The Hero Next Time: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 4)

Chapter Forty-Five: Sunny, Summer, 2009

Sunny sat around the table in the meeting room with Marty and Yvonne, going over their workloads and determining which files to hand over to associates. He was almost too busy to attend this meeting, and almost sat it out to attend to administrative work with Tori that had been sitting too long and needed attention. 

Later, he would wonder at how close he'd come to missing reuniting with the two remaining friends of his youth. If he'd missed the meeting, he would have missed this news:

"A will needs administration. Martha Anderson passed away."

Sunny looked up sharply from the notes he was jotting. "Martha Anderson?" he asked. "Why does that name sound familiar?"

"Do you know this woman?" Yvonne asked.

"I'm not sure. I knew a Mrs. Anderson a long time ago, when I was growing up in Queensborough, but that was back in the late Seventies, early Eighties, and I don't know if I ever heard her first name; we were kids, and to call an older person by their first name would have been rude."

Yvonne looked inside the file folder containing the will. "This Martha Anderson resided on Ewen Avenue in New Westminster."

"Holy shit," Sunny breathed. "She just died? She was old back then, I thought she would have died a long time ago."

"According to her birthdate, she would have been... one hundred and four."

"My God."

"So, we need to start the process," Yvonne went on. "There's an organization the will asks us to contact, the New Westminster Historical Society, as they've apparently been working intimately to organize her memorial service long beforehand." Yvonne shook her head and chuckled. "I bet she knew her time was overdue and wanted to plan a grande send off for herself."

"She was a good person," Sunny said, not liking Yvonne's intimation that she was some kind of glory hound. "She helped my friends and me a long time ago. We helped another kid leave an abusive home."

Yvonne raised her eyebrows in surprise. Marty asked, "Do you want this one, Sunny? I know you have a lot on your plate."

"I don't know," he said, worrying that his esteem for the older woman was going to saddle him with an extra file he didn't need.

"We also need to contact the intended executor," Yvonne said, "and apparently she's been hard to track down."

"She?" he asked, feeling his heart rate pick up, although he didn't know why.

Yvonne nodded. "Her name is Rachel McWilliam."

He sprang from his chair and held out his hand. "I'll take it."

Task number one: a phone call to Marjorie Wilson of the New Westminster Historical Society. To his surprise, Martha Anderson was willing her house to them. That house with the dolls, where they'd sometimes gone to chat with her and ask her advice, where she'd made them sandwiches and lemonade, and they'd listened to Rachel play the piano. 

Rachel McWilliam. Executor of her estate. What were the chances it was another woman with the same name? Zero. He remembered how well Mrs. Anderson thought of the nearly feral girl with the soiled clothes and the tangled hair, raised without a mother for eight years of her life, by a father who worked all the time and didn't know how to raise a girl. The older woman had been like a stand-in mother or grandmother to her, so in a way it was no surprise she wanted Rachel to be executor of her will.

"We have it all set up," Marjorie said when he called her. "We put the obituary in the Record. She's being cremated in a private ceremony I and a few others in the Society are attending, since she had no kin at the end of her life. Her cremains will be placed in an urn she picked out herself to match her husband's. The urn will be on display at the memorial service this coming Saturday. We have the dolls she wants displayed, as well as the flowers, food and drink arranged for delivery to Queensborough Community Centre; we have the clippings binder that shows all the clippings that featured her over the years, and we have the slideshow of pictures she wanted projected on the wall."