Chapter 6 - HER MOTHER'S CHOICE
The call ended.
Rose tried again.
No answer.
Gabriel reached for his phone.
“I can send—”
“No more men at doors,” Rose said.
Lena called the police and explained the interrupted conversation and the earlier incident with Owen.
Rose gave her parents' address.
Then she sat beside Ada's workbench and watched the clock.
Waiting felt worse than the fire escape.
Forty minutes later, her mother called from an officer's phone.
“I'm all right.”
“Are you alone?”
“Your father left.
I'm coming to you.”
She arrived wearing a raincoat over the same dress she'd worn to the wedding.
She carried an ordinary grocery bag.
Rose stayed seated.
Her mother looked at the bandage around her knee.
“I didn't know you were hurt.”
“You didn't ask.”
The older woman flinched.
Then she pulled a blue ledger from the bag.
“I saw him take it from the safe last week.
This morning he put it in the fireplace.”
“Did he burn anything?” Lena asked.
“He couldn't get the gas starter to work.
Then Rose called.”
She had taken the ledger after Richard left, while the officer waited downstairs.
Ada recognized Daniel's handwriting on several inserted pages.
Her hand stopped over a column of dates.
“This is his checking system.
He marked an X when the shipment numbers didn't match.”
There were dozens of Xs.
Beside the last one, Richard had written a payment amount and two initials.
O.H.
The date was the day before the fire.
“Owen Hale,” Rose said.
Her mother sat down hard.
“He told me it was gambling.
All of it.”
“You believed him because it let you sleep,” Rose said.
Her mother began to cry.
Rose hated that the old reflex still rose in her: go to her, apologize, make it easier.
She kept her hands in her lap.
“I was scared,” her mother whispered.
“So was I.
You still buttoned the dress.”
Lena photographed the ledger, recorded who had handled it, and arranged to deliver the original to investigators.
No one called it proof of everything.
It was a beginning.
Near the back, Rose found a folded bank notice.
She read it once, then again.
Her father had borrowed against a family trust six months earlier.
The trust belonged to her.
The amount was two million dollars.
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He hadn't just promised her to settle his debt.
He had already used her money to create it.
