Opal listened to every word without interrupting once.
When I finished, she set down her butter knife.
“Rebecca,” she said. “Do you have any documents from those years?”
“I kept a few copies,” I said. “Before I was arrested. I had a feeling something was wrong. I hid them.”
“Where?”
“In my father’s old fishing tackle box. In my aunt’s garage in Delaware County. She’s been keeping it for me.”
Opal nodded slowly. Then she got up from the table. She walked into the living room with her careful, slow steps and came back holding a folded piece of paper.
She set it down next to my soup bowl.
A name and a phone number, written in that same careful cursive.
Russell Keane. (614) 555-0148.
“Russell is a forensic accountant,” Opal said. “A financial investigator. He used to work for the FBI. He helped me when my first husband tried to hide $400,000 from me in our divorce in 1987.” She almost smiled. “He doesn’t work miracles. But he knows how to find lies hiding in numbers.”
Something shifted inside me.
“Mrs. Hargrove, I can’t afford a forensic accountant.”
“You can afford to call him,” Opal said. “Talk to him first.”
Then she sat back down. And she took her cell phone out of her dress pocket.
“There’s something else you need to know,” she said.
She turned the phone around and showed me a text message she’d gotten the night before at 11:42 p.m.
“Mrs. Hargrove, you don’t know me, but I’m trying to protect you. The woman living in your house is a convicted felon who stole over a million dollars from her own company. She is dangerous and manipulative. I will pay you $3,000 to fire her immediately. Please. For your own safety.”
I stared at the phone number at the top of the screen.
I knew it by heart. I’d called it from the prison phone a hundred times in the first year. Before she blocked me.
“That’s Monica,” I whispered. “That’s my sister.”
But that wasn’t what made my blood run cold.
There was a photo attached to the message. Sent by mistake, maybe. Or maybe Monica was in such a hurry that she grabbed the wrong picture.
It was a photo of my house on Brand Road in Dublin.
With a FOR SALE sign planted in the front yard.
And underneath the photo, a line of text. Like a note Monica had meant to send to somebody else.
“Before Rebecca finds out what we did with the deed, we need to get her out of Ohio.”
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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