“Why would she kill him?” I asked Margaret on the phone. “She was already stealing from the company. It was working. Killing him would only draw attention.”
“Unless he found out,” Margaret said quietly. “Unless he threatened to expose her.”
I thought about the blue ledger. My father’s careful handwriting. Eight years of it. He’d known. He’d been preparing to act. Maybe he’d confronted her.
Maybe that conversation had killed him.
“I need to see her,” I said. “I need to look her in the eye and ask her.”
The women’s prison in Cranston is a gray concrete building that seems to soak up all the light around it. I sat in a small visitation room with a metal table bolted to the floor and waited.
When they brought my mother in, I barely recognized her.
The elegant, calculating woman who’d tried to take my inheritance was gone. Florence Prescott had always been the best-dressed woman in any room. Pearl earrings. Perfect hair.
The woman who sat down across from me was wearing prison scrubs. Her hair was gray at the roots. She looked twenty years older than she had four months ago.
“Hello, Alyssa.” Her voice was flat.
“Hello, Mother.”
We stared at each other across the table. The silence stretched out between us.
“I need to ask you something,” I said finally. “And I need you to tell me the truth.”
She laughed. It was a bitter little sound. “The truth. That’s a luxury I haven’t had in a long time.”
“Did you kill Dad?”
The question hung in the air.
My mother’s face went through a series of emotions. Shock. Then anger. And then something I didn’t expect at all.
Genuine confusion.
“What? No. No. I stole from him. I lied to him. I manipulated him. But I didn’t kill him.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to believe whatever you want.” She leaned forward. Her eyes went suddenly sharp. “But I loved your father. In my own twisted way, I loved him. I would never have killed him.”
“Then why was money from your trust paying for his prescriptions? Under a dead doctor’s name?”
My mother went very pale.
“What trust?”
“The family trust. You’re listed as trustee.”
“I’ve never been trustee of anything. Gregory never would have allowed that.” She stared at me. “Somebody put my name on it.”
“Who?”
She was silent for a long time. Her hands were shaking on the table.
Then she said something that changed everything.
“Ask your Uncle Robert.”
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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