The Wilding Probate: A Bucky McCrae Adventure

by D. J. Butler

  Fellows glared at me. “Keep talking.”

  “My dad has it.” This was at least half a lie. By now Dad had probably filed the will with the court.

  “Which one?” Fellows asked. He watched me closely.

  I tried not to show that a light was going on in my head. There was more than one will, of course. The most recent one would be the will the court would enforce, but it couldn’t enforce a will it didn’t know about.

  But what did Fellows want? Did he want the will I had taken from him, or some other will I knew nothing about?

  Why did he care about what happened to Aaron Wilding’s property? And what did he want to happen?

  “I’m not sure.” That wasn’t really a lie. “Dad’s the lawyer. I’m just an office manager, really.”

  “You seemed to think you were more than just an office manager the other day.” He showed me white teeth and his voice took on an amused note. “Grilled me about Indian law and serving process on cowboys, as I remember.”

  I shrugged. “Just being cocky, I guess.”

  “It’s very important that Marilyn not inherit,” Fellows said slowly. “She’s wicked.”

  It was easy to agree with him on that point, since I thought it was pretty likely that Marilyn had poisoned her husband. Also, she had a secret room in her house, and I was starting to think she might have had Charlie Herbert beat up there. I still didn’t know how Fellows knew about the room. Of course, I had no real proof of Marilyn’s guilt, not yet, and the one thing I knew for certain was that Michael Fellows had shot a man dead, in the back. And killed these other two men right in front of me. And kidnapped Evil.

  “Tell me more,” I urged him.

  “I don’t care about me. Well, maybe I do, but the more important thing is that Marilyn not inherit.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me where the will is.”

  “Dad has it. Probably his office. It’s possible he’s filed the will with the court by now.”

  Fellows cursed. He looked up the hill toward the house, out of sight. “Sooner or later, more of her men will come looking for these two.”

  I didn’t like the thought of that, though at this point it seemed as if I was between a rock and a hard place. “Let me go. I can find out about the will. I can…come back and tell you what I find.”

  “You won’t come back. You’ll call your sheriff friend.”

  “You’ve got a hostage.” I pointed to Evil and tried not to sob. He lay still and the rain puddled around his body.

  Fellows shook his head. “We stick together. We’re going to find the will, and you’re not leaving my sight.”

  “Can we throw a blanket over my friend?” I asked. “Or maybe take him inside the…grow room? He’s hurt, and he doesn’t deserve to die.”

  Fellows looked down at Evil and almost seemed surprised. “Yeah. Let’s put him in the truck.”

  Fellows did the work; that guy was strong, especially for someone who’d been shot just the day before and, like me, only seemed to have the use of one arm. He knelt, dragged Evil up onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, stood, and then dumped him into the cab of the pickup truck. Then he flashed the truck keys and the pistol at me, shooting a glance up the hill.

  “Get in,” he said.

  “You remember the road doesn’t go anywhere,” I reminded him. “Just up to Charlie Herbert’s place.”

  “That place never belonged to Charlie Herbert,” Michael Fellows said. He slid behind the wheel of the truck and waited for me.

  He had Evil now.

  I picked up the two bottles of water and the fire blankets. I didn’t look at the cab of the truck, but I knew Fellows was following me in his mirrors. I stayed away from the pistol and the ax.

  Feet squelching in the mud, I stepped around the truck to the shotgun-side door and let myself in. I put the two bottles in the truck’s two cup holders in the dashboard.

  The one with the label picturing a stream came from the stream, I reminded myself. The stream where the deer had died. The one with no label on it had come from the house.

  Which had a secret, demented, room in it, a room decorated with bears in swimsuits, holding balloons.

  I shivered from the cold. I draped one blanket over Evil and the second over my lap.

  “Keep your hands in sight,” Fellows said. I shivered again.

  I checked Evil’s pulse. He was cold, and his pulse a little irregular, but he was alive.

  “What if we drop him off at the Urgent Care first?” I suggested.

  “Eventually. First, we have to get off this mountain. Seat belt.”

