Tattered, Battered, Priceless

The chair was back in place by the time Thad heard a car pulling up, but only just. He took a seat in another armchair, and was talking to Julia about how much longer she had to go before the baby was due when Skylar walked in. "I let myself in, and have refused all offers of refreshment, although I have offered to make your wife a cup of tea twice," said Thad the moment he came into the room, which made Skylar shake his head.

"I believe you, but thousands wouldn't… How was New York?"

"Interesting. There is a definite interest from Matthew's mother in pursuing the issue of the will alongside us, which should certainly help the case. She was also able to put a figure on how much Seth could have hoped to receive; around $10million. She knew what his two siblings got from the current will you see…"

"With figures like that, we definitely need to fight for him. When I think of all the things that he wished for over the time I knew him and had to deny himself, because he could not afford them. He endured hours on end of tutoring sessions with little horrors on top of his job at the Law Library when he first moved to New York to get some savings, so that he could eat more than Ramen every night. It might be too late for him to enjoy it, but we can still put his money to good use as he would have wished us to. Now, you can fill me in on all the other details in a moment, but given the way that her eyes keep closing, I think that my wife should head to her bed for a nap…"

Thad waited for Julia to protest, but she did not. He watched as Skylar carefully helped her up, and walked with her to the bedroom. He was glad that it would not be much longer before she was due to give birth. Seeing the way that Skylar was with her made Thad very happy though, and it was evidence that the immediate mental collapse that they had all feared would occur when Seth passed away had not materialised, at least, not as yet…

With his wife settled, Skylar returned with coffee and snacks, then listened intently as Thad told him all that he knew, all the time whilst he sat in the very chair that now raised so many questions. When Thad stopped speaking, he shook his head, and said, "When the chair arrived here first, I was conscious that Julia wasn't exactly happy about it being in here, so once Seth was in bed, I decided to give it a good clean, something it hadn't had in years by the look of it. The leather is still torn and frayed in places, but it is spotless. If there had been anything, then I am sure that I would have come across it then…"

"Well, there goes that theory, which is a great shame, as it now means the more unlikely one about concealed treasure will hold more sway," sighed Thad.

"To be honest, I did try and repair one of the worst rips in the leather when is was cleaning the chair. I am no upholsterer, and do it yourself is not my forte either, but I did manage to glue closed a big tear on the right arm of the chair. When Seth sat in it the next day, he immediately noticed what I had done; he wasn't best pleased at me, thinking on it, remarking that the tear had been there for as long as he had known the chair to exist. He said that the tear was down to his grandmother; it was where her hand came to when she was sitting in it, and she used to fidget, and eventually she had picked the hole in the leather. The funny thing was that it had only ever been a hole when he was living with her; by the time he saw it again the day it arrived in Bushwick, it had become a much clearer slit…"

Skylar stopped speaking as he saw Thad was suddenly staring at him, his mouth open and eyes wide. "Do you remember exactly where that slit was, Skylar? How big it was?"

"It was a good three inches wide… wait, you don't think…"

"That the old lady had made the hole into a slit before she died; that she concealed something in that slot, pushed into the arm; and that when you made that repair, you also sealed whatever it was inside the chair? You bet I do!"

"Well, I mean, I suppose that there could have been something in there… The truth is though, I am reluctant to go and check, even in the circumstances. What if we damage the leather irreparably in the process of checking it out? Seth left the chair to me because he cherished it, and I am not sure that I want to defile it now when he hasn't even been dead a month…"

At that moment, as if on cue, they both felt the telltale draught, and looked up to see Seth standing there, his wings folding away as he smiled broadly at them. "Well, I've managed to pull of my first solo flight without any disaster, so Wes will be more than pleased. Having said that, he probably had one of the others on standby, just in case I crash landed in a heap! Now to the reason that I am here. I have been watching with interest all that has been going on in connection to my grandmother's will, and what those two creatures that brought me into this world did, or may have done; I think that the former is the more likely though. I have come now to say that the chair is well constructed, and could do with being reupholstered, so if you really believe that there is something concealed in the arm that might prove that they had faked things, then rip the leather apart. If it means that the family I was kept apart from will benefit, then I have no issue whatsoever."

