Purely by Accident

by Jim Beegle

  Mark looked at the piece of paper that listed Cecil’s house, his furnishings and art, a checking account, and a savings account. The total came to just over $500,000.

  “As far as I know it seems to be okay,” Mark said, after scanning the document. “But I can’t really be positive. I didn’t know much of anything about Cecil’s, that is, Mr. Lawrence’s, finances.”

  Mr. Lawton just nodded and slid another piece of paper to Mark. “This document outlines all outstanding liabilities still remaining against the estate,” Mr. Lawton said, referring to the other document. “It seems that Mr. Lawrence took out a reverse mortgage on his home about six months ago. As far as we know there is no other outstanding encumbrance on the property.”

  “What’s a reverse mortgage?” Mark asked. During the long and complex process of selling Micronix, Mark had to be tutored in the finer points of finance. He had claimed on more than one occasion throughout the process that he knew nothing about anything that did not include computer code. He had joked once that this was one of the reasons why he had married a banker.

  “Oh, it is pretty common really,” Mr. Lawton said, leaning back in his chair. “Once you are over the age of sixty-five, current tax law allows you to take the equity out of your home in a one-time tax exempted transaction. You may then use the proceeds as you see fit. Banks will loan someone money on their property and not require any repayments. Instead, they allow the whole thing to go unpaid accruing the interest. When the will is probated, they take the house as payment on the loan. In Mr. Lawrence’s case, it appears that he knew that he did not have long to live and made a short-term arrangement with the bank.”

  Mark winced at having the life of his friend discussed in such impersonal terms. Mr. Lawton saw Mark’s reaction and apologized. “I am sorry. Forgive me for being so businesslike in my manner. I can tell that you two were close and that his death has affected you greatly.” He filled both glasses from the pitcher on the tray and gave one to Mark.

  “It’s okay, really,” Mark said, trying to control his voice. “I guess it’s pretty fresh on my mind. I’m still not over it yet.” Uncomfortable with this line of conversation, he shifted his weight in the chair. “I don’t think I will be for a while either.”

  “Again, I am sorry. By the way,” the lawyer paused, taking a sip from his glass, “are you a relative of Mr. Lawrence’s?”

  “No, no I’m not.” Mark was thankful for a question that was easy to answer. “I don’t think he has any family still living. I was just a friend.”

  “I didn’t know that. I prepared Mr. Lawrence’s will myself. I don’t usually do things of this nature anymore, but he insisted that it be a partner of the firm who handled his affairs. I know that he cared a great deal for you and spoke very highly of you. He seemed to think you were a pretty bright fellow.”

  Mark’s eyes began to sting. He took a drink from the glass, hoping the water would help him compose his emotions.

  “As Mr. Lawrence instructed, we have paid his final hospital bill, the remaining cost of the services provided by our firm, including this meeting, the probate filing fees, and the cost of his funeral and burial.”

  During one of their last games of chess, Cecil had made a point of telling Mark that all of his final arrangements had already been made. He gave Mark the name of the funeral home handling things and asked him to call them when it was all over. Even then, neither one of them was able to say the word “death.”

  “The county will report the probating of the will and our transactions today in due course. You, Mr. Vogel, will be responsible for any and all taxes that result from your gain from Mr. Lawrence’s estate.” Mr. Lawton referred again to the paper in his hand. “In accordance with these instructions, the final liabilities of the estate of Mr. Cecil Lawrence have been paid in full. My people here are drawing a check made out to you today in the sum of $86,435.82, which is the remainder of his estate and now your legal inheritance. There will be some papers that we will ask you to sign when the check is ready.”

  Mark nodded his understanding. “That was pretty simple. Why all the secrecy?”

  “Oh, that’s not all we have to do today,” Mr. Lawton said. He reached into the folder again and removed a large manila envelope that was sealed at the flap with tape. The tape was of special design to show if someone had attempted to open it. The envelope had Mark’s name written in flowing letters on the front. Winston Lawton slid the envelope across the table and asked Mark to verify that it was still sealed and that the seal had not been tampered with. Mark looked at it closely and agreed that it seemed to be unmolested in any way. When he was finished with his examination, he slid it back across the table. Picking up the envelope again, the lawyer removed his glasses and leaned back in his chair.

  “Mr. Vogel, in my numerous years of practicing law I have encountered some strange requests. People want their remains shot into space; they want to be cremated and buried in their first-grade lunch box; wives have arrived at the reading of the will to discover they have been left nothing in favor of a mistress. Sometimes girlfriends have discovered boyfriends. You name it and I have seen it. But this,” he said holding up the envelope, “is without a doubt one of the most unusual in my career so far. I have no idea what is contained in this envelope. Mr. Lawrence assured me that its contents did not require the firm to do anything illegal or anything that would bring its reputation into question. I was told that it could not be opened before his death and that the only time it could be opened was now—and only in your presence.”

  When Winston Lawton finished speaking, he opened the envelope, breaking the taped seal on the back. He took out the contents of the envelope—several more sheets of paper and a smaller envelope—and looked through everything before selecting one that Mark could see was addressed to Mr. Lawton. He read without speaking for several minutes. When he finished reading, he shook his head once and began speaking to Mark again.

