The Testament by John Grisham Read Free Book Online Page B

but she wasn’t angry. There was no way Rex could anger her now. She loved him more than ever.

SIX
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    T he trip west would be a pleasant respite from the chaos Mr. Phelan created with his leap. His ranch was near Jackson Hole, in the Tetons, where a foot of snow was already on the ground and more was expected. What would Miss Manners say about the scattering of ashes over land covered with snow? Should one wait until the thaw? Or sprinkle them anyway? Josh didn’t give a damn. He’d toss them in the face of any natural disaster.
    He was being hounded by the lawyers for the Phelan heirs. His cautious comments to Hark Gettys about the old man’s testamentary capacity had sent shockwaves through the families, and they were reacting with predictable hysteria. And threats. The trip would be a short vacation. He and Durban could sort through the preliminary research and make their plans.
    They left National Airport on Mr. Phelan’s Gulfstream IV, a plane Josh had been privileged to fly on only once before. It was the newest of the fleet, and at a price of thirty-five million hadbeen Mr. Phelan’s fanciest toy. The summer before, they had flown it to Nice, where the old man walked naked on the beach and gawked at young French girls. Josh and his wife had kept their clothes on with the rest of the Americans and sunned by the pool.
    A stewardess served them breakfast, then disappeared into the rear galley as they spread their papers on a round table. The flight would take four hours.
    The affidavits signed by Drs. Flowe, Zadel, and Theishen were long and verbose, laden with opinions and redundancies that ran on for paragraphs and left not a scintilla of doubt that Troy was of sound and disposing mind and memory. He was downright brilliant, and knew exactly what he was doing in the moments before his death.
    Stafford and Durban read the affidavits and enjoyed the humor. When the new will was read, those three experts would be fired, of course, and a half dozen more would be brought in to deliver all sorts of dark and dire suppositions about poor Troy’s mental illnesses.
    On the subject of Rachel Lane—little had been learned about the world’s richest missionary. The investigators hired by the firm were digging furiously.
    According to the early research pulled from the Internet, World Tribes Missions was headquartered in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1920, the organization had four thousand missionaries spread around the world working exclusively with native peoples. Its sole purpose and goal was to spread the Christian Gospel to every remote tribe in the world. Obviously, Rachel did not inherit her religious beliefs from her father.
    No less than twenty-eight Indian tribes in Brazil were currently being ministered to by World Tribes missionaries, and at least ten in Bolivia. Another three hundred in the rest of the world. Because their target tribes were secluded and detached from modern civilization, the missionaries received exhaustivetraining in survival, wilderness living, languages, and medical skills.
    Josh read with great interest a story written by a missionary who had spent seven years living in a lean-to, in a jungle, trying to learn enough of the primitive tribe’s language to communicate. The Indians had had little to do with him. He was, after all, a white man from Missouri who’d backpacked into their village with a vocabulary limited to “Hello” and “Thank you.” If he needed a table, he built one. If he needed food, he killed it. Five years passed before the Indians began to trust him. He was well into his sixth year before he told his first Bible story. He was trained to be patient, to build relationships, learn language and culture, and slowly, very slowly, begin to teach the Bible.
    The tribe had little contact with the outside world. Life had hardly changed in a thousand years.
    What kind of person could possess enough faith and commitment to forsake modern society and enter such a