The Westing Game

by Ellen Raskin

The delivery boy was sixty-two years old, and there was no such person as Barney Northrup.

A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake. Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person.

An open coffin draped in bunting rested on a raised platform at the far corner of the room; in it lay the dead man, looking exactly as she had found him, except now he was dressed in the costume of Uncle Sam—including the tall hat. Between the waxy hands, folded across his chest, lay her mother’s silver cross.

It is not what you have, it’s what you don’t have that counts.

ELEVENTH • Senseless, you say? Death is senseless yet makes way for the living. Life, too, is senseless unless you know who you are, what you want, and which way the wind blows.

Long before becoming a judge, Josie-Jo Ford had decided to stop smiling. Smiling without good reason was demeaning. A serious face put the smiler on the defensive, a rare smile put a nervous witness at ease.

FRIDAY WAS BACK to normal, if the actions of suspicious would-be heirs competing for a two-hundred-million-dollar prize could be considered normal.