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But in a shitty warehouse in North Carolina? I’ve never noticed him visiting Raleigh before. Sending a quick email to Brenda, I ask if she can get access to my father’s travel records.
The next thing I check are all of the local personal accounts, most of which have another beneficiary. Sure enough, there are accounts for both Annette Boyd and Isabel Posa. The money in the Posa account is available to Luis, as he is her only inheritor. I hurt for him knowing she had about half a million dollars in an account for what looks like his entire life, yet they lived in near squalor.
Does my father monitor these accounts? Technically he would have access to see where, when, or if the money is being used.
The Posa account has mostly been gathering interest over the past twenty something years, the only withdrawals are automatic payments to a cheap apartment community and utilities. The Boyd account was used a lot towards the beginning, I’m assuming for the work done on the estate. What’s different about this account is the payments never stopped. The Posa account was one large deposit and then nothing, but this account was regularly fed into until Annette Boyd’s death five-ish years ago.
I turn my attention to the BioCere, Inc. accounts and search for local transactions, hoping to get a lead on any local involvement. What I find instead are four large transactions to local accounts, and I’m horrified to find two familiar family names amongst them. At some point, around twenty something years ago, my father made generous payments to both the Williams and Anderson families. These were one-time payments, generous but nothing compared to the amounts in the Boyd and Posa accounts. These payments were also wire transactions rather than accounts set up, which I assume is because Jackson Adley was not likely to have fathered any of these children, and these payments were deposited a little before Micah and Lukas would have been born. I write down the other two account names to research later.
When the guys return, I am neck deep in numbers and an ever-deepening conspiracy. The idea of breaking all this news is making me sweat. Jackson comes into the dining room, and checks the phone. He declares it charged and ready, calling to Micah and Lukas to find the others so we can check it out together.
Jackson is definitely my role model for keeping the whole “family” involved, although I’d never admit it. I figure if this relationship dynamic is likely to work, I’m going to need to evolve beyond my solitary nature- which is why I set up a workspace in the dining room instead of my new office. This way we have plenty of space to work together.
While Micah runs upstairs to find Six and Luis, Lukas carries in a cardboard box that I assume contains the evidence for our four cases. As soon as he sets it down, I open the box. Before Six comes down, I want to put aside the evidence packet for the trucker’s death- not because I’m hiding anything from her, but because I think it’s useless to spend any mental or emotional energy on a rapist who, in my mind, got exactly what was coming to him. We have enough to focus on, and this is one mystery we don’t need solved. Lukas and Jackson both nod their understanding and agreement, a silent confirmation that we are putting it away for now. If she’d like to revisit it in the future, it will be there waiting for her.
It takes a little while for the rest of them to make it downstairs. Irritated, I’m about another thirty seconds from going up there myself, when Six walks in looking…. Ravishing. Captivating. Tantalizingly beautiful.
It’s all my mind can do to rifle through my mental thesaurus, trying in vain to come up with a word good enough. The haircut isn’t even half of it, it’s the confidence radiating off of her. She is absolutely beaming.
Jackson approaches her like a moth to a flame, touching her hair and face and planting a hard kiss on her mouth. I’m jealous of his ability to just go with it, to do whatever he feels compelled to do while I struggle to control myself.
“You look stunning,” I declare, barely able to get the words out. She blinks back at me in surprise and I hate that I’ve allowed her to think I’m that indifferent.
The others follow her into the room, and I give an appreciative nod to Luis. Well done, brother.
Brother.
The news I have is going to blow the top off everything we thought we knew so far, but we have a list of potential new information that hasn’t been opened yet. We might as well get it all out in the open first.
“I have a ton of new information to share, but I think we should open the phone first, and the evidence packets second. There may or may not be anything of interest, and I know what I have is going to invoke a lot of conversation.” I try to pose it as an open discussion, and everyone seems to agree.
Micah tries to hand Six the phone, but she waves it off, gesturing for him to look. He flips it open and starts thumbing through it while Lukas and I unpack the evidence box.
“Uh… yeah, here’s something.” Micah looks a little stunned. “There are pictures of all five of us saved. They aren’t very clear, it looks like Six snapped the pictures off a computer screen.” He passes the phone around so we can look. Sure enough, there is a photo of each one of us.
“You know what this means,” says Lukas, concerned. “You definitely at least knew of us before coming here. You came here because of us.”
Everyone takes a moment to absorb the idea, but to be honest I don’t know what to do with it. The deeper into this we get, the stickier the web gets.
Six looks horrified, her worst fears are coming true.
“There’s a couple other photos here,” Micah points out. We all gather in close, but the screen is too small.
“Hold on,” says Lukas, taking the phone. “Jackson, hand me the cord.” He opens his laptop and connects the USB charging cable to his computer and copies over all of the photos. A minute later we can see the photos on his computer screen.
“The pictures are not going to be good quality, but we should at least be able to see them better.”
He flips through the photos of each of us. Lukas’ staff photo, Micah’s basketball profile picture, Jackson taking a selfie while hiking, me giving a speech at some ceremony. Luis’ photo ends up being a mugshot, much to his chagrin.
“I didn’t peg you for the social media type anyway.” Jackson laughs, earning him a punch in the arm. He tries to duck, but Luis clips him right in the shoulder.
Jackson rubs his arm. “Ouch, no judgment, bro. It was a joke.”
“I got caught up in a fight outside the tattoo shop,” Luis explains.
“No one cares man, like he said, we aren’t gonna judge you,” Micah tells him.
Lukas moves on to the next photos. One is a picture of the uniformed guards that were searching for Six at the hospital, taken from what looks like a bus window. The next photo is of a large bald man wearing a black suit, who I instantly recognize.
