Muriel Jensen - Father Fever

Athena was lost in the moment, unaware that Pineau hadn’t covered everything until he said, a little quickly, she thought, “And to David Hartford, I leave Cliffside and all its furnishings.”

Athena’s eyes flew open. She turned to her sisters and saw the same shocked surprise she felt mirrored in their faces. There was a moment of stunned silence, then a loud and simultaneous “Who?”

“David Hartford,” Pineau repeated, tapping the document with the tips of his fingers. “A friend, apparently.”

The women stared at one another again. Athena, caught completely off balance, struggled to think.

But Alexis didn’t stop to think. “I’ve never heard of him,” she said, leaning forward across the table. “A friend from where? Dancer’s Beach?”

Pineau shook his head. “She didn’t say where she met him.”

“She never mentioned him to us.” Augusta looked from one sister to the other. Heads shook confirmingly. “You have to contact him about the will, Mr. Pineau,” Athena pointed out, an unidentified but unsettling suspicion forming in the pit of her stomach where her grief for Sadie ached. “You must know where he lives. And why isn’t he here?”

“I have contacted him. He lives in Chicago, but he wasn’t able to come to the reading. So, I’ve faxed him everything he has to know, and transferred the house into his name.”

Augusta and Alexis gasped simultaneously.

“When did Aunt Sadie change the will?” Athena asked. “We know that two years ago when we were all together at Christmas, she intended to leave Cliffside to the three of us. Not that we care about possession, but…it was a family home. Who is this guy?”

“This will…” Pineau began.

“What do we know about him?” Augusta interrupted. “I mean, she loved telling us stories about her life in Dancer’s Beach. She lived very quietly, except for hosting some local events because Cliffside was so big. I can’t believe she’d have become that close to someone without telling us. And if we’ve never heard of him…”

Pineau shook his head apologetically. “My job isn’t to investigate the beneficiaries of a will, just to see that the deceased’s wishes are carried out.”

“When did she change it?” Alexis asked again.

“As I said before,” Pineau replied patiently, “we drew up this will a year ago.”

Athena stood in agitation. Alexis got to her feet and began to pace.

“I don’t understand,” Augusta said from her chair. “Where would she have met this Hartford guy?”

“Maybe on one of her trips,” Alexis suggested, stopping in the middle of the carpet. “He’s probably one of those gigolos who preys on older women and gets them to sign over their life savings. Or their house.”

“Ladies, I know you’re disappointed about Cliffside,” Pineau said quietly, “but your aunt was very calm and clearheaded when she made the change. I think she truly wanted Mr. Hartford to have it. And I personally think she was too clever a woman to be fooled by a charlatan.”

Athena frowned at him. “But we don’t know for certain, do we, because you haven’t conducted an investigation of any kind.”

Alexis gasped and snapped her fingers. “Maybe he wants Cliffside for the smugglers’ stairs!” she said to Athena. “I mean, apart from the fact that it’s a wonderful property.”

“That’s right!” Augusta cried.

Pineau looked puzzled. “What stairs?”

“When we were children,” Athena explained, “we discovered a door in the basement at Cliffside that led to a stairway through the cliff down to the beach. Sadie padlocked it, telling us that during Prohibition in Grandpa Richmond’s day, booze had been smuggled in that way. Maybe Hartford is planning to put the house to a similar use. Drugs, maybe?”

“Ladies—” Pineau pleaded.

“I know, I know.” Athena cut him off. “It’s not your job to check him out, but maybe it’s ours. Think about what’s happened here! Our aunt dies in the crash of a light plane shortly after she wills the family home to a total stranger?”

“It’s been a year since she changed the will,” Pineau pointed out again, reasonably. “We have no reason to believe the plane crash wasn’t a simple accident. And Hartford wasn’t a stranger to her.”

She ignored his attempt at reason and turned to her sisters. “Until the authorities can bring up the plane and prove to me that the crash was an accident, I think this Hartford bears looking into. What do you say?”

Augusta nodded. “Let’s do it. I took a couple of weeks’ leave.”

Athena turned to Alexis. “What about you, Lex?”

Alexis shouldered a large soft leather pouch. “My time’s my own. I’m in. Where do we start?”

“What’s Hartford’s address?” Athena asked Pineau

Pineau tapped the document on the table. “As of the moment I notified him, his address is Cliffside, Dancer’s Beach, Oregon.

David Hartford surveyed the wide living room of his new home and thought it looked comfortable, if not exactly true to a period or a style. He’d put some of the pieces he’d inherited into storage to make room for some of his own things. When he had time to think about it, he’d decide what to do with them.

It had been a week and a half since Aunty’s attorney had called him to let him know he’d inherited a two-acre estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean and he still couldn’t quite believe it. He’d grown up in a house three times this size, but it had never been a home, and he’d never felt as comfortable in it as he did here after barely a week.

His inheritance included this twelve-room Colonial Revival home, a guest house, an apartment over a four-car garage, and a small forest of firs, ash and oak tucked around the back of the property in a half-moon embrace. A shaggy lawn stretched thirty yards in front of the property to the edge of the cliff that rose fifteen feet above the ocean. Shrubbery he couldn’t identify provided protection from the cliff’s edge.

And it was all thanks to the gratitude of a woman he’d never met, a CIA agent code-named Aunty who’d been his phone and radio contact on several jobs for the Company. He’d helped save her life in Africa when she’d been trapped in the path of a rebel advance, but he’d called in mercenaries to bring her out, so technically, they’d saved her life. That detail hadn’t mattered to her, according to Aunty’s attorney, who’d notified him of his windfall.

David was grateful, of course, and aware that the gift couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous time.

Life as a CIA agent had lost its glamour for him and his team after the fiasco in Afghanistan, and now the three of them were starting over as “civilians.”

So the large, comfortable furniture from his Chicago apartment now sat among a little round mahogany table, an old Windsor piano from the turn of the century, a curio shelf that now held his collection of hand-carved decoys. A large armoire removed from the bedroom had become a perfect entertainment center. The attorney had sent him a list of things willed to other beneficiaries and David had those shipped off to him.

He punctuated that observation with a sneeze. He held a folded handkerchief to his nose and thought it ironic that someone who’d survived spring and summer in Illinois as a boy without succumbing to allergies should be felled by the mold and mildew of an Oregon winter. Trevyn McGinty and Bram Bishop walked through the open front door, each with an armload of folding chairs borrowed from city hall’s meeting room.

“Are you going to help us?” Trevyn asked, moving on through to the dining room and shouting back over his shoulder, “or are you just going to stand there and congratulate yourself on making points with the mayor of Dancer’s Beach just two days after moving to town?”