Chapter 3 - Shadows of the Past
The silence that followed was absolute. The soft humming of the laptop’s cooling fan was the only sound left in the room.
“Mom?” I breathed out, reaching for the edge of the desk to steady myself. “No... that’s impossible. Mom loved Dad. She watched him collapse on the kitchen floor. She was the one who called the ambulance!”
“Madison, look at the transaction history,” Grant said softly, turning the screen slightly toward me.
The records were undeniable. Over the past six years—the exact six years since my father’s death—a private corporate entity registered under the name Helios Holdings had been depositing twelve thousand dollars on the first of every month into a restricted trust account. The sole primary beneficiary of that trust was Eleanor Harrison: my mother.
And the managing director of Helios Holdings was Arthur Pendelton.
“She’s been taking money from Arthur?” I whispered, feeling an overwhelming wave of nausea wash over me. “All this time? While I was helping her pay her grocery bills? While I was paying off her medical insurance every month thinking she was living on a tiny pension?”
Renee looked up, her tear-stained face registering absolute shock. “What? Mom? No... Mom doesn't even know how to set up online banking! Dad handled every single penny when he was alive!”
“She didn't need to know how to set up online banking,” Grant said, his fingers flying across the keyboard as he cross-referenced the corporate registration numbers with state public records. “She just needed to sign her name on the trust documents six years ago. The monthly payouts started exactly fourteen days after your father’s funeral.”
I pulled out my phone with trembling hands. My thumb scrolled to my mother’s contact photo—a picture of her smiling gently at a family barbecue two summers ago, looking fragile, innocent, and widowed.
“I’m calling her,” I said.
“No,” Grant said firmly, catching my wrist gently. “Not over the phone. If Arthur Pendelton is still using human couriers like Whitney to move physical storage drives around, it means he knows his digital footprint is being monitored. If he realizes we have this drive, he’ll liquidate those accounts and disappear before sunrise.”
“Why would Whitney drop the drive here today?” I asked, struggling to piece the chaotic puzzle together. “Why at a gender reveal party?”
Grant pulled up the security camera footage from our front porch camera on his phone. He rewound the video stream to two hours earlier, right when the guests were arriving.
On the small screen, we watched Whitney walk up our driveway carrying a large pastel pink box wrapped in satin ribbons. But right behind her, stepping out of a black town car parked along the curb, was a man wearing a dark wool coat and a wide-brimmed hat.
The man didn't enter our yard. He walked up to the side perimeter fence, waited near the oak trees, and stood precisely where the gift table was positioned on the other side of the cedar boards.
“Whitney wasn't leaving the drive for someone at the party,” Grant realized, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the spatial layout. “She was dropping it through the gap in the fence slats for him to pick up from the alleyway behind our yard. The party traffic was just a cover. Hundreds of people, noise, music, balloons—nobody would notice a tiny silver drive being slipped through a fence gap.”
“Who is the man in the coat?” I asked.
Grant zoomed in on the man’s face as he briefly looked up toward our house before slipping back into the town car.
Even through the pixelated security lens, the sharp, silver hair and aquiline nose were instantly recognizable.
It was legal counsel for the state prosecutor’s office—a man named Marcus Vance. The lead attorney who had presided over the initial closure of my father’s corporate liquidation six years ago, ruling it an un-actionable business failure rather than a crime.
“Arthur wasn't just paying off your mother,” Grant said, his voice dropping to a grim whisper. “He was paying off the officials who buried the investigation. And today... today was the final drop of the legacy files before the statute of limitations expires next week.”
I grabbed my coat off the back of the chair.
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“Where are you going?” Renee cried, pulling herself up from the sofa, looking terrified.
“I’m going to Mom’s house,” I said, looking my sister dead in the eyes. “And you’re coming with me.”
