Chapter 7 - THE DEAD MAN'S BROTHER
I had spent eight years trying not to think about Ethan Cross.
We had been engaged when he was killed in a highway collision outside Fayetteville, and his death had ended a version of my life I never got back.
After the funeral, I returned to work because work gave grief an order it would not otherwise obey.
Ethan's older brother, Caleb, had been a quiet presence at the service.
I remembered him holding their mother's hand beneath the church awning.
I had not seen him since.
Now his face appeared in the Richmond photograph beside my husband.
Bell met me in a secure interview room and spread the material across the table.
"Caleb Cross used the name Victor Hale in a number of transactions," he said.
"Are you saying Caleb owned Safe Harbor?"
"We're investigating the ownership structure. It's intentionally complicated."
I leaned closer to the photograph.
Caleb was older than I remembered, but there was no mistaking him.
"Why would he know Derek?"
"That's the question."
I told Bell everything I could remember about Ethan, including his brief employment with an overseas shipping contractor and the ordinary arguments we'd had over his travel schedule.
Bell listened without suggesting that a dead man was guilty of anything.
Then he asked whether Ethan had ever given me a storage device or paper file.
I remembered a blue metal box I had kept after his death, filled with photographs, letters, and receipts.
It had stayed in the locked trunk at our house.
"That box was in our bedroom," I said.
"Do you know if it's still there?"
"No."
The scene technicians found the trunk empty.
Derek had removed the blue box before leaving for the cruise.
I tried to reconstruct the last months of our marriage.
Derek had become strangely interested in Ethan shortly after I received a routine benefits inquiry involving the old estate.
He asked about the accident, the funeral, and the papers I had kept.
I assumed jealousy.
Now I wondered whether the jealousy had been staged.
That evening, I visited Ethan's mother, Ruth, after warning her that I could not discuss the investigation in detail.
She opened the door, saw my face, and embraced me without a question.
We sat at her kitchen table beneath a clock that clicked too loudly.
"Did Ethan ever tell you about Caleb's business?" I asked.
Her hands went still around a teacup.
"They weren't speaking at the end," she said.
"Why?"
"Ethan believed Caleb had taken money from men who frightened him. He wanted to expose it."
I felt a chill.
"Did Ethan leave anything with you?"
"Only a letter, sealed for you. I never sent it."
She went to a cupboard and brought down a white envelope, yellowed along the edges.
My name was written in Ethan's unmistakable handwriting.
I opened it with shaking fingers.
The letter apologized for hiding an investigation from me and warned that someone close to the family was helping move fraudulent contracts.
It ended with a single line.
If anything happens to me, look for the photograph of the red door.
Ruth's eyes filled with tears.
"He died two days after writing that."
At home, I remembered a photograph from Ethan's blue box.
It showed a red door on a narrow brick building, with three white numbers above the frame.
I had never understood why he'd kept it.
The number was 417.
May you like
And when Bell searched the old property records, the building turned out to be the original registered address of Safe Harbor Family Services.
