Chapter 6: What Vera Remembered
Vera came to my house the next morning.
She sat at my kitchen table with both hands wrapped around a mug of tea she hadn't touched, and she told me everything she remembered about the last weeks of my father's life.
"He called me on a Tuesday," she said.
"He was calm, but I could hear something underneath it.
Thomas was never a man who panicked.
But he was close."
"What did he say?"
"He said he'd been reviewing the quarterly accounts and found transfers he couldn't account for.
Large ones.
Routed through a subsidiary he didn't recognize." She set the mug down.
"He said he'd confronted Gerald and Gerald had laughed it off.
Said it was a tax structure.
Said Thomas was misreading it."
"But he didn't believe him."
"No.
He said Gerald's explanation was too fast.
Like he'd prepared it." She looked at her hands.
"He asked me if I knew anyone trustworthy in corporate law.
Someone Gerald didn't have a relationship with."
"Did you give him a name?"
"I gave him two." Her voice went quiet.
"He called one of them.
Set up a meeting for the following Friday.
He never showed up.
By Thursday night he was in the hospital."
I laid the email printout on the table between us.
She read it without touching it.
When she looked up, her eyes were wet.
"D.R.," she said.
"Dennis Rourke."
"You knew him?"
"I knew of him.
He had privileges at the same hospital.
Gerald played golf with him." She shook her head slowly.
"I never connected it.
I should have connected it."
"You didn't have the documents," I said.
"Helen did."
"Helen." She said the name like she was tasting something bitter.
"I never liked her.
But I think I misjudged her at the end."
"She wasn't kind," I said.
"But she did the right thing."
Vera nodded.
She picked up her tea finally and held it without drinking.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I don't know yet.
I need someone I can trust.
Not a lawyer Gerald knows.
Not anyone connected to him."
"I still have the voicemail," she said.
"Your father's voice.
Him saying he'd found something.
That he was frightened." She met my eyes.
"That's evidence too."
I hadn't thought of that.
"There's something else," Vera said.
She reached into her bag and set a small envelope on the table.
"He sent me a letter.
About two weeks before he passed.
I've kept it all these years.
I told myself it was sentimental." She pushed it toward me.
"But I think I kept it because I knew, somewhere, that it mattered."
I opened it carefully.
My father's handwriting.
Neat and even, the way it always was.
*Vera — if anything happens to me before Friday, the documents are with my daughter's things.
Helen knows where.
Make sure my girl is safe.*
My throat closed.
He had known.
He had known something might happen and he had still tried to protect me from a distance, through a woman I'd never met, through a stepmother who had made my life miserable — because those were the only pieces he had left to move.
I folded the letter back along its crease.
"He trusted you," I said.
"He trusted you more," she said.
"He just couldn't reach you directly without putting you in danger."
My phone buzzed on the table.
Unknown number.
I answered it.
"I saw you talking to the woman in the green coat," Gerald Marsh said.
"I think we need to have a more honest conversation.
May you like
Just the two of us.
Tonight."
