Empty Mansions

personality. The relatives saw up close the Japanese woman with a dragonfly pin smoking a cigarette, the woman cutting flowers. All the paintings bore Huguette’s signature.
    After the tour, several of the relatives commented that their Tante Huguette couldn’t have done those paintings herself. It wasn’t possible, they said. These must be the work of her painting instructor.
AN IMPOLITE ACT

 
    T WO OF H UGUETTE ’ S RELATIVES didn’t choose to play the inheritance Powerball lottery. One couldn’t be found, and the other said she didn’t want the money.
    The twentieth descendant of Huguette’s father was Timothy Gray, whose life story was one of rags to riches to rags to nearly riches. Born in 1952, he lived in several foster homes before being adopted at age five by one of Charlie Clark’s daughters and her husband, a physician, becoming as a result a half-grandnephew of Huguette’s. Tim had a troubled childhood verging into delinquency and was last seen by his family in 1990, not long after his mother Patsey’s funeral.
    When Huguette died twenty-one years later and it was time to alert all of her relatives of the filing of her will, private investigators were unable to find Tim. If the family was successful in overturning the will, he was in line for 6.25 percent of Huguette’s estate. His take would be roughly $19 million, or about $6 million after all the taxes and estate expenses.
    In late December 2012, Tim Gray, the adopted great-grandson of the copper king and railroad builder W. A. Clark, was found in the desolate mining and ranching town of Evanston, Wyoming, frozen to death under a Union Pacific Railroad viaduct. A boy and girl out sledding found his body. Tim was wearing a light jacket, and his shoes were off, though the temperature that week had dipped close to zero. He weighed only about a hundred pounds and looked homeless. Blood tests showed no alcohol or drugs, and the coroner listed the cause of death as exposure.
    In his pocket, Tim had a 1905 Indian-head penny that his brother, Jerry, had given him when he took him in at age seventeen for a couple of years. And in his wallet was a cashier’s check from the year 2003, his one-eleventh share of the disbursement of a trust left by his grandmother. The uncashed check was for $54,160.
    Though Tim was dead, he remained a potential heir to Huguette’sestate, because she predeceased him. If the relatives won their case or settled, a share would go to Tim’s estate, and that share would pass to his heirs. If he had no spouse or children and left no will, his three siblings would divide his winnings.
    Tim was not exactly homeless. He’d spent fifteen years in Evanston, the sort of town where people go when they don’t want to be found. He had an apartment and a rented office downtown, where he worked on computer software projects, including voice recognition software, though he had no Internet connection and no phone. He was a loner, neither friendly nor unfriendly, working odd hours, eating alone at Mother Mae’s Kitchen downtown, going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
    The owner of his apartment building said Tim spent only what he needed from the investment checks he received. He gave most of his money to charity, sponsoring children in Guatemala and handing cash to needy people in the neighborhood. He wrote to politicians, opposing the Bush tax cuts of the early 2000s as giveaways to the wealthy. He told the apartment building manager that he resented his Clark relatives, who he said had not made good use of their inheritances.
    About a year before his death, Tim seemed to disappear. He stopped paying for the storage space in Utah where he left his cars. The owner of his building didn’t rent out his apartment, knowing that Tim was good for the money. But Tim had staked out a prime sleeping spot under the viaduct, a corner of dirt that he and other men called Suite No. 3. There’s no indication that he knew anything about his great-aunt Huguette or the money he stood to inherit.
    Tim Gray left behind an apartment stuffed to the ceiling with scrap metal that he had been hoarding: rusted handsaw blades, automobile exhaust pipes, and wire, mostly aluminum and copper.
    • • •
    Huguette’s twenty-first relative said she could not justify opposing her great-aunt Huguette’s last will and testament.
    This half-grandniece, Clare Albert, born in 1947, told lawyers that Bock and Kamsler seemed highly untrustworthy and she hoped