Before Aaron could open the door, I stopped him.<\/p>\n
I wanted Ross\u2019s answer first.<\/p>\n
Three years earlier, he said, I had not simply fallen down the basement stairs.<\/p>\n
Diane had been inside my house.<\/p>\n
Memory returned in fragments.<\/p>\n
Rain against the windows.<\/p>\n
A folder on my kitchen counter.<\/p>\n
Diane asking me to sign documents supposedly meant to protect Frank and me.<\/p>\n
I had refused.<\/p>\n
Then she poured me another cup of coffee.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did you put in it?\u201d<\/p>\n
Diane\u2019s face answered before her mouth did.<\/p>\n
Ross said she had taken one of Frank\u2019s sleeping pills.<\/p>\n
My sister stood so abruptly her chair scraped the floor.<\/p>\n
Diane denied it.<\/p>\n
Ross reminded her that he had helped clean up what happened afterward.<\/p>\n
Aaron opened the door.<\/p>\n
Investigator Malcolm Reed entered with forensic accountant Joanna Pierce.<\/p>\n
Joanna carried the records Frank had spent months collecting.<\/p>\n
Among them was a document bearing my signature.<\/p>\n
Except I had never signed it.<\/p>\n
Joanna explained that the signature had been copied from legitimate refinancing paperwork.<\/p>\n
The forged document would have shifted property into a holding company controlled by Frank\u2019s children.<\/p>\n
If it had succeeded, they could eventually have forced me from my own home.<\/p>\n
I looked at Diane.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou drugged me for a house?\u201d<\/p>\n
She began crying.<\/p>\n
She said I had changed Frank.<\/p>\n
I finally answered nineteen years of resentment.<\/p>\n
I reminded her who had stayed through surgeries, chemotherapy, dressings, vomiting, sleepless nights, and all the humiliations illness had forced upon the man we both loved.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou do not get to come into this house after I buried him and tell me I stole him from you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diane said nothing.<\/p>\n
Reed said there was more.<\/p>\n
Joanna laid bank statements across the table.<\/p>\n
Over five years, nearly half a million dollars had moved from one of Frank\u2019s investment accounts to a company connected with Ross.<\/p>\n
Ross claimed Frank had paid him legitimately.<\/p>\n
Joanna pointed out that Ross\u2019s company had ceased operating before the transfers began.<\/p>\n
There were checks too.<\/p>\n
I knew Frank\u2019s handwriting.<\/p>\n
Those signatures were wrong.<\/p>\n
Ross blamed Diane.<\/p>\n
Diane blamed Ross.<\/p>\n
For the first time, I understood why Frank had hired someone outside the family to examine everything.<\/p>\n
He had wanted to trust his children.<\/p>\n
My accident destroyed that trust.<\/p>\n
Frank had found Diane\u2019s scarf in our kitchen after she told him she had not visited.<\/p>\n
He started looking.<\/p>\n
He discovered the forged property papers.<\/p>\n
Then the missing money.<\/p>\n
Then something stranger.<\/p>\n
Joanna showed me surveillance photographs.<\/p>\n
Me leaving a grocery store.<\/p>\n
Me gardening.<\/p>\n
Me sitting in a caf\u00e9.<\/p>\n
Someone had been watching me for years.<\/p>\n
Payments to the investigator led to a company called Hawthorne Residential Holdings.<\/p>\n
The company was connected to the attempted transfer of my house.<\/p>\n
Its ownership had been deliberately obscured.<\/p>\n
But Joanna had traced the original registration.<\/p>\n
The name on the page made no sense.<\/p>\n
Margaret Mercer.<\/p>\n
Frank\u2019s first wife.<\/p>\n
The woman I had been told was dead.<\/p>\n
I had helped Frank place flowers on her grave.<\/p>\n
Ross stared at Diane.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou told me she was dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diane\u2019s answer changed everything.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe woman in that grave is dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not Margaret.<\/p>\n
Years earlier, Margaret had called Diane.<\/p>\n
She was alive.<\/p>\n
She wanted money.<\/p>\n
Diane secretly sent it.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of thousands of dollars.<\/p>\n
Margaret had been blackmailing her.<\/p>\n
Ross demanded to know why.<\/p>\n
Diane looked at me.<\/p>\n
Margaret had known who I was before Frank ever met me.<\/p>\n
She had known my mother.<\/p>\n
I glanced toward the walnut clock.<\/p>\n
Diane followed my eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why I wanted it.\u201d<\/p>\n
My anger sharpened.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou weren\u2019t claiming it because it was valuable?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Margaret had told her something was hidden inside.<\/p>\n
I took the clock down.<\/p>\n
Four screws held the rear panel.<\/p>\n
Behind the mechanism was an envelope yellowed by decades.<\/p>\n
My maiden name was written across it.<\/p>\n
Eileen Harper.<\/p>\n
My mother\u2019s handwriting.<\/p>\n
Inside was an old photograph.<\/p>\n
My mother stood beside another young woman near a lake.<\/p>\n
I recognized the second woman from Frank\u2019s albums.<\/p>\n
Margaret.<\/p>\n
The date was 1978.<\/p>\n
My mother had written a note on the back suggesting that she and Margaret had done something Frank could never know about.<\/p>\n
Before I could make sense of it, the telephone rang.<\/p>\n
Reed told me not to answer.<\/p>\n
Joanna discovered the incoming number was linked to the prepaid account that had repeatedly contacted Diane.<\/p>\n
The phone kept ringing.<\/p>\n
I picked it up.<\/p>\n
An older woman spoke.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou finally opened the clock.\u201d<\/p>\n
My knees weakened.<\/p>\n
\u201cMargaret?\u201d<\/p>\n
She did not answer directly.<\/p>\n
She warned that Frank should have left the past alone.<\/p>\n
Then she told me to ask what had happened at Lake Crescent in 1978.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was six.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t remember being there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou weren\u2019t supposed to.\u201d<\/p>\n
The call ended.<\/p>\n
Reed produced an old newspaper clipping.<\/p>\n
A cabin fire.<\/p>\n
My parents.<\/p>\n
Me, six years old, wrapped in a blanket.<\/p>\n
Another child had disappeared that night.<\/p>\n
A four-year-old girl.<\/p>\n
Her name was Diane.<\/p>\n
I looked across the room at Frank\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n
The ages made no sense.<\/p>\n
The history made no sense.<\/p>\n
But the fear on Diane\u2019s face was real.<\/p>\n
For the first time that afternoon, I wondered whether the woman who had spent nineteen years insisting she was Frank\u2019s true family even knew who she was.<\/p>\n
Before Aaron could open the door, I stopped him. I wanted Ross\u2019s answer first. Three years earlier, he said, I had not simply fallen down the basement stairs. Diane had … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19843,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19881,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19846\/revisions\/19881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}