Chapter 14 - The Second Set Of Books
My father's recording lasted four minutes and twenty-three seconds.
I listened to it six times.
Each time, I heard something new.
Each time, I wished he were alive so I could ask why he had carried the burden alone.
The recording had been made in his office four years earlier.
He sounded tired.
Not frightened.
Angry.
That was my father.
Fear usually became anger before it reached his voice.
"Emma, if you are hearing this, then I was right to be worried."
"Do not trust the clean version of the company records."
"There are two sets of books."
"And Victor is not working alone."
He paused for several seconds.
Then he named three vendor companies.
North Coast Procurement.
Sterling Clinical Services.
Meridian Events Group.
Mara wrote each one down.
My father continued.
"The payments move through vendors, then consulting entities, then back toward people with influence over Daniel."
"I cannot yet prove who receives the final benefit."
"I can prove Victor controls the first layer."
Another pause.
"Daniel will resist this because Victor has spent years making himself indispensable."
Daniel closed his eyes when he heard that line.
My father knew him better than either of us wanted to admit.
Then came the sentence that mattered most.
"If anything happens to me, the originals are not in my office."
My heart began to pound.
"They are where Emma learned to walk without holding my hand."
The recording ended.
For several seconds, nobody spoke.
Then my mother began crying.
I looked at her.
"You know where he meant."
She nodded.
"The lake house."
My parents had owned a small house near Lake Geneva when I was a child.
I took my first independent steps across the wooden dock when I was fourteen months old.
My father told the story every birthday until I begged him to stop.
The property had been sold after his death.
My mother wiped her face.
While Jonah searched the lake house records, my mother told me something she had never mentioned before.
After Dad's funeral, she found a torn envelope in his desk.
The front had been addressed to me.
The envelope was empty.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I thought he had given you whatever was inside."
"He didn't."
"I know that now."
"Do you still have it?"
She nodded.
"In the estate box at home."
Mara looked up.
"Do not touch it more than necessary when you retrieve it."
My mother frowned.
"It has been in a cardboard box for four years."
"Then four more hours will not hurt."
I smiled faintly.
"Welcome to Mara's world."
The envelope was photographed and examined the next day.
There was no useful fingerprint evidence after years of handling.
But under angled light, faint pressure marks appeared on the paper.
Someone had written on a sheet placed over it.
A forensic technician enhanced the impressions.
Three words became visible.
Dock.
Blue key.
Mercer.
Alan Mercer.
My father's investigator.
The blue key meant something to my mother.
"The old dock box had a blue padlock."
"The storage bench?"
"Yes."
My pulse jumped.
The clue in the recording was no longer poetic.
It was literal.
My father had hidden something beneath or inside the dock storage area and meant for Alan Mercer to know how to find it.
"Why didn't Mercer retrieve it?"
Mara asked.
My mother shook her head.
"Maybe he never got the message."
That possibility haunted me.
My father had prepared a trail.
Death interrupted it.
Then years passed while the people he distrusted remained in place.
Sometimes a secret survives not because the hiding place is perfect.
Sometimes it survives because everyone who knows where to look assumes someone else already looked.
"The dock was replaced years before we sold."
"Could he have hidden something in the house?"
"Maybe."
Mara leaned forward.
"Who bought it?"
My mother named a retired couple from Milwaukee.
Jonah began searching property records immediately.
The house had changed hands again eight months earlier.
The current owner was an LLC.
My stomach dropped.
"Please don't say Vantage Meridian."
Jonah shook his head.
"No."
Relief lasted half a second.
"Who?"
"Bennett Lake Properties."
Daniel stood.
"Olivia bought your parents' lake house?"
I could not answer.
Mara looked at the filing date.
"Eight months ago."
Two months before Daniel filed for divorce.
Three months after Olivia had officially entered his life.
I looked at Daniel.
"Did you know?"
"No."
"Did you give her money for it?"
"No."
"Did Motion Labs?"
His face tightened.
"I don't know."
That answer said enough.
Jonah kept searching.
"The purchase price was six hundred eighty thousand dollars."
"Cash?"
"No mortgage recorded."
Mara looked at Daniel.
"Your wife's consulting company received more than that from Motion Labs before the purchase."
Daniel sat down again.
I thought I had run out of ways to be stunned.
I was wrong.
Olivia had not simply known about my father's old papers.
She had purchased the one property connected to his clue.
That could not be coincidence.
"She found the recording before we did," I said.
Mara nodded slowly.
