beat.

  She hadn’t even unpacked yet!

  Loni walked into her apartment at twenty past seven on her second day home. In her hand she carried an order of Chinese takeout. It was a relief to put the day behind her. Tired as she’d been, the time with Hugh had been comfortable, nice, a relaxing opportunity to catch up after the awkwardness at the airport, to tell him about her trip and hear what he’d been up to on Capitol Hill.

  Tonight, however, she needed some downtime. She was glad for the chance to be alone.

  She set the bag on the counter, opened the refrigerator, poured herself a glass of chilled mineral water, kicked off her heels, plopped into her favorite chair, and let out a long sigh.

  What a day!

  It wasn’t the lingering jet lag from the trip so much as being instantly plunged back into the fast pace of her life as Madison Swift’s assistant. She was suffering from emotional whiplash.

  Loni sipped from the glass in her hand and glanced across the room. Her open suitcase and carry-on still lay on the couch from yesterday. Sight of them sent her mind drifting to her airplane reminiscences of the day before.

  She almost never looked at her journal at home. The memories it stirred up were mostly reserved for travel. Yet she now found herself slowly climbing to her feet and walking across the room. She picked up the leather book where it lay with her things. She brought it back to the chair and slowly opened it.

  As she flipped through the pages, her eyes fell on one memory after another. Were her past and present more intertwined than she realized?

  She turned back to the opening lines of the first page. Those first words set the tone for all that had followed. Loni couldn’t remember what had originally prompted them. Maddy had given her the handsome leather journal as a Christmas gift their first year working together. Shortly afterward she had tucked it in her bag for a trip—she didn’t remember why.

  And then six miles above Kansas, without any specific plan, she had started writing.

  I was six when my grandmother told me my mother’s name, she read.

  Alison.

  How foreign the word was to my ears, even when I realized it sounded similar to my own, Alonnah. When I was alone I whispered it over to myself . . . Alison. It was the name of a stranger. How could a stranger be my mother?

  There was never a time when I didn’t know my parents were dead, that I was an orphan. My grandparents hadn’t tried to hide the truth from me. They sometimes talked about my father, their son, Chad Ford. Though not often. My grandmother got misty-eyed on the few occasions when she told me stories of him as a boy. She never got over his death. How could she? He was her only son.

  I somehow had the feeling that she blamed my mother. I don’t know if that’s true or why she would feel that way. When the subject of my mother happened to come up—which wasn’t often—she didn’t talk about her as a daughter-in-law, just as a shadowy woman with no story, no past. Just a woman who chanced to be her son’s wife. There were even times I wondered if my parents had been married at all, if maybe I was illegitimate. . . .

  Loni looked away from the page. The words in her own hand made her as sad as when she had first written them. Sometimes nostalgic melancholy felt good, cleansing in a way. At other times it hurt to remember.

  What did other people feel when they thought of their parents? When an orphan who had never known them thought of her parents, it was with a painful longing so deep no words could describe it. It was a longing for something Loni knew she would never have. It was a deep and silent anguish, a hole in the middle of the soul that couldn’t be filled.

  She had it better than most, Loni thought. At least she knew her parents’ names. And she knew her grandparents. But that wasn’t enough to heal the ache.

  During her college years she’d read several books about how others in similar circumstances came to terms with life and personhood differently than everyone else—like being adopted, the books said. Both brought unique heartaches. Yet adopted children had the possibility of searching for their birth parents. For orphans, that door was closed.

  It probably was no surprise when, at eleven or twelve, Loni began wondering if her grandparents were really her grandparents. Morbid scenarios followed, with her at the center of them.

  Mostly her gloomy fantasies took the form of the age-old fairy tale theme: that Mr. and Mrs. Ford had found a baby wrapped in rags abandoned on their doorstep. To explain her unknown origins, the old couple had invented the story that her father was their son. But, she had wondered, maybe she wasn’t really a Ford at all.

  Her ambiguous origins remained buried in Loni’s brain, the secret dread of her life. She was a foundling. A castoff. She had no name. No parents. No past. No roots.

  Notwithstanding the nagging doubts, she dearly loved her grandparents. They were kind, truthful, and “honest as the day is long,” as they would have described it. Yet she noticed odd expressions, heard whispered comments. She sensed her grandfather was mistrusted by some of the men. Their tiny religious community was dreadfully susceptible to rumors. She never knew the cause of whatever suspicions were harbored about him, but she imagined that she herself was the source of it. What else could it be but that her grandparents had brought an outsider, a black sheep, a heathen into the community?

  Her classmates seemed to know the secret about her that she didn’t even know herself. Her teachers seemed in on it too. She was different, strange, uncoordinated, and ugly. Her inner suffering gathered like a black cloud around the haunting reality that no one liked her, that she was an outcast.

  Was her name even Alonnah Ford? Maybe her grandparents—if they were her grandparents—had simply given their family name to the waif they had taken in.

