Chapter 7 - The Woman Wearing My Face
For several seconds, I heard nothing except the muffled activity of the emergency shelter beyond the library walls.
I looked at Grant.
“Say that again.”
He held the envelope with both hands.
“Evelyn is your mother’s younger sister.”
My eyes moved toward the woman who had raised me.
She did not deny it.
Madison sat motionless beside the window.
“If Claire is not your daughter,” she whispered, “then I am your only child.”
Evelyn turned toward her.
“You have always been my daughter.”
The sentence explained more than she intended.
My childhood returned in fragments.
Evelyn leaving my academic ceremony early because Madison was upset.
Evelyn refusing to pay my university deposit while purchasing Madison a luxury apartment.
Evelyn calling me ungrateful whenever I asked why the rules were different.
I had spent thirty one years trying to earn a mother’s love from a woman who never considered herself my mother.
“Who was Catherine?” I asked.
Grant handed me a photograph.
The woman in it looked like me.
She had blonde hair, gray eyes, and the same small line between her eyebrows that appeared whenever I concentrated.
“Your mother,” he said.
Catherine Mercer had owned a large section of forest and mountain land through her father’s family. White Pine Chateau stood on one of those parcels.
She disappeared during an avalanche when I was two.
Her body was never recovered.
Evelyn became my legal guardian.
“What trust?” I asked.
“Catherine placed the land, mineral rights, and family holdings into a trust for you,” Grant said. “Evelyn managed it until you turned thirty.”
“I am thirty one.”
“The trustees never completed the transfer.”
I looked at my aunt.
“Why?”
“Because you were irresponsible.”
I almost laughed.
I coordinated disasters affecting hundreds of thousands of people. I had paid my own tuition, built my own career, and never asked her for money.
Madison had abandoned three careers and depended on our parents for everything.
Yet Evelyn called me irresponsible.
Special Prosecutor Ward examined the letter.
“The trust contains a disqualification clause.”
Grant nodded.
“If Claire is convicted of financial misconduct or removed from public office, the assets pass to the next eligible family beneficiary.”
Madison.
My sister covered her mouth.
“So the contract was meant to make Claire a criminal.”
Evelyn stepped forward.
“I never wanted her imprisoned.”
“You only wanted my inheritance,” I said.
“It was never yours alone. Catherine received everything because she was older.”
“Grandfather left it to her.”
“He punished me for marrying Grant.”
Grant looked at her.
“So this was always about your father.”
“It was about fairness.”
I had heard the same word during every family conflict.
Fairness meant Madison receiving what I earned.
Fairness meant my boundaries becoming selfishness.
Fairness meant Evelyn taking whatever she believed she deserved.
Preston had recognized that resentment and built his plan around it.
He offered Evelyn a way to remove me from the trust.
He offered Madison a glamorous marriage.
He offered Grant a safe investment.
Each person received a different lie.
Ward’s team examined Catherine’s original trust records. One document carried a recent amendment supposedly signed by Catherine herself.
The date was only three weeks old.
My mother had been legally dead for twenty nine years.
Nora placed the amendment beside the venue transfer.
“The same handwriting expert reviewed both.”
“What did they find?” I asked.
“The signature transferring your venue is a poor imitation of yours.”
She touched Catherine’s name.
“This signature appears authentic.”
Grant stared at the date.
“That is impossible.”
Evelyn’s face lost its remaining color.
“You knew,” I said.
She backed away.
“I did not know she would contact anyone.”
“Catherine is alive?”
Evelyn looked toward the windows.
A helicopter appeared above the mountain lake.
It descended toward the private landing field behind the chateau.
Madison stood.
“Who is that?”
May you like
Evelyn whispered, “The reason the fire had to happen tonight.”
Continue to the next part: A signature made decades after Catherine’s funeral proves someone has been hiding Claire’s mother near the land Preston tried to burn.
