Chapter 9 - ASHFORD STREET
I had survived one fire by accident. I would not let another erase me on purpose.
Marcus drove. Grant sat in front. I sat in the back beside my father, still wearing borrowed hospital slippers now blackened by ballroom dust.
“You should have known,” Dad said suddenly.
I turned toward him.
He was not speaking to me.
He was speaking to himself.
“I should have demanded DNA.”
“You were grieving.”
“That is not an excuse.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
He accepted that without defending himself.
At Ashford Street, firefighters were already outside. Gray smoke leaked from a second-floor window, but sprinklers had slowed the blaze.
A police officer stopped us at the tape. Marcus showed his investigator ID. “Where did it start?”
“Records room B. Someone triggered the alarm manually before the fire spread.”
“Who?”
The officer pointed toward an ambulance.
A woman sat on the bumper wrapped in a blanket.
I recognized her immediately.
Tessa Quinn, the company archivist.
She looked at me and burst into tears.
“Ms. Mercer?”
I knelt in front of her. “What happened?”
“Mr. Sloan called. He told me to pull the old estate files and put them in the shredding room. I knew that was wrong.”
“So you called the police?”
“I pulled the fire alarm when a man came through the loading dock with gasoline.”
Marcus leaned closer. “Did you see him?”
She nodded.
“It wasn’t Mr. Sloan.”
Dad frowned. “Then who?”
Tessa looked past us toward the street.
“Peter Cole.”
Our corporate counsel.
The same lawyer who had supervised my probate case after the fire.
Grant went still.
Marcus asked, “Where are the trust files now?”
Tessa clutched the blanket tighter.
“I moved the originals yesterday.”
“Where?”
She looked at me.
“To the one place Mr. Cole would never search.”
May you like
Then she said my mother’s name.
“Eleanor’s greenhouse.”
