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Early on, Brett and I bribed a doorman to let us in to see Bernadette—she preferred the name Bernadette over Mom. We even engaged a therapist to help us bring her back into the family fold. No go.
From our descriptions, the therapist speculated that she might have mild dementia, possibly paranoia; he couldn’t say for sure, and you can’t force somebody to accept help or be treated.
One of the little known facts about extreme wealth is how stunningly long you can go with untreated mental illness if that’s what you want.
You can believe in bizarre things and rave and go out to restaurants and order foods not on the menu, and they’ll call you eccentric and smile and thank you for the huge tips.
And obsequious lawyers on your payroll won’t push back when you decide to leave everything to your dog, in care of a woman who claims to sense that dog’s thoughts or whatever it is, because the checks you write are good.
The checks you write are so very good.
We had no clue she was dying, of course.
I shove my hands in my pockets.
I glare over at Malcomb, sitting there with his colleagues, hiding behind confidentiality. I get it about the confidentiality. Still. He could’ve found a way to alert me.
Years ago, back when Dad died, Bernadette assigned Dad’s share of the voting rights to Kaleb, Dad’s second-in-command. It made sense at the time—I was in high school, too young to run things.
But then I graduated with my architectural degree and took over as CEO. I started to build and acquire other companies, turbocharging our growth.
Still my mother kept Kaleb holding ultimate veto power. She and I would argue about it, back when she was still talking to me.
Kaleb didn’t use his veto power a lot. He was happy to let me make Locke into the powerhouse it is, happy for my excellent ideas, but he’d veto the shit out of the things I cared most about.
I was CEO, but Kaleb was a roadblock to the real change I wanted to see.
Kaleb’s a decent guy, but he’s stuck in the legacy way of building. Cost per square foot.
It was bad enough having my hands tied by Kaleb, unable to fully run the company as I wanted. And now?
Now it’s controlled by a dog and a scammer.
Brett’s talking about Malcomb. “…probably an extensive competency determination he and his estate people put Bernadette through before allowing this…enough not to get disbarred.”
I nod. Malcomb’s good. He would’ve ensured she was of sound mind—sound enough, anyway, for the will to hold up in a court of law.
“So. Not the straight line to control I envisioned.” I say it lightly, like it doesn’t matter. Good old Bernadette, lashing out at me one last time for making her life miserable. My rap sheet for that stretches clear back to infancy.
Again the crafty little scammer asks what things mean. What exactly Mom stipulated. She’s a good actress, I’ll give her that. With her glasses and glossy ponytail and demure dress. A simple string of dark beads.
This is the woman my mother favored over her own son?
“I’ve prepared extracts,” Malcolmb says, leading her to the table. I follow along.
Malcomb hands her a stapled sheet. “Bernadette divided her assets three ways. Henry and Brett have inherited a number of properties and a share of liquid assets save what she distributed to the five second cousins. Smuckers’s inheritance is listed here. He’s in control of the family business, Ms. Nelson.”
She looks at the sheet, stunned. “So all the cranes and…”
All the cranes. I catch Brett’s eye. The cranes? Like she thinks we run a crane company?
“She left Smuckers fifty-one percent of Lockeland Worldwide, Ms. Nelson,” Malcomb says. “It’s a global corporation that includes a dozen distinct entities.”
“What does it mean though?” she asks.
Malcomb shoots me a nervous glance. Yeah, he should be nervous. He’ll never work for this family again, and nobody I know, if I can help it, though he may have a future in drawing up wills for people who want to torment their kids.
He points to the sheet. “These are the companies under Smuckers’s control.” My stomach turns as she reads silently. I know the list by heart. It’s arranged in chronological order. Locke Worldwide Construction comes first—that’s the company my grandfather founded to build homes out on Long Island. The development company comes next, when my father joined in and they started building grocery stores and shopping malls. As soon as I came on as CEO, we exploded the firm out into high-rises, massive public projects, lending, even asset management, because giant buildings are investment vehicles, just like stocks, and so that’s the financial portion.
