PART9-My Daughter-in-Law Pocket-Dialed Me—And I Heard Their Plan to Take My House
PART 9
I picked up the blue binder.
There was still one section Samuel hadn’t shown them.
A section containing transactions I hadn’t mentioned.
Transactions that began two years ago.
Transactions involving a second bank account.
An account Alicia didn’t know I had discovered.
I opened it.
Samuel looked over my shoulder.
“You’re sure you want to do this?”
I nodded.
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
I looked at the final page.
Then I smiled.
“Find out who else knew.”
Because something had been bothering me.
Alicia knew about the forty-thousand-dollar gift.
She knew about the house.
She knew about Raymond’s assets.
She knew about my accounts.
Too much.
She had never been the person who handled our finances.
Raymond had.
After he died, Samuel had.
So how did Alicia know exactly where everything was?
I turned the page.
There it was.
A transfer.
A large one.
Made eighteen months ago.
Not to Alicia.
Not to Mark.
To someone named Bruce Carter.
The same realtor who had been “admiring my crown molding.”
Samuel stared at the name.
His expression changed.
“Dorothy…”
“What?”
He pointed at the amount.
“That’s not a realtor commission.”
I looked closer.
$25,000.
And beneath it, in the memo line, were three words:
Consulting — Estate Preparation.
I looked toward the door.
Then back at Samuel.
“Sam?”
“Yes?”
“Raymond always told me there was one person you should never trust with a secret.”
“Who?”
I closed the binder.
“A person who already knows exactly how much your house is worth.”
Samuel’s face went serious.
“Then we have another problem.”
And this time, I wasn’t afraid.
Because whatever they had planned for me by Christmas…
I had started planning for them today.
PART 4
“Then we have another problem.”
I looked at Samuel.
“What problem?”
He turned the statement toward himself and studied it again.
“The payment to Bruce was eighteen months ago.”
“Yes.”
“But the first conversation about Silver Meadows happened less than six months ago.”
I nodded.
“So?”
“So Bruce knew about this before Alicia ever mentioned moving you.”
A chill moved through me.
I looked at the front window.
Mark’s car had already disappeared.
Alicia’s car was gone too.
For four years, I had believed my daughter-in-law was simply careless with money.
Selfish.
Entitled.
Greedy.
But now I wondered whether I’d been looking at the wrong person.
“Sam,” I said quietly, “what exactly did Raymond leave me?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, he closed the binder.
“That’s what I came here to tell you.”
My stomach tightened.
“You mean there is something else?”
“There always was.”