Thad nodded at once, but Skylar shook his head. "Even with your agreement, I am not comfortable with ripping the leather off, given how that would look to Julia; what I will do is go and find a craft knife, and slit open the spot that I sealed up again. That way there is less harm done."

"Okay, if that is what you think is best, but if you need to tear it, just do so. I really do want you to get it reupholstered eventually, in the same colour as the rest of the soft furnishings in here, so that it blends in and satisfies Julia's need for co-ordination. She deserves a home that is worthy of Homes and Gardens, not junkyard chic." Seth's last words were uttered to Skylar's retreating back, as he headed to find a suitable knife, and so only Thad witnessed the wink that Seth gave, indicating that he knew exactly what Julia thought of the chair deep down, sitting like a carbuncle in her otherwise perfect home…

A couple of minutes later and Skylar had returned with a sharp, almost scalpel like knife, and had located the spot where the original slit had been. He found the line, neatly stuck together, and with a sharp intake of breath, inserted the tip of the knife into one end, and sunk it down to the exact depth at which he had applied the fabric glue all those weeks before. With a gentle and constant motion, he slid the knife along, having to saw a little at times as he undid the excellent repair he had been so proud of. He came to the end of the original tear and stopped, having turned what had appeared to be little more than a line in the leather back into a gaping hole. He then set down the knife, and gently inserted one finger at first into the opening, feeling just inside, and finding nothing to indicate the presence of a note written in desperate times and concealed for safe keeping. He inserted another finger, and dug in slightly on both side of the hole, feeling nothing still but the stuffing against his fingers…

He turned to Seth and Thad, his disappointment written all over his face, and said, "There is nothing there; no sign of a note. I am reluctant to delve any deeper, as if the old lady had placed something in there in her final days, then she would not have pushed it so far in that it was impossible to reach." He got back up onto his feet, looking ruefully at the cut in the leather, knowing that he would need to go out and obtain fabric glue again.

As he moved away, Seth shifted over to take a seat in the chair, and then inserted his own fingers in the tear. "My grandmother was not the most demonstrative of women, and no hugs ever came my way from her. She was, however, an advocate of the most up to date of technologies, not that most people knew that, and she urged me to be the same, hence my abilities with computer aided design. That makes me think that what you have been searching for is all wrong. You have been looking for a piece of paper, but that would not be her first choice, given her style. No, she would have chosen something much more modern, something that was still almost space-age technology back in 2011 to many." Seth pushed his fingers in deeper, and began to feel in the stuffing, trying to imagine where the old lady would have reached. Then, just as he was beginning to give up, his fingers grazed over something; he delved deeper, and realised that his trust in his grandmother to be a lot more 21st century was justified…

The slightly smug grin that crossed his face then told the two mortal men that he had triumphed where they had failed, but they were both shocked when he pulled out an old but still recognisable memory stick. "My grandmother took care of all of the family finances, not that I was ever allowed to see any details, on a rather nice PC. I have no idea what exactly will be on here, but it must be important, given that she hid it in there, and they were then so desperate to find the chair, and thus this. I suspect that it will be conclusive evidence of their misdemeanours, and they have to have worked out that she had it, and where she had hidden it. Maybe one of her carers even saw her pushing something into the slit… She must have hoped that I would find it so much sooner though. She always told me that I should have the chair when she passed away, said it insistently whenever I was in her room. That day I went to collect my belongings I had no intention of removing it, but the moment I saw the chair, her words echoed through my head, and I knew that I had to take it; if only I had known exactly why…"

"What surprises me about all of this," exclaimed Skylar, still marvelling at the memory stick's existence, "was that as you were the only person that could have accessed the house, they did not show up at Dalton seeking the chair from you! I mean, if they were so keen to get it back, then it should have been their first stop!"

