Chapter 3 - Wedding Day
My father had been dead for six months.
Victor Mercer died at seventy-three in a private hospital room with my sister on one side and me on the other.
He never said Evelyn’s name.
Not once.
Now I sat outside an emergency room while doctors examined the woman I thought I had lost.
Claire sat twenty feet away with a police officer beside her.
I could not look at her.
Detective Brooks came out first.
“Evelyn is stable.”
“Stable from what?”
“Dehydration. Malnutrition. Old injuries. Nothing immediately life-threatening.”
“She wants to talk.”
“With me?”
“Yes.”
I entered the room alone.
Evelyn was sitting upright with a blanket around her shoulders.
“I searched for you,” I said.
“I know.”
“How?”
“Claire brought newspapers sometimes.”
That sentence nearly broke me.
“What happened that day?”
Evelyn looked toward the door.
“Your mother gave me a jewelry box before the ceremony.”
My mother had died four years before our wedding.
“She left it with the housekeeper years earlier. Arthur gave it to me that morning.”
Inside was a letter from my mother and a small silver key.
The letter told Evelyn to open an old secretary desk in the bridal suite if she ever married me.
Evelyn thought it was sentimental.
Inside the desk she found original trust documents belonging to the Mercer-Carter Foundation.
My mother and Evelyn’s mother had founded the charity together decades earlier.
What I did not know was that Evelyn’s mother had placed thirty-four percent of the foundation’s voting rights into a trust for Evelyn.
The rights would transfer when Evelyn married.
“That afternoon?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And Dad knew?”
“He knew I found out.”
Evelyn’s hands tightened around the blanket.
“I confronted Claire first.”
“Why Claire?”
“Because her signature was on the transfers.”
I looked toward the door.
“What transfers?”
Evelyn answered:
“Forty-two million dollars.”
“From the foundation?”
She nodded.
“To companies your father controlled.”
May you like
Then she looked directly at me.
“And one company in your name.”
