Chapter 7 - The Witness Who Disappeared
Rachel found Lydia's car at the courthouse lot just after midnight.
The driver's door stood open.
Her handbag lay on the passenger seat.
Lydia herself was gone.
For the next several hours, I heard only fragments from June, none of them enough to make a conclusion.
The uncertainty worked on me more brutally than anger.
I kept replaying Lydia's last call, wondering whether I had sent help quickly enough.
At dawn, Rachel contacted June with limited good news.
Lydia had reached her sister's home on foot and was physically unharmed.
She had fled when a vehicle pulled alongside hers and a stranger demanded the notary journal.
She would cooperate, but only under protective arrangements.
Her sworn account would matter because the forged deed and the fabricated affidavit both used her name.
Meanwhile, Arthur began a different campaign.
He sent our cousins a letter describing me as a vindictive state lawyer intimidating our mother.
The letter claimed I had cut him off from her medical care.
Mom read it at my kitchen table.
She picked up a pen with her uninjured hand and wrote her own message.
It was plain and devastating.
I am safe with Clara.
I choose my doctors and lawyers.
Do not use my name to silence me.
She mailed copies herself.
Two cousins called to apologize.
A third said she had already signed a petition in Arthur's support without speaking to Mom.
I asked who had provided it.
"Evelyn," the cousin whispered.
So the accountant was collecting signatures as well as affidavits.
June asked the court to require disclosure of everything submitted on Mom's purported behalf.
That afternoon, Rachel interviewed the paralegal seen carrying the scanner.
Her name was Tessa Ford.
She claimed Martin Keene had sent her to the house to inventory documents for a prospective guardianship.
She insisted she believed Arthur had lawful authority.
"Did you scan the signatures?" Rachel asked, according to Tessa's later testimony.
"Yes."
"Who told you to?"
Tessa became silent.
Hours later, June received an anonymous copy of a purchase ledger.
Three large payments had gone from Cedar Glen Holdings to a consulting company called Eastmark Strategies.
One was dated the day before Mom's arrest.
Another was scheduled for the day after the proposed closing.
The recipient company's manager was a name I knew from the Attorney General's broader inspection files.
Thomas Landry.
Brooke's uncle.
A financial connection did not prove he had ordered an unlawful arrest, but it shattered his claim of being merely a concerned relative.
When June filed the ledger under seal for appropriate review, the clerk noticed an irregularity.
Someone had already tried to withdraw our temporary restraint on the property.
The electronic request carried June Alvarez's credentials.
May you like
And June had never made it.
