Strange twist grips ugly estate battle.

Headline: Legless, Lonely Rich Guy Leaves Millions to Farmhands, Caretaker, Banker.

Kicker: IRS agent who audited man’s tax return married, then deserted millionaire now fighting bank to control $43 million estate.

Is this a fairy tale? Is it fake news? Folks, this is Florida. You know in your heart it’s true.

The estranged wife of the late citrus grower and rancher Bill Bland, whose father helped start what became SunTrust Banks, is locked in a vicious battle with the bank handling his estate, and the sordid fight is laid out in court documents.

“This is not what Mr. Bland wanted,” said attorney Derek Schroth in polite understatement. The Eustis lawyer represents the very staid First National Bank of Mount Dora, which is handling two trusts and the estate Bland left.

Bland, acknowledged by friends as an imperious old gent, died at 84 in November in hospice. Complications from diabetes left him suffering for months after amputations. “A hard man with a soft soul” is how one friend at First National described him.

He’d have had a profane word or two to say about the public fight over what boils down to this: Should his estranged wife be able to spend some of the principal of his estate, not just the $800,000 annual income from it? Or should the conservative bank keeping managing the trust, which almost certainly then would pass intact to the Mount Dora Community Trust on her death?

Bland intended for the money go to the Community Trust to support various charity works. What a marvelous gift to the community.

But we digress.

This strange tale began when Bland received a demand from IRS agent Mary Jane Brooks to meet and discuss the tax return for Blandford Groves, Inc., Bland’s citrus and ranch operation. It was April 15, 2002, just four months after Bland had lost his beloved wife, Lois.

Seven months after that portentous first meeting, Bland married his auditor at a beach wedding. He was 70, she was 50. Friends worried about the age difference and the quick courtship. But the grouchy, set-in-his-ways Bland was smitten, giddily toasting his bride with a phrase to the effect, “What’s mine is hers.”

Never were truer words spoken.

The pair lived together six years before Mary Jane left in 2008. Afterward, they sometimes saw one another, and a quarrel in June 2016 was the last face-to-face meeting before he died, according to court documents. She ended

RED HUBER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER John Pease, First National Bank executive vice president of the trust department, tours the Blandford House. The home — built by one of the founders of what later became SunTrust — is on the National Register of Historic Places but has never been...