Chapter 4 - The Iron Queen's Signature
“You own the trust?” Blake asked.
Darlene examined the printout twice.
“No.”
“Your name is on it.”
“My name is on a lot of things Julian arranged for me to sign.”
Blake remembered the threat she'd made in her office the night he found her brace.
For the first time, he wondered whether her secrecy was a survival tactic or another form of manipulation.
“I brought my daughter into your world because you said you needed help.”
“I never intended for Abigail to be involved.”
“Intentions won't protect her.”
Naomi interrupted before the argument became permanent.
“The trust is registered through a holding company formed before the accident.”
Darlene scanned the page and froze.
The formation date matched the week Sarah had entered St. Agnes for her final operation.
“I didn't authorize this.”
“Then who could?” Blake asked.
“Someone with the authority to act for me.”
“Julian.”
“Or my late husband's legal adviser.”
Her husband's name was Thomas Stanley.
Blake had seen his portrait in the Oakridge lobby, smiling beside Darlene at the company's founding ceremony.
Thomas had died of a heart attack eight years earlier.
Darlene explained that his estate office had continued managing parts of the family trust.
She had never reviewed every account.
“That isn't an excuse,” she said before Blake could respond.
“It's the mistake I'm going to correct.”
Back at headquarters, Naomi obtained the trust's original incorporation packet under an emergency preservation agreement.
The signature attributed to Darlene looked perfect.
The witness signature was more troubling.
Eleanor Voss.
The woman who had accessed Abigail's medical file and worked at the hospital where Sarah died.
Blake tapped the page.
“This is not a coincidence.”
Darlene opened an old board archive and searched for Eleanor's name.
A photograph appeared from an Oakridge philanthropic dinner seven years earlier.
Eleanor stood beside Thomas Stanley and a younger man in a surgeon's white coat.
The surgeon's name was Dr. Adrian Kessler.
Blake knew him.
He had been Sarah's attending physician during her final week.
Darlene enlarged the photograph.
On Thomas's wrist was a watch she had given him for their twentieth anniversary.
It was the same watch the police had listed among his possessions after death.
But the photograph was dated two months after his reported funeral.
She read the metadata again.
Then she made Naomi call the medical examiner.
“Request the records for my husband's death,” Darlene said.
Her voice was barely audible.
May you like
“Because I'm no longer certain who we buried.”
