Dean’s phone rang.
Priscilla.
He stared at the screen.
Margaret said, “Answer it. Speaker.”
He did.
“Where are you?”
Priscilla was crying.
“Dean, please listen.”
“Did you forge my mother’s signature?”
“No.”
Margaret raised an eyebrow.
“Did you use her credit card?”
Silence.
“Priscilla?”
“I was going to replace it.”
“With what?”
“You don’t understand.”
“You keep saying that!”
Her crying intensified.
Then she said something strange.
“Ask your mother about Arthur’s blue box.”
I stopped breathing.
Dean looked at me.
“What?”
Priscilla continued.
“Ask her what Arthur kept in the blue box in the garage.”
I grabbed the phone.
“How do you know about that?”
The line went dead.
Dean stared at me.
“What’s the blue box?”
I couldn’t answer immediately.
Arthur had owned a small blue metal lockbox.
After he died, I put it in the garage cabinet with some of his tools.
I hadn’t opened it in years.
Dean and I went outside.
The cabinet was unlocked.
The blue box was gone.
For two days, everything unraveled.
Police located Priscilla on December 23.
She wasn’t at her sister’s.
She wasn’t at a hotel.
She was sitting in her car outside a storage facility twelve miles away.
Inside the unit rented under her name were rental chairs, unopened Christmas decorations, boxes of expensive clothing—
and Arthur’s blue lockbox.
But the most important thing wasn’t inside it.
The box was empty.
Priscilla refused to speak without an attorney.
Dean moved into my guest room.
He barely slept.
Neither did I.
Then, on Christmas Eve morning, Margaret called.
“Sylvia, I need you at my office.”
“Why?”
“Because Harbor Ridge sent me their original loan file.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“And?”
“The signature may not be the biggest problem.”
I drove there with Dean.
Margaret had documents spread across her conference table.
At the center was a photocopy of something I recognized immediately.
Arthur’s handwriting.
I sat down.
“What is that?”
“A letter.”
She slid it toward me.
The date was seven years old.
Two years before Arthur died.
I read.
Then read it again.
Arthur had written that if anything happened to him, a specific account should pass to Dean.
I looked up.
“What account?”
Margaret pushed another document toward me.
An old investment statement.
Balance:
$412,806.
Dean nearly fell backward.
“I’ve never seen this.”
Neither had I.
Margaret explained.
Arthur had inherited money from an uncle.
He had apparently kept it separate.
But the account had been closed six months before his death.
“Where did the money go?” I asked.
“We don’t know.”
Dean stared at me.
“Mom?”
“I didn’t know it existed.”
Margaret studied my face.
“I believe you.”
Then she produced one final document.
A withdrawal authorization.
