Chapter 4 - What Was Inside the Locket
Behind the heavy velvet curtain near the wardrobe alcove, I held Sophie against my chest, one hand gently covering her mouth so her breathing wouldn’t give us away. She was completely still, her fingers clutching her rolled-up turtle drawing against my ribs.
Ten feet away, silhouetted by the amber glow of the streetlamp outside the office window, Claire Whitmore paced behind Rebecca’s old desk.
“I don’t care what Arthur promised Sterling,” Claire said into the phone, her arrogant manager’s persona entirely gone, replaced by raw desperation. “I pried open that cabinet an hour ago because Arthur told me the combination to the safe was inside Rebecca’s old ledger. He swore the original deed to the riverfront land was in there. It wasn’t! Just an empty envelope and this damn locket!”
She paused, listening to whoever was on the other end of the line.
My mind raced. The riverfront land. While Hearthstone Hospitality owned the eleven restaurants as a corporation, the prime three-acre parcel of riverfront land that Bellweather House sat on was different. Rebecca’s grandfather had left her that land personally before we were married. It was never transferred to the corporate shell; Rebecca had leased it to our company for one dollar a year so no board member or creditor could ever seize her favorite place on earth.
Without that land lease, Bellweather House couldn't legally be sold to Sterling or anyone else.
“Well, you tell my brother he’s running out of time,” Claire snapped into the phone. “Because Daniel Mercer just walked into my dining room wearing muddy boots, and I practically threw him out on the street before I knew who he was! If Arthur doesn't get Sterling to wire the escrow deposit tonight, I’m taking the locket and walking away.”
My brother.
The pieces clicked together with sickening clarity. Claire Whitmore. Arthur’s ex-wife’s maiden name was Whitmore—no, not his ex-wife. His half-sister from Cincinnati. Arthur had hired his own sister as general manager under her married name so the payroll department wouldn't flag the nepotism.
Claire ended the call, exhaled sharply, and tried to pry the silver locket open with her thumbnail. The clasp was stuck—a quirk it had always had. You had to press the tiny compass rose inward while sliding the catch to the left.
Frustrated, Claire tossed the locket onto the center of the desk, right beside a stack of blue legal contracts. “Damn thing,” she muttered. She checked her watch. “Six-forty. Appetizers.”
She smoothed her charcoal suit jacket in the reflection of the window, took one deep breath to put her cold mask back on, and hurried out of the office, pulling the door shut behind her.
We waited until her heels faded all the way down the mahogany stairs.
Sophie let out a long breath. “Dad, she’s a thief.”
“Yes, sweetheart, she is,” I whispered. “Stay right by the door and listen for anyone coming up.”
I stepped over to the desk and picked up Rebecca’s silver locket. It was still warm from Claire’s hand, which made my stomach turn. I pressed the center of the compass rose and slid the catch left.
The silver oval popped open cleanly.
On the left side was the tiny, faded photograph of Sophie as a toddler, fast asleep on my shoulder. On the right side, where my photo used to be, the picture had been slightly lifted at the corner. Tucked behind it was a tightly folded square of thin onion-skin paper, no bigger than a postage stamp.
I carefully pulled it out with the tip of my pocketknife and unfolded it under the light of the desk lamp.
It wasn't a deed. It was a bank safety deposit box claim slip from a small community credit union in Millersburg, Ohio, dated four days before Rebecca went into the hospital for the final time. Across the bottom, in tiny ink, Rebecca had written three words:
Audit the foundation.
I frowned, kneeling down to grab the yellowed recipe card I had seen on the floor beneath the safe earlier. I turned it over. The front was her recipe for rosemary shortbread, stained with butter from years ago.
The back, however, was covered in dates and dollar amounts written in Rebecca’s shaky late-stage handwriting.
March 12 — $45,000 (Roof repair, Bellweather)April 04 — $62,000 (HVAC replacement, Bellweather)May 19 — $80,000 (Riverwall reinforcement, Bellweather)
Below the numbers, Rebecca had written: None of this work was done. Arthur is bleeding the charity fund.
My heart felt like it stopped. Two years ago, we had launched the Rebecca Mercer Children’s Kitchen Foundation—a program funded by our restaurants to provide free hot meals to low-income school districts across Ohio. Arthur was the sole trustee while I was on bereavement leave.
He hadn't just been stealing from the company. He had been writing fake maintenance invoices at Bellweather House to siphon hundreds of thousands of dollars out of my dead wife’s charity for hungry kids. And now, to cover up the massive hole in the books before the annual audit next month, he was trying to sell Bellweather House to Sterling so he could use the buyout cash to plug the missing funds.
Wait. If Rebecca knew about this four days before she died, why hadn't she told me?
I looked closer at the bottom of the recipe card, where the paper had been torn. One final line remained:
Asked Arthur to meet me at the river patio at 8 PM. Going to give him one chance to return the money before I tell Daniel.
The date next to that note was October 14th.
The night Rebecca collapsed on the river patio from what the paramedics had called a sudden, stress-induced cardiac event—alone in the dark for forty minutes before a dishwasher found her.
Except she hadn't been alone.
The doorknob rattled behind us.
May you like
“Dad!” Sophie gasped.
The office door swung open, and Arthur Vance stepped inside, his face pale beneath the hallway light. He looked at the open locket in my hand, then down at the recipe card in my fingers, and reached behind his back to click the deadbolt shut.
