I couldn’t speak.
“He set up a trust for you, Laney. Everything goes to you on your eighteenth birthday. Plus a house on Foxglove Lane.”
My eighteenth birthday was next Saturday.
Eight days.
“Then I found the second page,” Jonathan said.
He turned the folder around.
It was titled FIRST AMENDMENT.
It named a company called Ziegler Family Holdings as the new beneficiary.
At the bottom was my father’s signature.
And a date.
November 14, 2009.
I stared at it.
Something cold crawled up my spine.
“My father d*ed in August,” I whispered. “I was fourteen months old.”
Nobody in the room moved.
“I know,” Jonathan said, and his voice broke. “I looked up the eulogy my dad gave. It’s framed in his office. August 2009.”
“My father signed this three months after the fun*ral.”
“Yes.”
Detective Ridgeway cleared his throat.
“Jonathan brought this to the state police financial unit on April third. We asked him to stay silent. If his father learned we were watching, he could have destroyed the records, or left the country.”
