Chương 5
“For me?”
“For both of us.”
“When does it open?”
“It already did.”
“Because of the forged power of attorney?”
“No.”
I waited.
Samantha’s voice softened.
“It opened automatically if Charles Baldwin attempted to exercise control over any Gallagher trust asset.”
The ambulance doors began to close.
Through the narrowing gap, I saw my father standing beside the porch where he had thrown me.
For the first time since he arrived that morning, he looked afraid.
Not angry.
Not insulted.
Afraid.
“What does the memorandum say?” I whispered.
“I’ve only read the first page.”
“And?”
The doors sealed shut.
Samantha took a breath.
“It says Lucas believed your father had been stealing from the company for almost three years.”
For several seconds, the only sound inside the ambulance was the fetal monitor tapping out my daughter’s heartbeat.
“What do you mean stealing?”
Samantha exhaled slowly.
“Lucas found irregular payments routed through subcontractors that had no meaningful operating history.”
“How much?”
“I don’t have a final number.”
“You have a number.”
“Victoria.”
“Tell me.”
“More than six million over roughly thirty-four months.”
I closed my eyes.
The figure was too large to picture, so my brain replaced it with stupid things.
The leaking faucet Lucas had kept promising to fix.
The maternity leave spreadsheet on my laptop.
The twenty-dollar bill I had found in his coat after the funeral and cried over because he had folded it into quarters the way he always did.
Six million dollars belonged to some other scale of life.
My father belonged to that scale now too.
“Why didn’t Lucas go to the police?”
“He wasn’t sure yet whether Charles was taking the money personally.”
“That sounds like a technical distinction.”
“It mattered to Lucas.”
The ambulance pulled away from the curb.
Through the rear window, my house slipped backward between the branches of the maple trees.
My father remained on the sidewalk.
Courtney sat on the porch step.
Deputy Harrison stood between them, writing something down.
Then the corner swallowed all three.
“What else did Lucas find?”
“I’m reading while we talk.”
Paper shifted on Samantha’s end.
“He believed someone inside Baldwin-Gallagher was approving inflated vendor invoices.”
“Someone?”
“His wording is cautious.”
“That means he didn’t know.”
“It means he didn’t want to accuse anyone before he could prove it.”
That sounded exactly like Lucas.
He distrusted certainty when certainty arrived too fast.
Once, during an argument about whether our neighbor’s maple was dying, he had refused to agree with me until he found an arborist’s report online.
The tree had been dying.
He apologized by buying me a blueberry muffin.
I pressed my fingertips against my eyelids.
“When did he start looking?”
“According to this, after an insurance audit flagged freight charges from a company called North Harbor Distribution.”
I opened my eyes.
“I know that name.”
Samantha stopped reading.
“From where?”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Think.”
Another contraction gathered, slower this time.
I concentrated on breathing until it passed.
Erin glanced at the monitor and then at me.
“You’re getting closer together.”
“How close?”
“About five minutes.”
“I’m four weeks early.”
“Babies are famously bad at calendars.”
Her partner smiled without looking up from the IV supplies.
I hated that it helped.
Then the name came back to me.
“North Harbor.”
Samantha waited.
“My father complained about them at a board dinner.”
“When?”
“Maybe last fall.”
“What did he say?”
“That Lucas was obsessed with squeezing pennies out of vendors and making everybody miserable.”
“Anything else?”
“He called North Harbor one of the few reliable operators left.”
Samantha was quiet.
“Lucas wrote that North Harbor had no trucks.”
The ambulance seemed to tilt even though the road was level.
“What?”
“No registered fleet listed in the audit materials he reviewed.”
“But we paid them freight charges.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“That appears to be the question Lucas was asking.”
My phone buzzed against my palm with another incoming call.
The screen showed an unfamiliar Syracuse number.
I ignored it.
“What does Courtney have to do with this?”
“I haven’t reached that part.”
“You said her company was created five months ago.”
“Yes.”
“Before Lucas died.”
“Yes.”
“So this didn’t start because he died.”
“No.”
That mattered.
Until that moment, some irrational part of me had still been trying to fit my father’s behavior into grief.
Lucas died, Charles panicked, money became available, greed took over.
Ugly, but comprehensible.
Five months changed the shape of it.
Whatever he had been doing, Lucas had still been alive when it began.
Possibly watching him.
Possibly suspecting him.
Possibly protecting me from him.
I stared at my wedding ring.
Lucas had been dead twenty-two days.
There were already things about our marriage I could no longer ask him.
That felt like a second kind of death.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
Samantha did not rush to answer.
“He says something about that.”
“Read it.”
“I don’t think you want me reading his words over the phone.”
“I absolutely do.”
She hesitated.
Then her voice changed, becoming flatter in the way people sound when reading something they wish they were not responsible for.
“Victoria trusts Charles partly because she has spent her life adapting to him.”
I stopped breathing.
Samantha continued.
“I am concerned that if I tell her before I can prove what happened, she will confront him, he will deny it, and she will end up defending him against evidence she has not yet seen.”
“Stop.”
She stopped.
Heat climbed up my neck.
Anger arrived before hurt because anger was easier.
“He wrote that?”
“Yes.”
“That I would defend my father?”
“Yes.”
“He thought I was that stupid?”
“No.”
“That is exactly what he thought.”
“No, Victoria.”
I looked toward the ceiling of the ambulance.
A plastic hook swung gently above me.
“He was probably right.”
The words came from me before I decided to say them.
Samantha said nothing.
That made me angrier.
“Don’t agree so loudly.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
May you like
“You have a very judgmental silence.”
“That may be true.”
