Sycamore Row - John Grisham

“That was my job. We talked every day by phone. I made some of his travel
arrangements, but he usually preferred to do that himself. He was not one to delegate.
He paid all of his personal bills, wrote every check, balanced every account, kept up
with every dime. His CPA is a guy in Tupelo—”
“I’ve spoken to him.”
“He has boxes of records.”
“I’d like to speak to you, Kamila, and Dewayne later, if possible.”
“Sure. We’re all here.”
The room had no windows and poor lighting. An old desk and chair indicated that it
once might have been used as an office, but not recently. A thick layer of dust covered
everything. One wall was lined with tall, black, metal file cabinets. Another wall had
nothing but a 1987 Kenworth Truck calendar, hanging by a nail. Four imposing
cardboard boxes were stacked on the desk, and that’s where Jake began. Careful to keep
things in order, he flipped through the files in the first box, noting what was in them but
not exactly crunching the numbers. That would come later.
The first box was labeled “Real Estate,” and it was filled with deeds, canceled
mortgages, appraisals, tax bills, tax assessments, paid invoices from contractors, copies
of checks written by Seth, and closing statements from lawyers. There were records for
Seth’s home place on Simpson Road; a cabin near Boone, North Carolina; a condo in a
high-rise near Destin, Florida; and several parcels of what appeared at first glance to be
raw land. The second box was labeled “Timber Contracts.” The third was “Bank—
Brokerage,” and Jake’s interest rose somewhat. A Merrill Lynch portfolio in an Atlanta
office had a balance of almost $7 million. A bond fund at UBS in Zurich was valued at
just over $3 million. A cash account at the Royal Bank of Canada on the island of Grand
Cayman had $6.5 million. But all three of these rather exotic and exciting accounts had
been closed in late September. Jake dug deeper, followed the trail that Seth had
carefully left behind, and soon found the money sitting in a bank in Birmingham,
earning 6 percent annually and just waiting for probate: $21.2 million, cash.
Such figures made him dizzy. For a small-town lawyer living in a rented house and
driving a car with almost 200,000 miles on the odometer, the scene was surreal: he,
Jake, poking through cardboard boxes in a dusty, semi-lit storage room in a
prefabricated office building at a backwoods sawmill in rural Mississippi, and casually
looking at sums of money that greatly exceeded the combined lifetime earnings of every
lawyer now working in Ford County. He started laughing.
The money was really there! He shook his head in amazement and suddenly had a
profound admiration for Mr. Seth Hubbard.
Someone rapped on the door and Jake almost jumped out of his skin. He closed the
box, opened the door, and stepped outside. Arlene said, “Mr. Brigance, this is Dewayne
Squire. His official title is vice president, but in reality he just does what I tell him.”
Arlene managed a laugh, the first one. Jake and Dewayne exchanged a nervous