The McHenry Inheritance
A Quill Gordon Mystery
Michael Wallace
Copyright © 2012, Michael Wallace
All Rights Reserved
Cover Copyright © 2012, Deborah Karas
Author’s photo Copyright © 2012, Greg Pio
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or entered into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction and imagination, and all names, places, characters and incidents are either imaginary or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people (dead or alive), events, locales, or business establishments is purely coincidental.
Acknowledgements
No one writes a book alone, and that is certainly true of this one. Several people have provided suggestions and direction along the way, and in that regard I would particularly like to thank Denise Marcil, Bud O’Brien and Melissa Milich. Every author needs help with technical matters. I thank William F. Locke-Paddon for suggestions on preparing a challengeable will and to Gary Wollin for advice on playing the stock market. If I got something wrong in either of those areas, the fault is mine, not theirs. And last but not least thanks to my wife, Linda, for her patience, understanding and support during all those hours I was isolated with the computer writing this novel.
No one markets a book alone, either, and thanks are due in that area as well. I am indebted to to John Bakalian for his tireless research into e-book publication and publicity; Deborah Karas for designing a bold and striking book cover; to Chip Scheuer and Rigo Torkos for creating a dynamic and eye-catching video; to Greg Pio, photographer, for making me look better than I really do; to Karen Kefauver for her invaluable help with social media promotion; to Melody Sharp for coming up with a clean and useful web site; and to intellectual property attorney Michael Mount for helping protect my legal rights.
In the spirit of Dornford Yates,
For Linda and Bud
The Angler and the Sharpshooter
Squinting into the early morning sun, the angler cast a practiced eye at the creek winding through the meadow before him. After fishing it for 25 years, he knew the water by heart and had a memory to go with every riffle, every pool, every bend. The weeks following Labor Day, with summer fast yielding to autumn, were often the best of the season. Sensing the approach of winter, the fish began to feed with abandon. A large attractor fly cast just short of the deeply undercut grassy banks could yield a sudden and violent strike on the surface of the water, followed by a scrappy fight with an energetic trout.
Taking cover behind a clump of sagebrush to keep a low profile from the fish, the angler planned his cast. He was standing at a bend in the creek, which cut a deep channel against the opposite side. With a good cast to the current at the head of the bend, and a quick upstream mend of his line after the fly had drifted ten feet, he could get a clean drift over twenty feet of water that, by all reckoning, should be holding some good fish. The cast had to be precise, however. Too long, and he could find himself tangled in the grass or brush on the opposite shore; too short and the fly would sit still on the dead water in the middle.
He was holding the fly, a size 12 Royal Wulff, in his hand. Later in the day he would switch to a grasshopper pattern, but it was too early now. With his left hand, the angler tossed the fly out over the water then stripped several feet of his line from the reel and began to cast. He made several false casts, admiring the tightness of the loop his line was making, then let the line shoot forward and fall lightly on the water. The fly landed just where he wanted, and he held his breath as it drifted downstream with the current. He executed the upstream mend and got the perfect 20-foot drift. His audience, the fish, let it pass.
A hundred yards behind him, entirely obscured by trees and brush, the sharpshooter lifted a deer rifle and sighted the angler in its crosshairs. With no obstructions and a still target, it would have been an easy shot, but the angler was in a direct line with the sun, which threw a blinding glare into the rifle’s telescopic lens. The sharpshooter cursed silently. This was not something that anyone would want to linger over, but there was nothing for it but to wait until the angler moved up or down stream enough to get out of the line of the sun. Gripped with feelings of irritation, impatience and anxiety, the sharpshooter lowered the rifle.
Meanwhile, the angler had made another perfect cast without a fish. Setting his rod down, he knelt on the grass and stuck a hand into the creek. The water was cold, probably in the low fifties — maybe just a little too cold for the fish to be looking for food on the surface. He turned and looked behind him at the few patches of frost remaining in the meadow. Although he did not know it, he was looking right in the direction of the sharpshooter.
Shaking the water off his hand, he considered his options. He could fish beneath the surface with a nymph and probably catch a few fish now, but the prospect held little interest for him. It was so much more exciting to take a fish on the dry fly, where you could see it strike, sometimes even see it coming out of nowhere to do so. It brought an element of the personal to angling that he felt was missing in the anonymous strikes you got on a nymph. He decided to leave the dry fly on and wait for the water to warm up.
He also decided to move downstream, where the sun had already been on the meadow longer. As he walked he looked closely at the dew on the grass, listened to the shivering of the pine trees as a short gust of wind came up and sighed through them, and took a deep breath of the clean mountain air — so familiar, yet so different from what he was used to in San Francisco. He found himself overcome by a feeling of profound sadness as these familiar things brought home how much this place meant to him. About 150 feet from the bend where he had been casting, he stopped and looked out over the creek. The sun was now almost directly to his right, and he cast a long shadow along the edge of the bank.
