Martin Greenberg - The Future We Wish We Had

“Just one of my many useful bartending skills,” Harry whispered to Jodi after the clerk left with a little giggle.

It took a while for them to find the right document in the huge Cryonomics bankruptcy file. If Mr. Owens was getting paid by the word, he was making a mint on this case.

After forty-five minutes of diligent reading, Jodi finally saw the name that had been in Mr. Owens’s letter-Andrew Sommersby. Her father’s name. Jodi hadn’t even known his name until she read it in The Letter . Now here it was again in an official court document. Jodi’s last name was Carnahan. Her mother’s name.

“Wow,” Jodi said. “He’s really there.”

She realized that up until this moment, she’d still thought that this was some kind of big joke. But here it was, in the court’s own file. She didn’t think anyone played jokes with a court.

Her father’s name was on a chart with twenty-two other names. Each name listed a date of interment and next of kin. Jodi’s name wasn’t listed next to her father’s, but her mother’s was. Someone-maybe the clerk-had handwritten “deceased” next to her mother’s name.

“Have you found anything on the trust?” Harry asked.

Jodi shook her head. It had to be here somewhere, right?

Three pages later, Jodi found another chart, this one listing all the trusts. Twenty-three trusts, twenty-three frozen people. None of the trusts was named Sommersby. None of the trusts identified the person it supported. How was she supposed to tell what her father would have named his trust when she didn’t know anything at all about Andrew Sommersby?

Jodi scanned the list again, frustrated.

Next to her, Harry let out a low whistle. “My good God, will you look at that? he whispered.

She looked at the column Harry was pointing at, the one she’d been ignoring in her search for the right name. What she saw were rows of numbers. Lots and lots of numbers. Numbers with more zeros than Jodi had ever seen in her life.

She felt the blood drain out of her face.

Her father’s trust could be any one of the ones on this page. And any one of these trusts could fund not only four years of college, but probably graduate and post-graduate school too, not to mention a nice house and a car of her own.

Holy shit.

Did this mean she was rich?

Jodi dialed Artemus Owens’s phone number from a pay phone in the courthouse lobby. She tried to ignore the way her fingers trembled and her stomach clenched around the soda she’d had in Harry’s car.

Harry stood next to her, leaning in to listen.

“About this trust fund,” she said once Mr. Owens answered the phone. “Does it belong to Cryonomics?”

She heard Mr. Owens let out a deep breath. “That would depend on the terms of the trust document. You realize I can’t advise you.”

Jodi rubbed her forehead. She wished her hands would stop trembling. “I know that,” she said. “I just need to know whether the whole thing belongs to that company, or whether, you know-” She took her own deep breath. “-it might actually belong to me because he’s my father.”

There. She said it.

Harry gave her a little hug.

“Figured out how much is at stake, did you?” Mr. Owens asked. He didn’t sound upset. In fact, Jodi thought she could almost hear the smile in his voice.

“Yeah,” Jodi said. “So, does it?”

She heard a rustle of papers on the other end of the line, then the tapping of computer keys.

“Well, I can tell you this,” Mr. Owens said. “It’s public record, and you could probably have found out for yourself if you’d kept reading what you’ve obviously looked at. Cryonomics is only claiming income from the trust as an asset. In other words, the trust earns money, and that income is what the company’s been using to maintain your father. The figures are annual estimates, rounded to the nearest dollar.”

“Wait.” Jodi was having a hard time comprehending what he was saying. “What’s on the chart… that was only income ?”

“Yes.”

Jodi dropped the phone. She thought Harry might have caught it before it hit the floor, but she couldn’t focus on that. All she could see were numbers followed by lots of zeros, and that wasn’t even the real number.

Her father must have been a millionaire. At least.

And he’d never provided anything for her mother, or for her.

She walked away from the phone, leaving Harry to deal with Mr. Owens. All of a sudden she was too angry to talk to anyone.

Her father had left her mother to deal with a life of penny-pinching and never having enough to make ends meet. A life of macaroni and cheese dinners, and coupon clipping, and keeping the heat at sixty in the winter just to save on the electric bill.

Jodi knew exactly what she wanted to do.

Let the bastard thaw.

“Calm down,” Harry said.

He’d run after her only to find her pacing by the side of his car.

“I want him to die,” Jodi said. Apparently too loudly and with way too much venom if the wary look she got from an older couple passing by on the street was any indication. “Do you know what he did to us? How we had to live? While he-what, dreamed about his nice little fantasy where he gets to be resurrected so he can ruin someone else’s life?”

Harry opened the car door and herded her inside. She jammed the seatbelt closed, then pounded her fist on the dashboard.

Harry glared at her as he got in the driver’s seat. “Just because you’ve found out your father, the popsicle, is a tightwad, that’s-”

“Corpse. He’s a corpse who doesn’t know it yet.”

“Okay. Have it your way. He’s a corpse. That still doesn’t mean you can take it out on my car.”

Jodi took a deep breath. Harry’s Mustang Cobra was his pride and joy. Most of his bartending tips went toward his car payments.

“Sorry,” Jodi muttered.

“Besides, he’s a rich corpse. And you’re his only next of kin, right?”

She shrugged. “I guess so. Or at least I’m the only one Mr. Owens could find. But I don’t want his money. I don’t want anything to do with him.”

Harry raised an eyebrow. “Oh, honey, of course you do. Don’t be ridiculous. If you didn’t want the money, we wouldn’t have made this trip, would we?”

She picked at a hole in her jeans instead of answering. This wasn’t her best pair. It was her second-best pair, and they weren’t supposed to have holes in the legs.

Harry started up the car and pulled into traffic. Jodi sat quietly in the passenger seat trying not to think about anything at all. Couldn’t she just go back to the way things were a couple of days ago? At least then she’d been poor but not quite so angry about it. And she didn’t have such a big weight on her shoulders. No matter how angry she was at the former Mr. Andrew Sommersby, he still was her father, absent and irresponsible or not.

After a few minutes she looked out the window expecting to see familiar streets on the way back to their apartment. What she saw was an on-ramp to the interstate.

She turned toward Harry. “Where are we going?”

He glanced at her, then went back to watching the traffic.

“It’s your day off, right? Well, if you’re going to let him thaw, you might want to meet him first,” he said.

What?

“Sit back and enjoy the ride,” Harry said. “We’re going to Cryonomics.”

For a high-tech company, the Cryonomics building looked like little more than a standard warehouse with once-fancy landscaping and a snazzy front office. Jodi could see the resemblance to the lushly depicted building in the company’s brochure, but clearly impending bankruptcy had taken a toll on nonessentials. Like watering the lawn.

Or paying for staff.