Chapter 2 - The Empty House
I walked out of the hospital into the freezing rain.
My phone vibrated constantly in my pocket with text messages from Julian.
He was finally realizing that I had stopped answering.
“Why are you blowing up my phone?” his message read.
“I told you I am in back-to-back meetings all week.”
I deleted the messages without typing a single word in response.
I drove straight to the large suburban house I had shared with Julian for two decades.
The driveway was completely empty.
I unlocked the front door and stepped into the silent, dark foyer.
I needed to pack my things and find any existing financial documents belonging to Eleanor.
I walked into Julian’s home office and turned on the desk lamp.
I started tearing through his perfectly organized filing cabinets.
I was looking for anything related to the defunct bank engraved on the silver key.
For an hour, I found absolutely nothing but standard tax returns and mortgage statements.
I was about to give up when I noticed a slight scratch on the wooden floorboards beneath Julian’s heavy safe.
I pushed the safe aside with all my strength.
Beneath the heavy steel box was a loose wooden plank.
I pried the floorboard up using a heavy brass letter opener.
Hidden in the dark cavity was a leather-bound ledger.
I opened the dusty book and gasped at the columns of numbers written in Eleanor’s elegant handwriting.
The ledger meticulously documented every single dollar Julian had secretly stolen from her estate over the last ten years.
He had embezzled nearly four million dollars from his own mother.
The final entry in the book was dated just three days before her strokes began.
“Julian thinks he has drained the accounts completely,” Eleanor had written.
“He has absolutely no idea that the real fortune is securely locked away.”
I quickly shoved the ledger into my canvas tote bag.
I needed to get out of the house before Julian figured out I knew the truth.
I turned around to leave the home office.
A tall, muscular man in a dark suit was standing in the doorway, blocking my only exit.
May you like
He held a suppressed pistol aimed directly at my chest.
“Julian said you might come looking for the key,” the stranger whispered.
