Chapter 6 - Six Years of Missing Calls
I waited until midnight.
The house finally became quiet.
Patricia went upstairs.
Derek disappeared into the den.
Melissa stayed in the bedroom.
Mom pretended to sleep in the laundry room.
I sat beside her until I heard her breathing slow.
Then I started looking.
Melissa had taken over the home office that once belonged to Dad.
The door was locked.
I knew the old spare key would not work because she had changed the handle.
Fortunately, Derek still made the same mistakes he made as a teenager.
He hid emergency keys in obvious places.
I found one taped beneath a drawer in the kitchen.
The office smelled like expensive candles.
Melissa had installed a giant desk.
Framed photographs of her vacations covered the shelves.
Mom was nowhere.
Dad was nowhere.
Our family had been erased.
I opened the desk drawers.
Most contained receipts.
Credit cards.
Invoices.
Then I found a small velvet pouch.
Inside was Mom's phone.
The screen was cracked.
But it powered on.
There were no recent calls.
No messages from me.
No voicemail.
I opened the blocked-numbers list.
My number was there.
So was my overseas work number.
Caroline's number was blocked too.
My hands went numb.
Melissa had not merely ignored my mother.
She had isolated her.
I photographed everything.
Then I opened another drawer.
Inside were bank statements.
Mom's Social Security deposits entered one account.
Hours later, most of the money transferred into another.
The recipient account belonged to M&D Residential Holdings.
I kept photographing.
Then I found something worse.
Credit-card statements in Mom's name.
Furniture.
Restaurants.
Jewelry.
A Caribbean vacation.
Nearly twenty-eight thousand dollars in debt.
Mom had never traveled to the Caribbean.
Melissa had stolen her identity.
A floorboard creaked behind me.
I turned.
Derek stood in the doorway.
Neither of us spoke.
His eyes moved toward the documents in my hands.
“You shouldn't be in here.”
I closed the drawer.
“You knew.”
“Rachel.”
“You knew she was taking Mom's money.”
“I can explain.”
“You knew she blocked my number.”
His face changed.
“What?”
I held up the phone.
For the first time, he looked genuinely surprised.
“She told me Mom stopped answering you.”
“And you believed that?”
“She said you were busy.”
“For six years?”
He looked away.
I stepped toward him.
“How much do you know?”
“Not everything.”
“How much?”
He sank into a chair.
“We were in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“My business failed.”
“I know.”
“It was worse than I told anyone.”
“How much?”
“Four hundred thousand.”
I stared at him.
“And you moved into Mom's house.”
“We didn't have anywhere else.”
“So you took her money?”
“No.”
He sounded desperate now.
“I didn't know Melissa was transferring that much.”
“But you knew about the loan.”
“Yes.”
“And the fake power of attorney?”
Silence.
“Derek.”
He covered his face.
“I signed as a witness.”
I stepped backward.
My own brother had helped forge a document against our mother.
Then he looked up.
“But Rachel, there's something you don't understand.”
“What?”
“Melissa isn't doing this just because of debt.”
His voice dropped.
“She owes someone else.”
Before I could ask who, headlights swept across the office window.
A black SUV stopped outside the house.
May you like
Derek looked terrified.
“They weren't supposed to come tonight.”
