**PART 2**
The next morning, I drove to Arthur Delgado’s office downtown.
His receptionist was a young woman named Kayla. She looked nervous the second I walked in.
“Mr. Delgado hasn’t been in for three days,” she said. “He said he was driving up to his cabin in Vermont. But his daughter called yesterday. He never got there.”
My blood went cold.
“Did he say anything before he left? Anything unusual?”
She hesitated. Then she opened a desk drawer.
“He said if anybody came looking for him, I should give them this. He said especially if it was you.”
She handed me a sealed envelope. My name on the front, in Arthur’s neat handwriting.
I opened it in my car. My hands were shaking.
Alyssa,
If you are reading this, something has happened to me. Robert found out I had the ledger. He knows everything now.
Your father did not die of a heart attack. He was poisoned. Slowly, over months. The medication was switched by someone he trusted. Someone who had access to his food, his drinks, his daily routine.
It was not your mother. She is a thief. She is not a killer.
The man who murdered your father has been hiding in plain sight for thirty years. He changed his name. He changed his face. And he waited.
Look at the photographs in your father’s house. Your grandmother’s eightieth birthday party. There is a man in the background, near the garden. Tall. Gray hair. That is him.
That is Robert.
He wants the company. He wants everything. And he will kill anyone who stands in his way.
I am sorry I could not protect you better. Your father made me promise.
Be careful, Alyssa. Please. Run if you have to.
Arthur.
I didn’t run.
I drove straight to the house on Benefit Street.
The old Prescott house. Three stories of brick and white trim, built in 1890. The house where I learned to ride a bike on the sidewalk out front. Where my father taught me to play chess in his study. The study where they’d found him on the floor.
I hadn’t spent a single night in it since the funeral.
The family photo albums were in the attic. My grandmother kept everything. Thirty boxes of photographs, all labeled in her careful handwriting.
It took me two hours to find the right one.
Grandma Prescott’s eightieth birthday. June 2009. The backyard. A white tent, round tables, paper lanterns strung through the old maple tree. My father in a blue blazer with his arm around Grandma. Me at nineteen, home from my first year at West Point, in a sundress I’d hated.
I went through every photo slowly.
On the sixth page, I found him.
He was standing at the very edge of the frame. Near the rose garden. Apart from the crowd. Holding a glass of wine. Not smiling.
Watching my father.
Tall. Gray-haired. Expensive suit.
I held the photo up to the attic light and stared at his face. Looking for something familiar. Something that would explain how a stranger could be my father’s brother.
And then I saw it.
The same sharp jawline. The same deep-set eyes. The same slight crook at one corner of the mouth when he wasn’t trying to smile.
My father’s face. Thirty years of somebody else’s life laid over it.
I took a picture of the photograph with my phone and sent it to Margaret.
She called back in eleven minutes.
“We ran facial recognition,” she said. Her voice was strange. “It matches a current identity. Richard Harmon. Founder and CEO of Harmon Industries. Respected businessman. Philanthropist. Sits on four corporate boards in New England.”
“Which ones?”
A pause.
“Alyssa. He sits on the board of Prescott Regional Builders. He’s been on it for eleven years.”
The floor dropped out from under me.
Richard Harmon. I’d met him. He came to my father’s funeral. He shook my hand at the reception and said, “Your father was a remarkable man. You must be very proud.”
He’d held my hand a second too long. I remembered thinking his grip was cold.
“Eleven years,” I said. “He’s been sitting at the same table as my father for eleven years.”
“Waiting,” Margaret said.
It started to make sense then. All of it.
Robert had come back with a new name and a new face. He’d built his own company, quietly, for twenty years. Then he’d worked his way onto my father’s board. Close enough to watch. Close enough to learn everything.
Close enough to find a weak spot.
“He found my mother,” I said. “And Christopher.”
“That’s my guess,” Margaret said. “Greedy, unhappy people with access. He probably introduced the whole fraud scheme to them. Let them steal. Let them take the risk. Kept his own hands clean.”
“And when my father found out about the fraud—”
“Robert couldn’t let him go to the FBI. Because the investigation would lead past your mother. All the way back to him.”
“So he killed my father. And set it up so if anybody ever looked, it would point to my mother’s name on the trust.”
“It’s perfect,” Margaret said quietly. “If no one asks questions, Gregory died of a bad heart. If someone does ask questions, the woman already going to prison for fraud takes the blame for murder too. Either way, Robert walks away.”
“What about Dr. Reeves?”
“I’m working on that. I don’t think he’s dead either. I think Robert scared him into disappearing and took over his identity for the prescriptions.”
“Where’s Harmon now?”
Margaret was quiet a second.
“Alyssa. I flagged his car this morning with a contact at the state police. His phone too, through a warrant on the Reeves case. He’s in Providence.”
“Where in Providence?”
Another pause.
“Benefit Street. He’s been at your father’s house for the last hour.”
I looked at the window of the attic. I hadn’t heard a car. I’d been up here for three hours with the photos.
“Margaret,” I said quietly. “I’m at my father’s house.”
“Get out. Right now. I’m calling the police. Get out of that house.”
I hung up.
And I went down the stairs.
I know what you’re thinking. I’ve thought it a thousand times since.
Why didn’t I go out the back? Why didn’t I lock myself in the attic and wait for the sirens?
