Free The Wind Chill Factor by Thomas Gifford

to Austin Cooper. There were envelopes with seals and no stamps as if they had never been intended to go through the mails. It was all—I don’t quite know—very official- looking, if you see what I mean.”
    Arthur raised himself slowly out of the chair and walked carefully to the window, stared down into the street. The light shifted with the movement of blowing snow but the gray glare remained. His head was wreathed in thick cigar smoke. Paula looked at me inquiringly.
    “Yes, I see what you mean,” he said finally, “but I don’t understand this business of documents. You say this is why Cyril asked John to come home? Curious, I should say. Curious at the very least.”
    “He laughed when I told him and then he said he thought it was funny, that life was so carefully constructed, detail upon detail. He told me I shouldn’t tell a soul. He said he’d contact John and be here in person to talk to me this week.” She smiled weakly. “He sounded so happy that he was going to be here … we’d been talking on the telephone for so many months.” Brenner turned to her expectantly. “He called me each week” she said, “from wherever he was—Cairo, Munich, Glasgow, London, and finally this last call from Buenos Aires.”
    Arthur thumped his hand on the back of the chair.
    “I don’t understand it. Why in the name of God would he come all the way back here, summon John all the way from Cambridge, just because you came across a bunch of Austin’s old Nazi junk? Who gives a damn about Nazis anymore, anyway?” He snorted, Kleenex at the ready. “And that solemn portentous telegram, FAMILY TREE NEEDS ATTENTION , now what the devil does that mean? And then he comes home secretly, goes upstairs, has a brandy, and dies. By gad, if Cyril were here I’m afraid I’d be short-tempered with him. All this obscurity!”
    “The point is,” I said, “that we don’t know why he decided to come back, nor why he asked me to come back. We know certain facts but we don’t know the one big fact: why .”
    He slowly levered himself down into the chair. Except for a flareup of gout, Arthur Brenner did not seem an old man.
    “You know as well as I do that Cyril Cooper was never capricious, Arthur. If he wanted me back here, well then he had a perfectly good reason. The problem is that we have not been able to figure it out.”
    Paula looked at me, then at Brenner, touched the huge safety pin on her blackwatch kilt. “Cyril knew something we don’t know, then.”
    “Of course he did, my dear,” Arthur said. “He knew why the devil he came back—which is everything at this point. Well, there’s the will,” Arthur said, changing the subject. “Fairly simple, really, John. You get it, most of it. Several million dollars, my boy, and what do you think of that?” A smile split the broad face and his eyes glistened. “You see, there was no one else to leave it to … although, and I thought it odd until this morning, there was one other substantial bequest.” He fixed Paula with those pale blue eyes. “One-quarter of a million dollars for you, my dear.” As I watched him I saw that there were tears welling up in his eyes. Quickly he snuffled and blew his nose, furtively wiping them from the corners of his eyes. The Coopers were his family.
    Finally, Paula began to sob quietly, her fingers clenching and working in the kilt. As for myself, I had not quite taken in the fact that I was suddenly a multimillionaire. The whole thing seemed faintly absurd. It was Cyril’s money; the family’s had been mostly wrapped up in foundations.
    “Well, I suppose we’d better take a look at those damned documents,” Arthur said grimly. “Damned nonsense and a waste of time.” He sighed. “But I can’t see what else there is to do, can you, John?”
    “No, I can’t. We’re going to have to look at the damned papers.” I hated it, the thought of prying into Austin Cooper’s Nazi world. I hadn’t realized how much I hated it