A Widow's Curse by Phillip Depoy Page A

it?—inheritance?”
    â€œThe funds that paid to get you out of Blue Mountain and into your university were all gleaned from—”
    â€œIt seems,” I picked up, “that it was all financed by the sale of this painting—something that my great-grandfather went to buy at some auction. On a whim.”
    â€œWhy couldn’t it have been any one of the three items that you’re talking about?”
    â€œLook at the asterisk,” I told him.
    He squinted, saw the asterisk, and went to the bottom of the page, where it said, “Sold/money held in trust for Fever Devilin/see attached.”
    He shuffled through the rest of the papers in the folder.
    â€œThe painting is the only thing that was sold?” He kept looking. “So where’s the piece of paper that says what happened to the coin?”
    â€œRight.”
    We spent the next twenty minutes in silence, raking through yellowing evidence, pages that had been amended, erased, altered with white-out, torn, folded, and stapled. It was hard to make anything out of them. At least two generations of small-town father and son lawyers had seen fit to correct or update almost everything on the original page, when it seemed to me that a more ordinary practice might have been to keep the old pages intact and create new documents for new situations. But, of course, I had no law degree. The system that had been used by the people who had attained such degrees rendered the documents impossible to understand clearly. Perhaps that was their aim. Or perhaps such is always the case when a son tries to rectify the mistakes of the father; when the sins of the father are visited upon the son.
    Becky brought us coffee and left silently. She even tiptoed out. I assumed she went home. I heard the phone ring once, then the sound of Taylor’s voice on the telephone, but it was impossible to hear what he was saying. I tried harder to focus on the folders.
    The third file, marked “Misc.,” offered almost nothing in the way of useful information. It did have several typed pages describing the coin Conner had purchased: “Saint on one side, capital B on the other,” but otherwise it was filled with petty receipts and inconsequential notes.
    My “Correspondence” file yielded little better, offering tantalizing new mysteries. There was a letter from an art dealer that said, fairly plainly, “John Sell Cotman was, of course, a landscape artist and rendered no portraits.” Another letter from a rare coin collector reported that the coin in question was not a coin at all, but a medallion and, in fact, a fake.
    Nowhere could we find a document or even a notation that indicated any sale of the coin, nor was it insured or given a monetary value in any folder.
    Andrews looked up at last.
    â€œThe painting was the only thing sold, it seems, and maybe that was a fake, too.”
    â€œLittle mention of the coin, and less of the so-called Cherokee artifact.”
    â€œAny idea what that might have been?”
    â€œThe Cherokee thing? None. Not really my field.”
    He pushed the file away from himself.
    â€œDid any of this tell us what we wanted to know,” he asked, “or do I have to chalk this up to just another of your many and much-needed psychological breakthroughs? I mean about your father—”
    â€œWell.” I folded my hands. “In no particular order: We can be relatively certain the coin Shultz’s father bought had once belonged to my great-grandfather; we know that neither he nor my father sold it to Shultz’s father, and so we know that the sale may well have been illegal. We hear from an alleged expert that the coin is fake, though I believe that assessment to be incorrect. I discovered just enough about the Cotman painting to want to know more about it, and him—the painter himself. In fact, we learned many things from these files—not the least of which is the certainty