  Loni looked again at the page before her.

  After I began to get taller than the other girls at school, that’s when I was sure something was wrong, that I wasn’t like the rest of them. The secret fear was that I didn’t belong to the Fellowship at all. Once that thought entered my mind, I couldn’t help thinking I didn’t belong to my grandparents either. I was afraid—of what, I can’t even remember. I would lie awake at night wondering if one day they would get tired of me and send me away, that I would be alone . . . just as I had come into the world. . . .

  At eleven she began working in her grandfather’s workshop. By twelve she’d graduated to the showroom where he displayed his handmade furniture. By degrees she was able to put the confusion, doubts, and fears of childhood behind her. The shop and showroom gave her a daily escape from the loneliness and humiliation of school.

  Probably because of her height, she looked older than she was. The people who came in, tourists mostly and occasional dealers, were friendly and treated her like an adult.

  Gradually she learned enough to converse knowledgeably about the various woods her grandfather used—oak mostly, but also birch, maple, mahogany—as well as about the different styles and designs and stains and varnishes. She became conversant in everything from pierced splats and cabriole legs to Pembroke tables and Victorian-era rosewood Davenports. She knew the difference between Chippendale, Adam, and Sheraton influences on English-period furniture and could point out her grandfather’s use of the ideas and methods of the famous craftsmen of the past.

  She loved it. She could hardly wait for school to end every day. The showroom became her life, a haven where she found purpose and acceptance, where she co
uld be herself without secretly wondering what terrible things people were thinking when they looked in her direction. Her personality blossomed. Summers were best—not having to go to school at all.

  Eventually her grandmother taught her about bookkeeping and bill paying. She took to the financial side of the work as naturally as a duck to water. She came to see how the whole business functioned together—the flow of money, products, inventory, wholesale suppliers, retail customers—all the details that fit into an intricately connected pattern, even for a small business. Then she began designing a few pieces of her own. Liking what he saw, her grandfather went to work on them. A few months later, several of her own designs turned up as finished pieces of beautiful furniture that appeared in the showroom.

  The most exciting day of her life came when she sold a coffee table she had designed. She then knew she would never be happy spending the rest of her life in Pennsylvania farm country. Her future lay somewhere, somehow, in the business world. She had had a taste and she wanted more.

  In her seventeenth year Loni realized she was ready to embark on an adventure of discovery into the wider world outside the confines of the Fellowship.

  Disappointed at her decision, but ultimately giving their blessing, her grandparents allowed her to enroll in the junior college in Harrisburg.

  Anticipating the change brought fears and uncertainties. The insular life of her grandparents’ community was all she’d known. She had been brought up to think of the outside world as secular, foreign, unfriendly, and hostile.

  How would she fare?

  She had no idea. But she was excited to find out!

  It would not be easy. She knew that her height drew stares. Everyone in the community made jokes about it. Long ago she had learned to drop her eyes, look away, and try to ignore the whispers that came with the stares.

  Arriving at junior college, however, reactions to the tall, slender newcomer turned out to be different from what Loni expected.

  28

  Unsettling Clouds on the Horizon

  WHALES REEF, SHEETLAND ISLANDS

  Though an early riser and usually in bed before nine o’clock, David’s meeting with Jason MacNaughton in Lerwick had so preoccupied him ever since that he was unable to sleep. Well after midnight, he was alternating between pacing the house and sitting with a cup of warm milk and honey. He continued to replay the conversation over in his brain.

  “You asked about your trust account,” MacNaughton had said when they were seated in Kvelsdro’s and had ordered. “You also asked why no deposits have been made in that and the Mill account. The answer to both questions is related. I must apologize for whatever inconvenience this has caused. As far as our part in the finances is concerned, we have always transferred funds into the factory account every month according to Mr. Tulloch’s instructions. Those payments were suspended immediately last August. I merely assumed you understood the state of affairs since Macgregor Tulloch’s death.”

  “I thought I did too,” said David. “Perhaps I was wrong. What state of affairs?”

  “The fact that his assets have been frozen pending the outcome of probate. Fortunately we have been successful in persuading the probate authorities not to touch your uncle’s home or seize his physical assets. We thought it wise that you retained full access in order to keep the place up. Only the finances have been frozen at this point.”

  “Right,” said David, nodding slowly. “I understand it takes time to finalize the details of an estate. But what does my uncle’s estate have to do with the two bank accounts?”

  “The accounts were both funded from his account.”

  David stared back at the attorney, trying to make sense of his words.

  “There must be some mistake,” he said. “What is deposited into my personal account comes from a trust my parents established for my sister and me. The other, the Mill’s operating account as I understand it, handles the income and disbursements of the factory business. I assumed it was funded by the income from the Mill’s orders, from receipts of accounts payable. How would my uncle’s death affect either of those? My sister has been on the phone to me twice, wondering what’s going on too. I told her it’s just a temporary delay, which is what I assumed.”

