“Your sister wants us to leave.”
“Yeah. She made that pretty clear last night.” Jason narrowed his eyes. “Did she say something to you?”
Angela nodded. “She was angry, Jason. She thinks it’s best if we were gone before they come back.”
“That’s too bad. We’re not going anywhere.” A tic began to leap in his jaw. “Anything else?”
“I overheard your mom trying to calm her down. She asked her to take a seat and concentrate on taking calming breaths. They counted to ten together.”
“Tracy always seemed a bit off growing up. I need to talk to her and find out what’s going on.”
Angela nodded. “Your breakfast is downstairs and your mom left a box of mail for you to sort through. Why don’t you go eat while I take over for a while, okay?”
“I think I’ll take you up on that offer.”
Jason stood.
Angela made her way to the chair in front of the computer and asked, “I’m just looking for any deposit or withdrawal over fifty thousand dollars, correct?”
“That’s right.” He kissed her on the top of the head, then headed downstairs. As he looked around the house, every object in the room flooded him with recollections: the bronzed statue on the coffee table, the tiled vase he’d broken and then secretly glued back together, the pictures lining the mantle.
He picked up one of the photos. Jason and his dad were sitting in a boat, fishing poles in their hands. Seeing the grin on his dad’s face made him smile. He missed him. His dad had passed away from heart failure before Jason was convicted of murder. For that Jason was thankful.
He ate a bowl of cereal, then settled into his dad’s favorite chair and began to look through the box of mail. His first inclination was to toss it all. But as he sorted through the envelopes at the top of the pile, a bank statement caught his eye. He opened it and pulled out the statement. It was for the account he’d set up before he left for prison. ACCOUNT CLOSED was stamped across the middle of the page in bold red letters.
Odd.
He sifted through the rest of the box, pulling out every bank statement he could find. The earlier statements, around the time of his imprisonment, reflected the correct balances. While Jason was incarcerated, Colin had made deposits just as he’d asked him to do. Jason had also given his mom full access to his account, so her name was listed beneath his.
Jason gave the most recent statement another look: ACCOUNT CLOSED. Zero balance.
He ripped open the rest of the envelopes, examining each statement hastily until he finally found one that showed a withdrawal of fifty thousand dollars. After putting the statements in order by date, he saw that the withdrawals were made every few months after that first one. It wasn’t until two years after the first withdrawal that another name was listed beneath his mom’s name: Tracy Caldwell.
His insides twisted.
Nothing made sense.
Without putting much thought into what he was doing or where he was going, he made his way up the stairs and into his sister’s bedroom. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he didn’t like the questions running through his mind.
Why was his sister’s name on his bank statement? What happened to millions of dollars? Who closed the account?
He found Tracy’s Smith & Wesson in the nightstand next to her bed. What was she doing with a gun, anyway? And why had she seemed so fearful this morning? Given her state of mind, he shoved the 9mm into his back pocket. He then went through every drawer and shelf in her room, rifling through her things.
Nothing. Not until he reached deep into the back of a bottom dresser drawer and pulled out a notebook. The pages were blank, but when he went to slide it back where he’d found it, a picture slipped out from the middle pages. It was a three by five photograph that had been cut at weird angles, so that only two people were left in the picture: Dirk and Tracy.
Jason remembered that day. It had been their first company picnic: Hot dogs, hamburgers, music. He and Colin had been posing next to them while Sophie took the snapshot.
Why would his sister cut him and Colin out of the picture?
He turned every page.
Stuck into the back of the notebook was an x-ray of some type. Upon closer examination, he realized it was a sonogram. The name Tracy Caldwell was printed on the upper left-hand side. Tracy? Pregnant?
His heart raced.
Dropping everything on the bed, he looked around, then headed for the closet, his mind whirling with speculation. He searched through coat and sweater pockets, then pushed clothes on hangers to the side so he could see if anything was on the floor. He glanced inside boots and shoes. On the shelf above his head were more clothes. He pushed them to the side, too. Shoved so far back on the shelf he could barely reach it was a shoebox. He brought it down and set it on the bed next to everything else. When he saw what was inside, he felt nauseated.
It was a portable voice synthesizer.