Chapter 5 - The Green Ledger
Charles Whitmore was Richard’s older brother.
The uncle Ethan almost never mentioned.
According to the family story, Charles had moved to Europe after a bitter business dispute twenty years earlier.
That was another lie.
He lived forty miles away.
Under a different surname.
And Lauren had met him three times.
I felt as though every conversation of the past year had contained a hidden door.
“How did he find you?” I asked.
Lauren wiped her tears.
“He contacted me.”
“When?”
“After Ethan proposed.”
Of course.
The moment my daughter became connected to the Whitmore family, Charles appeared.
He knew exactly who she was.
Thomas Hayes’s daughter.
“He told me Dad stole from the Whitmores.”
Richard exploded.
“That is a lie.”
Lauren flinched.
Charles had shown her financial records with Thomas’s signature.
Payments into an account.
$340,000 over eighteen months.
Enough to make a twenty-something bride believe her dead father had been corrupt.
“He said if Ethan’s family discovered it, they’d hate me.”
“So you hid me too?”
Lauren looked at me.
“You knew Dad. You might say something.”
There it was.
She hadn’t only been ashamed of my dress, my weight, my modest house or my ordinary life.
She was afraid my presence might connect two histories she desperately wanted separated.
I had spent months believing my daughter was embarrassed by me.
The truth was more complicated.
And somehow more painful.
“You could have told me.”
“I was scared.”
“So you punished me for a secret I didn’t know existed.”
Her face crumpled.
“I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t ready to forgive her.
Richard wanted the ledger immediately.
Lauren claimed Charles had it.
Then Ethan asked:
“What was inside?”
She hesitated.
“Names. Dates. Payments.”
“To whom?”
“I didn’t understand most of it.”
“Anything else?”
She looked at me.
“A photograph.”
My heart tightened.
“Of?”
“Dad.”
“Thomas?”
She nodded.
“With Grandma Evelyn.”
My mother.
“And?”
Lauren’s eyes moved toward Richard.
“Arthur Whitmore.”
Richard’s father.
Three people standing outside a bank.
Date stamped on the back:
March 18, 1997.
I knew that date.
It was two days before Thomas died.
Richard sat down.
“My father told police he hadn’t seen Thomas for months.”
Apparently that was false.
Then Diane whispered:
“Richard, there’s something you need to tell them.”
He looked at his wife.
“Not now.”
“Yes. Now.”
Her voice sharpened.
“You’ve hidden it long enough.”
Richard looked suddenly exhausted.
Finally:
“Thomas called me the night before he died.”
My heart seemed to stop.
“What did he say?”
Richard looked directly at me.
“He told me he had finally figured out where the missing money went.”
“Where?”
“He wouldn’t say over the phone.”
“Why?”
“He thought someone was listening.”
I gripped the back of a chair.
“Then what?”
“He said he was coming to see me the next morning.”
Thomas never arrived.
His car went through a barrier on a rain-soaked highway before sunrise.
The investigation ruled it accidental.
Richard continued:
“But Thomas said one more thing.”
“What?”
“He said if anything happened to him, I should find Evelyn.”
My mother.
“Why?”
May you like
Richard’s voice dropped.
“Because she had the second ledger.”
