Chapter 2 - The Letter Margaret Left Behind
James wrapped Lily in a towel while Ethan called emergency services.
Lily coughed against her father’s chest, frightened but conscious.
“Daddy,” she whispered, “Vanessa took me outside because I opened
Grandma’s room.”
Margaret had been dead three years. Her bedroom suite had remained
locked ever since.
“What did you find?”
“A letter with your name.”
Vanessa’s face changed.
Lily said the door had been open and Margaret’s desk drawer pulled out.
The envelope began with a sentence Lily could read: DO NOT TRUST VANESSA
WITH THE FOUNDATION.
Vanessa had snatched it away and dragged Lily toward the patio when Lily
threatened to tell Ethan.
“You held my daughter underwater because she found a letter?”
Vanessa cried. “I panicked.”
“That is not an explanation.”
Police arrived as paramedics examined Lily. Before leaving for
observation, Lily whispered that there had also been a photograph in the
drawer.
It showed Vanessa standing beside Margaret six years earlier.
Vanessa had always told Ethan she barely knew his mother.
Investigators recovered the envelope from Vanessa’s handbag. On the
photograph Margaret had written: VANESSA COLE — ASK DANIEL ABOUT HARBOR
HOUSE.
Daniel Mercer had once been the Whitmore Foundation’s accountant. Four
years earlier he was accused of stealing nearly seven hundred thousand
dollars and disappeared from public life.
Ethan opened Margaret’s letter.
Ethan, if Vanessa Cole ever becomes part of your life, do not confront
her until you understand Harbor House.
The next sentence was worse.
Vanessa is not the person I fear most. If she comes near you, someone
else has started moving the money again.
Ethan looked at Vanessa.
“What money?”
She said nothing.
Then James found a key taped beneath Margaret’s desk.
It opened an old foundation cabinet containing a file marked HARBOR
HOUSE.
The first page showed charitable payments.
The second showed money leaving through companies connected to Vanessa’s
late father.
Ethan looked up.
Vanessa whispered, “My father didn’t steal it.”
May you like
“Then who did?”
“Your father.”
