The younger lawyer was named Marcus, he was from Shaker Heights, he had attended Penn, where he had majored in philosophy and lettered in rowing. After a stint working in a rural Mississippi town with Teach for America, he had gone on to Stanford Law School. He had a lovely wife of Korean ancestry and a six-month-old baby and was just days away from closing on a Tudor Revival three-bedroom in the Queen Anne neighborhood—a bit of a fixer-upper but with good bones, a great family dwelling once they pulled the asbestos-covered heating ducts out of the basement, a job on which they were taking bids now. Alice extracted all of this from him and then, almost as an afterthought, got him to admit that his specialty was structuring transactions in the tech industry and that he didn’t really know anything about family law and had never drawn up a will. Before Stan—who had spent most of the conversation checking his phone—was fully aware of the trap that his young associate had just stepped into, he made a similar confession. Now that it was too late, he assured Alice that Christopher Vail had been quite good at that kind of thing.

Alice shook her head like a disappointed mom. On the flight from Omaha last night, she had blown fifteen bucks on wireless Internet service and apparently spent the whole three hours researching Chris Vail’s background and career and found no evidence at all that he knew anything about wills. “Yesterday I had Zula send a scanned copy of Richard’s will to our family lawyer back home,” she announced, “who may be a small-town lawyer but I can tell you that he has made out a lot of wills, as it is a major part of his practice, and he found three things wrong with it on the first page. Rookie mistakes, he called them.” She shook her head.

Stan had put his phone away and was sitting there red faced. Marcus was agog.

“Do you know what it looks like to me? It looks like this Chris Vail character got a call from Dodge that Dodge wanted a last will and testament drawn up, and he said to himself, ‘I don’t want to lose my billionaire, I do believe I’m just going to take care of it myself. How hard could it be to draw up a will?’ And he wrote the first and probably the last document of that type of his career, and I’m sure he was well-intentioned, but he botched it.”

“Alice—” Stan began.

“Malpractice, is what some would call it,” Alice said.

This woman was a cobra. Corvallis made a note of it.

Wishing he were elsewhere, he let his gaze stray to Zula, who was looking back at him deadpan. Welcome to the family, C-plus.