Perfect, thought the sharpshooter, raising the deer rifle again. The glare was gone and it was easy to get a clean sighting. Looking through the telescopic lens, the sharpshooter aimed the crosshairs directly at the middle of the back of the angler’s head and held them there for half a minute before thinking, “He’s still now, but he could move his head any time, and I don’t want to shoot twice.” Lowering the crosshairs, the sharpshooter traced a line down the angler’s neck and spine, stopping a third of the way down and moving a little to the left, where the heart should be. It was an easy shot. The sharpshooter took a deep breath and stayed in place with the finger precisely on the trigger. A gentle squeeze and it’s over. A minute later there had been no squeeze, and the rifle was lowered.
He had been seven years old, the angler remembered, when his father first took him out here with a bag of worms and a cheap spinning rod. As is often the case with small boys, he had been lucky. A worm, drifted to a deep hole, had been grabbed by a 14-inch rainbow trout, and he recalled with pride how he had fought the fish himself while his father stood by beaming, then finally netted it. They cooked the fish for dinner that night and he shared it with his sister.
A lot had changed since then. He now fished with a fly rod and released the fish he caught, but that was the least of it. It had been a long time since he enjoyed his father’s approval and now, with the old man dead, there was no chance he ever would. Why had they done it to him, his father and sister? Granted, he was different, at least by their standards. He had known that very early on in life, even though it took a while to realize why
. And they assured him it didn’t make any difference, but he didn’t believe them. After all, what else could it be?
The sharpshooter lifted the rifle again and took aim. As still as the angler was standing, it was almost like shooting at a target. That’s it, thought the sharpshooter. Think of it as shooting at a target, or a deer. His death would mean less to the world than the passing of a deer and might even do some good. God knows he’s caused enough pain already.
It took an almost physical effort for the angler to stop brooding and will himself into fishing again. Where he was standing, the creek ran for about 75 feet in a straight channel between grassy, overhanging banks. The bottom rose to a slight crest a foot from the surface in the middle, but a slightly faster current ran over two feet of water by the undercut bank on the opposite side. The angler had caught fish here before. He stripped out some line, made a couple of false casts, then dropped the fly on the water six inches from the opposite shore. Yes! he thought as he watched it drift downstream. That’s it. Come on. Come on. Come on. Now. Now.
Ka-chow.
Rocketing out from underneath the bank, a 12-inch brown trout took the fly with a splashy grab. In the three quarters of a second between then and the firing of the deer rifle, the angler raised his arm and pulled the rod back to set the hook. That accounted for the rod being dropped on the creek bank while the angler tumbled forward into the water, which began to carry his body slowly downstream. The fish thrashed around for half a minute, but with no one holding the rod and putting pressure on the line, it was finally able to throw the hook and swim back to freedom.
The gunshot had rung out like a thunderclap, reverberating through the small mountain valley. The coroner’s report said that the angler had probably barely registered the sound before he was dead from a high-caliber bullet that entered his body under the left shoulder from behind and slightly above, tore out 40 percent of his heart, shattered two ribs, and ricocheted to the right, coming to rest just under the sternum. What the report didn’t say was that the angler had died with a fish on.
Thursday September 9, 1993
A sudden afternoon thunderstorm had driven Quill Gordon off the East Buchanan River and into the Summit County Courthouse in Harperville. The county courthouse might seem like an unusual place for a 34-year-old stockbroker on a fishing vacation to take refuge, but Gordon had his reasons. He had an above-average level of general curiosity, which was coupled with an interest in the law that came from being the son of a judge. More to the point, in this particular case, there was a woman involved.
As Gordon stood dripping in the lobby of the courthouse, he looked around and tried to gain his bearings. Summit County takes its name from the fact that its western boundary follows the divide of the Sierra Nevada. The county seat is named after Jacob Harper, a pioneer settler who was perhaps best known for having built a bridge over the East Buchanan River two miles out of town and charging a ten-cent toll for its use. It was a lucrative enterprise, but the business ended suddenly one afternoon when a drunken cowhand took umbrage at the tariff and expressed his sentiments with firearms. After Harper had been buried for a respectable period of time there was talk of renaming the town, but as often happens in such cases, no one could agree on an alternative and the idea was eventually dropped.
Wedged between the mountains and the Nevada border, Summit County is accessible from the California side through two steep and winding passes, one of which is closed for the winter. In the 1880s, a brief gold rush swelled its population to 20,000, but by the 1890 census, 18,504 of those souls had moved on. In the 1920s, the discovery of a rich vein of silver led to another boom, which ended just in time for the county to hibernate through the Great Depression. In 1990, the county had a population of 4,037, with the primary sources of personal income being cattle ranching, tourism, working for the state highway department, and Social Security checks mailed to recently arrived retirees.