"Well, according to what another angel has told me, they did show up. I have it on very good authority that they came to one of the open days at the start of my freshman year, expressing an interest in having Barnaby enrolled as a student the following year. Security was good at Dalton, but on Open Days, well no-one really secured the dorm corridors. Somehow they found out where my room was, and well, we didn't lock the doors to those rooms, as there was little of value. They entered it, and saw no sign of the chair, and being a bit stupid, they decided that it couldn't have been me as it wasn't sitting in a tiny dorm room! They never thought to check if it was in storage elsewhere, for which we can all be grateful…"

Both Thad and Skylar looked shocked at the news that they had just been given, but Seth was unconcerned. "Had I known at the time, then it might have been an issue; it might have given me false hope that they had had a change of heart and I was about to be brought into the family in which I belonged. It is silly now to even imagine that that could have been possible. Of course, there was no danger that Barnaby would ever have been allowed to attend Dalton, in case we met and became friends; had he been sent there, then I would probably have been warned off, threatened with dire consequences if we had even met… One thing that this does tell me is that my mother never really knew her mother at all, or she would have insisted that the PC was removed before she even started on her wicked plans."

With a smile on his face, Seth walked over and handed the memory stick to Skylar, who examined it closely for a moment, then said, "Okay, let's see what we have got here. If she was using a Windows based PC, then hopefully the files that she saved on her all those years ago will still be compatible with those that I have on my laptop. If not, then we will need to find a computer expert to help us unlock them."

"I am sure that David, as our resident expert on all things in the computing world, would be able to help us access the data," remarked Thad, as Skylar headed into the hall, and brought back his briefcase, pulled out his laptop and switched it on. "If we can extract the files and send them to him as an attachment, then he could probably start looking at them for us in minutes, rather than the days another expert might require."

"I am still hopeful that we might be able to unlock them ourselves," said Skylar as he inserted the memory stick into the USB port of his laptop. He followed all the onscreen instructions about the new hardware, and was able to open up the new storage on his machine. It was a bit of an anti-climax to discover that there were only five named files upon it; somehow they had all expected a myriad of information to pop up. Worse still, one of the file names did not inspire confidence; AuntLucy'sMudCakerecipe did not sound useful at all…

"Well, at least this one is a word file, so that should open with no problem," said Skylar, ignoring the file's name. He clicked on it, and sure enough, it opened in a moment. A quick glance showed it to be an electronic copy of the original will, but with the exact figures written upon it, confirmation of just how much each of the beneficiaries could have expected at the time. Looking down, they also found the address of the property on Madison Avenue that should have gone to Matthew's mother, and that elicited a gasp from them all, as it was a familiar one. Judging by the value, it looked as if she had been left the title to several apartments in the same building as Flint's home…

The second word file they opened was a set of instructions for Aaron Carmichael on how she wanted Seth to be treated after her passing. They did not read too much on that, the time now passed, but it appeared from the most cursory of inspections that he had more or less respected what she had wanted…

As for the other three files, their type was not immediately apparent, and a simple click on them did not cause them to open. Skylar frowned, and was not in the least surprised when Thad pulled out his cellphone and speed dialled a number. His opening words of "Hey, David!" confirmed exactly who the Head Warbler had called. Thad explained what was going on, then took a closer look at the screen, and read out the file names one by one, then waited for a moment as he heard something back. Then he turned to Skylar, and said, "The good news is that David knows exactly what kind of files these are; they are video files. They could be very interesting viewing indeed, given that David is of the opinion that the string of numbers are the date and time they were made. The bad news is that they are an obsolete and now unsupported file type for Windows, at least officially…"

"So they are probably the most crucial files on here, and we can't open them! The two documents that we have so far are nothing; they could claim that anyone could have typed them, even us! We are still at square one!" complained Skylar.

