Gerald looked at the mountain of paperwork and heaved a tired sigh. Estate law was never pretty, but it became geometrically less so the more heirs and more money was involved.
At least the content of the various briefs was somewhat unusual. In contrast to most intestate cases, which tended to be single people or those felled by thunderbolts in their prime, the Trintles had maintained no less than two wills among them–it was only their sudden and bizarre ends, one after the other, that brought the case to court.
Harvard Trintle, who’d pulled himself up from a family of twelve to dowager head of a major accounting firm, had died simply enough–he’d had a heart attack on his motor yacht, apparently while trying to heft a gas can. The unusual thing was where the yacht was berthed: the port of Aden in Yemen, nearly 8000 miles from Trintle’s registered port of Boca Raton, FL. Harvard’s will left 100% of his estate to his widow.
Agnes Trintle had thus inherited millions in cash and real estate…a fact which she had only learned two days after being committed by her only child. Agnes had apparently had a psychotic break, and had been brought in raving about how a being named “Repre Demanoni” was conspiring to send the children of Earth, including her son Harold, to the moon. This would, according to Agnes, revitalize the flagging lunar radiance at the cost of billions of innocent lives. She died not long afterwards, apparently after an allergic reaction to her medication–or, rather, the peanut butter that it had been hidden in. Her will left everything to Harvard, or–if he predeceased her–to Harold.
And Harold Trintle, the last of his line, had no will at all, being as he was only 35 years old and unmarried. He spent wildly of his parents’ cash, having apparently been kept on a rather tight leash up to that point. He had apparently perished in the crash of a newly-purchased Lamborghini on a road near Bristol some months later–“apparently” being the operative word because the car had been plastered against a cement barrier to such an extent that identification of the occupants was more art than science. As an adoptee, Harold had no DNA to test against, though his personal effects were found in the car and he was booked into a local inn under the curious name “Finello Unsubject.”
