All The Hidden Pieces

by Jillian Thomadsen

  “Not that you would remember,” Greta responded. Then she placed the lifeless phone back in her pocket and resumed the job of looking outside the window. She tried to be optimistic, to envision everything going as planned -- but there was one thought that kept pulling her back, a nag that had originated in the rushing current from the house and was now made bigger by their apparent lack of a communications device.

  “Tuck …” Greta said. “You sent an email to your office, telling them you might be gone for awhile, didn’t you?”

  “Oh sure,” Tuck said. “Yeah, I did. I think so.”

  “You think so or you actually did?”

  “I did, I did. I’m sure of it. I mean, who knows how long we’ll actually be gone though.”

  Greta sighed and tried not to analyze whether there was a tremble in his voice, a cadence that drew the end of his statement to a high note, his giveaway for uncertainty.

  She needed to restrain herself from this exercise because the conjuring of worst-case scenarios was an ugly habit of hers – probably from the time that John was a child and she projected abduction scenarios every time he took a ride on his bicycle.

  Besides, wasn’t this worst-case scenario that she was thinking about wrapped up neatly in their best-case scenario? In the best possible case, all of her irrational musings came true and the Carpenters became wealthy seafaring nomads. In the most likely scenario, they returned to Avery Place within the next day or so, returned to their usual routines and had a story that was at the same time slightly embarrassing and highly entertaining. The time they followed Greta’s whimsical imaginings.

  Greta turned on the radio and focused on the music. She didn’t want to think about the future, the logistics, the mistakes she may or may not have already made. She just wanted to look at America’s rolling farmland, to revisit all the poignant memories of Marcia Brock from the past year, and to allow the future to unfold as it was going to happen.

  ***

  Marcia’s home was locked when the Carpenter family arrived, but Greta knew where to find the key. It was hidden in the same spot as eighteen years earlier – underneath the third stone in the path that led to the beach.

  Greta opened the front door and the rest of her family sprinted through as though propelled by a giant gust of wind. John was first and then Tuck, with Olivia hoisted on his hip.

  “Slow down!” Greta called after them, but she sprang up the steps just a few feet behind.

  Upstairs, she made a right and went into the drawing room. John and Tuck had just removed the portrait of Alden Brock from the wall and all three of them sighed in unison when they beheld the shiny gray rectangle of metal on the wall.

  “So there is a safe,” John whispered and then he got to work rotating the dial. Every time he reached a number, he whispered it out loud before turning the dial the other way. Tuck and Olivia stared at John while Greta tried to calm herself by focusing on the recently removed portrait. She looked at Alden and studied his features – long, pointed nose, saucer-shaped eyebrows. It was an ample distraction for the period of time when the only noise in the room was the whisper of numbers and the whirring of metal.

  At last, there was a clank and the safe door opened. Another sigh in the room – this one more like a collective gasp. John reached inside and started taking things out, narrating as he handed each item to Tuck.

  “This is a photo of a sailboat,” John said. “And this looks like a map of a marina. Here are instructions for a boat…thr---…thr--…throttle. This is a picture of a reserved parking space at the marina. These must be the keys to the boat. Oh, and here’s a page where Grandmother wrote: The Boat is Stocked. Go Have an Adventure like Jim Hawkins.”

  John held up a piece of paper with his grandmother’s instructions spooled across the page in red ink.

  “Is there anything else?” Greta asked, her voice shaking.

  “Oh yeah, further back.” John stretched forward until the safe had entirely consumed his arm. When he reemerged, he was clasping a burlap sack the size of a laundry bag. John looked inside and started laughing. “It’s money,” he said giddily. Then he stared inside the bag for a bit longer before carefully handing the bag to Tuck. His laugh became sharper, more vigorous, almost delirious. “It’s Benjamins!” John declared. “A shitload of Benjamins!”

