Gus Vanderwarf was 74 years old. He arrived 40 minutes later in a rumpled brown corduroy jacket with a bow tie, a cane he obviously didn’t need, and a leather briefcase so old it had been mended with duct tape.
He looked at the police officers, then at me. You’re Dolly’s girl, he said.
You’ve got her chin. Then he turned to the detective.
Wendell, he said because it turned out they knew each other. Everyone in Duluth knows each other eventually.
This woman is my client as of right now. And before you say another word, you’re going to want to see what’s in my briefcase.
He opened it and laid a document on the table beside the other will. It was also titled the last will and testament of Dolores M. Mercer.
It was dated July 11th. It left everything to me and to my brother Raymond in equal shares, and it named me as the executor, and it had one more paragraph, a paragraph Gus told us my mother had insisted on writing herself, word for word.
I have never been to any law office in St. Paul. I have never signed any will in favor of the Ammonson Heart Foundation or any other foundation.
If any such document appears after my death, it is a forgery, and I ask the police to find out who made it. The room was completely silent.
She came to my office in July, Gus said quietly. I’d known her since 1978.
I’m the young lawyer who fought the shipping company for her after the Holloway went down. We lost.
They paid $6,000 and not a penny more. And this summer she walked into my office, sat down, and said, “Gus, I think somebody is going to try to steal from my children after I’m gone.
I want to make it impossible.” Detective Asanti picked up the forged will.
He read the paragraph from my mother’s will. He looked at the notary stamp.
Harold Dempsey, he said. I ran that name last week.
Harold Dempsey of St. Paul was a real notary public. He died of a heart attack in March of last year.
14 months before he supposedly stamped this will, a dead man had notarized my mother’s forgery, and I was sitting at the table with both documents in front of me, and I finally understood why the teller had pressed that button. Then the door opened again, and an elderly man walked in, out of breath.
When he saw me, he stopped and his eyes filled with tears. “Oh,” he said.
“Oh, it’s you. You drive the bus.
Route 14.” This was Arin Iverson, senior private client manager of Lakeshore Fidelity Bank.
And he knew who I was because he told me my mother had shown him pictures of me every time she came in. Pictures of me standing beside my bus.
Pictures of Lily at her nursing pinning ceremony. She was so proud of you both, he said.
She would tap the photograph with her finger and say that one has never asked me for a single thing in her life. And with Gus beside me and the detective across the table, Arin Iverson told me where $67 million had come from.
It started in 1981, four years after my father drowned. In 1981, my mother cleaned the sixth floor of the Harbor Light building.
At the very end of the hallway was a tiny office barely bigger than a closet, rented by a young engineer named Felix Ammonson. Felix was 34.
His wife had died the year before of a heart arrhythmia that no one had caught in time, and he had become obsessed with building a small portable monitor that could warn a person before their heart went wrong. He worked there day and night.
He slept on the floor under his desk. My mother found him there night after night.
At first, she just emptied his wastebasket around him. Then she started leaving a thermos of soup on his desk, chicken and wild rice every Tuesday and Thursday.
Then she started sitting for 5 minutes on her break and he would explain his circuit boards to her and she would nod and not understand a word. In December of 1981, the bank that had loaned Felix money to build his first prototype called the loan.
He owed $6,000 by the end of the month or they would seize his equipment, his designs, everything. He told my mother this one night, sitting on the floor of his office, and he cried.
And my mother went home, took the union’s death benefit for my father out of her savings account. All of it, every dollar she had in the world, and gave it to Felix Ammonson in an envelope.
