The storm swept over the mountains during the night leaving in its wake bright, blue skies. It was the first real fall morning, and at nine o’clock the air was still brisk enough to require jackets.
The offices of Evans & Thorton were located in Academy Square on West Center. The directory inside the lobby pointed them to suite 221.
“Hi. I’m Rose,” the receptionist greeted them. “You must be Connor and Elly. Mr. Thorton is expecting you.” She led them down the hallway to his office. “Tom? The McKenzies are here.”
A bespectacled man with a bushy beard looked up from a cluttered desk. He resembled a middle-aged Santa Claus. “Oh, good,” he said with a beaming smile. He said to Connor, “Mr. Evans, my father-in-law, was your grandfather’s attorney for many years. I know he would have liked to see this through to completion himself.”
Connor nodded, though he still had no idea what this was all about.
“Do you have your marriage license?” Mr. Thorton asked.
That was the one unique item Mr. Thorton had asked them to bring, along with their drivers licenses. Elly got the envelope out of her purse.
“Dotting s and crossing t’s,” said Mr. Thorton. “I don’t foresee any problems with probate, but better safe than sorry.” He glanced over the license and their IDs and handed them to Rose. “Please,” he said, gesturing to the two chairs facing the desk.
Rose returned a minute later. She handed the copies to Mr. Thorton and returned the originals to Connor and Elly.
“What exactly is this about?” Connor said.
Mr. Thorton undid the strings binding a maroon accordion legal folder and extracted several documents. He handed Connor a pen and slid the papers across the desk. Connor signed his name on the indicated lines.
“A stipulation in your grandfather’s will,” Mr. Thorton explained. “I was to see that you took legal ownership of the property, along with the contents of this brief—” He tapped the legal folder. “What you do with them after that is your business. Everything should be ready by next Tuesday. Is that okay with you? Around ten? Good.” He shook their hands and bid them goodbye.
Elly said, as they walked back to the car, “That was weird. What did he mean about legal ownership?”
Connor snapped his fingers. “My grandmother’s Ford Taurus. Those papers were the title and registration for a car. When her eyes got too bad for her to drive anymore, the car became the family loaner. The driver-ed car, they called it.”
“So he’s giving you that car? Wow. That’s quite the inheritance.”
“Technically it was my Grandma’s. Maybe it was in her will. A handme-down for the very last grandchild. The Blue Book value can’t be much more than pocket change.”
“Still, it’ll be nice not to have to borrow Aunt Wanda’s car.” They got into the Camry. Elly said, “But you had to get married, first. Who knows what would have become of you if you’d been free to go gallivanting around during your undergraduate days.”
Wanda agreed about the Taurus. “Last I heard, your cousin Joe had the car. Seemed about time to pass it on to a permanent owner.”
“So who was Mr. Evans?” Connor asked.
“Gil Evans was a good man. Your grandfather never had much need or respect for lawyers until he sold the house and set up the living trust. But Gil didn’t run around getting crooks off, and that made him respectable enough in your grandfather’s eyes. Gil died last year. I heard that his son-in-law was running things now. Did he give any indication of when this transaction would be completed?”
“Next Tuesday. There was something about a set of papers that I was to get as well—”
“I cannot begin to imagine,” Aunt Wanda said. “You think you know everything about your parents, and then something like this happens.”
Elly spent Saturday afternoon between general conference sessions grading papers. Connor came downstairs and said he was driving Aunt Wanda to Smith’s Grocery. She said, “Oh, good. Basu-con.”
He nodded and disappeared into the bedroom. A minute later he poked his head out of the bedroom door. “Where do you keep it?”
“Top drawer on the right,” she said, scribbling away in red.
Several minute later, he emerged from the bedroom and headed for the stairs. “Well—?” she said.
He gave her a blank look. “Oh, yeah.” He returned to the bedroom and came out with the prescription.
“What in the world were you looking for?”
“Nothing,” he said, with far too much nonchalance. He went upstairs. She thought he’d left with Wanda, but then came back down carrying a box. “Aren’t you going to the store?”
“In a couple of minutes.”
He took down the Hokusai print, opened the box, got out a slide projector, plugged it in and turned it on. A crooked square of light lit up on the wall. “Aunt Wanda wasn’t sure it worked anymore.” He adjusted the stands until the square of light was even. Then he took a slide out of his T-shirt pocket, slipped it into the carousel and pressed the advance button one frame.
And Elly realized what he’d found in the drawer. She leapt out of the chair with a yelp and planted herself in front of the projector lens. “You can’t see that!” She folded her arms resolutely, but soon started to laugh. “I was seventeen at the time. This probably isn’t even legal.”
“I’ll let you know once I get a better look.”
Elly sighed the universal sigh of all women when confronted with the biological realities that make men men. But it had been six years and she was curious. “Okay,” she said, stepping to the side with a dramatic display of reluctance.
A blur of color splashed on the wall. Connor pulled the image into focus. The suddenly familiar pastel of blue and peach reflected back at her: the crystal sparkles of water frozen into brilliant shards of ice, her hair dark and glassy, her skin aglow with sunlight and youth, the smooth arc of her back, the proud rise of her breasts.
“Wow!” Connor said.
Wow was right. When she peeked over her shoulder at him, he reacted a bit sheepishly, and that made her grin. “This is not altogether decent,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, but you are so good looking.”
The compliment touched her. “Thanks,” she said.
“Who took it?”
“Becky Hoggan. You remember me telling you about her? The equivalent of your Billy Bragg.”
“She takes a good picture.”
“With my camera, no less. She said there wasn’t any film in it and I believed her. I was horribly mortified at the time. Now I’d like to believe that there was a kid working in the one-hour photo shop at Smith’s and I really made his day.”
“Sure would have made mine.”
“Even educated men have such Cro-Magnon minds. I’m keeping it for when I’m well past my prime.”
“You’ll never be past your prime.” He kissed the back of her neck.
“Oh, I will be, and then you will need some reminding.”
She heard footsteps. “Wanda—!” Elly gasped. Connor fumbled with the switch and then just pulled the plug out.
Wanda knocked on the wall adjacent to the landing. “Are you ready to go, Connor?”
“I sure am,” said Connor.
She leaned forward to look into the room. “Does that slide projector still work?”
“Works just fine.”
“Good.” She cast the two of them a stern look. Elly burst into giggles. Connor looked like he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Elly gave him a good-natured shove. “I have homework to correct. You’d better get to the store, unless you want to become a father quicker than we planned.”
After Connor and Aunt Wanda left, she plugged in the projector one last time. She cast her mind back, remembering who she was at that moment, so blithely naïve, so young, not a clue about what life had in store for her. “You see,” she whispered to herself, “it turned out right after all.”
She found another hiding place for the slide. It was one of those objects made all the more valuable by its rarity and inaccessibility.