  “Mr. Vogel, it would appear that you are instructed to fly, at your earliest opportunity, to Nassau, of the Independent Commonwealth of the Bahamas, on the island of New Providence. There you are to go to The Commonwealth International Bank, where you are to present yourself to the president of the bank, a mister,” the attorney referred to the documents in his hand, “Jonus Roddy. Mr. Roddy has been instructed to afford you every courtesy of his bank. You will be required to provide two forms of certified photo identification to establish your identity.”

  “What is certified photo identification?” Mark interrupted.

  “Anything issued by the government with your picture on it. A driver’s license and a passport will do.” Mark nodded his understanding. Mr. Lawton looked back down at the paper before continuing. “Good. Mr. Lawrence has further instructed that you take a laptop computer with you, and this,” Mr. Lawton slid the small envelope to Mark, “when you visit the bank. You will be given letters of introduction from this firm indicating that you are, indeed, Mr. Mark Vogel and the sole executor of Mr. Lawrence’s estate. He has left very detailed instructions. We are to remind you that the following part of the instructions is very important.” He held the paper in his hand closer.

  ‘You are once again encouraged to tell no one of this meeting and these arrangements. This prohibition is also extended to your family—especially your wife,” again the lawyer looked at the documents, “a Mrs. Amy Vogel.”

  Mark leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. So, Cecil had known. After the party in July, Mark had gone to great extremes to keep Cecil from knowing that Amy did not approve of him. He had never invited him back to his home in Dallas. Instead, he would invent reasons to take him to the ranch. He had even avoided talking about her with Cecil—not that they had discussed her that much in the first place. Mark had hoped that, by doing this, Cecil would not find out how she felt. He must have figured it out anyway. Even after his death, Mark’s admiration for his friend continued to grow.

  Mr. Lawton dis
rupted Mark’s train of thought and continued with his instructions.

  “When and if you decide to go to Nassau, you are to phone me and me alone and tell me about your travel plans. I will, in turn, alert Mr. Roddy as to when he might expect you. If I am not here, please do not leave a message for me. Instead, call back later. Speak to me directly and to no one else. This is not my request but, once again, Mr. Lawrence’s instructions to you. You, and only you, will be allowed access to whatever information is held for you in Nassau. You cannot do this by proxy. It appears that Mr. Lawrence recently visited Mr. Roddy and left him similar instructions regarding who would be granted access to whatever is there.”

  Mark picked up the small envelope and tore it open. It was very light. He turned it upside down and a single small key clattered out onto the polished table. Picking it up and holding it between his fingers, he contemplated it for several minutes.

  “What’s all this about?” Mark finally asked. “And what is this?” he asked, holding up the key.

  “As to the second question, that would appear to be a safety deposit box key. I have seen a few of them in my time and they are all pretty much the same. As to the first question,” he shrugged, “I have no idea.” The lawyer began gathering up his files and papers. “But I’d like for you to do me a favor, if you would.”

  “What’s that?” Mark asked.

  “Just out of personal curiosity, when you find out what’s there, would you let me know?”

  While Mark pondered this, Mr. Lawton excused himself from the room. Several minutes later, he returned and handed Mark a copy of the will, a check for $86,435.82, and documents for him to sign. The sale of his company had taught him patience when signing things, so Mark read through everything completely before signing. One was a notice of probate, the other was a receipt for the documents, and one was some sort of affidavit affirming that the envelope was still sealed and had not been opened beforehand. As he had been promised earlier, he was also given a set of letters addressed to the bank in the Bahamas identifying him as Mr. Mark Vogel and Cecil’s heir. The final form was a receipt for the check.

  When Mark finished reading the documents that required his signature, he signed them all. This gathering of Mark’s signatures was the last official act of the reading of Cecil’s will. He collected his copies and files, the check and the key and deposited them into the empty briefcase he had brought with him. When Mark rose to leave, Winston Lawton stopped him at the door of the conference room. He held out one of his business cards on which he had written his home number.

  “If you get down there and find that your friend has left you a load of trouble, give me a call. You may need some help.”

  Thanking the man, Mark took the card and put it in his shirt pocket. With that, Winston Lawton shook Mark’s hand and walked him out to the reception area.

  <<<<<<<>>>>>>>

  Mark was not sure how he managed to find his way home. The last thing he could remember was that he was sitting in his car in the parking garage at Micronix. Now, as he sat on his patio clutching his briefcase, he realized that the drive through Dallas’s ever-growing rush-hour congestion did not register.

  Amy was off to Europe this week, so he had the whole house to himself. He was glad for that. It would give him the much needed time to think through what had happened that afternoon. He situated the briefcase on the glass-topped patio table and opened it.

  He pulled the papers he was given by Mr. Lawton out of his briefcase. As he absentmindedly filled his pipe, he checked to see that the key was still in the little snap- closed pocket. Cecil had gone to a lot of trouble to get the thing to him so, for the moment at least, he wanted to be sure that it didn’t get misplaced. The shock of the events of that afternoon was now starting to wear off and he was beginning to think more clearly.

