Chapter 4: What Robert Already Knew
"You knew," I said.
It wasn't a question.
Robert was quiet for a moment.
"I suspected.
I didn't have proof.
And you weren't ready to hear it."
"Tell me what you suspected."
"Come to the house," he said.
"Bring whatever you found.
This isn't a phone conversation."
I drove to Robert's house in the dark.
He lived forty minutes outside Paradise Valley, in a house that had been in the Wentworth family since before I was born.
When I pulled up, the porch light was already on.
He met me at the door.
He was seventy-one years old, built like a man who had worked with his hands his whole life, and he looked at my face the way people look at someone who has just walked through something they can't yet name.
"Come in," he said.
"I'll make coffee."
We sat at his kitchen table.
I laid out the folder between us — the messages, the photographs, the transfer records, the forged signature page.
Robert put on his reading glasses.
He read slowly.
He didn't speak until he had gone through every page.
Then he took his glasses off and set them on the table.
"How long has Daniel been your partner?" he asked.
"Eleven years."
"And how long has your mother been unhappy about Irene?"
"Since the beginning."
"Since before the beginning," Robert said.
"She called me two weeks after you told her you were serious about Irene.
She wanted me to talk you out of it.
Said the girl was after the family money." He paused.
"I told her she was wrong.
She didn't speak to me for four months."
I looked at the forged signature.
"She found Daniel."
"Or Daniel found her.
Men like Daniel don't wait to be found." Robert tapped the transfer page.
"This holding group — Marsh-Wentworth Family Trust — when was it registered?"
"About nine months ago."
"One month before Irene announced the pregnancy."
The coffee maker finished.
Neither of us moved to pour it.
"They were going to take the company," I said.
"While I was in London.
With the documents from the safe, the forged trust, and whatever else they had prepared — they were going to present it as a legitimate transfer."
"And with Irene unable to testify, or too frightened to—" Robert stopped.
"She wasn't going to be frightened into silence," I said.
"She was going to be discredited.
A pregnant woman who married into money, making accusations against her husband's mother and his business partner.
That's what the narrative was going to be."
Robert nodded slowly.
"They needed her quiet.
Not permanently.
Just long enough."
I thought about the message.
*Don't leave marks he can photograph.*
I stood up from the table.
"I need a lawyer," I said.
"Not the firm Daniel and I share.
Someone outside."
"Sit down," Robert said.
I sat.
He reached into the drawer beside the kitchen table and pulled out a business card.
He slid it across to me.
*Patricia Hale.
Corporate and Criminal Law.*
"I called her three months ago," he said.
"When I saw the first sign that something was wrong with your account statements.
She's been waiting."
I stared at him.
"You've been building this for three months."
"I've been protecting my nephew for three months." His voice didn't waver.
"I didn't have enough to bring to you.
I didn't want to damage your relationship with Daniel on a suspicion.
But I have copies of two of those transfers.
Patricia has already reviewed them."
I picked up the card.
"Does she know about last night?"
"She will in about ten minutes," Robert said.
"Call her.
She'll answer."
I looked at my uncle across the kitchen table — the man my father had trusted above everyone, the man my mother had always called *difficult* and *interfering* — and I understood for the first time exactly why she had worked so hard to keep him at a distance from me.
I dialed the number.
Patricia Hale picked up before the second ring.
"Mr.
Wentworth," she said.
"Your uncle told me to expect your call.
Tell me everything, starting from last night."
I started talking.
May you like
When I finished, she was quiet for exactly four seconds.
"Don't go to that nine o'clock meeting alone," she said.
