**PART 1**
My Mother Brought Five Lawyers to Make Me Surrender Dad’s Estate
She Had No Idea I Was Colonel Alyssa Prescott
The name on the wire transfer stopped my heart cold.
Dr. Harold Reeves.
I stared at the screen at six-thirty in the morning, my coffee going cold beside my laptop. Margaret Chen had emailed me the file at 6:12. The subject line just said: You need to see this.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Wired from a shell company to an account registered to Dr. Harold Reeves.
My father’s cardiologist.
The man whose name was printed at the bottom of my father’s death certificate.
The man who was supposed to have died in a boating accident off Cape Cod six months before my father ever had his heart attack.
I read the file three times. I was sure I’d misunderstood something. I hadn’t.
Somebody had been using a dead man’s name to kill my father.
My phone rang at 6:47. Margaret’s voice was tight.
“You saw it?”
“I saw it. How is this possible?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Reeves supposedly drowned last spring. They never found a body. But his medical license stayed active. Somebody kept writing prescriptions under his name. Including the heart medication your father was taking. And somebody signed his name on the death certificate.”
“Somebody who wanted my father dead.”
“Somebody who knew exactly how to make it look natural.” She paused. “Alyssa, there’s more. I traced the shell company that paid for the prescriptions. It goes back to a holding corporation in Delaware. And that corporation is owned by a trust.”
“Whose trust?”
“The Gregory Prescott Family Trust. Your father set it up. But the trustee isn’t your father.”
I gripped the edge of the desk. “Who?”
“Your mother.”
My name is Alyssa Prescott. I’m thirty-four years old. I spent twelve years in the United States Army. Two deployments to Afghanistan. Military police. I came home a captain.
I thought I’d seen the worst people could do to each other.
I hadn’t met my own family yet. Not really.
I need to go back seven months. To the day my father died.
His name was Gregory Prescott. He built Prescott Regional Builders from a two-truck construction outfit into one of the biggest commercial builders in Rhode Island. Office parks. Hospitals. Later, a restaurant group on the side. He worked six days a week until he was sixty-seven.
He collapsed in his study on a Tuesday night in March. Massive heart attack, they said. He’d had heart trouble for two years. Nobody was surprised.
Except me.
I was stationed at Fort Bragg when I got the call. I flew home the next morning in uniform because I didn’t think to change.
My parents had divorced when I was nineteen. My mother, Florence, remarried a man named Christopher Vale. Smooth. Expensive suits. A smile that never got as far as his eyes. Christopher had a son from his first marriage, Lucas, who was twenty-six and worked in the company’s restaurant division.
At the reading of the will, I found out my father had left me the old Prescott house in Providence. The house I grew up in. And a controlling share of the company.
My mother stood up in the lawyer’s office and said, very calmly, “That’s not possible. Gregory promised that to me.”
Three weeks later, she filed to contest the will. She said my father hadn’t been of sound mind. She said I’d manipulated him from overseas.
I almost let her have it all. I was tired. I was grieving. I didn’t want the company. I didn’t want a war.
Then Arthur Delgado called me.
Arthur was my father’s attorney. Seventy-three years old, semiretired, the only person my father ever trusted completely. He asked me to come to his office alone.
He set a blue leather ledger on the desk in front of me.
“Your father gave me this six months before he died,” Arthur said. “He told me if anything happened to him, you were to have it. Nobody else.”
It was my father’s handwriting. Eight years of it.
Every page documented money disappearing from the company. Fake vendors. Padded contracts. Shell companies. Millions of dollars.
And every shell company led back to my mother and Christopher.
My father had known. For years. He’d been quietly building a case. He’d hired a forensic accountant, a former federal investigator named Margaret Chen. He was weeks away from going to the authorities.
Then his heart stopped.
I took the ledger to Margaret. Margaret took it to the FBI.
Four months later, my mother and Christopher were arrested for fraud and embezzlement. Twenty-three million dollars over eight years.
My mother was sitting in the Rhode Island Women’s Correctional Facility, waiting for trial.
I thought it was over.
Then Margaret sent me that file.
“Why would she kill him?” I asked Margaret on the phone. “She was already stealing from the company. It was working. Killing him would only draw attention.”
“Unless he found out,” Margaret said quietly. “Unless he threatened to expose her.”
I thought about the blue ledger. My father’s careful handwriting. Eight years of it. He’d known. He’d been preparing to act. Maybe he’d confronted her.
Maybe that conversation had killed him.
“I need to see her,” I said. “I need to look her in the eye and ask her.”
The women’s prison in Cranston is a gray concrete building that seems to soak up all the light around it. I sat in a small visitation room with a metal table bolted to the floor and waited.
When they brought my mother in, I barely recognized her.
The elegant, calculating woman who’d tried to take my inheritance was gone. Florence Prescott had always been the best-dressed woman in any room. Pearl earrings. Perfect hair.
The woman who sat down across from me was wearing prison scrubs. Her hair was gray at the roots. She looked twenty years older than she had four months ago.
“Hello, Alyssa.” Her voice was flat.
“Hello, Mother.”
We stared at each other across the table. The silence stretched out between us.
“I need to ask you something,” I said finally. “And I need you to tell me the truth.”
She laughed. It was a bitter little sound. “The truth. That’s a luxury I haven’t had in a long time.”
“Did you kill Dad?”
The question hung in the air.
My mother’s face went through a series of emotions. Shock. Then anger. And then something I didn’t expect at all.
Genuine confusion.
“What? No. No. I stole from him. I lied to him. I manipulated him. But I didn’t kill him.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to believe whatever you want.” She leaned forward. Her eyes went suddenly sharp. “But I loved your father. In my own twisted way, I loved him. I would never have killed him.”
“Then why was money from your trust paying for his prescriptions? Under a dead doctor’s name?”
My mother went very pale.
“What trust?”
“The family trust. You’re listed as trustee.”
“I’ve never been trustee of anything. Gregory never would have allowed that.” She stared at me. “Somebody put my name on it.”
“Who?”
She was silent for a long time. Her hands were shaking on the table.
Then she said something that changed everything.
“Ask your Uncle Robert.”
I didn’t have an Uncle Robert.
I spent the whole drive back to Providence trying to remember. Had my father ever mentioned a brother? There were no photographs. No family stories. No uncle at Thanksgiving. Gregory Prescott was an only child. That’s what I’d always been told.
I called Margaret from the car.
“Robert Prescott,” she said after a few minutes. “Born 1961. Five years younger than your father. Died in a car accident in New Hampshire in 1994. Car went into a river. Body was never found.”
“Body was never found,” I repeated. “Just like Dr. Reeves.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“Then we’re dealing with something much bigger than a family fight over money,” Margaret said.
“I need to talk to Arthur.”
