Chapter 4 - THE TURTLE IN THE WINE CELLAR
I took the blue-bound contract from Richard Sterling’s hand.
At the bottom of page fourteen, right above the printed name Thomas J. Mercer, Majority Shareholder, was a looping, confident signature in black fountain pen ink. It looked remarkably like mine—if someone had practiced tracing it off old payroll checks a hundred times.
And stamped directly below my forged name was the purple notary seal of the State of Ohio: Claire E. Whitmore, Commission Expires 2028.
Claire took a slow step backward toward the hostess stand, her face as white as the linen tablecloths in the dining room.
“You notarized my signature at four o’clock today, Ms. Whitmore?” I asked calmly, holding the page up so she could see it. “While I was standing knee-deep in wet mud thirty miles north of here, and ten minutes before you told me that people like me don’t belong in this restaurant?”
“Mr. Vance brought the signed page to my office,” Claire blurted out, her voice trembling as she threw her own fiancé under the bus without a second’s hesitation. “He told me you had signed it in his car outside because you didn’t want to come in with dirty boots! He swore you were too depressed over Rebecca’s death to sit through another board meeting!”
“Claire, shut your mouth,” Arthur snapped, his jovial executive persona vanishing entirely. He glanced nervously around the foyer, where several diners—and the young hostess—were staring openly at us.
“Uncle Arthur, why are you yelling?” Sophie asked, stepping partially behind my leg and clutching the hem of my canvas jacket. “And why did they take Mommy’s picture off the wall?”
Arthur looked down at his niece, a flicker of shame crossing his features before he hardened his jaw. “Tom, let’s take this upstairs to the private dining office. Now. Before we ruin a forty-million-dollar deal in front of half of Columbus.”
“There is no deal, Arthur,” Richard Sterling said coldly, snatching the contract back from my hand and sliding it into his briefcase. “Monarch Group doesn’t buy properties with forged titles. If your brother-in-law hasn’t signed off on this divestiture, you’re looking at federal wire fraud for the two-million-dollar earnest money deposit we wired into your escrow account on Tuesday.”
Sterling buttoned his overcoat, gave me a curt, apologetic nod, and walked right back out into the rain with his two associates.
As the heavy mahogany doors swung shut behind them, Arthur let out a shaky breath and ran a hand through his thinning hair. When he turned back to me, the fear in his eyes had curdled into desperate anger.
“You had to come in here tonight, didn’t you?” Arthur hissed, stepping close enough that I could smell the scotch on his breath. “Do you have any idea what you just blew up, Tom? This company is bleeding cash! Your precious scholarship foundation and your refusal to raise menu prices or cut kitchen staff bonuses have dropped our margins by twelve percent since Rebecca died! I was trying to save us!”
“By forging my signature and selling my wife’s restaurants behind my back?” I said quietly. “While giving her gold compass necklace to your accomplice?”
Arthur’s eyes darted to Claire’s throat. His face twisted in disbelief. “Claire, are you out of your mind? I told you to keep Rebecca’s jewelry box in the office safe until we left for Naples!”
Rebecca’s jewelry box.
A chill raced down my spine. The jewelry box hadn’t been taken from our house—I kept Rebecca’s things locked in my bedroom closet at home. The only jewelry she had with her the day she died was the overnight velvet travel case in the trunk of her Mercedes.
The trunk the Highway Patrol told me had been emptied by first responders or tow-truck scavengers before the car reached the impound lot.
“Where is her travel case, Arthur?” I asked, taking a step toward him. “How did you get the necklace she was wearing the day of the crash?”
“She wasn’t wearing it in the crash!” Claire cried out, backing toward the kitchen corridor as she realized what Arthur had just admitted. “She left her overnight bag and her necklace in the wine cellar office here at Bellweather twenty minutes before she got on the highway! Because she came here to fire Arthur!”
“Claire!” Arthur lunged forward to grab her arm, his face purple with rage.
I stepped squarely between them, blocking Arthur with my forearm. “Don’t move, Arthur.”
I looked down at Sophie, then over at the teenage hostess, Maya, whose eyes were wide with shock behind the podium. “Maya, locking mechanism on the downstairs tasting room still uses the manual deadbolt from the outside?”
“Y-yes, Mr. Mercer,” Maya whispered—Wait. She knew my name.
“How did you know who I was?” I asked softly.
“Your picture is still in the kitchen breakroom with Mrs. Mercer,” Maya said, her voice shaking. “The line cooks told me when I started last month that if you and Sophie ever came in, I should give you Table Four by the river because it was Mrs. Mercer’s favorite.”
That was why we had been seated at the VIP booth. Not by mistake—but because the twenty-dollar-an-hour kitchen staff and a teenage hostess respected my late wife’s memory more than her own brother did.
“Come on, Soph,” I said, lifting my daughter onto my hip. “We’re going downstairs to the office.”
We walked down the back mahogany staircase into the subterranean wine cellar, where the manager’s office was tucked behind the vintage Bordeaux racks. Arthur followed two steps behind us, his breathing heavy, while Claire trailed reluctantly at the bottom of the stairs.
In the corner of the hallway outside the office door sat a large galvanized steel trash bin filled with discarded renovations from the foyer. Lying right on top of the broken drywall was Rebecca’s heavy bronze dedication plaque, scratched and discarded like scrap metal.
I set Sophie down gently in the hallway. “Soph, wait right here by the glass door where I can see you, okay? Count the wine bottles on the top shelf for me.”
“Okay, Dad,” Sophie said, though instead of looking at the wine racks, she knelt beside the steel trash bin, trying to wipe a smudge of drywall dust off the bronze portrait of her mother’s smiling face.
I walked into Claire’s office, where the wall safe stood open behind the desk. Inside sat Rebecca’s familiar cream leather travel case.
Before I could reach for it, Sophie’s small voice echoed from the hallway:
“Dad? Why is Mommy’s green turtle stuck under the metal picture?”
I turned around and walked back to the trash bin.
When the maintenance crew had pried the bronze plaque off the foyer wall that afternoon, something flat and sealed in a waterproof plastic sleeve had been wedged into the hollow space behind the brass mounting plate—hidden there by the only person who knew the exact measurements of the wall frames.
May you like
Rebecca.
And drawn in the bottom corner of the envelope inside the plastic sleeve was a little cartoon turtle with purple feet and a bright blue shell—the exact secret code drawing Rebecca and Sophie used to leave for each other in lunchboxes.