  Why did he care that I was strapped in?

  I’d barely managed to buckle myself in when Michael Fellows gunned the pickup truck and swerved sideways into the trees.

  Evil bounced on the seat. He wasn’t buckled in, and I tried to pin him in place by pressing my body against him. He groaned.

  Michael Fellows tapped the butt of his pistol on the truck door. “Hands where I can see them.” The fact that he was driving with one arm, and holding a pistol in the same hand that held the steering wheel, made me nervous. I imagined the truck hitting a rock and Michael Fellows accidentally shooting me, like Samuel L. Jackson shot that guy in the back seat in Pulp Fiction.

  I put my hands where he could see them.

  The truck bounced over a fallen log and caromed back and forth across a ragged spill of boulders. Then it hit a slope of grass and started to slide.

  I didn’t scream then, either, but I grabbed the dashboard with one hand and Evil with the other and I squeaked pretty loud.

  “I guess the sheriff didn’t find you.” My vocals cords felt tight and my voice was a little unnaturally high.

  “It’s a big mountain. All I had to do was hold still for a while. They didn’t have dogs or anything.”

  “They still have people out looking on the roads,” I said. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure why I was telling him this. Maybe it was to gain his trust. Maybe if he thought I was on his side, he’d let Evil go. Drop him off with the doctor. “I mean, I don’t want to get caught in a shootout.”

  “Guess we better not use roads, then.”

  Fellows was pretty good at driving off-road, as it happened, even with one arm. He had an eye for the patches of rock that would rip the underside of the truck to pieces and he skidded around them easily, sometimes slaloming like a skier in the dust, grass, and mud. The slope was steep and the truck seemed to be falling, nose-first, toward Howard.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  He said nothing, didn’t even look at me. But I knew. Of course I knew; I’d set him up.

  The Fun Lanes.

  We hit dirt roads I didn’t recognize, coming down out of the Ups. Fellows took some of them, and some of them he skipped right over. He chose his path without hesitation—he knew the slopes intimately.

  The barbed wire fence that marked the edge of the Wilding Property, he didn’t even slow down for. The snapping of wire was almost melodic, like the sound of a guitar being smashed on stage. The bottles of possibly poisoned water jumped at the impact, then went back to rattling back and forth.

  We entered Howard proper past a few trailers I didn’t know. I saw the Dog Ears pass to my left and we crossed Reservoir Road, which meant I wasn’t too far from Sheriff Sutherland’s house. I had a momentary fantasy of jumping from the truck and racing to Wood Duck Island—but that wasn’t going to happen. Fellows had Evil as a hostage, and even if he didn’t, I couldn’t outrun him on foot.

  Finally, he skidded to a halt by a knot of pine trees I’d seen before a million times, but never up close; we were just across the river from the Fun Lanes. I sat still and kept my hands where he could see them.

  “Shall I check if anyone’s in the office?” I asked.

  “Your dad’s car’s not there,” Fellows said. “Just that woman’s, and a couple of beaters I don’t recognize.”

  “The Grand Marquis belongs to
Gladys.” I didn’t know whether the smarter thing was to avoid giving Fellows information I didn’t have to give him, or to try to humanize potential victims to slow him down. “The others are probably people bowling.”

  “Bowling,” Michael Fellows said. “I’d forgotten.”

  Pointing with his pistol, he backed me out of the truck. I took the two bottles with me, and the fire blankets. That was enough to make it hard to stand, exhausted as I was. Once outside, I looked around, hoping to see someone who might notice us, but there was no one.

  Then Fellows slung Evil across his shoulder again and prodded me in the direction of the Fun Lanes.

  “Take us in by the back door,” he told me.

  I entered the office first, but Fellows came in right on my heels, his pistol on the back of my neck. Dad wasn’t there, and Fellows shut the door behind us.

  “We keep coming back to the same places,” I said. “I interviewed you here.”

  “Good times.” Fellows pointed at the corner of the office with his gun. “Put the blankets down.”

