The lawyer was doing an excellent job at explaining the different structures available to Mr. Waite and myself. He’d clearly done this before, with people as or even more clueless than we were, and he had multiple color-coded graphs with lists of pros and cons for things like wills, living trusts, and everything in between. He was especially good at finding oases of clarity in the desert of legal terminology, and would occasionally spice things up by hinting at the ways in which the system could provoke familial conflict or trouble for relatives and spouses of the deceased.
This was not, however, a good way to keep short a meeting with a writer. It was great fodder for a mystery plot.
“Your wedding ring, for instance,” said the lawyer. “Right now it’s yours, because you brought it with you into the marriage. But if your kind husband were to add stones to it, it would become joint property, because he’d put money into it.”
“Really?” I perked up my ears. “What about, say, a family heirloom like my grandmother’s ring? Would it become joint property if he just had it resized or polished, or would he actually have to add stones?”
The lawyer blinked at my sudden enthusiasm. “He’d have to add stones,” he said.
“Ah,” I replied, jotting this down in my notes.
The lawyer cleared his throat and continued explaining. I interrupted a few more times to ask about “trust mills” (a shady practice whereby couples are sold a living trust but the trust isn’t funded, so that the seller keeps a boatload of cash and the surviving spouse is left with nothing on their partner’s death) and sapphire mines in Australia (which I normally think of as exclusively opal country — this was a bit of a detour, but really interesting). Soon we got into the meat of probate and post-death-of-a-spouse legalities. I waved off concerns about my own assets — I’m a writer, so: what assets? — and asked a lot of questions about the line of inheritance, trusts generally, the various opportunities for civil suits in inheritance law, that sort of thing.
And then, mid-note, I caught a sharp glance from the lawyer and realized: what I was doing was building up a pretty sizeable motive. This lawyer would definitely go right to the police and tell them all about my suspicious behavior. And then, officer, she specifically asked me to explain how to legally prevent someone from contesting a will.
I’d better hope nothing untoward happens to Mr. Waite.
Ominous music.
Clap of thunder.
Shifty eyes.
