The Will Read online

  “Permanently, and no amount of after-hours martini swilling with the boys is going to change that fact.”

  “Look, Sheldon,” Henry said, “not that this isn’t fun, but don’t you have my week to destroy?”

  Parker eyed him for a long time, and Henry began to suspect that for once he would press on and try to force an answer about leaving seminary. But Sheldon blinked, then released him as usual. It couldn’t possibly be from weakness. Why he allowed Henry to maintain his secret continued to be a mystery. “All right, Mathews,” he said, “but I’m going to get you good and drunk one day and make you spill. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “I’ll cherish the moment,” Henry replied. “Bereft of human emotion yourself, you squeeze the feelings out of your subordinates like toothpaste.” Henry nearly winced, stunned by the liberty he had just taken, ready for a withering response. But Parker exploded with laughter.

  “Damn, you need a wheelbarrow for those balls?” He waved his hand. “Of course, rednecks are known for their brass ones. Having been born smart, rich, and pretty, I can appreciate that.” To Parker, a Connecticut native whose family had been inextricably woven through the highly educated East Coast elite for a hundred years, a lawyer from the Kansas backwater was like a kind of rare, exotic bird: fascinating and mostly decorative. “In gratitude for your amusing banter,” he went on, “I will leave time for some no doubt obscene dinner plans with that lovely girl from Hargrove and Lecherous you’ve been hanging around.”

  “Hargrove and Leach,” Henry corrected. “And her name’s Elaine.”

  “Whatever. Whenever I think of that woman, I lose some fine muscle control. Blood rushing from the brain and all that.” Henry absorbed the tactless comment stoically.

  Parker reached for a sheaf of papers that was sitting neatly on his desk; apparently, playtime was over. He opened the top file. “You remember the Centel thing. We put together their takeover by Technology Enterprises.”

  “Must have been two hundred pages. That was what, six months ago?”

  Parker nodded. “Already going bad.”

  Henry looked up, surprised. “It looked airtight.”

  “Seems the Centel folks didn’t understand that their jobs were a part of the deal. Losing them, I mean.”

  “TE canned Centel’s management after the buyout?”

  Parker nodded. “Those who were sacrificed were not pleased.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Sheldon’s expression didn’t change; other people’s tragedies didn’t faze him. He was a professional, like a pathologist; he could turn over the internal organs of a corporation and stare at them without regard for the people involved. “Batting second, we have our favorite health-care provider, Dr. Lindsay Samuelson. Apparently he’s once again been misunderstood by a former patient.”

  Henry grimaced; he hated those kinds of cases. The firm did little of that kind of work, but Samuelson was a friend of one of the partners. “Messy?” he asked.

  “Plastic surgery gone horribly awry, apparently.” Parker smiled.

  “Mercy isn’t one of your strong suits, is it, Sheldon?”

  “Litigation pays better,” Parker replied easily.

  Henry sat quietly, mentally calculating the hours it would take to pull the projects together. Sheldon loved shoveling the big stuff on him, which was, he knew, a kind of compliment. In spite of the ritual abuse, Henry knew from the caseload that he was rising in the firm. The Centel case, in particular, was tricky stuff, the kind of law that the firm had made its reputation on. Parker wouldn’t trust it to someone in whom he didn’t have confidence. At a minimum, withstanding Parker’s tortuous workload was demonstrating a capacity for pain that was getting him noticed. He pulled out a legal pad and prepared to take notes. “Let’s get started,” he said. “We can’t have any millionaires feeling like we don’t care.”

  Parker chuckled again, a deeply satisfied sound. He opened another folder, but before he could speak his intercom buzzed.

  “No interruptions, Suzie,” Parker said. “I’m in my weekly meeting with the brilliant young comedian, Mr. Mathews. We’re much too busy to talk to any millionaires today.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” a breathy, female voice answered over the speakerphone. Parker hired his secretaries for their measurements, not their dictation. “I explained to the gentleman several times that you and Mr. Mathews were in conference. But he insisted Mr. Mathews take his call immediately.” Henry raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  “Oh really,” Sheldon answered grandly. “And who might this very important caller be?”

