Chapter 5: The Email My Father Left Me
The account still existed.
I sat in my car in the Blackwood driveway, engine running, and typed in the password my father had set when I was nineteen years old — my mother's birthday, the year they married, her middle name.
He had told me once, laughing, that it was the easiest password in the world to remember and the hardest for anyone else to guess, because no one else had loved her the way he did.
The inbox loaded.
One unread message.
Sent tonight, eleven minutes ago, from Harlan Voss.
The attachment was a scanned file.
Forty-three pages.
I opened the first page.
The deed.
The original Harlow Street transfer document, dated thirty-one years ago.
My father's name was at the top, printed in the clean typeface of a legal instrument that had never been meant to disappear.
*Daniel Mercer.
Sole transferring party.*
I scrolled to the second page.
Then the third.
My father's handwriting appeared in the margins — small, precise, the way he wrote when he was working through something carefully.
Dates.
Dollar amounts.
Names.
One name appeared four times in the first ten pages.
*R.
Blackwood.*
I scrolled to page seventeen.
A letter, typed on my father's letterhead, addressed to Richard Blackwood directly.
*Richard — I have reviewed the loan instruments a third time.
The Harlow Street property cannot be used as collateral.
The transfer was never completed.
You know this.
I am asking you, as someone I considered a friend, to correct this before it becomes something neither of us can control.*
Below it, in my father's handwriting:
*No response.
Three weeks.*
I turned to the next page.
A second letter.
Shorter.
*Richard — I am filing a formal claim.
I have given you every opportunity.
I am sorry it has come to this.*
The date on that letter was eleven years ago.
My father had his accident nine days later.
I sat in the car for a long time without moving.
The engine was still running.
The Blackwood house was lit up behind me, every window bright, and I thought about how many dinners I had sat through in that house.
How many times Vivienne had looked at me like I was a problem to be tolerated.
How many times Grant had smiled at something his father said and I had not understood what the smile meant.
I understood it now.
My phone rang.
Unknown number.
Different from Harlan's.
I answered.
"Mrs.
Blackwood." A woman's voice.
Professional.
Careful.
"My name is Grace Ellison.
I'm a forensic financial investigator.
I've been retained by a third party to look into the Blackwood Group's asset structure." A pause.
"I think you and I need to meet tonight."
"Who retained you?" I asked.
"I'm not able to say yet.
But I can tell you that the person who did has been building this case for three years." Another pause.
"And I can tell you that the $63.4 million your husband moved two days ago did not go offshore.
It went into an account that is going to be very easy to trace."
May you like
"Why are you calling me?"
"Because the account it went into," Grace said, "is in your name."
