Chapter 6 - Grandma’s Second Ledger
The lockbox contained a ledger.
Grandma kept records obsessively.
Dates.
Amounts.
Names.
Thirty years of family money.
At first, Samantha assumed it documented Mom’s theft.
She was wrong.
It documented payments made by Grandma herself.
To Margaret.
To Thomas Keene.
And repeatedly to a company called Hawthorne Medical Services.
The earliest payment occurred thirty-eight years ago.
Before I was born.
The latest:
Two months before Grandma died.
“What was Hawthorne Medical?”
Nobody knew.
The company dissolved years earlier.
Then Daniel said:
“It wasn’t medical.”
Everyone turned.
He remembered Keene mentioning Hawthorne while drunk.
It was a private investigative firm.
Grandma had been paying investigators for decades.
Searching for someone.
Who?
The ledger contained initials:
E.C.
Dad went silent.
“What?”
He pointed.
“Eleanor Carter.”
His sister.
My aunt Eleanor had supposedly drowned when she was sixteen.
I had only seen photographs.
Dad was thirteen when it happened.
Her body was never recovered.
Another dead Carter without a body.
I looked at Mom.
“Is anyone in this family actually dead?”
Mom said nothing.
Daniel almost smiled.
Then Samantha found a handwritten note inside the ledger:
If Margaret discovers Eleanor first, everything changes.
Why would my mother care about Dad’s sister?
Dad looked genuinely lost.
He and Eleanor were children when she disappeared.
Grandma Evelyn was Mom’s mother, not Dad’s.
Why was my maternal grandmother searching for my paternal aunt?
Then Thomas Keene requested a lawyer.
Before shutting up, he gave Sheriff Brooks one sentence.
“Ask Robert who really owned the farmhouse.”
Dad stared.
“I don’t know what he means.”
Samantha returned to the original property records.
Grandma sold me the farmhouse seven years earlier.
But she had acquired it decades before.
From whom?
A shell company.
Before that?
The Carter family.
Dad’s parents.
The farmhouse had originally belonged to his family.
Transferred shortly after Eleanor disappeared.
Then Grandma acquired it through intermediaries.
Why?
We searched the barn.
Nothing.
The basement.
Nothing.
Then Daniel remembered something.
When we were children, Grandma never allowed us inside the old milk cellar beneath the detached smokehouse.
The door had been sealed years ago.
Deputies opened it.
Dust.
Old shelves.
Broken jars.
Then Sheriff Brooks noticed scratches along the floor.
A trapdoor.
Beneath it was a narrow underground room.
Inside:
A bed.
Children’s books.
Old clothes.
And photographs covering one wall.
Most showed Eleanor Carter.
Teenager.
Young woman.
Older woman.
She had survived.
Grandma knew.
At the center of the wall was a recent photograph.
Eleanor standing beside a teenage girl.
On the back:
Eleanor and Emily.
I would have been ten.
I stared at it.
“That isn’t me.”
Dad slowly took the photograph.
His hands began shaking.
“No.”
“What?”
He looked at the girl.
“That’s not you.”
Then at me.
“Emily… Eleanor had a daughter.”
My stomach tightened.
“What happened to her?”
Dad whispered:
“She disappeared when she was ten.”
Same year as the photograph.
May you like
Same first name.
Emily.
