Chapter 2 - The Audit of Betrayal
While Deputy Vance kept a watchful eye on Marissa and Diane in the living room, I stepped back through the front door of Hawthorne Lane.
I didn't come alone. Behind me walked Arthur Pendelton and a certified forensic accountant named Carl Jenkins, whom Arthur had hired at seven o'clock that morning.
Lucy waited in the running SUV parked at the curb, wrapped in a warm blanket, listening to her favorite audiobook with a hot cocoa in her hand. I had promised her she wouldn't have to face them today.
"Evelyn!" my mother sobbed, taking a step toward me with her hands clasped in a gesture of desperate, theatrical grief. "Evelyn, my baby... please! This is all a misunderstanding! Marissa told me you wanted to move out! She told me you were looking for an apartment downtown!"
I didn't stop to look at her. I walked past my mother as if she were a ghost, heading straight upstairs to Lucy’s bedroom.
The room had already been stripped.
Lucy’s colorful bedspread was folded in a box near the closet. Her books were packed into plastic trash bags, and her desk—where she had spent hours drawing and studying—had been cleared out to make room for Marissa’s designer luggage.
"They were going to sell her things," Carl Jenkins murmured, shining a penlight into the open closet where several of Lucy’s coat hangers lay broken on the floor.
"They were going to erase us," I corrected softly.
I grabbed Lucy’s backpack, her asthma inhalers from the bathroom cabinet, her laptop charger, and her winter coats, packing them neatly into suitcases.
When I returned downstairs, Arthur Pendelton was standing at my father’s old mahogany desk in the den. He held a stack of bank statements and credit card bills that Marissa had left scattered near the printer.
"Evelyn," Pendelton called out, beckoning me over with his pen. "Look at this."
I walked over to the desk. Spread across the green felt blotter were dozens of withdrawal receipts from my mother’s primary account—the account where her monthly social security checks and my father’s modest pension were deposited.
"Over the last three months," Carl Jenkins said, sliding a ledger toward me, "approximately $64,000 has been transferred from your mother’s accounts into a private LLC registered under the name Marissa Holloway Enterprises."
My jaw tightened. "Where did $64,000 come from? My mother only receives $2,200 a month in pension and social security."
Carl looked up at me through his thick spectacles. "It came from the home equity line of credit, Evelyn. Someone forged your signature as majority owner forty-five days ago to open a $100,000 HELOC against this house."
I froze. The air in the den suddenly felt thin, cold, and suffocating.
"They forged my signature?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
"Not just forged," Arthur Pendelton said, lifting an original loan application bearing a sloppy replica of my signature beside a red notary stamp. "Your sister used an online mobile notary to notarize a fraudulent power of attorney. She didn't just lock you out of your house, Evelyn. She stole sixty-four thousand dollars of your equity and funneled it into her failing fashion boutique."
I turned around slowly to face the hallway.
Marissa was standing near the doorway, watching us through narrow, terrified eyes. She had heard every word.
"You're a monster, Marissa," I said, my voice terrifyingly calm.
"You don't understand!" Marissa yelled, stepping into the den with her arms flailing. "I was going to pay it back! The store needed inventory for the fall season! Mom said it was okay!"
"It wasn't Mom's money to give!" I shouted back, the rage I had held inside since sitting in the rain with Lucy finally exploding. "Fifty-one percent of this house belongs to me! You stole my child's future to pay for your failing life!"
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"Deputy," Pendelton said smoothly, turning to the officer standing in the hallway. "We are requesting an immediate criminal referral for grand larceny, identity theft, and loan fraud."
Deputy Vance pulled his notepad from his pocket and stepped toward Marissa. "Ma'am, I suggest you step away from the desk and place your hands behind your back."
