Where There's a Will

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Authors: Aaron Elkins
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, det_classic
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“It’s wonderful! A high-frequency UV thing, a real astral-plane consciousness-level entity. It’s very visible. I could help you learn to see it in no time. There’s a… let me see… a tall, white-bearded man with one blue eye and one gray eye who looks after you. Hasn’t anyone ever told you? Surely you’ve felt him?”
    Gideon was practically bent backward over the table. “Well, actually, Hedwig, I can’t say that-”
    “My friends call me Kuho-ono-enuka-ilimoku, Gideon. It’s my past-life vision name.”
    “Uh… past-life vision name?” he said and bit his tongue, but he was saved by the appearance of Auntie Dagmar, a diminutive, erect, elderly woman with a well-tended but slightly askew black wig and piercing, intelligent gray eyes in a lean, Swedish face. In one hand was an unlit black cigarillo; in the other a cordial glass of amber-colored liquor. Her clothes looked expensive: a plum-colored pant-suit, silk blouse, and turquoise earrings in the form of tortoises. Around her neck was a carelessly knotted blue Hermes silk scarf with small white stars. (Gideon knew it was a Hermes because she had put it on inside out and the label showed, which merely added to her queenly air, as if she were above the need to dress in front of a mirror.)
    “And what exactly is wrong with ‘Hedwig’?” she demanded. “It was good enough for your grandmother.” Gideon heard the gliding, lilting vowel-sounds of Swedish in her speech. “It was the name of royalty.”
    “So you’ve told me, Auntie Dagmar,” Hedwig said with her too-bright smile. “Three or four hundred times. But the fact is, I don’t like it because it sounds like ‘earwig.’”
    “That’s ridiculous, and you know you just say it to annoy me.”
    “Besides which, it’s too hard to pronounce. It’s very tiring when everyone asks if the “w” is pronounced wuh or vuh. ”
    “Oh, I see. But ‘Kuku-ono-mono-eenyweeny,’ that’s easy to pronounce.”
    Hedwig threw Gideon a “see what I have to put up with?” look and changed the subject, grimacing at Dagmar’s glass and cigar. “You have to be more careful at your age, Auntie Dagmar,” she said lightly. “I keep telling you. You’re getting on now. You’re not the woman you were.”
    “No, and I never was.” She turned to Gideon. “Young man, can you light this damn thing for me? There are matches on the table over there.”
    “Of course,” Gideon said.
    Hedwig shook her head. “Darling Auntie, I hope you don’t expect me to stand here and watch you kill yourself right in front of me.”
    “You mean you’re going to pester someone else? Excellent!” said Dagmar. “Thank the Lord for small mercies. Goodbye and good luck to you.”
    As Gideon held the match to her cigarillo, she spoke around it. “In my opinion, a woman of forty-five-a sedentary, morbidly obese woman with some very peculiar ideas, if you’ll forgive my saying so-has no business telling an active, perfectly healthy person of eighty-one how to live her life, would you agree?”
    “Yes, I would, Miss Torkelsson,” Gideon said truthfully.
    “Oh, for God’s sake, call me Auntie Dagmar. Are we related?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “That’s all right, you call me Auntie Dagmar anyway.” Exhaling a lungful of blue smoke, she patted him absently on the shoulder. “Will you excuse me? I just thought of something else to irritate my niece about.”
    Across the room, Felix Torkelsson banged a spoon against a glass for attention. “Six-thirty, everybody!”
    Felix, the lawyer-brother who had flown in from Honolulu for the occasion, was a ruddy, outgoing teddy bear of a man with twinkling eyes, round cheeks, and a short, neatly clipped pepper-and-salt beard. Given a few more years, he would be everyone’s choice to play Santa Claus, if he wasn’t already. His normal speaking voice was a penetrating drawl with a wry, nasal touch of W. C. Fields in it, and when he raised it a few notches, no one inside of a

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