  “It is a bit complicated,” replied the lawyer. “Those complications are all the more tangled given that Macgregor Tulloch died without a will. That, of course, is the crux of the problem.”

  “What?” exclaimed David.

  “He had no will. I assumed you knew.”

  “I had no idea!” said David, hardly able to mask his surprise.

  “That has necessitated, as I say, the freezing of his financial accounts. It explains the suspension of payments into both accounts in question.”

  “I see,” said David slowly. “Yes . . . obviously that would change things.”

  “My father had been speaking to him for years,” said the younger MacNaughton. “Your uncle promised to rectify the situation. My father urged him to explain his affairs to you. While we knew there was still no will, and that fact concerned us, we thought he had at least spoken with you.”

  “Not a word.”

  “I suppose Mr. Tulloch thought there was no urgency, that he had plenty of time to take care of the necessary legalities. He knew you would be his heir and was not concerned about it. Apparently he and my father spoke on the phone not long before his death. Mr. Tulloch promised to write something up. My father urged him to come to Lerwick where he could dictate his wishes, sign it, and have it done. Mr. Tulloch promised he would see to it.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing came of it. My father simply could not convey the complexities involved in modern probate proceedings, especially for an estate of this size, nor the idea that having no will would make things immeasurably more difficult for you. In many ways, I suppose, your uncle was a man of the past who had not entirely embraced the modern age. He was of an era when a handshake and word or two was as good as a legal document. I’m afraid those days are gone forever. Especially in matters of probate. Some of the laws are unbelievably complex.”

  “It would appear I am guilty of considerable naivety,” said David. “I assumed his affairs were in sound order.”

  “His death was unexpected, I take it?”

  “Completely. He seemed healthy as a horse. Well, in any event, now that I am acquainted with how things stand, what can I do to speed this process along? Especially for the employees at the Mill.”

  “I’m afraid at this point, David, very little. Unfortunately, you are in a powerless legal position. The inheritance and assumption of the informal title that goes with the property is not yet a legal fact.”

  “Isn’t the matter of the inheritance a mere formality?”

  “That is difficult to say.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “You are Macgregor Tulloch’s closest relative and the presumptive heir. However, when the government gets involved in a sizable estate such as this, they leave no stone unturned before declaring probate settled and releasing the assets. The process could take a year.”

  “A year! Are you saying the accounts will be frozen all that time?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “That will make the Mill’s operations difficult. But what about the accounts receivable for the orders the Mill continues to fill and being paid for?”

  “That is the unfortunate Catch-22,” replied MacNaughton. “Since your uncle’s estate owns the Mill, though money is coming into our offices for payment of the invoices your cousin sends out, which we deposit into the estate account as income, we are legally prohibited from authorizing expenditures to be made out of that account. It is unfair, I realize, that the income continues yet no expenses can be paid. Unfortunately, given the unique circumstances, that is the law. Money in your uncle’s estate is actually piling up, but we are prohibited from disbursing so much as a penny of it. I am afraid the same awkward stipulation prohibits funds being
deposited into your personal account as well.”

  “I still don’t see the connection with my parents’ trust,” said David. “I did not know their finances were entwined with Uncle Macgregor’s. I will find a way to manage. I’ll get by on oats and potatoes if need be. My sister is feeling the change as well, though she is not so dependent on the trust for income. But a good portion of the island depends on the Mill in one way or another.”

  “I am truly sorry. Our hands are legally no less tied than yours. It is most unfortunate. Even the simplest of wills would have avoided all this.” MacNaughton paused. “Actually . . . there is one other thing,” he added, then hesitated again.

  “What is it?” asked David.

  “Those complications I spoke of may already have reared their heads.”

  “How do you mean? What complications?”

  “It could get rather messy,” replied MacNaughton. “When the government gets involved as I said, it is an extensive process. An heir hunter has been brought in to investigate. The complication I mentioned is that in addition to yourself, we already have another claimant to the inheritance.”

  “Oh?” said David, clearly surprised. “Who is that?”

  “One Hardar Tulloch.”

  “Hardy!” exclaimed David, breaking into a laugh.

  “You know the man, I take it?”

  “Everyone in the Shetlands knows Hardy!”

  “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “We have known each other since we were boys. Hardy doesn’t like me much. We were involved in more scrapes when we were young than I can count. He always got the better of it too,” David added with a wry grin. “He is one tough bloke. There has long been a sort of division between the people of the island between those who value our Scottish and Celtic roots and those who revere the Scandinavian heritage of the Shetlands. Hardy champions the Viking cause. He loathes the kilt, pipes, and tartan. The mere sight of a kilt sets him off. He cannot stand the thought of our clan having emigrated from the mainland. He thinks of himself as a Norse God of Thunder and me as a wimpy Scotsman.”