Page 71 of Inside the Maelstrom: Part Two
I stood up and held out a hand. “I’m sorry. You weren’t what I was expecting.”
He laughed, shaking my hand with a firm grip. Nothing like those weak, two-finger shakes some men liked to give just because you were a girl. “You are exactly who I was expecting. Will would have loved you.”
“Will?” Evan asked from the other end of the table, eyeing Mitch with his unflinching stare. They were around the same age, I realized, though anyone with eyes could tell they were vastly different people.
Some of the mirth on Mitch’s face slipped away. “We have a lot to discuss. Please, have a seat. Is Laura getting you something to drink?” he asked, before shaking his head and walking over to a cabinet that ran right along one side of the room. He pulled out a decanter of scotch. “I think we’ll need this.” He slumped down in a chair opposite me. There were several folders in his hand, and they slapped onto the wooden top of the table. “I should start out by saying that Timothy Smith didn’t exist.”
My lips parted, and I swung my eyes to Evan.
“He has a passport entering and exiting the country. Seems pretty real to me,” Evan said coolly.
Mitch raised an eyebrow. “We both know that there are ways to get around these things.” He looked back at me, and I was shaking my head.
“Nemo wasn’t real?”
“Nemo?”
Sampson’s brows were drawn tightly together. “It’s what Aviva calls him. After Captain Nemo. If Timothy Smith doesn’t exist, then who is he?”
Mitch threw back his head and laughed. “He would have loved being referred to as Captain Nemo so much. Always was his favorite Verne character.” He grabbed a photo from one of the folders and slid it across to me. In it was a smiling blond man with bright, ice blue eyes that turned down at the corners, giving him a sad puppy look, kind of like a husky. “This is Willhem Vernon Timothée Vinchenzo the Second. He was the only son of a French heiress and a Russian diplomat. From what I’m aware though, they sent him to some fancy boarding school here in the States from the age of five, and he never moved back to France. You’d never know from talking to him that he didn’t just grow up in California or something, you know?”
I… What? “I don’t understand.”
Mitch gave me an empathetic look. “I know. Maybe it would be better to start at the beginning?”
I nodded enthusiastically, since this shit made no sense.
“I met Will in college. He was handsome and exotic, but introverted. He hated the fact that the girls flocked to him like moths to a flame. Guys, too. He spent so much time being aloof that I actually thought he was a bit of a dick.
“We became friends because he bumped into me on the way to class one day, knocking all my books out of my hands, and I called him a frog fucker. I don’t know why it made him laugh so hard, but he helped me pick up my books, and that was that. Friends for life.”
There was that sadness again, and my heart broke for Mitch.
“Will might have been an introvert, but he was one of those people who everyone loved immediately. People gravitated to him. He was a charismatic guy when he wanted to be, but underneath it all was this sadness that just never went away.”
Fuck, I knew that sadness. It had dogged my steps for most of my life.
“When he was twenty-five, he tried to commit suicide. It was rough for all his friends, because up until that point, everyone thought he was this happy, buoyant person.” It was clear even the memory shook up Mitch. “We’d been sharing an apartment on the bay, and I found him in the tub with his wrists cut. He got patched up, then they sent him to the psych ward. That was his first time in an institution, but it wouldn’t be his last.”
Mitch downed the rest of his scotch. “His parents found out, and basically disowned him until they died in a plane accident coming out of Moscow. On their death, Willhem became the beneficiary to the largest inheritance France had ever seen, as he was the last of the line on both sides of his family. If anything, the money and the pressure made Will even more unhappy, so he basically became a silent stockholder in most of his family’s companies, selling off what he couldn’t passively operate. It wasn’t always smooth sailing but it was a situation that worked in the end.”
He looked at Hendrick. “The fact it was you, Mr. Kenley, and you, Mr. Rubio, who joined in this chase… Well, that’s ironic in the extreme. Both of you young men in the same position he’d been in at your age.”
Sampson shook his head. “We weren’t chasing clues in a book, Goetz. We were chasing the girl.”
“Touché.” Mitch looked back at me. “About two years ago, he came to see me. Charmed the hell out of my receptionist. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years, but Will was one of those people who could disappear for a decade, yet the time apart would vanish in a moment when you reconnected. Anyway, he wanted to create a will.”
“He was planning on dying?” I breathed.
Mitch nodded. “I suspect so. He didn’t really say, and honestly, he seemed good. Happier than I’d seen him in ages. But when he listed the terms of his will, I wondered. I pressed him, and he swore he wasn’t going overseas to do something stupid.”
Hendrick shrugged. “In his mind, it probably wasn’t stupid. To him, it was probably the only choice, so he wasn’t really lying.”
“I’m a lawyer, Mr. Kenley; you don’t have to convince me of technicalities. Anyway, I drew up the will, and that was the last time I saw him. He sent me a letter, notarized by the Italian version of a legal registrar, that basically said that if I was contacted by an unknown person, that person would become his beneficiary.”
I couldn’t breathe again. It felt like I needed a doctor or something. Lungs were supposed to be reliable, right?
“His what? What does that mean?” I forced the words out past the lump in my throat.
