When the baffled heirs leave the Waters House, the grey day has morphed into a full-on storm. Running to their cars, the heirs create their own traffic on the already flooded roads.
The next day, the roads are so flooded that no one can even get down the driveway. The heirs were woken in the early hours of the morning by Tremors, rapping on their doors with a box of portable phone chargers. "I get it, Mr. Mack. The same thing happened to me this morning. I woke up, went to check my phone and lo and behold: it was turned off. Dead. During the night, the electricity went off, and it still hasn't returned. How will we survive without our smartphones, you may ask? Well, I'm here to tell you, you don't have to! Apple, Samsung, Windows, even Blackberry, I've got you covered. For just ten dollars- "
"Here," Mack cuts her off. He passes her a twenty-dollar bill, takes two chargers, and slams the door in Tremors' smiling face. Between Raina's hundred (all her lawyer gizmos), Mack's twenty, her mother's five (family discount), the money she had gotten off Trip and Linc, and her half of the check (although she thought she might have to use that for something else) Tremors was well on the way to starting a retirement fund.
Soon after, the lights come back on. If Tremors' clients are angered, she is safely barricaded in Ms. Romanoff's apartment while they go over their clues. Actually, all of the heirs were at least thinking about their clues- other than Cal and Wanda, who had not received their clues yet.
Calvin Johnson was not even sure he wanted to play the game. There had been a time when he would have gone just to get his half of the money, but that time was past. He did not need it now, however much Jiaying would like a little extra.
He is the only person thinking this way; everyone else is playing to win.
And to do that, the heirs need a copy of the will.
Darcy and Jemma are invited in for coffee at every apartment in SHEILD Towers other than Darcy's (because she couldn't invite herself in could she?) and the Hunter-Morse-Campbell-Banner's (how everyone in that family managed to have a different last name Darcy would never know). The conversations all seem to go something like this:
Your job? "Well, I was a paid intern to Ms. Jane Foster, the Nobel Prize winning scientist. She's working on a movie now, with her boyfriend Thor Odinson. Yes, the famous actor. I was supposed to be there as well, but now…" How sad. Your diagnosis? "They're giving me six months, longer with the treatments. I'm already losing my hair, so it must be working." Your recording. "Jemma and I have to go, the dear promised to help me around the building until I'm feeling a bit better." And on to the next apartment.
When that is done, the pair knock on the Morse-Hunter's door, which is opened by Bruce Banner in his wheelchair. "H-hi," he says steadily.
"May we come in?" Jemma asks, but the sentiment is lost as Darcy pushes past. The invalid seats herself on the couch, patting the space next to her. "Come on, Jemma. She's so proper," Darcy adds to Bruce.
Bruce laughs. Today was turning into an adventure, it seemed, with uninvited guests and murderers and clues and wills- all the possibilities were making his head spin. "T-ttea. In kitch-chen," he stammers, taking care to point in case they didn't understand. "And cak-ke."
Jemma gets up to serve the refreshments immediately. Darcy admires her partner's manners, her selflessness. If it were Darcy she would have just sat there until someone else managed to get it, even if the only people around were invalids.
"So, just putting this out there: I'm not the murderer, Jemma isn't the murderer, and we know you aren't the murderer."
Bruce nods. That much seemed obvious. No one would think he or Ms. Lewis was the killer because they were sick. And Jemma was just too nice to kill someone. "Wha isss W-aaann?"
"Wan?" Jemma asks excitedly, coming in with a tray. "W-A-N?" Bruce nods vigorously. "Like, Obi-Wan Kenobi?"
Both Bruce and Darcy look at her in surprise. "Star Wars guy?" Darcy asks.
Jemma looks scandalized, but bites her tongue. "He was in the Star Wars movies, yes."
Bruce looks confused. "Te-lll b-outt himm."
"Well, he was killed by Darth Vader in the first movie. Well, the fourth." Jemma sighs. "He was killed in the first movie of the original trilogy," she clarifies.