  “It’s a Mr. Roger Crandall, from Council Grove.”

  “Council what?”

  “I believe he said Kansas, sir.”

  A smile spread across Sheldon’s face as he turned to Henry. “How odd, darling. That’s Henry’s hometown. The Mathews spawning ground.”

  “That’s right, Sheldon,” Henry said. “That’s in the paperwork, too.”

  “From Council Grove to Chicago. Sounds like Mark Twain.” Parker stood up from behind his desk. “Tell you what, Henry. I’ve got to go to the can anyway. You can take the call from the insistent Mr. Crandall, of the Council Grove Crandalls, from here.” Parker handed Henry the phone, and pushed the intercom once again. “Here he is, darling,” he said, and walked out of the room.

  Henry rolled his chair up to the front of Parker’s desk and spoke into the phone. “Roger?” he said. “Is that you?”

  Roger’s flat, midwestern voice came over the phone. “Daddy’s dead,” he said. “So I’m calling you.”

  Henry sat back in his chair, absorbing Roger’s words. Tyler Crandall had been a legend in Henry’s own childhood, a kind of symbol that had seemed eternal. He had been the king of Council Grove, the most powerful man in the county. The idea that he was dead seemed impossible. “I’m very sorry, Roger,” he said. “I had no idea. That’s terrible news.”

  “I got a paper says you got all the legal stuff. And it says you got the will.”

  Henry’s own father, also a lawyer until his own death, had handled the Crandall legal affairs for decades. But with his father’s death those responsibilities had been transferred to Henry. With Crandall’s apparent good health and relatively young age he hadn’t dug in; an oversight, but Sheldon was working him night and day as it was. “That’s right,” Henry answered tentatively. “I can go through the papers for you.”

  “The funeral’s Wednesday, eleven o’clock.” Henry hesitated; Sheldon had just completed his usual surgery on his week. It was short notice, but of course that was how funerals normally were. “This here says you’re the executor,” Roger said curtly. “You gotta be there.”

  Henry made a snap decision. “Of course, Roger. I’ll have to juggle some things, but I’ll come in late tomorrow and be there for the service.” Sheldon wouldn’t like it, but there really was no choice. He would have to go and work it out some way.

  “Bring the papers,” Roger said flatly.

  “I’ll take care of everything, Roger,” Henry said quietly. “Send my condolences to your mother and Sarah.”

  “We’ll meet Wednesday night and we can go over everything then.”

  “All right, Roger. Try to get a little rest and take care of yourself.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a click, and Parker reentered the room. “Sheldon,” Henry said, “I’ve got to go home.”

  For early June, Chicago was clinging tenaciously to a cool spring; near the lake the north wind came off the water from Canada with the shrill whine of an ancient, crabby relative. Henry rolled up his window as he drove the shoreline to the freeway, wishing for the summer that seemed to wait so long to appear. He parked at O’Hare and walked across the lot clutching a jacket, his briefcase, and a small travel bag.

  Parker had given him the time without much dispute, to his relief. Personal matters were allowed to intrude, as long as they were legal personal matters. Not seeing Elaine was somet
hing else; he had called to explain, and she sounded disappointed, which pleased him. They had been a little tense together lately—except in the sack, where the chemistry was undeniable—but Henry had been chalking it up to their brutal schedules. Between the two of them, seeing each other in the daylight was becoming a faint dream. But she had sounded almost . . . sweet, he thought, and then rejected that idea out of hand. Elaine wasn’t sweet, he had to admit. Or tender, exactly. But the important thing was that maybe their awkward period was ending. She had blown him a kiss over the phone, and he had hung up with a smile. He hadn’t dated much in law school, just the usual stress reliever with the others. But Elaine had come into his life with a combination of erotic power and professional ambition that he had found intoxicating. She was money, not family money like Parker but self-made, which to Henry was more impressive. A rising broker at a securities firm near his office, they made a formidable team—not just in bed but in career terms as well. Lately he had found himself beginning to think long range about her, and surprising himself by not killing the thought the second it occurred to him.

