Chapter 8
After she left, I remained by the table while Malcolm and Priya gathered the documents.
Daniel did not move.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.
He exchanged a glance with Priya.
“That depends,” he said, “on whether you want to know tonight.”
“I do.”
He opened the folder to the final section, one he had not shown Julian.
“There was one transaction we could not fully trace,” he said. “A payment made by Aurelia to Bell Advisory Group nine months ago. The description said ‘strategic acquisition analysis.’”
“How much?”
“Four hundred thousand dollars.”
Priya added, “The payment was unusual because it occurred before Aurelia had formally begun looking for investors.”
I felt the cold settle more deeply.
“What did Bell do with the money?”
Daniel slid one last document toward me.
It was a wire transfer record.
The recipient account belonged to a company called Vance Family Ventures.
For a moment, I could not breathe.
My family name stared back at me from the page.
“That company doesn’t belong to me,” I said.
“No,” Daniel replied. “But it was formed using your mother’s former attorney as the registered agent.”
I looked at the date.
Nine months ago.
The same week Julian had asked me, casually, whether my mother had left any “old business entities” that were still active.
The same week he had encouraged me to let his accountant review my inheritance documents.
The same week I had told him I trusted him completely.
Daniel’s voice softened. “There’s more.”
He turned the page.
The listed manager of Vance Family Ventures was not Julian Mercer.
It was Eleanor Vance.
My mother.
But she had been dead for four years.
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PART 3: The audit exposed Julian’s secret, but the missing earrings held one more clue 1025
PART 3
But she had been dead for four years.
I read the sentence again, hoping the letters might rearrange themselves into something less impossible.
Daniel watched me carefully. Priya had stopped gathering the papers. Malcolm stood near the window, his reflection pale against the Boston skyline.
“Could someone have used her name without authorization?” I asked.
“That is one possibility,” Daniel said.
“Or this is an old entity she created before she died,” Priya added. “The manager information may have been altered later.”
“Why would my mother create a company called Vance Family Ventures?”