Chapter 6 - Elena’s Red Notebook
Elena had hidden the notebook beneath the lining of an old sewing basket. Andreas found it because she pointed to the basket three times and then threw a wooden thimble at his head.
“You could have just pointed,” he said.
She gave him a look that was almost amusement.
The notebook was small, red, and filled with writing from before the stroke. Dates crowded the pages. Names appeared beside numbers, addresses, and short observations.
June Bell saw the truck.
Cal Mercer poured after midnight.
Marina came through the laundry door.
Victor said the girl was alive.
Andreas sat on the floor with the notebook open across his knees.
“Why didn’t you show this to the police?”
Elena pointed to the page about Marina, then pressed one finger to her lips.
“You were afraid.”
She nodded.
“Of Marina?”
Elena shook her head.
She turned to a page marked with a black line. The name Grady Holt had been written four times. Beside it, Elena had drawn a circle around the word VALE.
“Dad was working for Holt?”
Elena tapped the page and then pointed at Victor’s study.
The study search had found no additional documents. Andreas returned there with the notebook and examined the walls. Behind a framed photograph of him and Leah at the lake, he found a narrow compartment.
Inside was a stack of bank statements and a letter addressed to Elena.
My love, if anything happens, do not trust the accounts. I thought I could pull out quietly. I was wrong. Marina knows about the ledger, but Holt knows where the bodies are buried. I am sorry I made you carry my silence.
There was no signature, but Victor's handwriting was unmistakable.
“Bodies,” Andreas said.
Elena wheeled herself closer. Her eyes fixed on the sentence.
She picked up the pen and wrote beneath it: NOT PEOPLE.
Then, with painful effort, she added: MONEY.
“The bodies are accounts?”
She nodded.
The financial records showed payments to shell companies, fake workers, and a nonprofit named Harbor Light. Money had moved through the nonprofit into Holt's development projects. Victor had helped build the system. Marina had entered the numbers. Someone else had approved the transfers.
At the bottom of a statement, Andreas recognized the initials A.V.
“That’s me.”
Elena reached for his wrist.
“I signed something?”
She shook her head and pointed to the date. It was from a summer when Andreas had been nineteen and away at college.
“They forged my signature.”
The phone rang. It was Leah, his younger sister, calling from Denver. Andreas had not spoken to her since the funeral.
“I heard about Marina,” Leah said.
“You heard from whom?”
“The lawyer.”
“What lawyer?”
“The one handling Dad’s estate.”
Andreas glanced at the bank statements. “Why would the estate lawyer call you?”
Leah hesitated. “Because he says the house may be seized.”
“For Dad’s debts?”
“For fraud.”
Elena began tapping the armrest. Andreas looked down. She had taken the red notebook and opened to a blank page.
She wrote two words in large, uneven letters.
ASK LEAH.
Before Andreas could ask what that meant, Leah said, “There’s something I never told you about the night Dad died.”
Andreas felt the old house closing around him, room by room.
May you like
“Tell me now.”
“I wasn’t in Denver that night.”
