PART 4
The letter continued.
I finished paying that debt off in 1986, Marguerite, and I genuinely believed, for almost forty years, that the entire matter was behind us. Then, last spring, a collections firm I’d never heard of contacted my attorney, claiming to hold a portion of the original 1975 note that had apparently been sold off in pieces over the decades, changing hands through firms that no longer even exist under their original names. They claimed the debt, with compounded interest, had never been fully satisfied, and they intended to pursue any assets connected to my estate to collect it.
Elias looked into it thoroughly, and the claim itself is almost certainly not valid — the original note had a clear satisfaction of debt filed in 1986, properly recorded. But claims like this, even weak ones, can tie up an estate in court for years while they’re being sorted out, freezing assets, delaying inheritance, costing everyone involved money and peace of mind neither of us wanted to hand our family after I’m gone.
Worse, Marguerite, once I started looking closer at where this new claim had actually originated, I found out Roland himself had a hand in it. He’d sold a stake in the original debt years ago, to cover a different set of financial troubles he never told Harriet about either, and the collections firm now pursuing my estate got its claim, however weak, directly from that sale.
I set the letter down for a moment, my hands not quite steady.
“Roland did this,” I said. “He caused this, decades ago, and now, even after Silas is gone, it’s still following us.”
“That appears to be the case,” Elias said carefully. “Though I want to stress, the claim itself has almost no legal standing. Silas and I built the entire plan around making sure it never got the chance to matter.”
