1 Chapter 1

1 VJ

I was wearing my gray wool suit, maroon silk dress shirt, Countess Mara tie, and dress shoes—no boots, no jeans, no flannel, and no gimme hat. Even during the best of times, sitting in a lawyer’s office becomes more and more uncomfortable the longer it lasts without the lawyer present. Dressed in my best suit and trying to look stoic, I double checked that my phone was on mute.

I could tell by how he was fidgeting as he sat next to me, former cowboy rodeo star Tommy Sullivan felt the same. Even a nice old guy like Mr. Evers Marshall was intimidating, and his somber law office in McCook, Nebraska, did nothing to put us at ease.

Marshall’s secretary had parked us here across from the man’s antique mahogany desk and told us the lawyer would be in presently. Only the ticking of the grandfather clock overcame the silence that sat like a fog around us.

Tommy and I had greeted each other neutrally, with a nearly imperceptible head nod and a millisecond meeting of the eyes. This is the way we’d met for the last ten years ever since I’d kissed him one disastrous night in college when my libido overcame my good sense. In that instant, I’d tasted heaven, and the Grand Canyon had sliced open between us

He’d pulled away, and after a few seconds of stunned silence, muttered, “Whoa. What’d you do that for?” In the next second, the rift opened, I fell down into it, and I’d been climbing out of the hole ever since. I’d also held a tight rein on my libido from that moment on, at least around him.

Tommy and I had met a half dozen times a year at various ag group get-togethers. Nebraska’s not so big a state that we could avoid running into each other. Not with as much land as we both owned. He’s a rancher. I’m a farmer. We both live in the middle of the state. Agriculturally, we meet on occasion at the corner of beef feed and corn production.

Today we sat in Marshall’s office because the lawyer had told us we’d been named in the last will of Doc Wilby, one of the legends around these parts.

The lawyer walked in, his three-piece suit ruffling around his skeletal body. I was surprised to see how much weight he’d lost since my folks’ deaths five years earlier.

“Vladimir. Thomas.” He greeted us with a nod before sitting down.

I winced at hearing my full name since I’d been known for years as “VJ.” I remember being a boy and being teased by other kids as “Vlad the Impaler.” When my grandmother heard they were doing this, she asked my grandfather, “Why they do this laughing? Vladimir, it is a pretty name.” Neither of them ever understood the joke.

Blond, blue-eyed Tommy Sullivan, on the other hand, never had this problem when we were in school. I was always grateful that Tommy had never called me Dracula, at least I never heard him if he did. Maybe that, besides his looks, was why I was initially drawn to him. Even if he was one of those kids with glints of mischief in their eyes, he never verbally attacked me. Instead, we were neighbors and friends.

“I wanna thank you boys for coming in today.” Lawyer Marshall ran his hand over the meager salt and pepper strands of hair on his head. His wrinkled hand shook, dark veins popping in sharp contrast to his paper-white skin.

“I don’t git out into your part of the state too often these days. So thanks for coming all this way.” Mr. Marshall also seemed to be wheezing a little more than I remembered.

Five years earlier, I’d been sitting right here when a more vigorous, lively Marshall had told me about my inheritance after my folks’ accident as if I didn’t already know what they left me. I didn’t see the old man unless there was bad news. Hearing the man cough and taking in the look of him, I wondered if he’d be around much longer.

As far as I could tell, he was a dying breed, the stoic Nebraskan who weathered the cold and wind in fall, winter, and spring and the searing heat of summer. He was the type who’d graduated from the University of Nebraska and remembered the Cornhuskers football team as bowl winners.

I wasn’t surprised Marshall didn’t get into our little town or the bigger nearby town of Kearney often. Not many people from where he lived in McCook did, even less from Lincoln or Omaha. Our tiny community sat in the middle of the state north of Interstate 80. Doc’s land, if I remembered correctly, was located to the north and a little west of town.