Chapter 3 - Harbor House
The Port Mason Library occupied an old courthouse with sandstone steps and windows too tall for the narrow town. Nora arrived ten minutes early. Mara wanted to come, but Nora had learned that fear multiplied when shared with someone else. Today she needed to know what June had planned before she let anyone else into the room.
At eleven, a man in a charcoal coat approached the reference desk. He was in his sixties, broad-shouldered, with a silver beard and the watchful posture of someone who had spent years expecting bad news.
“Nora Ellis?”
“Yes.”
“Thomas Bell. I worked for your father-in-law.”
Nora stiffened. “My father-in-law died eight years ago.”
“I know.” Thomas glanced toward the entrance. “June asked me to wait until she was certain Adrian had crossed a line he couldn’t uncross.”
“She’s in intensive care.”
“Then the line has been crossed.”
He led her into a reading room and placed a thick file on the table. The label read HARBOR HOUSE DEVELOPMENT TRUST.
“Your father-in-law created this trust when he bought the inn,” Thomas said. “The property was meant to fund housing grants for dockworkers and their families. June managed it after his death.”
“Adrian told me the inn was his.”
“Adrian told everyone whatever made the next conversation easier.”
Thomas opened the file. The first pages were original trust documents. June’s name appeared as trustee. Adrian was listed only as a beneficiary, and even that benefit was conditional. He could receive money from the trust only if the property remained in Port Mason and the grants continued.
“Why would he create a company around it?” Nora asked.
“Because he found a loophole.”
Thomas showed her a series of amendments filed over the last eighteen months. Each bore June’s electronic signature. Together, they transferred control of Harbor House to a corporation called Blue Current Hospitality.
“I never heard of it.”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
The corporation’s mailing address was a private office in Honolulu. Its listed manager was Sloane Avery.
Nora felt the room contract around her.
“She’s not just his affair.”
“No. She’s the public face of the property they plan to open in Maui.”
Thomas removed a bank statement. More than two million dollars had moved from the trust to Blue Current over the previous year. The transfers were labeled restoration expenses, but the vendor names belonged to shell companies with no websites, no employees, and no business history before Adrian became involved.
“Where did the money go?”
“Some of it paid for construction on a villa called Tideglass. Some went to lawyers. The rest is missing.”
Nora remembered Adrian’s late nights, his sudden insistence that they refinance the house, his anger when she asked for receipts.
“Why didn’t June stop him?”
Thomas looked down at the file. “She did. She hired an auditor. Adrian found out and threatened to accuse her of dementia.”
“He threatened his own mother?”
“He told her nobody would believe an old woman over a successful developer.”
Nora rose and walked to the window. Across the street, gulls wheeled over the harbor. She imagined June at the emergency room, alone beneath the lights, still protecting the son who had robbed her.
“What’s on the flash drive?”
“I don’t know. June never gave it to me.”
Nora connected it to her laptop. A folder opened containing audio files, scanned bank records, and one video. The video showed Adrian entering June’s house late at night. His face was clear. He carried a leather case.
The timestamp was two weeks earlier.
Adrian crossed the kitchen, opened the locked cabinet where June kept trust records, and removed a packet of documents. He spoke to someone off-camera.
“Once the final transfer clears, she won’t have the leverage to fight us.”
Sloane’s voice answered, “And Nora?”
“Nora will sign whatever the court puts in front of her. She thinks confusion is the same as kindness.”
Thomas shut his eyes.
Nora watched herself on the screen as if she were a stranger being discussed in a room she had never entered.
“There’s more,” Thomas said.
The final audio file was dated three nights earlier. June’s voice sounded weak but clear.
“If you’re hearing this, Adrian has taken the money and gone to Sloane. He will say I was incompetent. He will say Nora knew. Neither is true. The key opens the records, but the truth is not in the papers alone. Find the woman in Apartment 6B. She remembers what I forgot.”
The recording ended.
“Who lives in Apartment 6B?” Nora asked.
Thomas handed her a torn envelope. “A former employee of Adrian’s. Her name is Lila Grant.”
Outside, Nora called Mara and explained what she had found. Mara listened without interrupting.
“There’s one problem,” Mara said when Nora finished.
“Only one?”
“If those transfers were made under June’s signature, Adrian can claim she authorized them.”
Nora looked at the frozen image of Adrian on her laptop. “Then we find proof she didn’t.”
Thomas gathered the file. “Be careful. Adrian has survived every accusation by making the accuser look emotional.”
“I am emotional,” Nora said. “I’m also right.”
At the library entrance, a black SUV idled across the street. The driver lifted a phone and took a picture of her.
Nora stepped into the rain anyway.
May you like
For the first time since Adrian left, she did not feel abandoned.
She felt hunted.