"I said officially unsupported. David has a program, one that they use at Google, that can unlock them and convert them to a supported modern equivalent without losing any of the original integrity of the video. Even better, he can actually send you the program, as long as you promise to delete it immediately we finish using it, right now, if you want…"

"Now that is a daft question! Of course we want it!" exclaimed Seth, which made Skylar laugh.

"I had expected as much, which is why he has already sent you that e-mail with the link to the program in it. Once you click on the link, it will take around 20 minutes to download, so we will have time for a fresh cup of coffee, and a catch up with our angelic friend…"

"That's cool; I can also go and check up on Julia whilst the program downloads," said Skylar, opening the e-mail and hitting the download link without hesitation…

In the end, Thad made the coffee, and brought it back to the living room where he found Seth sitting watching the coloured progress indicator bar moved slowly across the screen as the download took place. "I used to hate how slow these things were when I was in the earthly plane, and they seem to have slowed down even more now I am an angel," he remarked with a sigh, and Thad concurred.

"I think that it is the fact that we are anticipating a breakthrough that leads to that sensation; not just the content in your case, but the person that you might see in them as well…"

"I admit that it will be nice to see her living again, if indeed it is her on the film. It might well not be; she had a little webcam, that nobody other than me knew about, and it might well be she secreted it somewhere so that she could record the moment when they made her sign the will that stood, the new one."

"Well, we won't know until we open them, but if that is indeed what she managed to record… If they found the webcam afterwards, and worked out where it was pointing, or she left them a note saying what she had done, then it would explain why they were so keen to find the chair. It went from being a valueless item to being more important than the British Crown Jewels…"

Thad said no more as Skylar returned with the news that Julia was sound asleep, and so they settled down with coffee and cake as they waited for the download to finish, and chatted about other things… As was so often the case, the download seemed to take forever, time slowing down as they waited for the bar to fill to the end. Those last few fractions of an inch seemed to take four times as long to fill up as the rest of the bar had, at least from their point of view. Then however the word complete appeared, and the program was ready to open. Initially it would just allow them to play the files, but there was another part of the program that David could send, which would allow them to keep them stored on Skylar's laptop, if they were of interest, for posterity…

As Skylar went to play the first of the files, Seth suddenly stopped him. "Can you give me a minute to get my had round all of this… It will be odd to hear her voice and see her alive again after so long. I did wonder if she would be around somewhere in the heavenly realms when I got there, but it seems that her soul was much younger than mine, and she was sent back and into another body; she is somewhere in Texas, apparently. She was my family, and whilst I might not have had the hugs and stuff that most of the rest of you enjoyed, I still knew that she loved me in her own way, and I loved her too…"

"Some people are not brought up to be able to make grand displays of affection, and that ends up passing on down through the generations," said Thad, recalling that his own paternal grandparents had been as cold as his father. "I would surmise that those siblings of yours had a pretty loveless childhood as well. Still, it will be interesting to see what happens when Barnaby and Hilary are back in the country in a few days. I am sure that someone will take the greatest of pleasure in informing them that they had an elder brother all this time. Their reaction to that will be a great indicator as to how much their upbringing has removed the natural empathy all humans should have."

Skylar nodded, and couldn't help but think that Thad was talking as an expert in all of that as well. His parents had made poor choices and created a very dysfunctional family as a result. The parents and three siblings of the Head Warbler lived in Columbus, but they might as well have been on the other side of the world. To them, Thad no longer existed, and all because he had decided that medicine was not the career that suited him…

Eventually Seth was ready, and he nodded to indicate it was time. Skylar pressed play on the first video, taking the numbers as a date so they played the oldest first. The camera showed a view of a room in which there sat, at the very centre of the image, a familiar item of furniture, occupied by an older lady. She appeared to be asleep, but none of the three watching took that for a definite fact. Then there was movement, and in to shot walked a man in a suit, carrying an attaché case, a woman in a nurses uniform at his side. They came close to the camera, and as soon as the faces became clear, they all let out a collective gasp, one that was tinged with delight. Skylar found the pause button, and froze the shot…

"Well, well, well, so much for being in Brazil on the day that the will was witnessed! She is wearing a cheap wig, but that is definitely mommy dearest!" said Seth smugly.