The honest answer is twelve years of Army training and three months of grief. Somebody was in my father’s house. The house where he died. And I wanted to see his face.
The second floor was dark. The main floor was dark.
Except for one light.
The study.
The door was half open. I could see the green glass lamp on my father’s desk.
I walked down the hallway without making a sound. I’d cleared a hundred buildings in Kandahar. I knew how to move through a house.
He was standing at my father’s desk with his back to me.
He was holding the blue ledger.
Arthur’s copy. The original was with the FBI. But Arthur had made a second one for himself, in case anything happened.
And now Robert had it.
“Hello, Alyssa,” he said without turning around. “I wondered when you’d figure it out.”
He turned. He looked exactly like the photograph. Older. Thinner. But unmistakably the same man.
My father’s face. Wearing a stranger’s life.
“Where’s Arthur?” I said.
“Somewhere quiet.” He set the ledger down on the desk carefully. “He’s alive, if that’s what you’re asking. For now. I needed to know who else he’d talked to.”
“You killed my father.”
“I did what was necessary.”
“He was your brother.”
“He was never my brother!”
His voice cracked across the room like a whip. For a second, the polished businessman was gone, and something raw and ugly looked out of his eyes.
“He was my competitor. My rival. From the day I was born, Gregory was the golden child. The smart one. The one Father took to the job sites. The one who got the company. The inheritance. Everything.”
He breathed hard.
“I got told to be more like Gregory. For thirty years. Be more like your brother.”
“So you faked your death.”
“I drove my car into the Pemigewasset River in 1994 and walked away. I built a new man from nothing. And I waited.”
“Thirty years,” I said.
“Thirty years.” He smiled. It was a cold, thin thing. “And it was perfect, wasn’t it? Your mother and her idiot husband took the fall for the fraud. You were overseas playing soldier. Lucas was too young and too scared to see anything. And your father—”
He picked up a framed photo from the desk. Me and my dad at my West Point graduation. He looked at it.
“Your father died thinking his whole family had betrayed him. His wife. Her husband. His company. That was the part I enjoyed the most.”
I didn’t move. I didn’t let my face move.
“How did you do it?”
“Gregory had a weak heart. Everyone knew. He took four pills a day. I simply arranged for one of them to be something else. A little at a time. For five months.” He shrugged. “Doctor Reeves’s prescription pad was very useful. So was his signature.”
“Where is Reeves?”
“Somewhere he’s very afraid of me.”
“And the trust in my mother’s name?”
“Insurance. In case someone like you started asking questions.”
He set the photograph down. Then he reached slowly into the inside pocket of his jacket.
He took out a syringe. The needle caught the green light from the lamp.
“You’re going to kill me too,” I said. “Just like Dad.”
“I’m afraid so. Same medication, actually. Much larger dose. The coroner will call it a heart attack. Congenital. Runs in the family. The grieving daughter, buried right beside her beloved father.”
He took one step toward me.
“It’s almost touching.”
“Except I’m not going to let that happen,” I said.
I moved first.
He was expecting a woman frozen with fear. He wasn’t expecting someone who’d spent twelve years training for exactly this moment.
I stepped inside his reach. I caught his wrist with both hands and twisted hard. He cried out. The syringe hit the floor and rolled under the desk.
Robert was stronger than he looked. He drove his shoulder into me and slammed me back against the bookshelves. Books came crashing down around us. My father’s books. The leather-bound Dickens. The construction manuals. The chess strategy books he’d read to me when I was eight.
I rolled away. I came up swinging and caught him square in the jaw with a right hook.
His head snapped back. Blood ran from his lip.
“You think you can beat me?” he snarled. “I’ve been planning this for thirty years!”
“And I’ve been fighting for my life since I was nineteen,” I said.
He came at me again. I grabbed the brass fireplace poker from the stand beside the hearth and swung it. It connected with his shoulder. He howled.
But he didn’t stop.
He lunged at me with everything he had. We crashed through the French doors behind my father’s desk. Glass exploded around us. We spilled out onto the stone patio in the cold March night.
We rolled across the wet stones. He got a hand around my throat. I drove my knee up into his ribs. He let go. I got on top of him and pinned his arm behind his back the way they teach you at the academy.
He was gasping. So was I. My arm was bleeding from the glass. I didn’t feel it.
Then I heard the sirens.
Faint at first. Then louder. Then everywhere at once. Blue and red lights sweeping across the bare maple tree in the backyard. The same tree where the paper lanterns had hung at my grandmother’s party.
Margaret Chen had tracked my phone. She’d known exactly where I was. And she’d brought half the Providence Police Department with her.
Robert heard them too.
He stopped struggling. He turned his head on the wet stones. For the first time, I saw fear in his face.
“It’s over,” I said. “You’re done.”
He looked up at me. Really looked at me.
Something shifted in his expression. Not remorse. Not regret.
Recognition.
“You’re just like him,” he whispered. “Just like Gregory. You never give up.”
“No,” I said. “I’m better than him. He trusted you. I didn’t.”
Police officers came around the side of the house with their guns drawn. I raised my hands and stepped back.
They put Robert Prescott face down on my father’s patio and cuffed him.
Margaret came running through the gate behind them. She was sixty-two years old, in a raincoat, and she was out of breath.
“You absolute idiot,” she said. Then she hugged me so hard my ribs hurt.
