Chapter 7: Everything She Took
I drove home with Emma and Rosa and went directly to my study.
The filing cabinet in the corner held the physical copies of the trust documents, the property deeds, Catherine's estate records, and the insurance policies.
I kept them in a locked drawer inside the locked cabinet.
I had the only key to the cabinet.
Or I had believed I did.
The drawer opened on the first try.
I stood there for a moment looking at the hanging files.
Then I began checking them one by one.
Most were intact.
But the section containing the trust amendment history — the original filing, the beneficiary designations, the co-trustee provisions — had been disturbed.
The papers were slightly out of order, the way they get when someone has leafed through them quickly and tried to replace them without being precise.
One document was missing entirely.
It was the original co-trustee provision from when Catherine and I had first set up the trust.
The document that would have shown, clearly, that no co-trustee had ever been named other than Catherine herself — and that after her death, the provision had reverted to me alone.
Without that original document, the forged amendment would have been harder to challenge.
"She took it," Rosa said from the doorway.
She was looking at the open drawer.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry, Mr.
Harlow.
I should have told you sooner.
I should have—"
"Rosa." I turned around.
"You wrote the letter.
You put it in her bag knowing she might find it before I did.
That took courage." I paused.
"How long had she been threatening you?"
Rosa looked at the floor.
"Since the third month.
She came to me in the kitchen one evening after you had gone to bed.
She told me she knew I had sent money home to my sister in the Philippines and that some of the amounts were irregular.
She said she wasn't accusing me of anything.
She just wanted me to understand that she noticed things." Rosa's jaw tightened.
"I had never taken a single thing from this house.
The money she mentioned was my own savings.
But she said it in a way that made me feel I had done something wrong.
After that, whenever I thought about speaking up, I heard her voice."
I called Grace and told her about the missing document.
She said it didn't matter — the original filing was held by the county clerk's office and could be retrieved.
The physical copy being gone actually helped us, because it demonstrated that someone with access to my locked files had removed it deliberately.
"That's evidence of a second crjme," Grace said.
"Theft of legal documents.
Add it to the list."
Emma appeared at the study door.
She had her stuffed rabbit under one arm — she only carried it when she was unsettled, and she had been carrying it since the previous morning.
"Is Juliette going to come back?" she asked.
"No," I said.
"Promise?"
I crossed the room and crouched in front of her.
"I promise.
She is never coming back into this house."
Emma looked at me for a long moment.
Then she said something I had not expected.
"I tried to tell you before.
Not about the pool.
About the way she looked at me when you weren't watching.
I didn't have the words for it."
"I know."
"You believed me," she said.
"When I told you at the pool.
You believed me right away."
"Of course I did."
Her chin wobbled once.
Then she pressed her face into my shoulder and I held her there in the middle of my study while the afternoon light came through the window and Rosa stood quietly in the doorway and said nothing, because nothing needed to be said.
My phone buzzed.
A message from Detective Marsh: *Warrant executed at Forsythe's registered address 4pm today.
Subject in custody.
Ms.
Marchand picked up at the airport 6:15pm attempting to board a flight to Lisbon.
Both in processing now.*
I read it twice.
Then I set the phone face-down on the desk.
"Are you hungry?" I asked Emma.
She pulled back and looked at me.
"A little."
"Rosa," I said, "would you stay for dinner?"
Rosa smiled for the first time in two days.
May you like
"Yes," she said.
"I would like that very much."