"Unfortunately we do not know for certain that this clip was filmed on that day," cautioned Skylar. "The date stamp could well be for the date that the film was last edited. However, the fact she is there in a wig and nurse's outfit is controversial…"

Thad agreed, and was the one to press the play button. The 'nurse' and the man they assumed to be the new lawyer came right up to where the camera was, and they all waited for one of them to spot it and snatch it away. Instead, the two of them began to talk in low voices. The sound quality was not great, and part of what they said was inaudible, but there was enough; the words 'new one overrides the former', 'fake it if she won't freely', and 'impossible to prove in a court of law; the paper trail does not exist. People will assume that she was angry with them all…' were all clear enough, and indicated what they had suspected…

Then the screen went black, before the image came back to the same shot, but this time the 'nurse' was gone, and the lawyer had been joined by two other women. He was placing a document in front of Seth's grandmother. They watched as she looked at it, then said in a clear, carrying voice, that she had no recollection of wishing to change her will, or indeed her lawyer. She proceeded to sign it nonetheless. Then the microphone picked up the lawyer mentioning the word 'dementia' to the two women, and that was enough to get the two women, who they guessed had to be the witnesses they needed to find, to look less confused and hesitant, and then append their signatures to the document as well…

"I don't know if they will say that is proof of the fact that she was coerced into signing a new will," said Thad sadly as the clip ended. "It isn't clear enough; she does not protest for long before she signs, and the witnesses were there at the time. I had hoped that they had signed it after the fact, because that would have been a winner for our case…"

"What we do have now is not just names, but a description and ID for them both; that is the positive of that little film," said Skylar. "Who is to say that those two women are actually the two women named on the will?"

"Maybe the next clip will be more helpful," Seth responded in hope, and Thad fell quiet as Skylar clicked on the next one in the sequence. This time the whole screen was filled at first with a face, one that made Skylar sniff in memory. Then his grandmother sat back in her chair, the room pitch black behind her. When she spoke, it was with clarity, and she held up a newspaper for the day after the new will had been signed. They let it play for a while until the lady paused, signs of the illness that had ended her life apparent.

Thad looked at Skylar, and then said, "So at 11pm on the day after she signed the will they used, she sat down, with proof of the date visible, and made a living will to counter the fake one. By the sound of it, it is the original will that we know about, as she is reciting it more or less word for word; I see no evidence of a script or prompts, so that kind of disproves the dementia claim. I think that we need to check exactly what the law is on this sort of thing, but I would hope that this would supersede the paper will they made her sign. It also needs no witness, as it is the lady herself stating her wishes."

"She certainly wasn't stupid. She knew that neither her old lawyer, or indeed another new one, would be admitted to the house. She also knew that there was no way she could post the memory stick to someone else, as she could not leave with it, and there was nobody she could trust around anymore. All that she could hope was that Seth would remember what she said about the chair, and get to it before them," Skylar responded.

"If only I had thought to check the chair out fully at the time!" said Seth sadly. "Now that I think back, she said the chair was comfortable, but also that it was safe and secure. That it had hidden benefits. That I need that to stick in my memory… Oh God, she told me what she was going to do, and I didn't realise… if I had, and found the memory stick then…"

"You were young, and had just lost the only family you had ever known, Seth. You couldn't have known what to do… The past is the past, and whatever else happens, we have the evidence now, and trust me, we will be using it against the people that denied her her final wishes," said Skylar, determined that the wrongs would soon be righted on his friend's behalf by them…

