Chapter 10 - The Four Million Dollars
Dad had created a private account under a trust I had never heard of.
The beneficiary was me.
The access requirements were unusual.
Two signatures.
Mine.
And Thomas Bell’s.
Thomas was dead.
Which should have made the money unreachable.
But Dad had prepared a replacement authorization.
He had hidden it before his death.
Diane had been searching for it ever since.
The nine hundred thousand Evan stole was only the money he could reach.
Four million remained protected.
Grant believed Thomas had hidden the authorization document.
I remembered Thomas visiting me after Dad’s funeral.
He brought a box of old photographs.
He told me Dad wanted me to have them.
I never opened the box.
For a year, it had sat in the storage room of my house.
Police retrieved it.
Inside were family photographs.
My graduation.
Nora’s wedding.
Dad holding us as children.
At the bottom was a photograph of Dad standing beside a lake cabin.
Written on the back were two words.
REMEMBER SUMMER.
My hands trembled.
Dad took us to that cabin every summer until Mom died.
After her death, he sold it.
Or claimed he had.
Property records showed the cabin now belonged to another holding company.
Bennett Family Preservation Trust.
We drove there with police the next morning.
The place had been untouched for years.
Dust covered everything.
In Dad’s old bedroom, I found a loose floorboard beneath the bed.
Under it was a metal document box.
Inside lay Thomas Bell’s replacement authorization.
There were also letters.
One addressed to Nora.
One addressed to me.
I opened mine.
Mara,
If you are reading this, I was unable to finish what I started.
Trust your instincts.
Do not confuse kindness with weakness.
Do not let guilt turn someone else’s cruelty into your burden.
I know you love Evan.
I hope I am wrong about him.
But if I am not, remember that love does not require blindness.
Dad.
I cried until I could no longer see the page.
Then Cole found something beneath the letters.
A memory card.
It contained scans of every financial record Dad had collected.
Enough to expose dozens of transactions.
Enough to connect Diane to accounts investigators had not known existed.
But one file was encrypted.
Its title was simply:
D.M. EXIT.
Cole asked whether Dad used any meaningful passwords.
I tried birthdays.
Mom’s name.
The cabin address.
Nothing worked.
Then Nora looked at the photograph.
“Remember summer.”
We entered the year of our last summer there.
The file opened.
Inside were travel documents.
Bank accounts.
A passport photograph.
Diane.
And a reservation for a private airfield.
Departure scheduled for midnight.
Tonight.
Detective Cole grabbed her phone.
Then I noticed the destination.
It was not another country.
The plane was headed to Maine.
To a coastal town where Diane owned nothing.
But my father once owned something there.
A boatyard.
And suddenly I understood.
May you like
Diane was not running.
She was going to retrieve the money first.
