My father was Edmund Aldicott. She said the name in a flat, careful voice, like a person quoting a document. He owned Aldicott industrial steel mills mostly, some railway supply contracts. By the time he died last March, it was worth somewhere between $2 and $3 million. "The number sat there between them in the firelight. " "He had one surviving child," she said.
"Me. " And he left everything to me outright, which was not what anyone else expected and not what certain people were willing to accept. She paused. My father's brother, my uncle, Harlon Aldicott, had been managing the business for the last 2 years while my father was ill. Harland believed that managing the business gave him a claim on it. He and his son, my cousin Fletcher, made their position clear within a week of the funeral.
"How clear? " Gideon asked. She looked at the fire. Fletcher came to the house with a lawyer. "Not my lawyer, his. " With a document that had allegedly been signed by my father 3 weeks before his death, amending his will to give controlling interest in the company to Haron. I'd never seen it.
Neither had my father's attorney who had drafted the original will. The signature was She pressed her lips together. It was close, but it wasn't right. I knew my father's signature, and that wasn't it, and I told them so. What happened then?
Fletcher told me that the document was legally valid, and that if I contested it publicly, I would find myself in circumstances I wouldn't enjoy. She said it without drama, just recounting. I understood what he meant. There were other documents, things Fletcher had access to because Harland had been in the business files that could be manipulated to look as though I had done things I hadn't done. Financial irregularities, that sort of thing.
He was telling me he could destroy my reputation before any court looked at his father's forged document. Gideon thought about this. Why not go to the police? Because Harlland had a relationship with the city magistrate that predated my father's illness by 15 years, and because Fletcher's document had two witnesses whose names I recognized, men Harlon had employed for the specific purpose of being useful in situations like this. She looked at him.
I had my father's real attorney and I had the truth. And neither of those things was going to be enough in a courtroom in Philadelphia in the spring of 1893 when my uncle had already spent 6 months making friends with the people who decided what was true. Doss. He was quiet for a moment. The trunk.
The trunk. She nodded. My father's attorney helped me. He gathered everything. The original will, correspondence between my father and the attorney that established his intentions, the gold certificates from accounts Harlon didn't know existed, other documents that proved the business was mine.