Chương 13
I said, “You know.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“They were meeting someone.”
“Who?”
“Daniel Rowe’s widow.”
My mouth went dry.
“Why?”
“She had something Daniel left behind.”
“The records.”
“Yes.”
“Did they get them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were the records in the car?”
“Possibly.”
Tobias stared at her.
“You knew all this and told me Charles cut the brakes because he wanted the shipyard.”
“I believed he did.”
“Believed?”
“I found evidence linking one of his subcontractors to the garage.”
“The photograph.”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“A payment.”
“To whom?”
“The mechanic.”
“That sounds fairly direct.”
“It was.”
“Then what are we missing?”
Evelyn looked at me.
“The payment came from an account controlled by Martin Keene.”
I felt the room go still again.
Our chief financial officer.
The man in the photograph.
The man still inside our company.
“Why wasn’t he arrested?”
“Because the account was corporate.”
“Whose corporation?”
“Ours.”
I stared at her.
“You’re telling me the money used to pay the man who sabotaged my parents’ car came from our own shipyard.”
“Yes.”
Julian whispered something I could not hear.
Tobias asked, “Who authorized it?”
“That is the problem.”
Evelyn stood and opened one of the folders.
She removed a photocopied payment authorization.
Even before she turned it toward us, I recognized my father’s signature.
Except my father had been dead three days when the payment was issued.
I stared at the date.
“That’s impossible.”
“Yes.”
“Forgery.”
“Almost certainly.”
“By Keene?”
“Maybe.”
“Charles?”
“Maybe.”
“Victor Mercer?”
“Maybe.”
“Then we have four people with access and no answer.”
“Five.”
I looked at her.
“Who is five?”
“Martin Hale.”
The attorney who had shown me a trust document I could no longer trust myself to remember correctly.
I sat down.
The entire structure was becoming visible, but every beam was rotten.
Tobias asked, “Does Garrett know all of this?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then what does he know?”
“Enough to kill you.”
Penelope covered her face.
The second phone buzzed.
I picked it up.
Another message.
This one contained no warning.
Just a photograph taken moments ago.
Garrett stood beside a sheriff’s vehicle near Savannah Creek.
He was speaking to a man in a dark suit.
The man’s profile was visible.
Charles Aldridge.
Garrett’s father had apparently arrived at the scene.
Under the photograph, the sender had written:
They know the bodies are missing.
My pulse accelerated.
A second image appeared.
This one showed a laptop screen.
An email draft addressed to members of our company board.
The subject line read EMERGENCY SUCCESSION MEETING.
The sender was Martin Keene.
The meeting time was tomorrow at 11:00 a.m.
The attached agenda included one item.
Temporary transfer of voting authority due to presumed death or incapacity of Rosalind and Tobias Vale.
I turned the screen toward Tobias.
His face hardened.
“They’re moving before midnight.”
Evelyn looked at the clock.
“They have to.”
“Why?”
“Because if the board transfers authority tomorrow, someone controls the company before your survival becomes public.”
I read the agenda again.
“Who receives authority?”
The attachment did not say.
Julian spoke through the prepaid phone.
“My father’s car just changed direction.”
“Where?”
“Toward the airport.”
Penelope stood.
“Can you get the plane?”
Julian did not answer immediately.
Then he said, “Yes.”
Tobias looked at me.
“We still don’t know whether we can trust him.”
“No.”
I put the second phone into my pocket.
“But Garrett thinks I’m dead.”
I looked at Evelyn.
“Keene thinks I’m dead.”
Then at Tobias.
“Charles thinks we’re both dead.”
My brother’s expression changed slowly.
For the first time that night, fear was not the only thing in his face.
There was something harder.
Leverage.
I said, “So for the next few hours, being dead is the most useful thing I own.”
By 9:40, Evelyn had turned her kitchen into a temporary command center while Tobias and I argued about whether being dead required us to behave intelligently.
“It requires you not to walk into your own office,” he said.
“I wasn’t planning to use the front door.”
“That is not the reassuring sentence you think it is.”
Penelope sat at the table with Julian still on the prepaid phone, arranging access to Mercer Marine’s plane without telling his father why.
The pilot was already scheduled for an overnight maintenance repositioning flight to Baltimore.
Julian could change the passenger manifest internally, but not erase it.
That meant we would leave a trace.
I preferred traces now.
Garrett’s entire life depended on controlling which ones survived.
Evelyn found us dry jackets, baseball caps, and enough cash for the drive to the small regional airport.
She also handed Tobias his wheelchair.
He stared at it.
“So we’re doing this again.”
“Until someone photographs you standing, yes.”
His mouth tightened.
I understood the humiliation then in a way I had not fifteen years earlier.
He lowered himself into the chair.
His hands rested on the wheels.
For eleven years, that chair had been camouflage.
It had also been a prison he had chosen every morning.
I touched his shoulder.
“I’m still angry.”
“I know.”
“I may stay angry for a long time.”
“That seems fair.”
“But I’m sorry I called you dead.”
He looked up at me.
“That one hurt.”
“I know.”
“Good apology.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
His smile lasted half a second.
It was enough.
We drove north in two vehicles and changed cars once outside Richmond using one of Evelyn’s old security contacts.
The trip became an ugly stretch of gas stations, bad coffee, silence, and anonymous messages that stopped as suddenly as they had begun.
Julian met us at a private hangar shortly before dawn.
He was taller than I expected and much less polished.
His shirt was wrinkled.
There was grease on one cuff.
Penelope stood three feet from him and did not move closer.
He looked at her stomach before he looked at her face.
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
He nodded.
“Me neither.”
May you like
That was all they gave each other.
For the moment, I respected it.
