Chapter 8 — THE LAST WEEK OF MY FATHER'S LIFE

I hated myself for the thought.

That is the first thing that needs saying.

My father died of a heart attack.

There was a death certificate.

There was a paramedic report.

There was a doctor who had been telling him for three years to take the tablets and stop eating fried shrimp on Fridays.

There was no mystery about it at the time.

But suspicion is a solvent.

Once it gets into a memory it starts lifting the paint.

I remembered him calling me eleven days before he died.

I was thirty-one.

Nora and I had been together a year.

I was on the road four days a week.

He asked whether I could come by the house.

I said I was slammed.

He said it was about money.

I made a joke about whether he was offering me any.

He did not laugh.

That should have stayed with me at the time.

Instead I rescheduled.

He died before we ever had the conversation.

For six years I carried the ordinary guilt of a son who did not visit enough.

Now there was a second kind waiting underneath it.

What if he had been trying to warn me?

Raines refused to speculate with me.

"We have no evidence that your father's death involved anybody's wrongdoing."

"I know."

"Fisk's remark could refer purely to a financial dispute."

"I know."

"And to look at historical medical circumstances we need a factual basis, not a feeling."

"I understand."

And I did.

It did not stop me going through six-year-old messages until two in the morning.

Delia did the same in Savannah.

We searched emails.

Voicemails.

Photographs.

Anything from the last month of his life.

Nora sat up with me two of those nights and made tea neither of us drank.

Margo pulled the estate file.

Three days went into paper.

Then Delia found an email.

Our father had sent it to himself.

The subject line was one word.

Roland.

The body was four sentences.

R.F. pushing V again.

Says the new fund will recover the losses.

Numbers do not work.

Need an independent audit before she moves another dollar.

I read it eight times.

Losses.

There had already been losses before he died.

Then there was a second one.

This one was to Samuel Ives, the estate attorney my mother later fired.

Sam,

I need to update beneficiary instructions and separate my accounts from anything V has opened with Fisk.

Can you call me tomorrow.

It was sent nine days before he died.

Margo read it twice.

"This is important."

"He knew she was moving money."

"He had concerns and he was acting on them."

"Did he manage to change anything?"

"That's what we check."

Ives's old firm found no completed instructions.

My father died before the appointment.

Then Delia found something worse.

A voicemail.

Our father's old phone had been backed up to her laptop years earlier, when she helped our mother pull family photographs off it.

She still had the archive.

We listened in my kitchen with the lights off because neither of us wanted to look at the other one.

He sounded tired.

Ethan, ring me when you get this.

Your mother and I are dealing with something involving Fisk.

I need you and your sister to understand what belongs to you.

Don't sign anything that man sends you.

Ring me.

Thirty-eight seconds.

I have no memory of ever hearing it.

I checked the date.

It was left while I was working a hurricane deployment in Wilmington with three hundred claims open and my phone permanently at four percent.

Maybe I heard it and forgot.

Maybe it never synced.

It does not actually matter.

The warning existed and it did not reach me.

Nora put her hand flat on my back.

"He was trying to protect you."

I stared at the screen.

"And I wasn't picking up."

"You didn't know."

"That excuse is wearing out."

"It's still true."

Raines took the voicemail to the financial crimes team.

They traced my father's investment activity backwards.

The picture came into focus and it was not flattering to anyone.

Three years before he died, my mother put ninety thousand dollars into a fund Fisk promoted.

My father objected in writing.

The investment lost slightly more than half its value.

Fisk then presented a second opportunity that he said would recover the first.

My mother went in again.

Some of that money came out of joint accounts.

My father found out.

He started separating everything.

Then he died.

After the funeral, my mother had control of several accounts as the surviving spouse.

The beneficiary account should have passed straight to his children.

Instead, paperwork appeared that sent it somewhere else.

The signatures on that paperwork were being examined.

I already knew what the examiners were going to find.

Raines called me back to the station on the Thursday.

This time she had news about Roland Fisk.

They had found him.

A hotel outside Savannah, of all places, forty minutes from my sister.

He had not been arrested.

Not yet.

But investigators had interviewed him for five hours.

"What did he say?"

"He denies forging anything."

"Naturally."

"He says your mother handled all family documents independently."

"Do you believe him?"

"No."

Raines almost never answered that directly.

Something had changed.

"Why not?"

"Because he denied knowing Hollis Deane."

"You have a photograph of them at the same table."

"Yes."

"He also denied any involvement in Calloway Legacy Partners."

"He's the registered organiser."

"Yes."

I almost smiled.

"That is a remarkably bad lie."

"It gets better."

He had claimed he had not spoken to my mother in months.

The device records showed contact three days earlier.

"Can you charge him?"

"Investigators are coordinating with the solicitor's office."

Process.

Again.

But this time I could feel something closing.

Then Raines slid a report across the table.

The attempted mortgage login, the one that happened while my mother and cousin were both sitting in custody, had been traced.

Not to Fisk.

Not to Corinne.

Not to Deane.