  I did as I was told, and he slid Evil to the floor on the blankets. Following further directions, I stood in another corner and waited.

  Fellows peered through the front door of the office into the Fun Lanes. I heard hooting and some bad singing along to a Kid Rock anthem, and then Fellows pulled the door shut.

  “So?” He gestured at the New Files cabinets. “Find the will.”

  I set the water on the desk and looked. I was going through the motions with a heavy heart, because I knew I wouldn’t find anything. Dad had already filed the will. He was probably still at the courthouse, unless maybe he had accompanied Marilyn Wilding home.

  But I made a show of pulling the fat WILDING file from the cabinet and setting it on the desktop. “I would expect the will to be in a folder here in the front of the file,” I said. “Matters get put into the file in chronological order from back to front, so you can stick a new matter for an existing client right in the front of that client’s folder. Once the file gets too full, you stick the stuff in the back of the file into the Old Files cabinets.”

  “That sounds as half-assed as could be.”

  “And yet it works. Mostly. Here, the most recent thing in the file is…looks like a DUI Dad handled for Aaron Wilding, a year or two ago.” I couldn’t help snickering. “Pot, maybe?”

  “What does that mean? Where’s the will?”

  I sighed, knowing I’d have to explain what I had known all along must be the case. “It means the will is probably filed with the court now.”

  “The court…” Fellows gestured with his pistol, “sits in one of those trailers downtown.”

  “Yeah.” I shouldn’t have found anything amusing in that, but I did. “Both courts are in trailers downtown, actually. The district court judge is Judge Ybarra. She says she won’t waste county money on a fancy building the county doesn’t really need, just to boost her ego. Dad says she worries if she moves her court into a fancier building, some of Howard’s Latino populations—migrant workers, for example—might find it harder to approach her. And Sam Barlow, the old magistrate, can’t very well move his little court into a new brick building when the district court’s in a trailer. So that’s Howard County justice for you…dispensed from a trailer.”

  I had no business spilling all that to Michael Fellows, but I didn’t intend to. He mentioned the trailers, and suddenly I felt like I had to talk. Like there was something really important or interesting about those trailers.

  Only I couldn’t quite remember what it was, even with all the spilling the beans.

  Two trailers. Two courts in two trailers.

  Fellows shook his head. “Check again. Maybe it got misplaced.”

  You’ve got the pistol, I almost said, but there was no need to provoke him. Instead, I just dug through the files again, looking. “Can we take Evil to Urgent Care?” I asked, my fingers walking from one file folder to the next with short, precise steps. “I’m worried about him.”

  I was worried about myself, too. My hand was shaking, and my lips and the tip of my nose both felt numb.

  “Find the will.” Fellows jabbed his gun in the direction of the Old Files cabinets, in the odd corner of the room created where the bar’s walk-in refrigerator jutted out, disturbing the otherwise rectangular space. “What about those? Are those the Old Files?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think the will’s that old, but I can look.”

  “Don’t make excuses,” Michael Fellows said. “And don’t fail.”

  The Old Files were organized by the same logic as the New Files: alphabetical, more or less. I had little hope, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found a folder marked WILDING. It was lurking behind WINDOWS, rather than in front of it, but there you go…alphabetical, more or less.

  Still, the folders in the file seemed irrelevant. A boundary agreement, a threatening letter to a contractor. “It’s not…wait a minute.” I pulled a folder out from deep in the file. “No, that’s not it.”

  Fellows crowded close to me. “It says ‘will’ on it.”

  “Yeah, but look at the date.” I pointed. “This is twenty years old.”

  Fellows frowned. “Pre-Marilyn.”

  “Exactly. This is not the one I saw. That you had…taken from here.” I pulled the old will out to look at it and confirm. Sure enough, it was an entirely different document, and Aaron Wilding’s heirs at the time were two people named Rainbow and…

  “Indra?” I said.

  “What?” Fellows said.

  And then I froze.

  Don’t freeze up, don’t freeze up, I told myself.