  Henry boarded the plane and took his seat in first class, a bonus from working at the firm. The office had its own travel department, and it could usually wrangle an upgrade. Henry leaned back in the chair, thinking about what Tyler Crandall had meant to Council Grove. The man hadn’t bothered to hold any office, because any one of them would have been beneath him. He got what he wanted from intimidation rather than cooperation. And Roger had been his lieutenant, although an uneasy one. Father and son were known to snap at each other, sometimes quite publicly, oblivious to onlookers. Henry had seen them fight more than once, appalled at the messiness, the lack of discretion. Apparently the power the Crandall family wielded in Council Grove was so complete that the idea of embarrassment didn’t occur to them. They simply did as they pleased, and they didn’t care who watched.

  Henry opened the big bundle of papers detailing the Crandall family holdings. Almost immediately his eye was drawn to one of the few sights with the emotional power to dismantle him. He looked down and saw his own father’s handwriting, the loose, slightly chaotic scrawl on a note attached to a large manila envelope that was sealed by a notary. Only to be opened in the presence of the immediate family of Tyler W. Crandall, the note said. Sealed this day January 17, 1993. Signed, Henry L. Mathews, Sr., attorney-at-law.

  With the sight of that note Henry’s father materialized, disheveled and frayed, in his mind. He was smiling, tossing his keys to his secretary as he walked out the door of his little office just off the town square. Henry watched his father’s back recede as he walked down the sidewalk, his image fading, getting smaller. Henry blinked and took a drink of the wine he had ordered; the picture disappeared, cast back into a compartment he didn’t willingly open. But there were times it opened on its own, over his objections, and he was forced to indulge a memory, knowing that he would burn himself on it.

  He blinked again and he was back at seminary. The open sore, the blot that had required constant explaining during the interviews for jobs. One year of his life, represented by a single line on linen résumé paper: 1994, Trinity School of Divinity. Incomplete. He had been told to leave the whole episode off—to lie, in effect—but he refused. The line would be there and it would say incomplete, because Henry’s faith had left him three weeks before the end of a semester while sitting on the second floor of the religion building.

  Seventy-two hours earlier a car containing his father and mother had been hit head-on by a drunk driver drifting across the center line as he crested a hill; one second sooner or later and they would probably still be alive. But the perfect, obscene timing of the driver’s alcoholic stupor had stolen both parents from him, smashing into his life and stealing from him a past, present, and future. His father’s car had careered off the road into a steep embankment, turning over in a horror of twisted metal until it came to rest upside down, thirty-five feet below the highway. The driver of the other car was killed as well. The autopsy showed a blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit.

  In the wake of his parents’ death belief had evaporated off Henry like a sudden shower off hot asphalt. There had been a memorial service in Council Grove, little more than a collection of platitudes from William Chambers, pastor of the Evangel Baptist Church. A dinner afterward, steaming-hot plates of food, succulent and repulsive, carried into his empty house. Looks of strained compassion, more hollow words, an aunt and uncle arguing over when to leave. Then the flight back to Louisville, Henry taking his pain back to Trinity and finding himself alone in a classroom, sitting and thinking. His books were stacked up on his desk, Bible commentaries and treatises: Pliny the Elder; the Gospels in Greek; the book of Exodus in Hebrew. Metal hit metal in his mind, smashing glass, and then an awful silence on an open road.

  Henry had pushed his books from the desk in a sweeping movement, the dust of them scattering upon impact with the floor like a holy cloud, little particles exploding into the sunlight that streamed through the windows. He sat in the chair, numb, the lives of his father and mother rolling across his memory. Lives that seemed, in the pain of death, absolutely meaningless.