  He reread the statements of asset and liability. All totaled, Cecil had less than seven thousand dollars in his checking and savings accounts. The note Cecil had taken out on his house explained how he had managed to cover his hospital, legal and funeral bills, but that appeared to be all it covered. He looked over the papers again. No, he hadn’t missed anything. There were no other assets listed. What had Cecil been living off of the last year? Or over the last few years for that matter?

  Cecil had lived a lifestyle that, while not lavish, required more money than could be earned from passbook interest on $4,329.00—the total that had been in his savings account when he died. Cecil had once told him that he had been living off the interest from his investments. But where were the principal investments? They weren’t listed in the asset accounting from Winston Lawton. It wasn’t the fact that he desired to find the source of Cecil’s money for his own personal gain. It was now a mystery that needed solving. Like all good engineers, Mark rose to problems like this. In fact, he lived for them. He again came back to the key.

  What was in Nassau, in what he assumed, just as Winston Lawton had assumed, was a safety deposit box? Was it something of value? Was it something of value only to Cecil, like a keepsake? Was it something he meant for Mark to have but just never got around to retrieving? He rummaged through the briefcase and found his copy of Cecil’s will. It was dated July 15th. So Cecil had made his will (or changed it) after the party, but before he was admitted to the hospital. Why not have whatever it was transferred to Texas? Why not tell Mark about it beforehand? Whatever it was, it couldn’t be that large if it was stored in a safety deposit box. Or could it?

  Why had Cecil guarded his secret so closely that he had not even given his lawyer a clue as to what was involved in all of it? Did he not trust him? Or was the habit of compartmentalizing information so deeply ingrained in him that it was hard for him to tell his whole story to anyone? Or, as Mr. Lawton hinted, was it something that would bring trouble to anyone connected with it? Maybe it was a combination of all of these reasons. Mark had no way of knowing and now had no one to ask either.

  He was still pondering all these questions when he made dinner for himself and tried once again to read the Dallas Morning News for that day. After dinner, he loaded the dishwasher and went into the den to check his email. The phone rang several times, but it was Amy’s line and he did not answer it.

  In addition to a number of secure high-speed Internet outlets, they had several phone lines running into the house for different things. One line was Amy’s, and it rang a lot even when she was out of town. One was for her fax machine, which resided in a sitting room off the master bedroom they shared when she was in town and not mad at him. He had a phone line for his calls. If Amy wanted to talk to him, she would call him on his line. It would be the only one he would answer.

  When she had first started traveling for IBC, she would call every night and tell him stories of where she was and what she was doing. Then the calls had dropped to one a trip, usually the first night, letting him know where she was staying. Now, however, even that habit had died out. These days, he rarely heard from her when she traveled. When he asked her about why she stopped calling, she passed it off by telling him she was usually very busy. Either that or she had a hard time working out the time zones and did not want to wake him. He guessed that age and a heavy workload made it hard to do the simple calculations required to figure out what time it was in Dallas.

  The next morning when he went to the office, he took the briefcase with him and locked it in his trunk—where it stayed for the next two days. On Friday, when he left his office for the day, he did not go to Highland Park. Instead, he took Texas Highway 114 for the hour drive through the Metroplex, mostly through Ft. Worth, and then another hour and a half northwest to his place outside of Runaway Bay.

  He had stayed very busy for the two days following his meeting with Winston Lawton. It wasn’t until he got to the ranch and unloaded the car that he remembered the briefcase. He took it with him into the house and left it in the den, where it stayed through most of Saturday as well. Finally, on Saturday night, Mark took it ups
tairs and put it on the very top shelf of the closet in his bedroom. He hoped that, by leaving it somewhere on purpose for a change, he might have a better chance of keeping up with it.

  On Sunday, Mark drove back to Dallas and found Amy home—newly returned from her latest adventure in some faraway part of the world. Eastern Europe this time he remembered. Eastern Europe was a hot, if risky, business commodity lately. Seventy years of communist rule had made the people of the former Soviet Union hungry for everything Western—new and modern. It seemed that IBC was trying to get ahead of the wave into the next new booming market and, in the process, doing their part to educate their citizens that their dreams could be easily purchased today and paid for tomorrow. Of course, with the annually compounding interest, those not-so-easy payments that came with the reality of capitalism were becoming a hard lesson.

  From Amy’s bubbly mood, Mark guessed that this most recent trip must have gone well for her. She gave him few details, not that he wanted any, just an impression that the trip had gone well. She did tell him that her efforts and charm had almost single-handedly won the day for IBC, as well as earning her another rung up the ladder to a director’s chair on the 24th floor of the IBC building. It seemed to him that she was like a Boy Scout collecting merit badges but, in the process, not taking the time to ponder the lessons of first aid, swimming, or survival being taught. No, her eyes were on making Eagle Scout, and the badges were just flares to light her path along the way.

  <<<<<<>>>>>>

  They both went their separate ways every morning that week, joining up again at the house in the evenings.

  Friday morning, Mark asked Amy if she would like to go to the ranch with him that weekend. “After all,” he told her as they dressed, “it has been a long time since you have been out there. It might be nice to get away for a little while and relax together.”