Chapter 14 - Rebecca
Rebecca did not answer her phone.
Her office was empty.
Her assistant said she had left the previous evening carrying two file boxes and had canceled every appointment for the week.
I felt stupid.
Rebecca had been beside me from the beginning.
She had handed me the deed.
She had opened Grandma’s files.
She had brought us to the safe-deposit box.
She had guided every discovery.
“What if she was guiding us on purpose?” I asked.
Marcus nodded. “Control the investigation by controlling what gets found.”
Laura sat in my kitchen, pale with anger. “Margaret trusted her.”
“Did she?” Marcus asked. “Or did Rebecca inherit the files after Margaret’s longtime attorney retired?”
Laura looked at me.
We had assumed Rebecca was part of Grandma’s inner circle.
She never actually said she was.
Daniel opened Rebecca’s professional biography.
She had joined the estate firm nine years earlier.
Thomas died eleven years earlier.
Two years before Rebecca arrived.
Charles stared at the screen. “Find her maiden name.”
Marcus did.
Rebecca Shaw had been born Rebecca Vale.
Charles stood so fast the chair scraped backward.
“Vale.”
“You know it?” I asked.
He looked at Laura.
She knew too.
Thomas’s longtime accountant was named Edward Vale.
He had disappeared after Laura’s crash.
Rebecca was his daughter.
The pieces became uglier.
Edward Vale had helped Thomas move money offshore. If Rebecca grew up believing her father had been sacrificed to protect the Whitmores, she had motive against everyone.
But motive was not proof.
Then Marcus found proof.
Rebecca’s access card had entered Kingsley House seventeen times in the previous year.
Usually after midnight.
She had installed the cameras.
She had known about the ledger.
She had known Daniel touched it.
And she had access to my mother’s old identity documents through the estate files.
I turned to Laura. “The phone call.”
She frowned. “What?”
“The woman who told me not to trust Daniel. I assumed it was you.”
“It wasn’t.”
Cold spread through me.
Rebecca had manipulated me into doubting my husband.
My phone rang.
Private number.
I answered.
Rebecca’s voice was calm.
“You’re learning quickly.”
“Where is Grant?”
“Alive.”
“For now?”
A pause.
“Yes.”
Daniel moved closer, listening.
“What do you want?” I asked.
Rebecca answered without hesitation.
“Kingsley House. The voting shares. And the original ledger.”
I looked at the black book on the table.
“If I refuse?”
May you like
Rebecca’s voice became very soft.
“Then your husband loses the only brother he never knew he had.”