  He was losing the memory of his mother, not by attrition but by forcing it away until only a few blurry images remained, impenetrable to the blotting, covering force of her death; one, a scene of her down on her knees planting beans and summer squash in the backyard, and another, a glimpse of her standing in the front doorway of their house leaving for church, tired, indifferently dressed. She had needed to be industrious; Henry’s father had spent his life doing small-time legal practice in a Kansas backwater, establishing the equivalent of a rural legal-aid office but without even the pathetic government funding. He had spent most of his time vainly fighting farm foreclosures with out-of-state creditors. Farming was dying in Kansas, family legacies turning inexorably into ten-thousand-acre agribusiness. Farm after farm was lost. Foreclosures led to divorces, theater of the absurd warfare for people with nothing left to fight over. Between that and the biggest pro bono workload in the county, his father had worked twelve-hour days, lost more than he had won, and at his death left a mortgaged house and thirty-eight hundred dollars in the bank. Henry sold the house at a loss, and there was just enough money left to bury them. After the funeral Henry gave away most of their possessions, unwilling to keep the pathetic reminders of his father’s underachievement.

  Henry ordered another drink and closed his eyes. He had come back to Trinity after the funeral and sat alone in a classroom. Once again the words came to him, just as they had that day. They were words of power, silent and liberating: It’s not true. I don’t believe it. God is silent or He does not exist. Both come to the same thing. There’s nothing for me here. His father and mother were in the ground, and that was all. There was no “by-and-by,” no preposterous streets of gold. He left his books on the floor and walked out of the building. He left Louisville the next day. Then, a string of successes: graduating in the top 5 percent of his class, law review, the state supreme court clerking job. Finally, the pinnacle: a job offer from Wilson, Lougherby and Mathers, a firm that specialized in corporate takeovers, junk-bond issues, and IPOs. Inevitably in such actions, there were enemies to be crushed. Under the tutelage of Sheldon Parker, he was thriving, becoming as lethal as a shark in an aquarium.

  The plane landed with a jolt, bringing Henry back to reality. The Chicago-to-Wichita flight was short and it was just before seven in the evening when Henry picked up his rental car. The air access to Council Grove was lousy; Wichita was too far south, Kansas City too far north. Inevitably, a drive of a couple of hours followed either flight. He pulled into light traffic for the drive, heading north. The traffic quickly thinned and he watched the numbers of the cross streets grow: 63rd Street, 91st, and, improbably, 125th—by then he was merely driving through farm country—then 197th Street, which marked nothing more than a blacktop road cutting through a cornfield, and on and on, the city zonin
g commission stretching its authority farther and farther into the optimistic absurd, until the numbers took on the grandeur of a borough of New York. Long after the last traffic light or stop sign he passed 275th Street, and then, fantastically, 303rd Street. At last, however—a good fifteen miles after anything possible to confuse with city life had passed—the numbers died out and the comfortable Kansas rural route system appeared. With those numbers he reentered a different world, a world as far away from Chicago as his own practice was from his father’s.

  Henry relaxed into the drive, and in an hour and a half he entered the Flinthills, his rental car rolling out over enormous, languishing waves of earth. Some unknown crop had just been planted off to his left, and the seeds lay hidden under great black dunes of exposed soil stretching out beside him. To his right, tall range grass grew. Henry had learned to drive on these endless ribbons of straight blacktop that cut through the Flinthills of northeastern Kansas. That land hadn’t changed appreciably for five hundred years, and the roads were a kind of brand, burned into the ground over Indian ranges with hot asphalt to show who now owned it. It was a curious feeling now, coming from his new life, to ride out on the path of a bullet into the horizon, mile after perfectly straight mile, no stoplights, no traffic, no people.

  The light gradually failed as Henry drove. The fields were broken by occasional farms, usually consisting of a weathered barn, a gathering of smaller outbuildings, some scattered farm equipment, and a frame house, all arranged close in on each other as if sheltering from the wind. Henry crested a hill as the sun vanished behind him, and the world seemed to gently fall away into a shallow valley, the distance across it so great that the air darkened into gray fog at a wide, distant horizon. Tall bluestem grass now filled endless fields on both sides of the road, a shifting, darkening blue and green that trembled in the growing shadows. Wild sunflowers lined the right, their black eyes seven feet high staring silently back at the sun as it vanished. Henry rolled down his window; the air was cool, and he breathed it in, smelling black dirt and humus. This was the world of AM radio, of country jamborees and wailing preachers at midnight on clear-channel stations three states away.