My eyes trail back even farther, to the day Bradley died. “Talk to B about ME,” I read aloud. “She had to schedule time to talk about herself?”
“Am I allowed to say that he didn’t seem like a great listener?” Felix lifts the edge of the calendar, sliding out a piece of paper on official-looking letterhead with lots of initials after the name. “What’s a forensic psychiatrist? Wouldn’t that be like mental health for dead people?”
I don’t know how sleuths of yore coped without access to search engines. Maybe that’s why you had people like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, who knew something about everything. Since Felix and I are (semi) normal teenagers, I find the answer on my phone.
“It looks like they either work with criminals or—” I trail off, stomach sinking.
Felix nudges me. “What?”
“Court cases. Including ‘posthumous evaluation’ to determine ‘testamentary capacity.’” I look up from my phone. “Probably we should read the letter.”
It’s short and full of fancy terminology, but we both get the gist: She’s looking for someone to help her challenge Claude’s will. This person turned her down, but that doesn’t mean Bernie hasn’t found an “expert” to testify that Claude didn’t know what he was doing—or was “unduly” influenced by someone around him.
“I guess she wasn’t working on herself when she visited all those shrinks,” Felix says.
“Unfortunately not.” Which we should have guessed from her personality. Why try to improve what she already thinks is perfect? “So then what, they throw out Claude’s will and she gets the whole building because she’s his closest relative?”
Frowning, Felix drops to his knees and starts opening drawers. In the second from the bottom, he finds a rolled sheet of white paper. I know it’s not going to be something really good like a treasure map, but my heart still beats faster as he slides off the rubber band.
“Oh.” He smooths it with both hands. “It’s a building.Manor Estates,” he reads.
“Is that not… redundant?”
“You’ll have to ask Bernie. Apparently this is her happy place.” He points at a spot on the plans where someone has written the words “Salon (nails and hair)” in pink marker. There are other notes in gold and tan (Tea Room, Boutique), clearly added after the fact.
My eyes trace a line from the Golf Cart Depot to the Pickleball Courts. “Where are they even going to build something like this? This town is already wall-to-wall retirement communities.”
Felix bends closer to the drawing. “Oh shit.” His eyes go wide. “It’shere.”
The blankness of my expression tips him off that I’m not following.
“Look.” He points to the bottom right corner of the page. “These are the cross streets forthisblock. They want to build this thing right where we’re standing.”
“But that would mean—”
“No more Castle Claude,” he confirms. “It’s still not enough land… ohhh.”
“What?”
“Remember that empty lot, with the fence around it?” He swallows. “And the sign?”
Felix turns back to the plans, and this time I see what we’ve both overlooked until now. In the upper left corner, above an address and phone number, tiny block letters spell out the wordsODELL PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT.
“M-E,” I breathe. “As in Manor Estates. This is what Bradley was coming to talk about. Notme.”
“Although it is pretty narcissistic.” Felix scowls at the plans. “Coming in here and destroying a whole community so you can have your personal playground.”
“We need to show this to Mervyn.”
Felix grimaces. “Might be tricky to explain how it came to be in our possession.”
“Maybe he’ll be too upset to notice.” Another thought occurs to me. “He was dead wrong about Claude’s sister. She’s more than a nuisance.”
“Yeah, but he was right about Bradley’s family.”
“Wait.” I grab Felix’s arm when he starts to roll up the drawing. “If this was the plan all along, why was Bradley talking about his Dudebro Chateau? Because those two flavors do not mix.”
Felix shakes his head. Real estate wheeling and dealing isn’t part of the high school curriculum. My only frame of reference is Monopoly, and I hate that game.
