Chapter 5 - The File That Never Existed| The address Margaret had given me led to a modest office above a tax preparation service. The name Daniel Price was printed on a faded directory, but the receptionist said he had moved away years earlier.
I left my number and asked her to pass along a message.
Three days later, Daniel called.
“I knew Eleanor,” he said. “But I don't discuss that period over the phone.”
We met in a public park during lunchtime. Daniel was a narrow-shouldered man in his late sixties, with silver hair and the wary expression of someone accustomed to checking the exits.
He carried a leather folder.
“Your mother was the best accountant the trust ever hired,” he said. “She could find a missing dollar in a thousand-page ledger.”
“Why was she investigating the Romano family?”
“She wasn't investigating the family at first. She was investigating missing funds. The money led to companies connected to Dominic Romano and Victor Moretti.”
He opened the folder and showed me copies of old invoices. Several payments had been approved for children's medical care, but the receiving organizations did not exist. Other transactions had been routed through freight companies that claimed to transport donated equipment.
One name appeared repeatedly.
Northstar Holdings.
“Your mother discovered that Northstar was moving money through legitimate businesses,” Daniel said. “When she challenged the figures, the trust's director told her to stop.”
“Did she tell the police?”
“She intended to. Then Dominic Romano died, and the investigation changed direction.”
I remembered Adrian's warning.
“What changed?”
“The trust's board claimed the missing money had been approved by Dominic. Victor presented documents that supported the story. Eleanor believed the signatures were forged.”
“Could she prove it?”
“She had a copy of the original ledger. At least, she told me she did.”
“Where is it?”
Daniel closed the folder.
“I don't know.”
“Did she leave it with someone?”
“She said she had put it somewhere safe. She never told me where.”
I leaned forward.
“Did my mother have anything to do with Dominic Romano's death?”
Daniel looked away.
“Your mother was frightened after he died. She said she had misunderstood someone she trusted.”
“Who?”
“I never found out.”
A cyclist passed between us, briefly blocking my view. When he was gone, Daniel's expression had changed.
“There's something else,” he said. “A week before the accident, Eleanor asked me to prepare a duplicate record of every suspicious payment. She wanted the copies to be impossible to alter.”
“Did you do it?”
“Yes. I placed them in a sealed archive under the trust's original registration number.”
“Where is the archive?”
“It's supposed to be at the old Bellweather offices. The building was sold years ago, but the records were transferred to a storage facility.”
He wrote down an address.
Then he hesitated.
“If you find the archive, don't assume every name in it belongs to a criminal. Some people were used without knowing what they were signing. Others knew exactly what they were doing.”
“Why are you helping me now?”
His eyes softened.
“Because your mother asked me to protect you if she couldn't.”
He stood and walked away before I could thank him.
I took the address to Rachel, who helped me send a formal records request to the trust's successor organization. We were told the archive might have been destroyed during a relocation.
Might have been.
The words stayed with me.
That evening, I returned to my apartment and searched the small box of belongings I had brought from the Romano estate. I found my passport, a few books, my wedding certificate, and a photograph of my mother standing in our old kitchen.
In the photograph, she was smiling.
Behind her, beneath the kitchen sink, sat the blue sewing box.
I turned the picture over.
There was writing on the back, almost invisible beneath a faded adhesive mark.
The place where the house remembers.
I stared at the sentence until the meaning began to take shape.
My childhood home had been demolished after my mother's death. But before she died, she had spent months helping my aunt repair an old house in Queens.
A house with a wooden staircase.
A house with a loose floorboard beneath the kitchen window.
I called my aunt's former neighbor.
May you like
He remembered the house.
And he remembered the day a man in a gray suit came looking for my mother.
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