They restarted the film then, and the second part turned out to be far more explosive; in it, she accused all of those that she felt had betrayed her, and the one taking most stick was her daughter, who she stated had always put her own needs before those of anyone else, even her children. Then, her tone changed, and she made apologies of her own, to her surviving son, whom she admitted was no angel, but so much better in all ways than his sister. The she came to Matthew's mother, and she apologised for not having been there for her when she had needed her the most, as she had been caught up in a welter of her own grief at losing her second son, and as a result, losing all contact. She went on to describe her as a much better mother than she had ever been, and twice the parent that her daughter was…

"The problem with my only daughter is that she was the apple of her father's eye, and even once I had realised that she was rotten to the core, there was nothing that I could do about changing her habits and ways. The mistake I made was in what happened when she fell pregnant; had her father still been alive, he would have been disappointed, the shine taken from her, and she would have been forced to marry sooner and raise Seth… And yet, that might also be a good reason to be glad that he was no longer around. If she had raised him, he would not have grown up to be a fine young man, worthy of enrolment at Dalton, the school that my own brother attended. I wish that my brother was still here, that I could have sent Seth into his care, but he has already been taken from us by the cruel cancer that is destroying me; he would have been an excellent guardian for my dear grandson…"

The old lady paused again, and wiped tears from her eyes then, before with a sniff, she started once more. "Having said that, the two men that I have asked to watch over him are exactly the kind that will ensure that Seth stays the good man that he is. I see encouraging signs that my daughter was some kind of aberration, as her children are of the same disposition and nature as the elder brother they will never know of. That is a great pity, but what I have done was to safeguard Seth's welfare, and it has to be."

"Now, as for the young man that is watching this, I hope, I have to tell him exactly how proud of him I am. I might not have shown you in the way that others do, but I am afraid that is the way that I was brought up, to be undemonstrative… Seth, I love you very much, and having you with me has coloured these last years of my life with a joy that I never thought to find again. I hope that you will find the happiness that you truly deserve, with someone special that you can adore. And on that note, I bid you farewell…"

With that, the video stopped. In the silence that followed, nobody moved. Then, very quietly, Seth whispered, "I love you too, grandma…" blinking tears away from his eyes. To have heard her say that she loved him had made his day…

The third and final video clip turned out to be the shortest, and once again showed people from a distance, only this time the sound quality was much better. This time it was completely obvious that the 'nurse' was her daughter, and the topic of conversation was the will. She was being accused by her mother of being the one that had more or less forced her to sign a new will, and the old lady was happily telling her that she had taken steps to ensure that her plan would fail. The laughter that followed was mocking, and then, her face inches from her mother's, the woman that had given birth to Seth informed her that there was nothing that she could do. The will was watertight, the signature genuine, and the witnesses were independent. Like the rest of the world, they believed that the old lady was senile….

Then came a shock; when she informed her daughter that if she was indeed senile, then she wasn't of sound mind and body when she signed, and that would invalidate the document, her daughter just laughed again, and said coldly, "Which is exactly why you all signed two copies, mother; you should really check things before you sign, as one copy was dated for this time last year, when you were in full charge of your faculties. The only difference between the two is that in this one, we left even less money to the children…"

They stopped the film there, worried how it might progress; in any case, they knew that the old lady was right already. The other clips gave them the evidence that the will had not been the intention of the deceased. Thad was confident that once Grace had seen the video clips, there would be a change, and fast. Seth was feeling a little emotional still, and he left once he had convinced Skylar that he was okay. Thad would stay and have dinner with Skylar and Julia, as he waited for the files to be converted by the second part of David's program, and then watched as Skylar sent them to the Cloud as well. Only then did Thad head for home, but as he left, he was surprised when Skylar handed him the memory stick.

"I have a feeling that this is dynamite that needs to be kept in a very safe, secure place, and in all honesty, Dalton is definitely the safest. The thing is, we have been doing a lot of sniffing around, and they will remember me, and assume that I am behind it, if wind gets back to them that there have been enquiries. They might come and pay me a visit, and not in a friendly way…"

Thad left, convinced that his young friend was worried over nothing…but if he wasn't, then the guilt would be overwhelming…