Chapter 19
At somewhere close to three o’clock in the morning, Rachel braced an elbow on the table and rested her jaw in the curve of her hand, eyelids heavy.
Her gaze shifted to the sofa, where she and Mick had already made up a bed for him two hours earlier with a pair of twin sheets, a pink, heart-shaped pillow from the twins’ room and one of her mother’s quilts that she’d kept in the closet.
She’d been too exhausted to argue when he’d brought up staying over again. Now she couldn’t imagine corralling the energy to climb the stairs herself.
In the chair next to her, Mick sipped from a mug of coffee that was four hours cold. She winced on his behalf.
“Did you find something else?”
She almost prayed that he hadn’t. Already, they’d located several documents connecting her father to Bilton Holdings and the Bilton Foundation.
Like the confession, they were copies, but if there’d ever been other signatures at the bottom, they were whited out in these versions.
Though she had to agree with Mick that her father, whom she could only think of as “Stan” now, couldn’t have committed all the crimes alone, so far, all of the evidence pointed to him. Only him.
As she reached for one of the most damning pieces they’d found, nausea built in her stomach.
The soil study showed the possibility of an oil reserve on the property owned by Bilton Holdings.
Only it was dated two years before oil was discovered.
And two months before the Bilton group even purchased the land the Mount Isabel council had looked into buying for an assisted-living facility to serve low-income seniors.
Worst of all, the same Ben Morrison, who Stan had claimed as his murder victim, was the geotechnical engineer who’d written the report.
A quick obituary search had confirmed that he was, indeed, dead.
“Do you think this report was ever filed with the state of Michigan?”
“What do you think?” His skeptical expression gave away his opinion.
“Yeah. Probably not. Paying off the author of that report might have been the first crime.” She pointed to the confession that she’d placed in the middle of the table.
“But it was more than twenty years between the soil study and his death.” He reached for the report and checked the date. “Could he have come back for more money?”
“Maybe. A lot of it doesn’t make sense to me.” As frustration and shame melded with exhaustion, she lowered her head. “I still can’t believe that it was all just a land scheme for oil.”
“Not oil. Money. Isn’t that what everything comes down to?”
“Apparently, it did for Stan,” she groused, then rubbed her eyes.
“And all his friends, who were probably listed on the originals of those documents before some clever copying.” He indicated the large amount of white space at the bottom of one.
“So it’s clear why Riley’s emails never included the biblical quote about love of money being the root of all evil,” she said with a smirk.
“That would’ve been off-brand.” He brushed his chin, with a full weekend of stubble between his thumb and forefinger. “Mount Isabel is nice and all, but can you imagine how great it would have been if the village had owned the property, instead of Bilton, when oil was discovered?”
Rachel’s neck warmed. Mick hadn’t mentioned Stan’s name, but that didn’t change the truth that her father and his likely co-conspirators had stolen all those possibilities from every village citizen and even those from neighboring cities who could have benefited from those buildings or services.
“All those grants from the Bilton Foundation that everyone drooled over for nearly forty years were really just consolation prizes,” she said. “The people in that assisted-living center could have enjoyed their senior years with dignity for free.”
“But if the village purchased the land and built on it instead of choosing an alternate site for that center, oil wouldn’t have been discovered at all, and there would have been no gifts.”
Rachel rolled her eyes at him. “It’s a little late for finding silver linings. Ben Morrison also wouldn’t have been dead.”
“There is that.”
“I remember Stan saying he used to serve on the village council before my parents were married. Wonder who convinced them to seek an alternate location.” She lifted a hand to stop him from offering an obvious guess.
“And even if land outside the city was dirt cheap in the ’80s, how did he come up with the money to buy it in the first place? ”
“With a little help from his friends, I suspect. The same ones who have ensured that only your dad’s name is on everything.”
“Good friends.” She sat straighter as she realized that, like Mick, she still wanted to defend Stan. Even with all the documents showing that she shouldn’t cling to her belief in him.
“Speaking of money, what do you think your dad did with it? His place is nice, at least what I’ve seen of it, but it isn’t a palace.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out” She pointed to the soil study that they’d moved to a stack all on its own. “We weren’t rich. Riley would tell you the same thing.”
“At least you didn’t live like it.”
Her jaw tightened, and she crossed her arms, but then she dropped her hands to her lap and lowered her chin to her chest. “I guess that’s what I meant. We always had everything we needed, but not necessarily everything we wanted.”
“Did you have a few special things? Nice but not too nice? Paid for with cash?”
She closed her eyes, mining her memories for images. When she opened them again, her gaze landed on the emerald ring on her right hand.
“Oh no.” Her stomach roiling, she covered her mouth with both hands and ran for the kitchen sink. No way would she make it to the half bath past the back door.
Though she managed to avoid decorating the sink with secondhand coffee and bile, she was still leaning over it, her face covered with sweat, when Mick approached and rested a comforting hand on her shoulder.
Her throat filled, and her eyes burned. He probably thought she would shake off his touch when what she wanted to do was throw herself into his arms and sob.
Without asking where to locate anything, he moved to her cabinet and pulled out a glass. He’d been in her kitchen before, though suddenly it seemed like a lifetime ago. After twisting the faucet to the side of the sink, away from her, and filling the glass with water, he held it out to her.
“Here. Drink this if you think you can keep it down.”
She lifted her head and waited for another wave of nausea to pour over her. Once she believed she could trust her stomach, she straightened and took it from him, touching it first to her warm cheek before taking a sip. After a few more seconds, she took another.
“Thanks.”
“You okay?” he asked though they both knew she wasn’t.
He reached for her hand and guided her back to the table. Only after he’d pushed her chair in did he return to his.
