“Your mug’s still in the cupboard over at Featherstone Lane, you know,” he said, apropos of nothing, like he’d been saving it up. “Priscilla’s already put the house up for sale. Somebody ought to go get that mug before some stranger throws it out with the rest of the estate sale junk.”
“Somebody ought to go get that mug.”
Priscilla did try to contest the trust, about six weeks after the funeral, exactly the way Mrs. Vance had predicted she would.
It didn’t hold. Franklin’s office produced three years of dated, witnessed transfer documents, an independent psychiatric evaluation confirming Odetta Vance’s full mental competency at every stage of the funding process, and a clean, uncontested public will that named me nowhere at all, removing any argument that I’d manipulated a vulnerable elderly woman for personal gain.
