Chapter 3 - THE BRASS KEY
Lauren’s knuckles were white where she gripped the brass key against the glass.
“Don’t roll it down, Mom,” Ellie said, her voice tight. “She helped him steal from Grandma.”
I looked at Lauren’s face. Her mascara had smudged under her left eye, and her lipstick was gone. She didn’t look like the polished thirty-two-year-old woman who had glided past my table an hour ago. She looked terrified.
I glanced toward the hotel entrance. The double doors were still closed, but Daniel wouldn’t stay inside much longer.
I cracked the window two inches.
“Get away from my car, Lauren.”
“He just called the police,” Lauren said, her voice breathless and raw in the cold air. “He told the hotel security chief that you had a nervous breakdown inside and took company property from his briefcase. He’s trying to get them to stop your car before you leave the lot.”
My stomach dropped. The silver USB. Daniel knew what my mother had found, and if he got his hands on that drive, the only copy of Margaret’s testimony would vanish.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked cleanly. “You notarized the forged quitclaim deed on Carter Holdings. You’re in this with him.”
Lauren flinched as if I’d struck her through the gap in the glass.
“I didn’t know Margaret was sick when I stamped that paper!” she said, tears finally spilling over her lashes. “Daniel brought me that deed in June. He told me your mother was moving into assisted living and wanted to transfer the land into your name so the nursing home couldn’t seize it for medical bills. He showed me a power of attorney form with your signature on it!”
I stared at her. “I never signed a power of attorney.”
“I know that now,” Lauren whispered, glancing frantically over her shoulder toward the portico. “Tonight, when your mother’s face came up on that screen… I realized why he gave me those pearls this afternoon. He didn’t give them to me because he loved me.”
“Why did he give them to you?” Ellie asked sharply from the passenger seat.
Lauren looked past me at my thirteen-year-old daughter, shame flushing her cheeks dark red.
“Because he wanted your mother to lose her temper in front of four hundred witnesses,” Lauren said. “He’s been telling the board of directors for two months that Claire is emotionally unstable since her mother died. He needed a public scene tonight so nobody would question it next week when he files for emergency conservatorship over her half of the company.”
The air inside the SUV seemed to freeze solid.
He hadn’t been careless with my mother’s pearls.
It had been a trap. Every ounce of my humiliation had been calculated to make me look crazy, except I hadn’t screamed. And Ellie had played the videos instead.
“Take this,” Lauren said, shoving the brass key and the torn piece of green ledger paper through the two-inch gap in the window. They fell into my lap. “I quit five minutes ago. I went into his coat pocket in the VIP lounge while he was yelling at the event chairman.”
I picked up the torn strip of green paper. It was a page ripped from my father’s 2004 ledger—the one my mother said Daniel had stolen from her house.
Written in my father’s blocky handwriting were four lines: Oct 12, 2004 — Cash deposit from M. Carter to HCH Operating: $42,000. Nov 03, 2004 — Wire from M. Carter to HCH Operating: $65,000.
“Where is the rest of this book?” I demanded.
“It’s in the place that key opens,” Lauren said. “Daniel keeps a private storage climate locker in Franklin, under the name of your first client—Miller Remodeling. Locker 412. All the real papers are in there. The ones that show how he set up the Delaware account in your name.”
“Wait,” I said, narrowing my eyes at her. “My mother’s video showed a woman in my navy wool coat cashing a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar check at First Tennessee Bank three weeks ago. That woman had blonde hair tucked under a scarf. That was you.”
Lauren’s hand flew to her throat again.
“I never wore your coat,” Lauren swore, her voice trembling. “Three weeks ago I was in Cabo with my sister. I have passport stamps and airline tickets to prove it. If someone wore your coat into a bank, Claire, it wasn’t me.”
Before I could challenge her, the glass doors of the hotel burst open.
Daniel came striding out onto the pavement, flanked by two uniformed hotel security guards. His eyes swept the parking lot and locked onto my white SUV.
“Go,” Lauren whispered, stepping back from the car. “Don’t go to your house. He already had the locks changed at four o’clock today while you were getting your hair done.”
I threw the SUV into reverse, backed out of the space with the tires chirping against the asphalt, and pulled out onto the main highway before Daniel even reached the bottom of the steps.
For ten minutes, neither Ellie nor I spoke. I watched the rearview mirror every few seconds, half expecting flashing blue lights.
“Mom?” Ellie said quietly. Her hands were folded tightly over her laptop. “Did he really change the locks on our house?”
“I don’t know, baby,” I said, reaching across the console to squeeze her knee. “We aren’t going to find out tonight. We’re going to Franklin.”
The storage facility sat behind a tire shop off Highway 96, lit by buzzing fluorescent tubes. I used the gate code written in pencil on the back of the key tag—0914, Daniel’s birthday, because of course it was—and drove down the narrow row of orange metal doors until we found 412.
“Stay in the car with the doors locked,” I told Ellie. “Keep your phone ready.”
The brass key turned smoothly in the cylinder. I hauled the corrugated metal door up just high enough to duck underneath and clicked on the overhead bulb.
The unit was tiny, no bigger than a walk-in closet. Inside sat a single metal filing cabinet, a cardboard banker’s box, and a wooden coat rack.
Hanging on the wooden coat rack was a navy blue wool coat.
My breath caught in my throat.
I walked over and touched the sleeve. It was the exact brand and cut of the coat in my hall closet at home—the one I had bought during a trip to Atlanta two years ago.
I reached into the right pocket.
My fingers closed around a crumpled paper receipt from the county clerk’s office in Davidson County, dated four days before my mother died.
Next to it was a silver compact mirror I had seen a hundred times before.
It didn’t belong to Lauren.
May you like
Engraved on the lid of the silver compact were the initials S.H.
Sarah Harrison. Daniel’s younger sister—my best friend since college, the godmother of my child, and the Vice President of Finance at our bank.