"Or Victor told her what your father said."
"But how did the audio get emailed to me now?"
No one had an answer.
The email account had been created that morning through an encrypted provider.
The metadata was stripped.
The sender could have been anyone.
Karen.
Victor.
Olivia.
Someone else entirely.
Nora's nurse entered and told me my daughter was stable enough for skin-to-skin contact.
Everything else stopped.
For the next forty minutes, I held my daughter against my chest.
She was warm beneath the blanket.
Tiny breaths touched my skin.
Her existence made the chaos outside the room feel smaller.
Not gone.
Smaller.
Daniel stood near the window and watched us.
He did not ask to hold her.
That was one of the first respectful choices he had made in a long time.
Later, when Nora returned to the nursery, Mara insisted I sleep.
I slept for three hours.
When I woke, Daniel was gone.
My mother was asleep in the chair.
Mara sat near the window reading her phone.
"You have that face again," I said.
"What face?"
"The one that means my day is about to get worse."
"Your day is already impressively bad."
"Mara."
She sighed.
"Daniel went to the lake house."
I pushed myself upright.
"What?"
"He called Jonah from the car."
"Why would he do that?"
"Because he says he knows where your father might have hidden the records."
"How?"
"Apparently Robert once showed him a false panel beneath the dock storage bench."
I stared at her.
"He never told me that."
"Daniel says he forgot until he heard the recording."
I laughed bitterly.
"He forgets a lot of useful things."
Mara did not argue.
"Jonah told him not to enter the property."
"Will he listen?"
We both knew the answer.
My phone rang.
Daniel.
I answered immediately.
Wind roared through the speaker.
"Where are you?"
"At the lake house."
"Do not go inside."
"Too late."
I closed my eyes.
"Of course."
"Emma, listen to me."
His voice was different.
Urgent.
"The back door was open."
"Leave."
"Someone has been here."
"Daniel, leave."
"The floor in the old study is torn up."
Mara stood and came closer.
"Put him on speaker."
I did.
Daniel continued.
"The dock storage bench is gone."
My skin went cold.
"Gone?"
"Cut out."
"Call the police."
"Already did."
A sound came through the phone.
A door closing.
Daniel stopped talking.
"What was that?" I asked.
No answer.
"Daniel?"
I heard footsteps.
Then a man's voice in the distance.
"You never could leave anything alone."
Daniel whispered one name.
"Victor."
The line went dead.
I called back.
No answer.
Mara called Jonah.
My mother woke to the sound of my voice shouting Daniel's name into the phone.
Police were already on the way, but Lake Geneva was more than an hour from Chicago.
The local department arrived first.
For twenty-three minutes, we knew nothing.
While we waited for news from the lake house, I asked my mother why they had sold it.
"I could not go there after your father died," she said.
"I thought you sold it because of maintenance."
"That too."
She smiled sadly.
"But mostly because every room sounded like him not being there."
I understood.
Grief could turn a place into an echo.
"Do you regret it?"
"Selling?"
"Yes."
She thought for a moment.
"No."
"Even now?"
"A house is not a person."
Her eyes met mine.
"And keeping a house does not keep a life from changing."
The words landed directly on the part of me still grieving the home Daniel and I had shared.
My mother knew.
She always knew.
"You can miss what happened in a place without needing to own the place forever," she said.
I looked down at my hands.
"I think I needed that."
"I know."
Then Jonah's call came through with news that the storage bench had been cut out.
My mother's face changed.
The lake house stopped being only a place we had lost.
It became a place someone else had been searching.
Then Jonah called.
"Daniel is alive."
I nearly collapsed with relief.
"What happened?"
"He was hit from behind and knocked unconscious."
"Victor?"
"Gone."
"Did Daniel see him?"
"He says he heard Victor's voice before he was struck."
"Were the records there?"
Jonah paused.
"Something was."
My heart started pounding again.
"What?"
"Police found a metal lockbox under the floor where the storage bench used to be."
"Was it empty?"
"Not completely."
"What's inside?"
"One ledger."
"Only one?"
"Yes."
"What does it show?"
Jonah's answer came slowly.
"Payments from Victor's old vendor companies to an account controlled by someone with the initials O.B."
Olivia Bennett.
I closed my eyes.
Then Jonah added the detail that made no sense at all.
"Emma, the first payment to O.B. was made seven years ago."
I opened my eyes.
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Seven years ago, Olivia had not been Daniel's mistress.
Seven years ago, according to Daniel, he barely knew her.