  Tuck placed the papers and the keys on the floor and used two hands to open the bag wider. He superficially sorted through the items near the top and allowed a few bundles of wrapped bills to topple out. “Greta, there must be hundreds of thousands of dollars in here!” Tuck said. “Maybe more!”

  Greta realized then that her heart was pounding. She tried to calm herself, to steady her respirations, to find stamina in her wobbly legs. She knew that this moment was critically important – the crucible for the family’s future course, and she wanted to make sure her decisions were rational.

  “Are we sure we can consider all of this ours?” Greta asked. “Grandmother never explicitly said it was for us.”

  Tuck glanced up from the bag with a stoic expression but John looked distraught by this suggestion. “Mom, of course this is for us!” he said. “Grandmother gave us the picture with the clues and apologized for making it a race. She even mentioned the sailboat. It’s a race and we won!”

  Greta shook her head. “But instead of rushing out to the marina, should we stick around for a bit? Maybe tidy things up back at home, maybe show our respect at Grandmother’s funeral, since she’s done so much for us? We can take the sailboat out after.”

  “No,” John insisted. “Grandmother didn’t leave us a note telling us to attend her funeral. She left us a note telling us to go have an adventure on the sailboat.”

  “Greta, I know this is going to sound strange but I agree with John.” Tuck said. “Just because we got here first, I wouldn’t consider the race to be over. If Griffin discovers any of this, he’ll claim the rights to it. He’ll tie us up in probate court. It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission, right? If we want our sailboat adventure, we have to take it now.”

  Greta looked at the faces of her family members: Tiny Olivia, who was looking around while sucking on her index finger – oblivious to the conversation around her. John, who was calm and hopeful, staring at his mother with a tacit but desperate expression. And then there was Tuck, who pressed his lips together while he dug deeper into the bag of cash.

  “Okay,” Greta said at last. “Okay.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  September 18, 2017

  Marcia Brock’s funeral was simple and elegant. Griffin sat in the front row next to his wife and infant son. When the time came, he trotted up the stairs, stood behind a podium and delivered a moving eulogy about a caring mother who had lived a full and rich life.

  There were other tales as well. Marcia’s longtime closest friend stood up and told stories from Marcia’s college years – well kept secrets of playfulness and mirth, pranks that Marcia had participated in, which kept the funeral-goers amused.

  There were five speakers in all, and the common thread across all of the exaltations was that Marcia was benevolent and charitable. She gave profusely and without any expectation of reward or recognition.

  When all the eulogies were done, when Marcia’s memory had been invoked and her spirit had been blessed, a few of the closer family members gathered around her gravesite and watched as her coffin was lowered into the ground. One of Griffin’s cousins asked about John’s absence but Griffin just shrugged it off. “Teenagers,” was his response. Until that moment, he hadn’t given much thought to his older son. There had been too many other matters to think about.

  It was a perfect mid-September day – sunny sky, light autumn breeze that caused a rustle in the branches – although Griffin still shivered as he watched the box go into the earth.

  After the gravesite ceremony came coffee, pastries, petite fours and light appetizers at a relative’s house in Evanston, Illinois. Griffin walked from room to room w
hile his wife tended to the baby upstairs. He felt like the mayor of the funeral, the way that everyone came up to him – not just to offer their condolences but to regale him with stories. After an hour, he could feel the suspension of his face – cheeks frozen into a half smile, voice nearly hoarse from saying “uh-huh, uh-huh” so many times.

  Finally, there was refuge in the laundry room. Griffin stood next to the washing machine and stared at a pile of folded clothes. At last there were no suppliant people, no stories from decades earlier, nothing he needed to respond to. There was just the emptiness inside and the muffled chatter that leaked in underneath the door.

  Griffin thought he might stay in there for a while – after all, he had his cell phone with him and could always feign a work emergency – but the door trembled and then an obese, bearded bald man stepped inside.

  “Thought I might find you here,” the man said.

  “Please,” Griffin said. “I just need a few moments to be alone.”