With her fingers splayed, she stared down at the ring, letting her memory of joy swell first and then burst like a popped balloon. Another lie. She ripped it off her finger and whipped it across the table. Mick caught it before it could roll to the floor.
“Stan told me it was my mother’s ring when he gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday.
It was supposed to be…precious.” Her voice broke on the last word, but she shook her head, pressing her lips together.
She refused to cry. “I thought it was old. And…hers. Not some piece of gold he’d picked up at a jewelry store. Using cash.”
“You still don’t know that,” he said.
She stared at him until he waved a hand, conceding.
“Okay, you suspect. But it still might have been hers. Even if he lied about some things, he might have been telling the truth about the ring.”
Mick offered a hopeful smile. He wanted it to have belonged to her mother as much as she did, and she loved—no appreciated—him so much for that.
He studied the ring in his palm and then pointed to it with his opposite hand. “Mind if I put this somewhere for safekeeping.”
“Do whatever you want with it.” She waved it away, sure she would never be able to wear it again. It might not have been hot, but she suspected he’d purchased it with dirty money. That felt like the same thing. If Mick left the ring with her, she would probably chuck it in the garbage.
He stowed it in the inside zipper pocket of his coat before turning back to her. “Is there anything else you remember? Besides the ring.”
“Not that I can think—” She stopped herself, recalling a big item in both size and price tag. “Well, the garage.”
“That did look newer than the rest of the house. And the heaters are nice.”
Their gazes flicked to each other’s and then away.
“Riley’s basketball court, too. Those were built at about the same time. I remember the cement contractor saying how unusual it was for someone to pay with that much cash.”
“How long ago was that?”
She thought about it for a few seconds. “Well, Riley was about fourteen. And he’s twenty-seven now. You do the math.”
“Man, you two are young to have survived so much.”
“We were on the accelerated program, I guess. But we’d be happy to quit. Anyway, I don’t feel young.”
“I can imagine.”
“Your life hasn’t been exactly pain-free, either, you know,” she said.
Mick tapped his finger on each pile of papers. “That’s true, but this isn’t my turn. We’ll worry about my messed-up life another day.”
“Since it’s my day—in bonus hours since my phone says it’s Monday—I just thought of something else. Stan paid my college tuition after I had the girls. That I can’t give back.”
They exchanged a look that told her he understood just how hard that was for her.
“How did he even manage it? Walk into the bursar’s office with a briefcase full of cash?”
Even as awful as the situation seemed, she couldn’t help but smile at that image.
“Nothing quite that drug-deal-like. He took out a loan against his retirement account. I tried to talk him out of it. Told him I knew he couldn’t afford it and was grateful for the help he and Riley were already giving me with the twins. But he insisted.”
“So, at least that money was legitimate. He worked for it and saved.”
“Unless you consider that if he’d figured out a way to pay back that loan to his account, it would have been with money that he’d effectively stolen from the village. Or that if he didn’t pay it back, he didn’t really need his retirement fund.”
“That brings us back to the earlier question. Where’s the money?” He thought about it for a few seconds and then continued. “What about when he died? If you received a big windfall from his will, that would have been obvious. So, what did you two inherit?”
“Just what was left in his retirement account and the house and property, which he owned outright. Apparently, Mom received a small inheritance after our grandparents died, so—” She sighed and covered her face with a hand so that her fingertips touched one cheekbone and her thumb stretched to the other.
“What do you want to bet that my mother’s parents never left our family any money? ”
“Like I’ve said before, we still don’t have all the facts. And it’s possible that your dad could have been telling the truth, at least part of the time. Like about your mother’s inheritance.”
A knot forming in her throat, Rachel nodded. Mick didn’t know how much she wanted to believe that.
“So what now?” he asked. “Where do we go from here?”
“While the girls are at school, I’ll take a closer look at these documents and try to find more information on the foundation online. Maybe more about the corporate endowment, which I discovered is managed by Mount Isabel Bank & Trust.”
She stood and started stacking the piles of papers, giving the collection a quarter turn each time to keep them separated.
Then, returning to stand behind her chair, she glanced down at the name she’d jotted in her notebook.
“Then I’ll also see if I can find out anything about that guy, Phil Fuller, who was mentioned in the confession. We don’t even know who he is. Or was.”
“But you won’t be going out anywhere alone, will you?”
“Other than for school drop-off or pickup, no.”
“Good. I just don’t think it’s safe.”
She didn’t point out that she’d be alone in her home once he’d left for the station and she’d taken the girls to school. He had to be as tired as she was not to have reached that conclusion.
“Tomorrow—I mean later today—we have to look at relocating you and the girls to a safer spot.”
Instead of arguing about that now, when she was too tired to even make her case, she nodded. “There are clean towels in the bathroom at the back. Good night.”
“See you in the morning.” He stood up from his chair and grabbed his backpack.
Rachel shut off the dining room light, leaving him with only the lamp in the corner of the living room to guide him to the facilities or her to the stairs. As they passed each other on their opposite journeys, their fingertips brushed, causing a tremor to climb from her wrist to her shoulder.
She crossed her arms to resist the ridiculous temptation to reach up to him, allow him to fold her into his arms and provide comfort along with the safety he’d promised.
But she already knew how that could end, and however delightful, they were both exhausted.
She couldn’t think about that, anyway, when so many questions still crowded in her mind, their answers elusive.
Making the smart move, she continued to the staircase, but stopped at the landing.
“Mick,” she called in a soft voice just as he switched on the overhead light in the kitchen. He stuck his head out through the doorway. “Thanks for staying.”
He nodded and then moved out of sight. She climbed the stairs, her head and heart as heavy as her footsteps on each tread. With Mick out here as extra security, she had at least a small chance of getting some sleep.