Chapter 3 - Three Destinations
The next morning, Dr. Patel let me go home only after my blood pressure fell and the contractions stopped. Home, however, was no longer a place I could enter without thinking about the pool.
Priya met us in the hospital parking garage. She wore a navy suit, carried two phones, and looked as if she had not slept.
“The court can freeze what remains,” she said. “The credit union has placed a temporary hold on the receiving accounts. But we need to understand the transfers.”
“Why did money go to Caleb’s company?”
“That is what we’re going to find out.”
Hannah drove while I sat in the back seat with a pillow under my knees. Caleb had called seventeen times. I had not answered once.
At Priya’s office, a fraud investigator named Ellis Grant spread bank records across a conference table. He was a quiet man with a silver beard and the careful habit of reading every page twice.
“The first transfer was $9,800 to Diane Rourke’s personal account,” he said. “The second was $7,200 to Rourke Development. The third was $6,000 to a payment processor.”
“What payment processor?”
“A debt-collection service.”
Priya tapped the company line. “Rourke Development was already in trouble?”
Ellis nodded. “Their operating account was overdrawn by forty-six thousand dollars. The $7,200 covered payroll taxes and a bounced equipment payment.”
“So he stole my money to keep the company alive.”
“Partly,” Ellis said. “The debt-collection payment went to an account associated with a private lender.”
“Who?”
Ellis slid over a report. The lender was listed as Bellwether Capital. Its owner was Victor Kane.
I knew the name. My father had once mentioned Kane during a dinner when I was nineteen. “Never sign anything he puts in front of you,” Dad had said. “A man who calls himself a bridge usually owns the river.”
“Why would Caleb owe him?”
“That’s the question,” Priya said.
My phone rang. Caleb.
Priya held out her hand. “Put him on speaker. Do not discuss evidence. Let him talk.”
I answered. “What?”
“Nora, please. I need to see you.”
“No.”
“Your mother-in-law was upset. She didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“She pushed me.”
“She panicked.”
“You transferred my money.”
“I borrowed it.”
“You used my password.”
“We’re married.”
Priya raised one finger, telling me to keep him talking.
“Where is the money?” I asked.
“It went to a family obligation.”
“Which one?”
Caleb hesitated. “The company.”
“And Bellwether Capital?”
The silence on the line was longer this time.
“Who told you that?”
Priya pointed to Ellis, who silently wrote down the words.
“You did,” I said.
“Nora, you don’t understand what was happening.”
“Then explain it.”
“I will, but not over the phone.”
“You can explain it to Detective Ortiz.”
He hung up.
Ellis leaned back. “He knew the lender’s name before you said it.”
“That helps,” Priya said.
“It doesn’t recover my money.”
“No,” Priya replied. “But it may prove intent.”
Hannah opened the blue folder from the nursery. She had found it behind a stack of old blankets after returning to the house with a deputy.
Inside were photocopies of my trust agreement, my driver’s license, and a form bearing a signature that looked like mine.
At the bottom, Caleb had written: Temporary Family Loan — Repayment by October 1.
“I never signed this,” I said.
Priya studied the signature. “He copied it from another document.”
“Why would he need a loan agreement if he had access to the account?”
Ellis turned the last page over.
On the back was a handwritten note in Diane’s script: If Nora resists, use the medical emergency. She won’t risk public embarrassment this close to delivery.
May you like
For the first time, I understood that the baby shower had not been a celebration that went wrong.
It had been a plan.
