Chapter 2 - The investigator my husband never told me about
Rescue crews reached us nineteen minutes later.
I know because Gabriel told me afterward.
I remember almost none of it.
Only fragments.
A red helmet outside the windshield.
Someone cutting my coat.
A medic telling me not to look at my leg.
The groan of metal being spread apart.
And Gabriel standing uphill beneath the rain, not behaving like a stranger who happened upon an accident.
Watching.
Always watching.
I woke in a hospital outside Knoxville with surgery already behind me.
Broken tibia.
Two fractured ribs.
Deep bruising across my hip and abdomen.
A concussion.
No spinal injury.
Lucky, everyone said.
The word irritated me.
Lucky people generally do not discover their dead husband had hired a private investigator to determine whether they intended to kill him.
Gabriel appeared the next afternoon.
No neon jacket.
Gray shirt.
Dark jeans.
Without the beard shadow and trucker cap, he looked less rustic and more precise.
He closed the hospital-room door but remained near it.
“I won’t stay if you don’t want me here.”
“Why did Daniel hire you?”
No greeting.
No gratitude.
I had too little energy for politeness.
Gabriel pulled a chair farther from the bed before sitting.
“Three years and four months ago, Daniel contacted my firm.”
“What firm?”
“Shaw Investigative Group.”
“Why?”
“He thought someone was interfering with his medications, vehicle maintenance, and financial records.”
My chest tightened.
“Someone?”
“At first, he thought you.”
I laughed once.
It hurt my ribs.
“Of course.”
“He was wrong.”
The room went still.
“How do you know?”
“Because I spent seven weeks watching you.”
The anger arrived before the fear.
“You followed me?”
“Yes.”
“Without my knowledge?”
“Yes.”
“Into my work?”
“Not inside. Public movements, financial patterns, routine contacts.”
I stared at him.
“What did you find?”
“That you were working sixty-hour weeks, driving Daniel to appointments, paying most household expenses, and taking your lunch break every Wednesday to call the insurance company he kept forgetting to contact.”
My eyes burned unexpectedly.
Gabriel continued.
“I found no affair, no unusual medication purchases, no unexplained cash movements, no contact with anyone who would benefit from Daniel’s death.”
“Then why didn’t he tell me?”
“Because by the time I cleared you, I had found something else.”
I looked toward the window.
Outside, rain slid in long gray lines across the glass.
“What?”
“Daniel’s fears weren’t invented.”
My pulse quickened.
Someone had loosened bolts on his boat trailer.
A refill request had been altered at his pharmacy.
A maintenance invoice for his truck showed work no mechanic remembered performing.
And someone had attempted to change the beneficiary on one of his investment accounts.
“To who?”
Gabriel paused.
“Evan.”
I turned back.
“He was fourteen.”
“Yes.”
“He couldn’t have done that.”
“Not alone.”
The phrase landed.
Not alone.
Gabriel reached into his jacket and removed a sealed plastic evidence pouch.
Inside was a photocopy of a handwritten note.
Daniel’s handwriting.
If something happens to me, do not assume Claire did it.
I closed my eyes.
The pain in my leg suddenly felt far away.
“Why did he think I would be blamed?”
“Because somebody had already started building that story.”
Gabriel explained that anonymous complaints had been sent to Daniel’s life insurer, his estate attorney, and one business partner.
Each suggested I was pressuring him to change his will.
That I resented Evan.
That I had become “obsessed” with controlling family assets.
None were signed.
Daniel showed them to Gabriel.
At first, they fed his suspicion of me.
Then something happened.
“What?”
“Evan repeated a detail from one of the anonymous letters.”
My mouth went dry.
“What detail?”
A phrase.
The cabin should stay with blood.
Daniel had never told Evan about the letters.
Yet during an argument about the ridge property, fourteen-year-old Evan screamed:
“Mom said the cabin should stay with blood.”
Mom.
Rebecca.
Dead eight years.
Daniel asked where Evan heard it.
The boy said he didn’t remember.
Gabriel did.
Because the exact phrase appeared in the second anonymous letter.
Then Daniel started questioning whether somebody had been feeding Evan information.
“Who?”
“That,” Gabriel said, “is what I never finished proving.”
I stared at him.
“You kept investigating after Daniel died?”
“At first because I thought his death might be connected.”
“Was it?”
“Officially, no.”
Daniel’s boat had capsized after sudden weather on Norris Lake. He hit his head during the accident and later developed complications.
No mechanical sabotage was established.
No toxicology anomaly.
No evidence anyone was with him.
Gabriel had spent months trying to find what was not there.
“The accident really may have been an accident,” he said.
“Then why keep watching Evan?”
Gabriel leaned forward slightly.
“Because after Daniel died, someone broke into my office.”
My skin went cold.
“What did they take?”
“Only one file.”
Daniel Mercer.
Then, two weeks later, Gabriel found a photograph taped to his windshield.
A picture of Claire and Evan leaving Daniel’s funeral.
Across the back:
Family stays with blood.
Same phrase.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying somebody wanted me to stop looking.”
“Evan?”
“He was fourteen.”
“Not alone.”
Gabriel nodded.
Then he placed another item on the bedside table.
A photograph taken from a distance two months earlier.
Evan outside a diner near Gatlinburg.
Across from him sat a woman in a camel coat.
Face partly turned away.
But I recognized her anyway.
My dead husband’s sister.
Margaret Mercer.
May you like
The aunt who had spent three years insisting she wanted nothing from the estate.
Cliffhanger: Evan had been meeting secretly with Daniel’s sister Margaret—the same relative who had once argued that the ridge cabin should “stay with blood.”
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