Chapter 17
Chapter 17 – The Missing Piece
The door hadn't even fully closed behind the federal agents before Oliver Samson was on his phone, his voice echoing frantically off the walls of my kitchen.
"It's not in the Boston archive, Catherine!" he shouted, throwing a stack of digital printouts onto the counter. "I’ve checked every secure vault connected to the Montgomery estate. The original 1996 funding articles—the papers that prove where the initial capital came from—are missing. Someone physically removed them from the company files years ago."
"Henry," I said, the name tasting like ash in my mouth. "Henry was the corporate secretary in 1996. He handled all the banking registrations while Albert was focusing on the design floor."
"If Henry has the originals, we're dead in the water," Oliver said, pacing the room, his tie loosened, his hair disheveled. "He’s in a federal holding facility in lower Manhattan. His personal estate is completely cordoned off by a court-ordered security team. We can't legally subpoena him for documents he claims he doesn't have, and we don't have time to wait for a judge to grant a search warrant on his properties."
Maya stepped into the kitchen, her face pale but her eyes remarkably calm. "Henry doesn't keep his real leverage in corporate vaults, Oliver. I know how men like him think. He spent twenty years threatening my grandmother with those papers. He wouldn't leave them where an auditor could find them."
"Then where are they, Maya?" I asked, looking at her.
"He has a duplicate network," Maya said softly. "But there’s only one person who spent three years managing Henry’s private household accounts while David was running the business. Someone who knows exactly which safe he used for his personal black books."
I looked down at David’s yellow letter resting on the table.
Emily.
May you like
My stomach twisted into a painful knot. The thought of sitting across from her again, of looking into the eyes of the woman who had tried to erase my existence, filled me with a deep, visceral revulsion. But pride is a luxury of the safe, and right now, my family was drowning.
"Call the prison bureau, Oliver," I said, my voice dropping into a dangerous, quiet resolve. "Arrange an emergency visitation clearance for tomorrow morning. I need to see my daughter-in-law."
