Burning Questions

“...to be divided equally between my son, Robert, and my daughter, Jennifer… Finally, please burn the shoe box in my bedroom cupboard labelled ‘Tax docs 2014-2015’.”

“Well, what do you think?”

John sighed. This is why he hated these DIY wills.

“This is why I HATE these DIY wills,” he said. “Why didn’t your mother come and see me? Or any solicitor? Any halfway decent lawyer would have told her the same thing.”

“Which is?”

John looked at the expectant faces of his “clients”, Robert and Jennifer Anderson. He didn’t usually give freebies, but he and Rob had been mates since uni and, when Rob asked him to run his eye over his late mother’s will, John assumed it’d take five minutes and then they’d go for a drink. Now, Rob and his sister Jen were sitting in front of him eagerly awaiting his opinion on their mother’s odd request.

“Well… there’s certainly some ambiguity...” Lawyers hated ambiguity. “I HATE ambiguity. Properly drawn-up wills don’t allow any wiggle room. But this...”

“Look, can we open the box or not?” Jen asked impatiently.

“It doesn’t say you CAN’T open it but...” John shrugged.

“But?”

“It comes down to whether you want to observe the letter or the spirit of the will. Certainly, the way your mother has phrased this, you COULD choose to read it as ‘remove the contents, then burn the box’ but I think we all know that she probably meant, ‘DON’T look inside. Just burn it’. I would have advised her to word it that way or, better still, to just dispose of it herself.”

“She was pretty unwell at the end. She probably didn’t feel up to burning it or burying it in the backyard,” observed Rob.

“She could’ve chucked it in the bin and we wouldn’t have known anything about it. The fact that she didn’t, I think, means she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. That’s why I don’t REALLY think she wanted us to burn whatever it is,” said Jen.

Rob was clearly on the fence, so John waded in again.

“Have you considered that there might be no mystery? It might just be what it says on the tin? Old tax documents?”

There wasn’t a great resemblance between the siblings — Rob was tallish and gingery, while Jen was petite and darker — but the way they derisively snorted “No way!” was identical.

John was inclined to agree. Elaine Anderson had been an office manager for most of her working career and her penchant for neatness and orderliness had been evident in the way she’d kept her own home. Tax files would have been stored in a filing cabinet, neatly labelled along with all the other important family documents, including the will, which the siblings had found in a file handily labelled “will”. No. There was no way she’d have shoved some random old tax docs into a shoe box in a cupboard. There HAD to be something else in there and, like Jen, he was becoming curious about what it actually contained. The solicitor part of him knew that he should respect her wishes and burn both the box and its contents. But the nosy, stickybeaky part of him was keen to know what was in it. And, after all, Elaine WASN’T his client. He offered a possible solution.

“How about this…? Bring me the box. I’ll look inside. Then I can advise you about the wisdom or otherwise of putting a match to all of it.”

Rob and Jen exchanged glances and obviously came to some sort of mutual agreement telepathically.

“Er… thanks for that John but, if we DO decide to open it, it’s probably best if we do it privately...” said Rob.

John understood. Having stumbled upon a box of saucy pictures and letters in his grandmother’s attic after her demise, he understood that some things were best kept in the family. Frankly he wished grandma had burned that damn box as he’d never quite recovered from viewing its contents.

Back at Elaine’s home, Rob and Jen looked at the box on their mother’s bed and considered their options.

“I wonder why she wrote ‘Tax docs’ on it,” Jen mused.

“Because if she’d labelled it ‘Personal. Do not open’, you’d’ve had the lid off before she was cold,” said Rob.

Jen was self-aware enough, and had done enough snooping through other people’s rooms, not to even bother to feign horror.

“What do you think is in it?”

It was the $64,000 question. Or possibly more. Or possibly less. Maybe the box contained a treasure map. Or the details of a secret offshore bank account. Or maybe it really was just some boring old tax stuff. But why would she insist that it be burned?

“OK. If you died, what would YOU absolutely not want anybody to find?” asked Rob.

They both contemplated it. Certainly there had once been videos and then DVDs which he would have wanted cremated with his body, but which the advent of the internet had rendered obsolete. Now he had a wife and kids and, since he didn’t want to have to constantly remember to clear his browser history, he was extremely circumspect about his searches. Logically, he knew that one was beyond embarrassment once one was beyond the veil, but he still didn’t like the thought of his wife and daughters discovering just how much he’d loved watching pottery videos. There was just something about seeing somebody create something of beauty from a lump of clay on a wheel… He blamed Demi Moore in Ghost. It had all started with her…

“Porn. Obviously.”

“What?” Jen had roused him from his reverie.

“Not me! I’m just thinking aloud about the stuff people generally hide. Naked pics. Love letters. Evidence of affairs...”

“You think OUR mother, Elaine Goody-Goody Anderson, had affairs?”

“Well… you have to admit… you and I don’t look that much alike. And I’ve always thought you looked a lot like Uncle Bob. And you ARE named after him...”