So this Obi-Wan guy was killed by an Evil Father, Bruce thinks. Interesting. "H-iss daad?"
"Oh, no. It was the main character's father, although we didn't know it then."
Who was the main character? Bruce ponders. It could have been Waters, he was the dead man. Or Tremors, she certainly demanded a lot of attention. But they were all heirs, it could have been any one of them. Bruce changes his tactics. "R-recoor-dingg."
As soon as half the word has left his mouth, Darcy is up and halfway to the door. "I've got to go. Meds and all," she excuses herself. "Come on, Jems. I need you to open the door for me."
"Right," Jemma says. "Sorry. Bye, Bruce."
Bruce nods, already deep in thought. The clues were easy enough to remember:
TRULY WAN I'M A CHANCE BEAT
Wan meant Obi-Wan, the guy who was killed by an evil father. Beat= music, which Tremors was always listening to. Tremors' father was a vet, he would have access to drugs that could kill a person, but to do so he would have to lie, which referred to truthfulness. Truth= truly. Bruce was not sure about 'chance' yet, but maybe Leo would have some idea. If he ever came over to talk about it, that was.
Bruce closes the door behind them, locking it securely. He wheels over to the window, binoculars bouncing against his chest. Banner immediately knows where to look. A curtain in the window of the Waters' House twitches.
Tremors Johnson thought she knew exactly what her clues meant.
I AM THE EVIL ON TERD
"I AM means will. . Evil is Live backwards, like the album Evilive by the Misfits. And I just realized 'ON' could be 'NO'. As in: No shit. Which leaves THE. I think he's referring to 'The The', which is another band."
"So everything relates to music. Or is a way of saying duh."
Tremors nods. "And Waters was all about money, about being number one. So you know what we have to do?"
"What?" Natasha asks, smiling. It was nice having a kid around, all that boundless energy and imagination.
"The Billboard charts. Now, in the last sentence of the will, Water's said the word 'water' four times. So we need to make the fourth song on the Charts, make it first and keep it there."
"How do we do that?"
"Well… we'll need to use the money to buy lots and lots of the track. And stream it on YouTube or Spotify a lot. And tell everyone you know to listen to it. And you can play it once or twice while you're seeing people, and then they'd want to hear it more and more because their brains would be singing the chorus over and over again."
Natasha looks amused. "Okay. What is it?"
Tremors taps her phone a couple times. "Desiigner- Panda," she says, looking up with a wicked smile.
"This makes more sense," Mack says, separating the words DANCE and REPEAT.
"You heard the doorman, it's repeat dance." Jiaying searches her brain for his name, but cannot find it. She has never bothered to learn it. Oh well, Jiaying does not really think it matters all that much. She puts it out of her head and puts the words back together again. Slowly, Jiaying notices a pale, smallish figure staring out the window. "Is she trying to get our clues?"
Mack looks around. "What? Wanda?" Mack shakes his head, looking back down at their clues. "She can't speak English."
"Are you sure?" Jiaying asks rudely. "How do you communicate then?"
Mack says something in a different language that's too profane to be translated.
"You learned Russian?"
"Sokovian."
Jiaying waves a hand, not wanting to divulge the fact that she had no idea where that was. "Same thing."
Mack clenches his fists briefly. Waters had a sense of humor, pairing him with this bigoted woman. "It's not."
"It doesn't matter. Do you remember what was on that girl's leggings yesterday? The one with cancer." Another name Jiaying had disregarded.
"Was I supposed to?" Mack asks sarcastically. Mack had been far too busy cursing Waters's soul.
"Every detail counts," Jiaying says aloofly. "She was wearing black leggings which had female dancers on them, loads right next to each other."
Mack shakes his head. "How exactly do you think Waters knew she was going to show up wearing those?"
Jiaying ignores his last comment.
A DANCE REPEAT TRULY I'LL
"I'll means 'I will'."
"I know."
"Are any of the heirs named Will?" Jiaying asks.
"No."
