Chapter 4 - Wendy’s Second Secret
I read the message twice.
Don’t trust Wendy.
The easiest response would have been anger.
Instead, I felt something worse.
Uncertainty.
I had spent my career acquiring companies because I was good at finding the detail everybody else overlooked. Numbers didn’t care about loyalty. Documents didn’t care about family.
People lied.
Evidence didn’t.
I needed evidence.
Marcus sent two men to Michael’s apartment while I returned upstairs.
Wendy was still awake.
I found her in the guest cottage packing a suitcase.
That told me enough.
“Going somewhere?”
She froze.
“Daniel.”
“Open the suitcase.”
“What?”
“Open it.”
She slowly did.
Clothes.
Passport.
Cash.
A second phone.
I picked it up.
“Whose?”
“Mine.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
I held up my own phone.
“Michael just told me not to trust you.”
Wendy sat down.
For several seconds she looked older than sixty-one.
“Is he alive?”
“For now, I hope.”
She closed her eyes.
“Then Richard knows.”
“Knows what?”
“That Michael switched the files.”
I stared at her.
“You knew?”
“Yes.”
The fury came back.
“You’ve had enough opportunities to tell me the truth.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You mean you wouldn’t.”
Wendy looked toward the main house.
“Because the truth could destroy Jessi.”
“Stop using my wife as an excuse.”
Her eyes snapped toward mine.
“You think I wanted this?”
“I think you frightened my daughter into silence.”
Her face collapsed.
“I will regret that until I die.”
“Good.”
The word landed hard.
But I meant it.
“Now tell me everything.”
Wendy did.
Richard Langley was her older brother.
Their father had built Langley Medical from a small equipment distributor into a national corporation. When he died, Richard assumed control.
Wendy inherited shares but stayed away from operations.
Thomas didn’t.
He discovered Richard had been siphoning money through shell companies.
But financial fraud wasn’t the worst of it.
Some of those companies had been billing hospitals for equipment that was never delivered.
Thomas gathered proof.
When Richard realized it, Thomas’s car was sabotaged.
Thomas survived because he had switched vehicles with a colleague shortly before the crash.
The colleague died.
That detail had never been told to Jessi.
“Thomas blamed himself,” Wendy whispered.
“So you staged his death.”
“We used the confusion surrounding the crash.”
“Who identified the remains?”
“A corrupt official Richard already controlled. We used his lie against him.”
It was reckless.
Desperate.
But it worked.
Richard believed Thomas dead.
Until three months ago.
“What changed?”
Wendy opened the second phone.
She showed me a message.
I KNOW HE’S ALIVE.
Sent twelve weeks earlier.
Unknown number.
Then another.
BRING ME WHAT HE TOOK OR JESSICA LEARNS WHY HER FATHER REALLY DISAPPEARED.
“Why would Jessi learning the truth help Richard?”
“It wouldn’t.”
Wendy swallowed.
“But Richard knows Thomas’s weakness. He knows Thomas would expose himself to protect her.”
I understood.
Jessi wasn’t merely a target.
She was bait.
“And Fiona?”
Wendy began crying.
“I thought if I brought her to Thomas, he would finally agree to leave the country.”
“What?”
“He wouldn’t go. He said he couldn’t disappear again without knowing Jessi and Fiona were safe.”
“So you used my daughter to persuade him?”
Her silence answered.
That was why the secret visits happened.
It wasn’t acceptable.
But it was finally comprehensible.
My phone rang.
Marcus.
“We found Michael.”
“Where?”
“His apartment.”
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
I exhaled.
“He’s injured, but conscious. Police are there.”
“What happened?”
“Someone forced the door. Michael locked himself in the building’s maintenance room and called 911.”
“Who attacked him?”
“Gone.”
I looked at Wendy.
“Get your coat.”
An hour later, Michael sat in a private hospital room with a bandage above his eyebrow.
When he saw Wendy, he tried to stand.
“No.”
His voice was filled with fury.
“She leaves.”
“Michael,” I said.
“She’s the reason this is happening.”
Wendy went pale.
“What are you talking about?”
Michael reached for his phone.
He opened an email.
Eight years old.
Sender: Wendy Bennett.
Recipient: Richard Langley.
Subject: Thomas.
My mother-in-law stopped breathing.
Michael handed me the phone.
The message contained four sentences.
Richard, Thomas knows everything. He copied the records. He’s going to federal investigators tomorrow. Please talk to him before this destroys the family.
I looked at Wendy.
“You warned Richard.”
“I didn’t know.”
Her voice cracked.
“I thought Richard could convince Thomas not to go public. I didn’t know what my brother had become.”
Thomas’s accident happened the next morning.
Wendy covered her mouth.
“I caused it.”
For eight years, she had carried that guilt.
Michael leaned back.
“Richard kept the email. He’s been using it against her.”
Suddenly Wendy’s behavior made terrible sense.
She hadn’t merely protected Thomas.
She had spent eight years trying to repair what one frightened email had set in motion.
Michael explained the rest.
Richard approached him four months earlier.
“He told me Thomas was alive.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because Richard showed me surveillance photos of Fiona.”
My hands curled.
“He said if I warned you, he’d disappear before we could prove anything. So I played along.”
“You could have trusted me.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
I laughed bitterly.
“Apparently everybody in this family protects people by lying to them.”
Nobody answered.
Michael had stolen the files from my server because Richard ordered him to.
But before handing them over, he replaced them with corrupted copies.
“The originals are safe.”
“Where?”
He looked at Wendy.
“I gave them to Thomas.”
Wendy stared.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
A knock interrupted us.
Marcus entered.
His expression told me something had happened.
“What?”
“Your home security called.”
I stood.
“Jessi?”
“She’s safe.”
“Fiona?”
“Safe too.”
I exhaled.
“But someone came onto the property twenty minutes ago.”
“Richard?”
“No.”
Marcus handed me his phone.
The security image showed a black sedan.
A man stood at our front gate holding an envelope.
He had delivered it and left.
Inside the envelope was a photograph.
Thomas.
Taken that afternoon.
Beneath it was a handwritten message.
MIDNIGHT. COME ALONE, OR THIS TIME THE DEAD MAN STAYS DEAD.
But there was something Richard couldn’t possibly have known.
Thomas and Michael had already given me the one thing Richard had spent eight years trying to find.
And for the first time since Fiona whispered to me in the kitchen, we were no longer reacting.
May you like
We had a way to make Richard come to us.
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