Chapter 6 - The Lion Signet Ring
The wet floorboards of my childhood bedroom seemed to drop out from beneath my knees as I stared at the stamped paper in Detective Miller's gloved hands.
For twenty-five years, I had endured my father's cold silence and Gwendolyn's cruelty out of loyalty to the man I believed had given me life and the gentle woman whose photographs sat on my nightstand.
With trembling fingers, I took the waterproof document from Detective Miller and read the faded blue typewriter text beneath the official seal of the Arizona Superior Court.
Twenty-five years ago, at a private maternity clinic in Paradise Valley, a newborn baby girl had been placed into the legal custody of Clara and Samuel Mercer under a sealed private guardianship arrangement.
Listed on the line for Biological Mother was the name Victoria Sterling-Reed, who had died of complications three hours after delivering the child.
And listed beside the custody transfer was a financial stipulation stating that Clara Mercer—who had been Victoria's lifelong best friend and college roommate—would raise the child in secrecy to protect her from a violent inheritance war inside the Sterling-Reed dynasty.
Attached to the back of the certificate with a brass paperclip was a short handwritten note from my mother Clara, written on the same week she discovered she was being poisoned.
"My darling Paige, if you are holding this paper, it means Gwendolyn and Samuel finally found out why twenty-five thousand dollars was wired into my private trust every month to care for you," Clara had written in steady ink.
"Even though you did not grow beneath my heart, you were my whole world from the second I held you, and I swore to your dying birth mother Victoria that I would keep you hidden until you were strong enough to claim what was stolen from her."
"Take this gold lion signet ring to the penthouse of the Reed Tower in downtown Phoenix and place it on the desk of Chairman Harrison Reed—he is your maternal grandfather, a billionaire who was told twenty-five years ago that his daughter's baby died at birth!"
Tears blurred my vision as I pressed Clara's letter to my chest, realizing that the woman who had raised me had literally given her life to protect a secret that wasn't even her own bloodline.
"Wait a second, Detective," Julian Vance said sharply, looking up from his legal pad as the terrifying pieces of the timeline snapped together.
"If Harrison Reed—the richest real-estate mogul in the Southwest—was told his only grandchild died twenty-five years ago, who sent those monthly trust checks to Clara, and who murdered Victoria after she gave birth?"
"Check the executor signature at the bottom of the sealed hospital guardianship agreement," I said, pointing to the bottom right corner of the yellowed page.
Written in bold black ink beneath the hospital seal was the name of the family trustee who had arranged the secret handoff twenty-five years ago: Judge Richard Cole—the father of my traitorous fiancé, Evan Cole!
"Evan's father was the Reed family's chief legal counsel twenty-five years ago," Julian gasped, his eyes widening in disbelief.
"Judge Cole told old Harrison Reed that his granddaughter died at birth so the Cole family could embezzle the baby's fifty-million-dollar maternal trust fund, and when Evan realized two years ago who you really were, he started dating you to steal the rest of your property before your twenty-fifth birthday audit exposed the fraud!"
Suddenly, my cell phone buzzed in my pocket with an incoming video call from an unknown hospital landline at Saint Joseph's Medical Center.
I swiped the green button and held the screen up so Detective Miller and Julian could see.
On the screen was my father, Samuel, lying pale and wired to cardiac monitors inside a locked fourth-floor intensive care room—and standing right behind his bed with a locked stainless-steel syringe poised over his intravenous line was Evan Cole, wearing a stolen white doctor's coat.
"Hello, Paige," Evan said calmly into the camera while Gwendolyn stood by the hospital room door keeping watch on the hallway.
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"Chloe just used her one phone call from the police cruiser to tell Gwendolyn that you stopped the fire and opened the floor safe in your bedroom," Evan continued, his cold eyes locking onto the gold lion signet ring in my hand.
"Listen to me very carefully: do not say a word to that detective beside you, walk out of that house alone, and bring that cylinder and the signet ring to the roof of the hospital parking garage in twenty minutes—or I push fifty milligrams of air and potassium into Samuel's line and let the monitors blame it on a second fatal heart attack!"
