Элин Хильдебранд: What Happens in Paradise

Anita should be glad you weren’t more like him, Irene wants to say. Anita and Ed Sorley were part of a group of friends Irene and Russ had made when the kids were small—and yes, Anita had been transparently smitten with Russ. She had always laughed at his jokes and was the most envious on Irene’s fiftieth birthday when Russ hired an airplane to pull a banner declaring his love.

“I need help, Ed,” Irene says. “You’re the first person I’ve told other than my kids. The boys and I flew down to the Caribbean last week. Russ’s body had been cremated and we scattered the ashes.”

“You did? ” Ed says. “So are you planning a memorial, then, instead of a funeral?”

“No memorial,” Irene says. “At least not yet.” She knows this will sound strange. “I can’t face everyone with so many unanswered questions. And I need to ask you, Ed, as my attorney, to please keep this news quiet. I don’t even want you to tell Anita.”

There was another significant pause. “I’ll honor your wishes, Irene,” Ed says. “But you can’t keep it a secret forever. Are you going to submit an obituary to the Press-Citizen ? Or, I don’t know, post something on Facebook, maybe?”

“Facebook?” Irene says. The mere notion is appalling. “Do I have a legal obligation to tell people?”

“Legal?” Ed says. “No, but I mean…wow. You must still be in shock. I’m in shock myself, I get it. What was… why…”

“Ed,” Irene says. “I called you to find out what legal steps I need to take.”

There’s an audible breath from Ed. He’s flustered. Irene imagines going through this ninety or a hundred more times with every single one of their friends and neighbors. Maybe she should publish an obituary. But what would she say? Two hours after the papers landed on people’s doorsteps, she would have well-intentioned hordes arriving with casseroles and questions. She can’t bear the thought.

“When I called you before, Ed, you said Russ signed a new will in September.” Irene had shoved this piece of information to a remote corner of her mind, but now it’s front and center. Why the hell did Russ sign a new will without Irene and, more saliently, without telling Irene? There could be only one reason. “You said he included a new life insurance policy? For three million dollars?” She swallows. “The life insurance policy…who’s the beneficiary?” Here is the moment when the god-awful truth is revealed, she thinks. Russ must have made Rosie the beneficiary. Or maybe, if he was too skittish to do that, he made a trust the beneficiary, a trust that would lead back to Rosie and Maia.

“You, of course,” Ed says. “The beneficiary is you.”

“Me?” Irene says. She feels…she feels…

Ed says, “Who else would it be? The boys? I think Russ was concerned about Cash’s ability to manage money.” Ed coughs. “Russ did make one other change. After you called me last week, I checked my notes.”

“What was the other change?”

“Well, you’ll remember that back when you and Russ signed your wills in 2012, you made Russ the executor of your will and Russ made his boss, Todd Croft, the executor of his. In my notes, I wrote that Russ said his finances were becoming too complex for, as he put it, a ‘mere mortal’ to deal with and he didn’t want to burden you with that responsibility. He said Todd would be better able to deal with the fine print. Do you remember that?”

Does Irene remember that? She closes her eyes and tries to put herself in Ed Sorley’s office with Russ. She definitely remembers the meeting about the real estate closing—she had been so excited—but the day that they signed their wills is lost. It had probably seemed like an onerous chore, akin to getting the oil changed in her Lexus. She knew it had to be done but she paid little attention to it because she and Russ were in perfect health. They were finally hitting their stride—a new job for Russ, a new house, money.

No, she does not remember. She doubts she would have objected to Russ making Todd Croft the executor of his will. Back then, Todd had seemed like a savior. Todd the God .

“So Todd was the executor,” Irene says.

“And when Russ came in to sign the new will this past September, he changed it,” Ed says. “He made you the executor.”

“He did?” Irene says.

“Didn’t he tell you?” Ed says.

“No,” Irene says. Then she wonders if that’s right. “You know what, Ed, he might have told me and I just forgot.” Or I wasn’t listening, she thinks. It’s entirely possible that back in September, Russ said one night at dinner, I saw Ed Sorley today, signed a new will with extra life insurance protection, and I made you executor. And it’s entirely possible that Irene said, Okay, great. Back in September, this information would have seemed unremarkable, even dull. Life insurance; executor. Who cared! It was all preparation for an event, Russ’s death, that was, if not exactly inconceivable, then very, very far in the future.

Now, of course, the will has red-hot urgency. Irene is the beneficiary of the life insurance policy and she’s the executor of the will. This is good news, right?

“I have something else in my notes,” Ed says, and he sounds on the verge of getting choked up again. “When I asked Russ if he was concerned that being executor might be a burden for you, considering the complicated nature of his finances, he said, ‘Irene is the only person I trust to do the right thing.’” Ed pauses. “Those were his exact words. I wrote them down.”

Irene is the only person I trust to do the right thing. That seemingly simple sentence has a lot to unpack. Russ didn’t trust Todd Croft to do the right thing—no surprise there. Had Russ assumed that Irene would find out about Rosie, Maia, the villa in St. John? And if the answer was yes, did he expect that Irene would have enough forgiveness in her heart to make sure that Rosie and Maia were taken care of financially? If again the answer was yes, he had given her a lot of credit.

Irene sighed. Russ was right. Rosie is no longer an issue, but Irene most certainly plans on providing for Maia.

“What do I do from here, Ed?” Irene asks.

“I’ll need at least ten copies of the death certificate,” Ed says. “I’d like one as soon as possible so I can start the probate process.”

“Where do I get a death certificate?” Irene asks.

“Um… no one provided one for you? You should have been issued one from the state where Russ died.”

“He died in the British Virgin Islands,” Irene reminds him. “Between Virgin Gorda and Anegada.”

There’s silence from Ed. She might as well have named two moons of Jupiter.

“Baker was in charge of figuring out exactly who claimed the body,” she tells Ed. “And who performed the cremation. He had some trouble. It’s apparently very hard to get a body back from another country, and it was over the holidays. The regular people were on vacation.”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Irene,” Ed says. “My experience with this is limited. But you’re saying you didn’t get a death certificate while you were down there?”

“We didn’t,” Irene says. “Baker called the Brits, who directed him to the Americans, who sent him back to the Brits. Todd Croft had someone go down and identify the body—that was before we arrived—and he ordered the cremation without even asking me.”

“What?” Ed says.

Irene has opened the proverbial can of worms now; she may as well keep going. “Todd Croft has, essentially, vanished. I can’t reach him or his secretary, and the Ascension web page is down.”