Free The Secret Keeper by Dorien Grey Page A

I asked.
    “Interesting you should bring that up,” Mel said. “Grandpa B had named his lawyer, Eli Prescott, to handle his affairs, but Mr. Prescott was killed in a car crash less than a week before Grandpa B died. He and Grandpa B were good friends, and his death hit Grandpa B hard.”
    “Hard enough to drive him to suicide?” Jonathan had mentioned the lawyer’s death and its effect on the old man. And I remember Marty’s mentioning there was something about it in the police report on his death.
    Mel shook his head. “No. Grandpa B was both a pragmatist and a realist. He’d lost good friends before. He knew death was a part of life, but he wanted to hold on to life as long as he could.”
    “I’d assume there was an alternate executor to his will?” 
    “Yes. Co-alternates: Uncle Richard and my mother.”
    Apparently, my face reflected my thoughts. He paused to take another drink of his coffee, then said, “Yeah, it just gets better and better. And that brings up another issue. A big one.”
    “Which is…?” I asked.
    “I went over to see Grandpa B right after Eli Prescott died—the day I met Jonathan, as a matter of fact. He was still really upset and was sort of rambling, I’m afraid. But he said something about making a new will, and said I shouldn’t worry. I told him he didn’t owe me anything. He asked me not to say anything about it to anyone, and he didn’t go into detail, but I know he’d been pretty fed up with Richard and his kids for a long time. The thing is, I wasn’t able to tell if he’d already made out a new will, or was planning to do it when Eli died.”
    “So you didn’t tell anyone about it?”
    “No. I did ask my dad if Grandpa B had ever talked to him about a new will, but I didn’t say I knew he had one. 
    “Anyway, after Grandpa B died, Andrew Weaver, the lawyer who took over Mr. Prescott’s clients, found an unsigned copy of a new will Mr. Prescott had drawn up, apparently just before he died. Mr. Weaver called my mom and Uncle Richard to see if they knew anything about it, whether Grandpa B had ever signed it, or, if he did, where the signed copies were. Mom didn’t even know there was a new will, and Uncle Richard claimed he didn’t, either, but I wouldn’t believe a word he said.
    “Mr. Weaver said there had to be copies somewhere, since it didn’t appear to be a rough draft, and wills are always drawn up in sets of four. Nobody seems to know what happened to the other copies, or if Grandpa B ever signed it. And then I found out that Mr. Prescott’s home had been burglarized during his funeral! I think the burglary was just a cover-up for looking for the new will.”
    Now, that was an eye-opener. If true, it could suggest Prescott’s fatal accident could have been murder, to hide the fact there was a new will. Whoever did it must have been pretty sure Prescott didn’t have the signed copies with him at the time of his death, because they wouldn’t have risked having the will found in the wreckage. How they might know was another matter. But if that were the case, the funeral would have then provided a perfect time to search Prescott’s home for it. 
    In any event, it opened up a very large can of worms. 
    I again pulled myself back to the moment as Mel was saying “…and since nothing was found among any other of Mr. Prescott’s or Grandpa B’s papers, and the new will was never filed, with Mr. Prescott dead there’s no proof it was actually signed. So, unless we can find a copy that Grandpa B signed, the original will retains precedence.”
    “Might it be in your grandfather’s safe deposit box, or his home safe?”
    He shook his head. “Mom and Uncle Richard went to the bank just to see if it might be in the safe deposit box—as co-executors, they both had to be there in order to get into the box, which is probably a good thing—and only a copy of the original will was there. As for a home safe, he didn’t have one.”
    “How do you