To an IP address at my mother's house.

I stared at it.

"She was in a cell."

"Yes."

"Then who was in her house?"

"That is what we asked."

Delia has a key.

Corinne has a key.

Trent stayed there sometimes.

Fisk had been there.

Several possibilities.

Then one detail closed most of them off.

A doorbell camera across the street from my mother's house had recorded a vehicle leaving her drive nineteen minutes after the login attempt.

A black Range Rover.

Registered to Deane Coastal Group.

My hands went cold on the table.

"He was inside my mother's house while she was in custody."

"It appears so."

"Looking for what?"

"We don't know."

I thought about the message on the tablet.

Get the rest out of the garage before he opens it.

Maybe Hollis Deane had been doing the same job at the other end.

"Have you searched her house?"

Raines looked at me for a moment.

"We executed a warrant this morning."

My heart went up into my throat.

"And?"

"Financial records."

"Two computers."

"Property files."

"And a safe."

"What was in it?"

"Some of it is still being inventoried."

She paused.

"But we recovered documents relating to your father."

I leaned forward.

"What documents."

"Medical records."

That word went through me like cold water.

"What kind?"

"Cardiology notes."

"Prescription history."

"Insurance correspondence."

"Why would my mother keep my father's cardiology notes in a safe?"

"She may simply have stored them."

"In a safe. Six years later."

Raines did not answer that.

"There was something else."

"What."

"A handwritten note."

She put a photograph on the table in front of me.

The handwriting was my father's.

I would know it anywhere.

Vivian,

I know what you and Roland have done.

If that money is not back by the end of the month I am going to the police.

My hands went numb from the fingertips in.

There was no date on it.

No envelope.

No context.

But it existed.

My father had found out.

He had put it in writing.

He had threatened to report them.

And then he died.

I stood up.

Raines spoke immediately.

"Ethan. Do not go where you are going."

"How am I supposed not to?"

"Because a conclusion is not evidence."

"He threatened to report them."

"We do not know what 'what you and Roland have done' refers to."

"The money."

"Probably."

"And he died before he did it."

"That does not establish a connection."

I knew she was right.

I resented her enormously for being right.

Then she told me the rest.

My father's medical records showed significant coronary artery disease.

His death was medically consistent with natural causes.

That should have been a relief.

It was.

Partly.

"He really was that ill?"

"Yes."

"Genuinely at risk?"

"Yes."

I breathed out for what felt like the first time in three days.

Some of the darkness went back into its corner.

Then Raines added one more sentence.

"However, there is an unexplained change in one prescription in the week before he died."

My head came up.

"What change."

"A refill was collected."

"So?"

"His cardiologist's office has no record of authorising it."

The room went very quiet.

"What medication?"

She would not tell me yet.

The medical review was ongoing.

She said again, twice, that an unauthorised refill does not mean anybody harmed my father.

Pharmacies make errors.

Surgeries make errors.

People collect medication for entirely ordinary reasons.

I heard every word.

And all I could think about was a locked safe with my father's cardiology notes inside it, six years after his funeral.

That evening Delia came to the house.

We sat on the back steps after Nora took Silas up.

My sister looked about fifteen years old.

"Do you think Mum hurt Dad?"

"I don't know."

She started crying.

"I hate that I'm even able to ask that."

"So do I."

"We used to be a normal family."

I looked at her.

"No."

"What?"

"We used to think we were a normal family."

She laughed through the crying.

"That's worse."

It was.

Then she told me something she had never told anybody.

Four days before our father died, she drove over to the house to drop off a dish.

Our parents were arguing in the kitchen.

She sat in the car in the drive because she did not want to walk in on it.

She heard our father shout.

You have already taken enough.

And then our mother, clearly.

If you tell Ethan, you will destroy this family.

I stared at my sister.

"Why have you never said that?"

"I thought it was an affair."

"What?"

"I thought maybe Mum had cheated on him."

"He sounded so betrayed."

"And I didn't want to know."

It made a horrible kind of sense.

All of us had a talent for not wanting to know.

That is what my mother actually ran on.

Not deception.

Silence.

My phone rang.

Raines.

Her voice was different.

Faster.

"Ethan, is your sister with you?"

"Yes."

"Put me on speaker."

I did.

"We've finished the initial inventory of the safe."

Delia took hold of my arm.

"We found an envelope containing two cashier's cheques."

"Total value one hundred and sixty thousand dollars."

"Payable to who?" I asked.

"Deane Coastal Group."

My chest tightened.

"Drawn on what account?"

"An account descended from your father's investment funds."

Delia whispered, "She still had Dad's money."

"Some of it," Raines said.

Then she added:

"We also found a sealed letter addressed to you."

I stopped breathing.

"From my father?"

"No."

"From your mother."

"When was it written?"

"There's no date inside the envelope."

"What does it say?"

"We haven't opened it. It may contain personal material outside the warrant."

"But there is writing on the outside."

"What writing."

And Detective Raines read it out slowly.

For Ethan, if Roland fails.