The Summit County courthouse was built during the silver boom, and its grandeur reflected the temporary prosperity of the time. The exterior was made of massive limestone blocks, and inside the floors were marble. There were two courtrooms on the second floor, one of which had been converted to a general meeting room after the boom ended. Visitors were generally struck by the brightness of the lobby, illuminated through a windowed dome by the strong mountain light. A set of stairs ran from the center of the lobby to the second story, rimmed by balconies that hovered over the entryway on three sides.
Having figured out from the directory by the doorway where the court room was, Gordon walked across the lobby, his hiking boots squeaking against the marble with every step. As he went slowly up the stairs, he appreciated the fine quality of the oak banisters, noting at the same time that they were badly in need of polishing. At the door to the courtroom he removed his dripping parka and, seeing no place to put it, slung it under his arm. As quietly as he could, he turned the knob of the door and walked in, his boots making four loud squeaks against the marble as he walked to an aisle seat in the third row from the front.
The witness being sworn in at the moment looked up briefly at the intrusion, then finished his oath and sat down. He was a man of medium height with a paunch whose age might have been anywhere between 50 and 65. The little hair on his head was gray and closely cropped, and his gray eyes gave an impression of vulnerability, rather than hardness. Wearing a sport coat with lapels a bit too wide and checks a bit too pronounced and fidgeting in his chair, he had the look of a chemistry teacher who had inexplicably been asked to give a lecture on physics.
When Gordon looked to his right, he saw that the witness had grounds for concern. Rising to examine for the plaintiff was Manfred Bosso, one of San Francisco’s foremost trial lawyers. When not leaning over to get closer to a witness, Bosso stood six feet four and weighed 250 pounds. His size alone would have made him a formidable presence in the courtroom, and the impression was further enhanced by a full head of wavy white hair over a florid face with bushy eyebrows. Bosso had penetrating eyes and a deep, rolling voice that in a trial were weapons unto themselves. He had been known to strike fear into the hearts of police chiefs and the most tyrannical of business executives. Gordon guessed that the suit Bosso wore cost two thousand dollars minimum, and that he could easily afford it. Someone obviously wanted to win this trial very badly.
Sitting next to Bosso was a man about Gordon’s age. That must be the brother, he thought, as his eyes moved to the other side of the aisle where Ellen McHenry was sitting with her attorney. Gordon found himself hoping her lawyer had the facts on his side, even though, against Bosso, that wasn’t always enough.
“Please state your name and occupation,” Bosso said, with an edge in his voice.
“My name is Howard Marchand, and I practice law in this town.”
“How long have you done so?”
“Since 1962,”
“And do you number the McHenry family among your clients.”
“Not at this time.”
“Have you previously?”
“I represented the late Frank McHenry on a number of occasions.”
“Did any of those occasions involve drawing a will for him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how many times did you prepare a will for Frank McHenry?”
“Three times in all.”
“When was the first?”
“It was in 1975, I believe.”
“Could you tell the court, in general terms, what its provisions were with respect to disposing with the bulk of the estate.”
“The bulk of the estate, then as now, consisted of Twin Creek Ranch and its assets, along with lease holds on various Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands. When that first will was drawn, Mr. McHenry’s wife was still alive, and the property was left to her in trust, then to the two children in a residual trust.”
“You said to the two children. Was it left to them equally?”
“No, it was not.”
; “How, then, was it divided?”
“The ranch itself was left to the son …”
“That would be the plaintiff, Daniel McHenry?”
“Correct. He was to inherit the ranch and assets, and an arrangement was made for his sister, Ellen, to receive a portion of the annual earnings and to maintain living privileges on the property and free and full use of the ranch and its facilities for the remainder of her life.”
“Is that, in your experience, a common way of disposing of such an estate?”
“I wouldn’t say it was common, but it certainly was not unheard of at that time. And I should add that an attorney in this county doesn’t see many estates such as this.”
“Did you, as Mr. McHenry’s attorney, recommend this arrangement to him?”
“I recommended the specifics of the trust and the formal wording with respect to the disposition.”
“Let me rephrase the question. Whose idea was it to divide the property as it was done in that will?”
“Mr. McHenry’s. In such a matter, my obligation is to carry out the wishes of the client.”
“Did you in any way advise or caution him about potential problems with such an arrangement?”
“Certainly. I would have been remiss in my duties had I not pointed out to him that such an unequal disposition of the estate could cause hard feelings among the children and increase the possibility of legal action down the road.”
“And what was his response to that?”
“He pretty much dismissed the concerns. He said he wanted to leave the ranch in the son’s hands because he felt that running a ranch was a job for a man. He also said he thought his children were sensible enough not to resent the arrangement and that his daughter would probably be married and living with her husband in any event.”
The McHenry Inheritance (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 1) Page 1