Chapter 15 — WHAT MARGOT WANTED
Ozick filed his motion on the third of February.
It was, as Voss had predicted almost word for word, a petition to determine heirship — an action asking the probate court to find that Adam Halloway was not the biological issue of Gerald Halloway and that therefore neither he nor his daughter had ever been lineal descendants under the trust.
It came with a request for genetic testing of a minor.
I read it four times and then I called Voss and said, "She's going to stand up in a courtroom and say her own son was a bastard."
"Yes."
"To keep a house."
"To keep a life interest in a house, an income of about three hundred and ten thousand a year, and, more to the point, to avoid clause eleven." Voss made a note of something. "Mrs. Thorne, I want you to understand the shape of what she is doing, because it is genuinely unusual and I have not seen it before."
"Okay."
"She is not defending the assault by saying she didn't do it. Mr. Ozick will do that separately and badly. She is defending the *consequence*. She is saying: even if I did it, the forfeiture clause doesn't reach me, because the child I harmed was never in the bloodline."
"That's monstrous."
"It is also, and I say this with regret, not a bad argument."
The hearing was on the eleventh of March.
Margot did not testify. Ozick was not stupid.
What he had was a haematologist from Yale who explained Hb Kempsey to a probate judge for fifty minutes and did it well.
What we had was Harlan Voss, the 2017 memorandum to file, and a letter in blue ballpoint.
Voss made one argument and he made it in about nine minutes.
He said the trust does not say biological.
He said clause four defines descendants by reference to a schedule, and the schedule was prepared in 2017 — the same March — and it names Adam Halloway by name.
He said Gerald Halloway sat in a car park outside St. Ambrose in March 2017, was told by his son what his son had just told him, went to his lawyer the following week, added a forfeiture clause and a named schedule, and told no one.
"Your Honour, the petitioner asks this court to find that Gerald Halloway did not know. We have a letter from his son saying he did know, and had known since the child was four, and said so out loud in a hospital car park. And I would add — because it is the only piece of this that is mine — that Mr. Halloway instructed me to draft clause eleven eleven days after that conversation, and he was not a man who did anything in eleven days."
The judge took six weeks.
On the twenty-second of April she found that Adam Halloway was a beneficiary as named in the 2017 schedule regardless of biological paternity, that Wren Elise Thorne took by representation, and that the petition to determine heirship was denied.
Margot Halloway walked out of that building having formally alleged, on the record, that her son was not her husband's — and gained nothing at all by it.
Except that it was now in a court file with a number on it.
Which meant it was public.
Which meant that on the twenty-fourth of April I was able to do the thing I had been unable to do for five months, which was ring Emmett Cole and say: it's out. You don't have to protect anyone anymore.