Quid Pro Quo by Vicki Grant

spy-recorder tape and my notes from Stan. Then I tried to think how all this fit together.
    What it all added up to was this: I was dead meat.
    I couldn’t call the cops, and I couldn’t figure it out myself. I was broke. I was alone. My mother had run off without even leaving me anything to eat, unless of course you counted her powdered coffee whitener. So much for “There’s dinner in the freezer, sweetie!” What was she trying to do? Rub it in? “You’re starving and there’s no food! Ha ha! See ya!”
    Hey, I thought, what was she trying to do? So much had happened since I got that weird message that I’d never even thought of looking in the freezer. Maybe she knew she had to go, and she really did leave me some food. You could say a lot of stuff about Andy, but you’d have to admit, she always looked out for me.
    I yanked open the freezer door, and a puff of cold air rolled out. I was hoping for a frozen lasagna or even a couple of pizza pockets, but no such luck. The freezer was empty.
    Empty, except for a large legal folder.

chapter
twenty-five

Title
    The right to ownership of property
    A ndy also said she left me money for a treat in the Player’s Tobacco tin. When I realized dinner was going to be a pile of legal documents, I figured the best treat I could hope for would be an overdue electric bill, but I got the tin down anyway.
    Eighty-seven dollars in cold, hard cash. Andy must have cleaned out her bank account before she left. That—or I’d just found her stash.
    I didn’t take another look at the file until I’d gone to Toulany’s and bought myself three Swanson Hungry-Man Dinners, two liters of chocolate milk, a jumbo bag of Cheezies and some Oreos. The guy at the counter asked if I was having a party. No, I said, just lunch. A big guy like me, you know … While I was zapping the first dinner, I looked at the file. Mostly it was just notes that Andy had scrawled on loose-leaf.
    They were a mess. I couldn’t decipher them on an empty stomach. I put them aside.
    The rest seemed to be real estate stuff. It looked like Andy had done a title search on the Masons’ Hall. I had to help her with one when she was in law school. Any time a building is sold, you have to make sure the seller has “clear title” to the property. In other words, you have to make sure he actually owns what he says he owns. That’s why you hire a lawyer to do a title search. They go to this government office—I think it’s the Registry of Deeds, something like that anyway—and sort of do a history of the property. They look at all the documents showing every time the place was sold or divided in two or whatever. They go way, way back. The one we did in law school showed title right back to 17something, to this soldier who got a land grant from the king. (The only problem was the king couldn’t prove how he got it from the Indians, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone in those days.)
    The Masons’ Hall title search didn’t go back that far. The Uniacke family owned the land for, like, a hundred years, then the Masons bought it in 1886, built the hall in 1888 and sold it in 1998 to the Heritage Preservation Association of Nova Scotia. That was all straightforward enough. The only thing unusual in the title was that an estoppel had been put on the property in 1889.
    Estoppel.
    I tried it again.
    Es.
    Top.
    Pel.
    Oh, geez, I remembered that from law school. What I mean is, I remembered the word estoppel. I didn’t have the first clue what it actually meant. I was pretty tired by then, but still. You’d think that, given this was a life-or-death type thing for Andy, I could’ve come up with something.
    But no. I just sat there, scratching my head and looking like a baboon doing double-digit division.
    What was the matter with me? I actually slapped myself in the side of the head and said, “Smarten up,