The last nine months or so have been pretty uneventful.  I finished up Char and started marketing it, then finished the rough draft of Mars Looks Different.  I’ve written several chapters of a new story that I’ve tentatively called Traffic Accident.  It’s a sequel to Char, which explains how she got here as kind of a sideline to the main story, which involves—

Okay, somewhere there may be a time-line where that’s all true.  I’m not living in it though.  I’m living in a time-line where my writing time has been eaten by a real-life adventure that I often wish I was only reading about.  It has most of the elements that your average adventure story has: a mysterious death, a disputed inheritance, missing valuables, mysterious gunshots, thousands of dollars worth of assets suddenly and mysteriously changing hands, a trusting elderly relative at risk of losing everything she worked for all of her life, a shocking deathbed scene, and coming soon, a courtroom drama.  It even may have cattle rustling.  Unfortunately three things separates this little drama from the kinds of thing you see on TV: first, the heroes and especially the villains aren't particularly good looking,  second, I'm involved in it personally, and third, if I wrote this up as a mystery story it would get rejected as not credible.. 

I hesitated to say anything about any of this, but I do want people to understand why my writing output has been so low for the last year or so.  I'm going to have to be very careful what I say here because this situation is almost certainly going to trial and I don't want to tip off the other side as to what I know and don't know, or to state something as fact when I can't prove it..  I actually cut out about half of what I initially said here because I don't want to take even the slightest chance of helping out the bad guys.

It all started a little over three years ago, on December 28, 2001, when my cousin, David Lenstrom died suddenly of an apparent heart attack at age 46.  David didn’t smoke, was not overweight, and had no history of heart problems or high blood pressure.  There was no autopsy—something I didn’t find out until after he was buried.  

David and I were close for the first fifteen to twenty years of our lives, almost like brothers.  His mom worked, and my mom stayed home.  She (my mom) raised my sister and I.  She also babysat David, so I had essentially a brother around 40 hours a week for the first ten years or so.  After that we visited back and forth a lot.  My parents had a garden at the Lenstroms’ farm near Beloit Wisconsin , and during the summer we went up there about every other day.  We got to enjoy the good parts of farming—taming the farm kittens, playing with the series of farm dogs, playing in the sand hill, and hunting and fishing with my dad.  We also got to experience the not-so-fun but necessary parts of gardening: pulling crabgrass out of rows of vegetables in the hot sun with mosquitoes swarming over us, swinging a hoe until our hands were covered with blisters.

David and I took seperate paths over the years.  He got into farming and became extremely good at anything mechanical.  He rebuilt cars in his spare time, while I wrote stories and built computers.  We still got together and enjoyed each other’s company.  Both of my daughters enjoyed the farm, and some tastes of country life.

David did well for himself.  He worked hard--incredibly hard.  He had a full-time job, farmed, was a professional photographer on the weekends, and as I mentioned earlier, rebuilt cars.  By the time he was 46 he had his own farm—roughly 380 acres.  He had both the farm and the equipment on it paid for, and enough resources set aside to get him through a few bad years.  He wasn’t rich, but he was reasonably well off.  That actually started to be a problem because he was still a bachelor and he found himself having to wonder if the women he met were interested in him or in what he had.

 After David died, things went to pieces fast.  His dad had already been diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer, and didn’t have many years to live.  His mom was 79 years old, hadn’t even finished grade school, and couldn’t drive.  Now they had not one but two farms to take care of—theirs and David’s.  To make matters worse, the vultures started moving in.  David’s dad was an extremely nice guy—too nice.  He would give you the shirt off his back if you asked for it.  He was also grief-stricken and lonely—extremely vulnerable.  David’s mom withdrew into a routine of gardening and puttering around the house after her son died.  My sister and I tried to help fill that vacuum, as did other relatives.

Unfortunately, we failed to keep the vultures from getting to David’s parents.  Shortly before David’s dad died this past winter, a lot of assets that had been David's got transfered to an unrelated couple under very mysterious circumstances. I mentioned cattle rustling, a shocking deathbed scene and mysterious gunshots at the beginning of all this.  I'm afraid I can't give you any details on any of those things for various legal and tactical reasons.

I've been appalled at a lot of things in this case.

• My cousin should never have been buried without an autopsy. He was 46 years old with none of the risk factors for a heart attack.
• A lot of people that should have been appear not to have been trained to spot and deal with potential fraud.  That includes several people at a hospice and at least one person at a bank.
• The police and prosecutors have apparently done almost nothing to help protect my aunt, though I hope there are things going on behind the scene that I'm not aware of.
• It was apparently extremely for the couple involved to gain legal possession of my aunt's assets.  They have had custody of those assets for nearly a year, and will at least until the case comes to trial in mid-December. 

In any case, this whole thing is an enormous mess.  We contacted the authorities early on and they told us to advise our aunt to get a good lawyer, which she eventually did,.  Hopefully things will get straightened out eventually.

As I noted, for various legal and tactical reasons I’m not telling you quite everything that has happened.  We know things that I can’t take even the most remote risk of getting back to the other side.  We suspect a lot of things that we can’t prove yet. 

In any case, this is very much  not something I want to be personally involved in.  I really feel for my aunt.  She lost her only child and her husband.  Then she was faced with a choice of getting into a bitter court fight or letting this couple take everything that her son had worked so hard to build up.  She is almost 83 years old now, and would prefer to putter around in her garden and watch the birds that come to the feeder in her back yard.  At the same time she is determined not to let herself get ripped off.  That means that the case will almost certainly go to court, and my sister and I will be in the thick of it.  We would all prefer reading about this set of experiences to living it.   Maybe in a time-line nearby I am quietly finishing up a chapter in Traffic Accident.  Meanwhile my cousin David is putting the finishing touches on restoring a Mercedes that had been used and abused.  My sister and her husband are enjoying their retirement, and David’s mom and dad are quietly puttering around their farm.  I’d like to think so.  I’d like to be there.