  “You don’t recognize me but we’ve met before,” the man said, and he extended his right hand. His fingers were chubby, with dark sprouts of hair, and what looked like a class ring was strangling his ring finger. “I’m Wade Wilson, your mother’s estate attorney.”

  “Oh right, right,” Griffin shook the man’s hand, and tried to avoid the sensation that his hand was being swallowed by the grasp of Wade Wilson.

  Wade smiled. “I’m sorry to chase you down like this but I’m about to leave town for a week and I thought you might like a back of the envelope estimate. Again, this is just our best estimate so the final number will be a few off in either direction.”

  “Oh right, of course. I’d like to hear,” Griffin said. He tried not to appear too eager to hear the numbers, like a kid about to receive a prize or a grown man about to hear the much-awaited details of his inheritance.

  Wade unwrapped a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Naturally, all of her holdings, bank accounts and real estate were left to the trust, which lists you as sole beneficial owner. We estimate the house on Lake Michigan will sell for $7 million and that, combined with the rest of it, leaves a total of $8.5 million.”

  Wade placed the paper back in his pocket and waited. Griffin knew that this was the moment he was supposed to smile and give a muted cheer – his ebullience restricted by the gravity of the situation. But even though the number was high on an absolute level, it was still low based on his expectations.

  Griffin had been entertaining dreams of unlimited wealth – where men made donations in the range of several million and had buildings and libraries named after them. He had dreams of multiple residences across cities – Aspen, Ibiza, New York and Pacific Palisades. All these visions would now have to be tamped down and reshaped. He could still be a player, but not in the manner he’d been expecting.

  “You look disappointed,” Wade said.

  Griffin frowned. “I guess I didn’t realize that nearly all of her net worth was wrapped up in the Lake Michigan house. What about the Hamptons house? My parents owned a house by the water in Southampton where I used to play when I was a child.”

  “Marcia sold it – years ago – and I think most of the proceeds went to charity.”

  Griffin sniffed and nodded. Of course, his mother had been charitable – hugely, extravagantly charitable, at the expense of her trust and her heirs. That had been the reigning theme of her funeral after all – tales of giving to children’s hospitals, animal shelters and political campaigns. Ironically, just as she was ever eager to give to established charities, she was quite stingy when it came to family members.

  Griffin had been given a starter loan for his real estate business but only after he’d promised to make her a silent partner. She funded some of his real estate ventures, but she expected to be compensated as though she were a venture capitalist sitting on the Board, an arms-length financier who demanded smart investments.

  And now Griffin knew – if Marcia’s final, bizarre ramblings were to be believed – that Greta had come to Marcia asking for money for John to attend The Jefferson School back in 2010, and that she’d been turned down. Most likely Marcia had used the same refrain that she’d repeated to Griffin his entire life – handouts made you lazy, lethargic and robbed you of the zest to work for yourself. Meanwhile, Winnetka Animal Shelter had received an enormous donation that year. It was Marcia’s money, and Marcia’s prerogative to spend how she pleased, but in Griffin’s view, the allocations didn’t always make sense.

  “What about the safe?” Griffin asked. “The one behind the painting in the study.”

  “We got to the house right after we took your call. Our agents opened the safe and…I’m sorry to say Griffin…there was nothing inside,” Wade said.

  Griffin nodded and took a deep breath. He remained in the same position but darted his eyes across to the far edge of the room…until he was staring at a pile of old towels on the floor.

  “Is that not what you expected?” Wade asked.

  “I don’t know what I expected,” Griffin said with a shrug, his eyes still lowered. “The safe was something that I always knew about, but never knew the details. My mother would make reference to it but only in jest or passing. If I had to guess, I think that at various times it probably had cash…although who knows.”

  “Griffin, your mother had three quarters of a million dollars in a checking account, and more in mutual funds. That’s all part of the trust that will go to you. I don’t know why…”

  Wade’s voice trailed off and Griffin wasn’t sure whether he had censored himself or not come up with the right wording.

