The Key
Chapter I: A Conversation “Mark, would you please invite Danielle over to dinner on Sunday afternoon?” my sister Gail asked. “I’d like to have a talk with her”. Gail was more than a big sister - she became my legal guardian when our mother was killed in a car crash three years earlier, and I lived with her and her husband Ron in the mansion she had inherited from Mom. My inheritance was locked up in a trust fund until I graduated from college, a fact that had caused a sudden improvement in my once miserable high school grades. I was still the only 19 year old senior in the school, but I would graduate in June. My first two misspent years in high school were also the reason for certain other bizarre requirements in the trust fund language. ...