Chapter 4 - Richard Left Emily a Package
Daniel remembered a package delivered three days earlier.
It had been addressed to Emily.
Margaret intercepted it at the villa.
She claimed it contained old family photographs and placed them in the
guest room.
Emily had barely looked inside.
Sarah sent officers to preserve the room.
The box was still there.
Photographs filled the top.
Beneath them was a false cardboard panel.
Inside was an envelope.
FOR EMILY CARTER VALE.
The handwriting belonged to Richard.
Daniel recognized it immediately.
Emily opened the letter with Sarah and an attorney present.
Emily,
If you are reading this, I failed to fix something before my death.
Do not give Margaret the key.
Do not trust the first version of what happened to your father.
Emily stopped breathing.
“My father?”
Her father, Thomas Carter, had died in a boating accident seventeen
years earlier.
Richard had known him.
Daniel had never mentioned that.
Because Daniel had never known.
The letter continued:
May you like
Your father did not meet me by accident.
He came to me because he discovered what Vale Maritime was carrying.
