Chapter 6 - The Assistant
Mom kept looking at the email address on Marisol’s screen after the video call ended, as if staring hard enough might reveal the person behind it.
“It has my name,” she said. “Someone wanted them to think it was me.”
“Someone did,” I said. “We still don’t know who.”
I wanted to give her a more satisfying answer. The revised instruction bore a signature that looked like hers. The money had gone somewhere it shouldn’t have. Daniel’s report had accounted for the same amount as a property expense. None of that told us who had opened the email account.
Mom closed her laptop.
“Call Marisol in the morning,” she said. “And don’t stay up trying to solve it without me.”
That was the first instruction she’d given me since the hospital that sounded entirely like my mother. I promised I wouldn’t.
By the following afternoon, Detective Ruiz had spoken with Clara Bell.
Ruiz told Marisol, who called us after getting Clara’s permission to share one detail: Clara had asked for a lawyer before answering questions about Cedar Quay Property Services. Ruiz had stopped the interview.
I was standing at my kitchen counter with a pencil in my hand. For one ugly second, I took Clara’s request as proof that she knew everything.
Then I remembered Mom’s words about the chair.
“Does Clara have a lawyer?” Mom asked.
“She’s finding one,” Marisol said. “Ruiz gave her contact information and left it there.”
I put down the pencil. Clara worked for Daniel. Her name was on the company filing. She might have signed papers she didn’t understand, or she might understand them better than anyone. We had no right to decide which because she wanted advice before speaking to police.
“Could we ask her about the trust reports?” I said.
“I wouldn’t,” Marisol replied. “Let her counsel handle any contact. What you can do is help Margaret identify records that could be checked independently.”
Mom pulled out the chair beside her.
“That,” she said, “we can do.”
We spent the next two days building a chronology from documents Mom had kept and reports Daniel had emailed us. I made copies for Marisol only after Mom chose what to share. On one page, she placed the Alder Road closing statement beside Daniel’s quarterly trust report. The closing statement showed $298,614.80 directed under revised instructions; the report listed a reserve and remediation charge for exactly $298,614.80.
Matching numbers were not an invoice. We marked the charge **support not yet supplied** and left room for the underlying ledger Marisol had requested.
Mom found three earlier property reports in which Daniel’s office had charged small repair bills to the trust. Each listed a date, a vendor, and a property address. The Alder Road reserve had no vendor detail attached.
“That doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” she said, tapping the blank space.
“No.”
“It means somebody ought to be able to produce it.”
We made a separate list of people or records that might answer each question. The settlement company could authenticate what it received. A bank could confirm where the payment landed. The trust’s records could show whether the charge had a legitimate basis. Clara might know how Daniel’s office prepared reports, but her name went at the bottom of the page, followed by two words Mom insisted on writing herself: **if willing**.
At her shoulder follow-up, the doctor told her to continue the care instructions she’d been given at discharge. I waited while she asked her own questions. Afterward, in the parking lot, she stood beside the car instead of getting in.
“Everyone has been gentle with me,” she said.
“Is that bad?”
“No. But they keep looking at you before they answer me.”
I thought of the station, where Daniel had proposed assisted living while Mom sat bruised beneath the fluorescent lights. I had stepped between them. I would do it again. That didn’t mean I should step in front of her every time someone asked a question.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She opened the passenger door.
“You can help me without becoming my voice.”
The next morning, we found a possible route to the page attached to the message that had lured her to Larch Street.
It began with a question from Marisol. Had Mom ever scanned her corrected reconciliation notes?
“I scanned a stack,” Mom said. “I wanted a backup in case I lost my folder.”
“Where?”
“Here. On your printer.”
I remembered the afternoon. She had come over with records spread across the dining room table. I’d shown her how to scan several pages at once, then gone outside to take a call. She had finished the job herself.
I used our printer for household bills and tax papers. Its scans went automatically to a shared household account. Daniel knew the password. He had used that account for years.
I asked Mom to sit with me while I opened it.
We found the file among insurance forms and appliance receipts. Its name was a string of numbers assigned by the printer. The preview showed her handwritten correction in the margin—the same correction we had seen in the false message’s attachment.
Mom leaned back.
“I thought I was saving it to the computer.”
“You did. The printer also saved a copy here.”
“Daniel could open this?”
“Yes.”
I showed her the folder without clicking through any other files. The scan had been there for more than a week before the attack. I could say Daniel had access to it. I could not say he had opened it, copied it, or sent it to anyone.
Mom read the date twice.
“I told Ruiz I’d never shown anyone that page.”
“You hadn’t. You didn’t know it was here.”
“Will she think I lied?”
“We’ll tell her what we found.”
Marisol asked us not to delete or move the scan. She arranged for Ruiz to document it and for someone qualified to examine the account records. I gave Ruiz my account information through the proper request, not Daniel’s devices or files. There was a difference between helping an investigation and trying to conduct one myself.
That evening, Daniel called. I let it go to voicemail.
He said he had the Alder Road cost breakdown almost ready and hoped I would stop “turning every routine document into a family crisis.” He did not mention Mom’s injury. He did not ask how her shoulder was healing.
I saved the voicemail for Marisol. Mom listened once, then asked me to turn it off.
Two days later, Ruiz received bank records through the investigators’ formal request. She shared only what Marisol needed to advise Mom: the $298,614.80 payment had reached an account in the name of Cedar Quay Property Services. Records supplied so far also showed Daniel had given directions concerning payments made by that company. Ruiz was still examining the scope of his authority and who ultimately owned or controlled the account.
Daniel had called Cedar Quay a vendor he did not control. The bank response gave Ruiz reason to test that claim. It did not establish that every dollar remained there, that Clara owned the company, or that the Alder Road reserve represented no actual work.
Mom wrote **received by Cedar Quay** on our chronology. Underneath, she wrote **control disputed**.
“You’re getting good at this,” I said.
She gave me a look.
“I ran an accounting firm for thirty years.”
“I walked into that one.”
“Yes,” she said. “You did.”
For a moment, our kitchen felt like a place where we could simply be ourselves. Then Mom noticed Clara’s name on the company filing beside the stack of records.
“She brought me a chair,” Mom said again, quieter this time. “I hope somebody tells her she can choose what to do now.”
“She’s getting a lawyer. That’s a start.”
I thought about how easily Daniel could turn helpful people into parts of his machinery. Clara had arranged his schedules and made his events run smoothly. I had trusted his explanations about the properties. Neither fact told me what Clara knew. I hoped her lawyer would help her say it plainly, whatever it was.
On Friday, Marisol called while Mom and I were sorting the last of the repair invoices. Clara had retained counsel. Her attorney had contacted Ruiz and, with Clara’s approval, sent Marisol a short message.
“Clara says Daniel instructed her to preserve a folder marked with the Larch Street address,” Marisol said. “She has it. Her attorney is arranging to provide it to investigators.”
Mom set her pen down.
“Why would he tell her to keep it?”
“We don’t know. Clara isn’t giving an account of its contents through me.”
Marisol paused. I could hear paper shifting at her end of the line.
“There’s one more thing her attorney was authorized to pass along. Clara says the folder contains a record concerning the office emergency Daniel told Emily about that night. She wants the dates checked.”
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I pictured our bedroom, the space beside me empty after Daniel had left. I had accepted the word *emergency* because it was ordinary in his business. Mom had gone to Larch Street because a message used the name of a lawyer she trusted.
We still had to see what the folder held. But if its dates were what Clara feared, Daniel’s supposed emergency might have been prepared before Mom ever received the message telling her to come alone.
