Chapter 8 - My Mother’s Last Warning
Bell pushed Marcus toward a side exit while Martha grabbed my arm. We slipped through the library’s children’s section and out into an alley that smelled of wet cardboard and snow. The SUV roared away before the local police arrived, but not before one of the men looked straight at me and smiled.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I spread my mother’s papers across the kitchen table and searched for any reference to the chapel. I found it in a letter dated six months before she died.
Thomas says the family chapel is the only place Eleanor still respects as private. If the records ever disappear, look behind the stone panel beneath the east window. I pray you never need this, my love.
I read it three times. My mother had suspected the Ashfords long before I did.
Martha arrived at dawn with bagels and a second envelope. “Your mother gave me this after the first suspicious transfer,” she said. “I thought it was only a personal letter. I was wrong.”
Inside was a handwritten list of company accounts and a note naming a bank in Boston. The final line read: If anything happens to me, do not let Eleanor tell Avery I left her nothing.
My throat tightened. “She knew.”
“She suspected,” Martha said. “She couldn’t prove it before she got sick.”
Bell called with an update. A judge had approved a preservation order for the company’s financial records. The Ashfords would be notified by noon.
“They’ll know we’re close,” he warned. “If you go to that chapel, you do not go alone.”
“I won’t.”
Martha shook her head. “You’re not going at all. We have enough to get a warrant.”
I agreed to wait until Bell had a team ready. Then my phone rang. Julian’s name flashed across the screen.
“Avery,” he said, voice ragged. “My mother knows about the recording. Richard is going to burn the files tonight.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because I’m done helping them.”
May you like
I almost believed him.
Then he added, “But if you want the records, you have to come alone.”