The money was the most important thing for Lincoln and Trip. So that got done first. Half for Trip's car fund, the other half would go to the bakery. And then the clues:
WHO OR WHAT I TO ROW
"Questions," Linc mutters. "They're questions."
"Yeah but what are the answers?" Trip, sitting on the other side of the table, locks in on one word. "Hey, what's OHW mean?"
Lincoln looks it up. "It's a shoe company or an abbreviation for One Hit Wonder. Why?"
Trip turns WHO 180 degrees. "Got anything now?"
"Something, maybe. I need more time."
Trip gets up, staring to jog in place. "Great, call me when you figure it out." He jogs out, planning to run up and down the stairs for the rest of the day.
After an hour-long drive through the eye of the storm (at six a.m.), Raina Z was 'stormed in' at the law office where she worked. It was not the worst place to be; they still had power and the coffee stand in downstairs in the lobby was open for business. Upstairs was a restaurant, also open. Turned out people in Waterstown were still influenced by the workaholic behaviors of one Steve Waters, even now that he was dead.
Raina did not feel as productive as usual, with the clues running around her brain. And hell if she knew what they meant.
KEEP CORE THEY WILL DO
Waters knew how to write, yet these supposed clues made almost no sense. Which meant his options were limited, which meant their clues were all a part of something bigger.
But how to get all the heirs to pool their clues? That was the real question, not who may or may not have killed Mr. Waters. And did it really matter? If Waters was murdered, the man got what was coming to him.
"Thinking about those clues?" Grant asked her, making Raina jump. Hot coffee sloshed out of the lid and handed on her new white shirt. "Oh shit! I'm sorry!"
Raina sighs. These days, Grant seemed to be everywhere. "I'm fine." She wasn't really, but 'fine' was decidedly better than 'on the verge of a malfunction'. "I've got another shirt in my office."
"I can get it for you," Ward offers.
Raina internally grimaces, thinking about the state of her office after a run-in with the office klutz. "No, it's fine."
"At least let me buy you dinner. You worked straight through breakfast and lunch."
"Grant, we can't keep doing this." Raina turns around to leave, but Ward takes her arm.
"We can have dinner, Raina. No expectations other than a little conversation. I always feel weird eating alone in public."
"I've got a lot of work to do."
"Come on, do me this one favor. I'm a lawyer who has to work as an assistant at a law firm to pay rent. I'm sad enough."
Raina thinks for a moment. What harm could one meal do? It wasn't like they had to take it further. "Fine. Just let me change my shirt."
Jemma sits down next to the envelope of clues and a script. "That for Ms. Foster?"
"No. They're giving me a part in her and lover boy's movie."
"Cool." Jemma tries out the word, feeling it on her tongue. "Anyway, let's start with the clues." She opens the envelope and holds it out to Darcy. "You take one first."
Darcy nods, hesitantly pulling out a clue. "Save."
Jemma pulls out the second: Shouldn't
They alternate, until all the words have been pulled out.
I'LL SAY SHOULDN'T IS TO SAVE
"Now put it together with the others."
"I'll say shouldn't is to save depressing but obvious repeating dances row, row, row, your boat crap or shit Wan," Jemma says aloud. "Doesn't exactly make sense."
"No," Darcy says, thinking. "Get anything from your mother or Tremors?"
"No, their rooms were locked up tight. Sorry, Darcy." The doorbell rings. "I'll get it." Jemma quickly unlocks the door and throws it open while Darcy hides their clues. "It's Lincoln," she calls back to Darcy.
The teenager is holding a small notepad and a pencil. "Anyone want to play a game of tic-tack-toe?"
"No!" Darcy calls.
"But thank you," Jemma adds, closing the door. There are a whole lot of locks on that thing. "Why don't we listen to the recording?"
"Yeah, sure. Just let me find my iPod." Darcy looks around, a little lazily at first but then almost franticly. "Where is it?!" Her and Jemma comb the apartment, looking for her iPod. After an hour of searching they finally give up. "Shit!" Darcy curses. "One of those bastards stole it!"
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