Chapter 5 - The Other Properties
I called Melissa back.
No answer.
Again.
Nothing.
I called the police.
Then Rebecca.
Then Nina.
Within twenty minutes, officers were headed toward Jackson's office.
I sat at Nina's kitchen table staring at my phone.
At 5:46, it rang.
Unknown number.
I answered immediately.
"Claire?"
Melissa.
"Where are you?"
"In my car."
"Are you safe?"
"Yes."
"What happened?"
"It was Daniel."
Jackson's CFO.
"What did he want?"
"He caught me in the records room."
My chest tightened.
"Did he hurt you?"
"No. He asked what I was doing."
"What did you say?"
"Looking for an invoice."
"Did he believe you?"
"I don't think so."
"Go to the police."
"I am."
"Melissa, what did you find?"
She hesitated.
"The $1,200 is a repayment."
"Repayment for what?"
"Money Margaret took."
I said nothing.
"Years ago," Melissa continued, "Jackson and Daniel started moving money between companies. Margaret let them use accounts in her name."
"Why?"
"To hide losses."
"How much?"
"At least $600,000."
I gripped the table.
"Margaret knew?"
"Yes."
"So the $1,200—"
"Jackson promised her monthly payments for taking the risk."
It made sense now.
He hadn't been asking me to support his mother.
He had been asking me to help finance the consequences of their scheme.
"And my apartment?"
"Collateral. They needed an asset that wasn't already tied up."
"Why not their own properties?"
"Because they are."
Every appearance of wealth had been built over debt.
The SUV.
The vacations.
Margaret's grand house.
Jackson's business.
All of it.
My apartment was attractive precisely because it wasn't part of their financial mess.
It was clean.
Just as Melissa had said.
"What other properties did they take?"
"Uncle Robert's rental."
I froze.
"Jackson's Uncle Robert?"
"Yes."
The same Robert who had defended me at dinner.
"Does he know?"
"I don't think so."
There were two more.
One belonged to an elderly family friend.
Another had belonged to Jackson's late grandfather.
Different methods.
Different paperwork.
The same network of companies.
I felt something inside me shift.
Until that moment, some part of me had still treated what happened as a marriage collapsing.
It wasn't.
My marriage had simply been the door through which I discovered something much larger.
Melissa went to the police.
So did Robert.
When investigators told him what they suspected about his rental property, he looked physically ill.
He called me afterward.
"I should have stood up sooner at dinner."
"You did stand up."
"Not soon enough."
I didn't argue.
He continued.
"Margaret has been covering for Jackson his whole life."
"I know."
"No. I mean his whole life."
Robert told me stories I had never heard.
Jackson at sixteen, wrecking a car after drinking.
Margaret persuaded the other family involved not to pursue it.
Jackson at twenty-two, taking money from his grandfather's business.
Margaret called it a misunderstanding.
Jackson at twenty-eight, falsifying sales numbers at his first company.
Margaret found someone else to blame.
Every consequence had been removed.
Every boundary negotiated.
Every victim encouraged to keep peace.
I suddenly understood my husband better than I ever had.
Jackson didn't believe rules didn't apply to him.
He had evidence.
Decades of it.
Until now.
The divorce filing went forward.
Jackson contested everything.
He claimed the dinner incident was exaggerated.
Unfortunately for him, twenty people had witnessed it.
Several had already given statements.
Melissa had taken a photograph seconds after the plate shattered.
I didn't know she had.
The image showed me standing beside the broken pieces, Jackson facing me, Margaret behind him.
It became difficult to pretend nothing had happened.
Then there were the financial records.
Investigators obtained warrants.
Jackson's office was searched.
So was Daniel Mercer's.
Computers were taken.
Phones.
Boxes.
The storage unit.
The locked document case.
Inside the case were notary stamps, copies of identification documents, and records connecting Marston Holdings to Jackson and Daniel.
Jackson's attorney stopped calling the allegations misunderstandings.
He started calling them disputed facts.
That was progress.
Three weeks after the dinner, I returned to the house I had shared with Jackson.
Not alone.
A police escort accompanied me while I collected personal belongings.
The place looked almost exactly as I had left it.
My coffee mug was beside the sink.
A jacket hung over a chair.
Our wedding photograph sat on the mantel.
I stared at it.
Eleven years.
Were all of them fake?
No.
That would have been easier.
There had been real laughter.
Real vacations.
Real mornings when Jackson brought me coffee.
Real nights when he held my hand.
People wanted monsters to be monsters every second.
They weren't.
That was why leaving them could be so confusing.
I removed the wedding photograph.
Then I left the frame empty.
Upstairs, I opened Jackson's closet.
Most of his clothes were gone.
I packed mine.
At the back of my dresser, I found a birthday card from Dad.
I sat on the bed.
The card was from my twenty-seventh birthday.
Before I married Jackson.
Dad had written:
Build a life where your kindness is valued, not collected as a debt.
I pressed the card against my chest.
"Okay, Dad."
I packed it.
Before leaving, I checked the home office.
Police had already searched it.
One drawer remained partly open.
Inside were old household bills.
Nothing important.
Then I noticed a yellow envelope taped beneath the drawer.
My name was written on it.
Not in Jackson's handwriting.
Margaret's.
I opened it.
Inside was a copy of a letter dated eight years earlier.
Three years into my marriage.
It was addressed to Jackson.
The first sentence made my stomach drop.
You need to make sure Claire never learns what happened to the Bennett account.
I read the rest standing there.
Then I called Rebecca.
"What Bennett account?"
She didn't know.
Neither did Uncle Rob.
But my father's old financial records might.
We started searching.
Dad had maintained meticulous archives.
Uncle Rob still had several boxes.
Two days later, he called.
"I found something."
"What?"
"An investment account."
"Mine?"
"Originally."
"What do you mean originally?"
"Your father opened it when you were a child."
I had known about a college fund.
This wasn't that.
At one point, the account held almost $90,000.
By the time Dad died, it had been emptied.
"Where did the money go?"
"I'm looking."
The transfer records were old.
But there was a destination.
A business account.
Not Jackson's current company.
His previous one.
The company he had claimed failed before we met.
The dates told a different story.
The money moved three months after our wedding.
I stared at the transaction.
"How could Jackson access it?"
Rebecca asked the same question.
The authorization showed my father's signature.
But Dad would never have transferred my money to Jackson without telling me.
I knew that with absolute certainty.
We requested the original documentation.
It arrived four days later.
I looked at Dad's signature.
Then at the practice sheets recovered from B-17.
My skin went cold.
Forgery wasn't something Jackson had recently learned.
He had been doing it for years.
My phone rang.
Rebecca.
"Claire, don't contact Jackson."
"I wasn't going to."
"There's been an arrest."
"Jackson?"
"No."
"Daniel?"
"No."
I waited.
May you like
Rebecca spoke slowly.
"It's Margaret."