  “What about the car?” Griffin asked. “My mother drove an Aston Martin. Have you searched the car?”

  “No, we haven’t searched the car,” Wade said. “I don’t have the keys on me, but stop by the office tomorrow, we’ll get you the keys and you can do a search if you like.”

  “Okay, thanks Wade. I appreciate it,” Griffin said. He was partially sweating now, a film of perspiration that treaded across his forehead and behind the ears. He knew he looked a little crazy and he felt that way too. Maybe the tragedy of his mother’s passing would afford a bit of leeway when Wade spoke about him to his colleagues. Maybe his mother’s passing had clouded his thinking and confused his memories.

  Here he was, grasping at intangibles, as tenuous as air, and hoping to spin straw into gold. What he didn’t know how to explain was that it wasn’t just the number…the number could have been eight figures, or nine or ten. It was that lifetime dream of the safe – that moment the metal clacked and the door opened. It was the fabled riches beyond the door that he had spent years thinking about, that seemed to get larger, more exotic with each deliberation.

  And wasn’t it just fitting that the safe had been completely empty? His mother wouldn’t have been able to fulfill any of these lavish, puerile fantasies and so she’d left it empty for him and moved all of her wealth into interest-bearing electronic accounts. Wasn’t that the intelligent thing to do?

  He just needed to accept it, to override the drone in his mind that something was wrong, something wasn’t adding up, and accept the number. The temperature in this laundry room seemed to be rising with each minute, or maybe the problem was his proximity to Wade Wilson, who seemed to be absorbing all the oxygen in the room, leaving little space and air for Griffin.

  Griffin wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and was surprised to find it dripping. Those towels in the corner now seemed like more than just an eye fixture; they were a downy comfort when he felt close to passing out, a source of dryness when he needed to look presentable. As he toddled towards the back corner of the room, he could sense Wade reaching an arm out to him, an attempt to bring him back.

  “Hey man,” Wade said. “Are you okay?”

  Griffin picked up one of the towels and wiped it across his face. He closed his eyes and felt the flicker of darkness, the cool soft threads against his tingling skin.

  Everything felt okay
again and everything would be all right. The number was more than sufficient to provide for his family for a lifetime. He might or might not search the Aston Martin once all of Marcia’s assets were turned over to him, but whatever he found or didn’t find would be just fine.

  “I’m okay,” Griffin finally answered, and he listened to his own words echo around the small room. “Let’s get back out there, okay? I’m fine.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  October 13, 2017

  Detective Hobbs blinked underneath the florescent lighting of the police station. She had been sitting at her desk for an hour already, reviewing files and reports that she’d already reviewed, waiting for that moment when something new would jump out at her – something she’d missed during the first iteration.

  Outside the wind was howling – so loud she could hear its squeal from her desk. Branches tapped at their windows – newly bare from the loss of foliage. Hobbs tried not to be distracted. She bent her neck and brought her eyes to the top line of the page, which was a report from the interrogation of Griffin Brock. She needed to focus, to clear her head, to read every line as though she’d never read it before.

  A bang caught Hobbs’s attention, and as she lifted her head, she saw that Colt Bundy had ripped through the front door of the police station. He was wearing jeans and a Cardinals jersey, his hair mottled with grease or sweat. He was waving a piece of paper frantically.

  “Detective Hobbs! Detective Hobbs!” Colt yelled. “Where are you? I have something for you!”

  Hobbs could see Colt freeze on the tips of his toes and search the station. His eyes were roving anxiously across the room as if taking inventory. Hobbs stood up and they locked eyes on each other at the same time.

  Colt trotted to her desk, unfolded the piece of paper he’d been strangling and held it in front of her. “It’s a letter from Greta,” Colt said, his voice stabilizing from its previous hysterical pitch. “She sent it two weeks ago from Manitoulin Island. Here’s the envelope. Look at the postmark.” Colt produced an envelope from his pocket and pointed to the black scrawling across the postage stamp.