  “The heirs on this will,” I said. My head swam. “Rainbow and Indra Wilding.”

  “Huh.”

  He’d recovered quickly. But when Michael Fellows had said ‘what,’ it hadn’t been the ‘what’ of ‘what are you talking about,’ but the ‘what’ of ‘what do you want from me,’ the kind of ‘what’ you say in answer to another person saying your name.

  As in: Hey, Bucky?

  What?

  The Howard County Register was still on Dad’s desk, open to Aaron Wilding’s obituary. My eyes jumped to the photo of the dead man, and I silently cursed myself for not noticing it earlier.

  Michael Fellows had Aaron Wilding’s hair, his eyes, and his nose.

  There was no Michael Fellows. This was Indra Wilding. That kind of sounded vaguely like a girl’s name, but maybe it was Indian or something. His sister’s name, after all, was Rainbow, and his dad was a fruity millionaire from California.

  And Indra Wilding probably wasn’t here as somebody’s agent. He was here on his own account. He wanted the will…why? Because he thought he was getting screwed?

  Because he hated his father’s new, young wife. I almost laughed out loud at the thought; it was like Howard County had its own little fairy tale, complete with wicked stepmother, and I was caught up in the middle of it.

  Two trailers. Nuts, why was that ringing such a bell?

  “If the new will isn’t filed,” Indra Wilding said, “and this one gets filed instead?”

  “The executor files the will with the court and publishes notice. If no one comes up with a later will, this would be the will that would get executed.”

  “What if the more recent will…disappeared from the court?”

  I tried to imagine. “Boy, it depends,” I finally said. “If it got far enough that there was a good record of it, or if there were witnesses to the making, it might not matter that the original disappeared. But if the filing hasn’t been recorded for some reason, if it’s just waiting in Judge Ybarra’s inbox…then maybe.” I almost mentioned that the filed will was a certified copy, and that Sheriff Sutherland had the original in his evidence room, but then I had visions of Indra Wilding barging in the front door of the sheriff’s office with a gun to my head, demanding the key to the evidence room.

  That was a scenario I could do without.

  Indra l
ooked at the clock. “How far are we from closing time?”

  I shrugged. “We could close now. It’d be early for us, but it wouldn’t be the first time we’d closed before the hours posted on the door. This is a small town, people understand when you have a personal emergency.”

  Indra thought about that. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he finally said. “You text your dad and tell him you’ll close up here, not to worry. Then you send the old lady home.”

  “I don’t think I’d call Gladys an old lady. At least, not while she was armed.”

  “Right now, I’m the one who’s armed.” Indra Wilding’s face cooled and he pointed his pistol at the floor between my feet.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “We wait here until it’s dark. Then we go break into the court and get that will back. Understood?”

  I nodded. “I’ll need to use Evil’s phone. I…lost mine yesterday.”

  “Funny.” Indra dug in his pocket and produced my phone. It was dirty, and had a crack across the face, but it was definitely mine. I touched its screen: the battery icon was red, but the phone wasn’t dead yet. “I found it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Be careful what you type.” Indra stepped behind me. “I’m watching.”

  I wished at that moment I had code words with Dad, if you know what I mean. A secret word I could type into the text message that would look harmless but would in fact be a cry for help. Like, maybe the code word could be onions, so I’d type: Dad, don’t worry about coming by the office. I’ll lock up and then bring home the onions, and he’d know there was something wrong.

  But we didn’t have a code word, and if I had tried to write any nonsense about onions to my dad, I was pretty sure Indra Wilding would have shot me.

  Dad, I typed. I’m at the office. I’ll close up here, and see you at home later.

  There was no immediate answer, and then Indra took back my phone.

  “Right.” He nodded. “Now call Gladys over here, and send her home.”

  He positioned himself to one side of the door and pressed his body flat against the wall. He kept his pistol pointed at me. I was getting awfully tired of having a gun pointed at me. Evil lay in the corner of the room behind the door, so he’d be invisible to Gladys unless I opened the door all the way, which of course I wouldn’t do.