Rob knew she was teasing but couldn’t help taking the bait.

“You know who else I look like? Our dad. Ron. Who was Bob’s twin brother. Who was named after his dad — our grandfather — Robert. Idiot.”

She smiled.

“OK but what about the other stuff? You know millennials didn’t invent naked selfies, don’t you? It’s just that instead of being taken on phones and uploaded to the cloud and stolen by hackers, they used to be taken with Polaroids and hidden in boxes in cupboards for horrified relatives to find and get scarred for life.”

“But… you don’t really think mum would’ve...”

“She did have a life before us, you know. Her life didn’t begin when she gave birth to you, Rob. She and dad were married for three years before you came along. And she had a couple of boyfriends before him...”

“I know, I know. But still… I just can’t see mum….”

“Getting her gear off and taking pics? No. Me neither.”

Nor could either of them imagine their taciturn father, who’d marked every birthday, anniversary and Valentine’s Day with a bunch of chrysanthemums from the servo, a peck on the cheek and a “here you go, love” dashing off billets-doux so incendiary they had to be incinerated. Their mum had always said he had hidden depths, but they were doubtful.

What else could it be? They wracked their brains. Whatever it was had to be small enough to fit in a shoe box, but so big, metaphorically speaking, that their mother had wanted it destroyed.

“Maybe it’s a confession,” mused Jen.

“To… what…?” Rob was sceptical.

“I don’t know… something bad...” Jen said vaguely.

“What? Not returning library books? Embezzlement? Murder?”

“Gosh. That escalated quickly,” said Jen. “Maybe. Who knows? Do we really know anyone? Think of all the serial killers who’ve ever been arrested. Does anyone ever say, ‘Oh yes. I always suspected he was a serial killer.’ No! It’s ALWAYS, ‘But he was so nice and quiet.’”

“‘I mean… I could’ve done without the chainsaws at 3am, but apart from that he was a wonderful neighbour. Always took out my bins. And looked after my cat when I went on holiday. Until it mysteriously disappeared...’” Rob’s spot-on impersonation of every serial killer neighbour ever made Jen laugh.

“OK,” said Jen. “So we both agree mum was a serial killer. She fits the profile – quiet neighbour, least likely, nice person blah blah blah… But which one?”

“Mmmm… yes… it has to be one who’s never been caught…”

“What about the Zodiac killer?”

“Right,” said Rob, doing a quick Google search. “So our mother travelled from Sydney to… let’s see… San Francisco when she was… eight and… conducted a killing spree for a few years. Then she returned home to resume her schooling and send taunting letters to newspapers and then she went to secretarial college and became an office administrator?”

“And then, wracked by guilt, she felt compelled to confess, but she didn’t want her children’s lives ruined, so she planned to take her secret to her grave.”

“Wow. OK. Mystery solved I guess. Stoke up the fire pit and let’s get to burning,” said Rob.

They smiled and sat in silence for several minutes, thinking about their mum. They knew perfectly well that Elaine Anderson, who had once left an apologetic note on an old Cortina that was more dent than car because she’d ever so slightly backed into it, was not guilty of any kind of crime.

“Come on,” said Jen. “We both know there is no way we’re burning this box without looking inside it. Let’s just do it. How bad could it be?”

Rob raised his hands in surrender.

“Off you go then Pandora.”

Gingerly, Jen lifted the lid. Inside was a small black notebook. Jen recognised it. It was a Moleskine she’d bought for her mother when she’d expressed a desire to keep a diary while recuperating from her first stroke (before the second one finished her off). Jen had often seen Elaine writing in it in bed or on the couch. She’d once wondered aloud why her mum didn’t just use a laptop. Elaine said that she enjoyed writing in longhand after so many years of typing. She felt more creative. And also, she never 100% trusted computers – files could be hacked, deleted ones could be retrieved… It was too permanent.

But books can be burned, thought Jen.

They’d come this far. They never even considered not reading it. Jen, assuming it was just a journal about her mother’s last days, was pleasantly surprised, then stunned and amazed to discover that she had penned, in her exquisite cursive, a steamy, bodice-ripping romance that had her “oohing” and “aahing” and sighing and (frequently) blushing until the final page, where her mother had written: “Jen, you naughty girl! I told you to burn this. Hope you enjoyed it. Love Mum. PS “Ronaldo” is based on your dad.

“Gross,” said Jen, who had revelled in Ronaldo’s romantic antics. And, once she got over the ick factor, she decided others would too. This time, it was an old uni friend of hers, who now worked at a publishing house, who was asked to offer her professional opinion for free. Despite heaping praise on the writing, the publisher passed – they didn’t really do romance. So Rob and Jen put it on Amazon for 99c where, thanks to great reviews and word-of-mouth, it quickly sold more than 20,000 copies (20,202 2/99 to be precise). The day they hit $20k, they cracked open a bottle of champers, fired up the barbie and burned the box.