I need to go back seven months. To the day my father died.
His name was Gregory Prescott. He built Prescott Regional Builders from a two-truck construction outfit into one of the biggest commercial builders in Rhode Island. Office parks. Hospitals. Later, a restaurant group on the side. He worked six days a week until he was sixty-seven.
He collapsed in his study on a Tuesday night in March. Massive heart attack, they said. He’d had heart trouble for two years. Nobody was surprised.
Except me.
I was stationed at Fort Bragg when I got the call. I flew home the next morning in uniform because I didn’t think to change.
My parents had divorced when I was nineteen. My mother, Florence, remarried a man named Christopher Vale. Smooth. Expensive suits. A smile that never got as far as his eyes. Christopher had a son from his first marriage, Lucas, who was twenty-six and worked in the company’s restaurant division.
At the reading of the will, I found out my father had left me the old Prescott house in Providence. The house I grew up in. And a controlling share of the company.
My mother stood up in the lawyer’s office and said, very calmly, “That’s not possible. Gregory promised that to me.”
Three weeks later, she filed to contest the will. She said my father hadn’t been of sound mind. She said I’d manipulated him from overseas.
I almost let her have it all. I was tired. I was grieving. I didn’t want the company. I didn’t want a war.
Then Arthur Delgado called me.
Arthur was my father’s attorney. Seventy-three years old, semiretired, the only person my father ever trusted completely. He asked me to come to his office alone.
He set a blue leather ledger on the desk in front of me.
“Your father gave me this six months before he died,” Arthur said. “He told me if anything happened to him, you were to have it. Nobody else.”
It was my father’s handwriting. Eight years of it.
Every page documented money disappearing from the company. Fake vendors. Padded contracts. Shell companies. Millions of dollars.
And every shell company led back to my mother and Christopher.
My father had known. For years. He’d been quietly building a case. He’d hired a forensic accountant, a former federal investigator named Margaret Chen. He was weeks away from going to the authorities.
Then his heart stopped.
I took the ledger to Margaret. Margaret took it to the FBI.
Four months later, my mother and Christopher were arrested for fraud and embezzlement. Twenty-three million dollars over eight years.
My mother was sitting in the Rhode Island Women’s Correctional Facility, waiting for trial.
I thought it was over.
Then Margaret sent me that file.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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