“The account number is forty-two trillion, three hundred seven billion, eight hundred ten million, five hundred sixty-four thousand, three hundred twenty-eight. Request the full history. Trust no one in the family. Only you, Maggie.”
Maggie. That’s what he called her when she was a little girl, sitting at the chessboard, losing again, and he’d console her: “It’s okay, Maggie, you’ll get it next time.” Margaret photographed everything—the passbook, the note, the account number—and immediately uploaded the images to a secure cloud server. Her legal training had made her paranoid. Originals could disappear, files could be deleted, but a time-stamped cloud copy was hard to dispute.
Back in Cleveland, she finally fell asleep at seven a.m. and was woken by a phone call at ten. It was her mother. Her voice was soft and caring, with the cooing tone Margaret remembered from childhood.
“Sweetie, how are you? Yesterday was so hard, I know. Did you get some rest?”
“More or less.”
“That’s good, that’s good.” A pause, a slight cough. “You didn’t take anything from Grandpa’s house, did you? We need to keep everything for the appraiser, you understand, before we sell. Every little thing can affect the price.”
“I just took the chess book,” Margaret replied. “For sentimental value.”
A longer pause. Tense.
“Okay. Of course, that’s fine. Just, Maggie, don’t take anything Grandpa said recently to heart. He wasn’t well, you know. The doctors said his dementia was progressing. The poor man would say the most outlandish things, he was completely out of his mind.”
“I know, Mom.”
“Good girl.”
At seven that evening, Arthur called—for the first time in six months, not counting a perfunctory New Year’s text. His voice was friendly, relaxed, as if they talked every day.
“Hey, Mags. Listen, Mom and I talked it over. She’ll handle the house sale, all that paperwork she loves. I’ll get my lawyers on the land deal, we can make a good profit if we handle it right. You don’t have to worry about a thing, we’ve got it covered.”
“Thanks, Arthur.”
“No problem. And hey… you know Mom. Don’t argue with her. It’s not worth it. You’ll just stress yourself out for nothing.”
Two calls in one day, nine hours apart. Too coordinated to be a coincidence. Margaret recorded both conversations. Her mother played the concerned parent, her brother played the voice of reason. A classic good cop, bad cop routine. She’d seen it at work when a project manager and an accountant tried to explain away budget discrepancies.
The next day, she took a personal day and drove to Newport. The bank branch was in a two-story building with a sign faded by the sun. A young teller smiled, took the passbook, her ID, the death certificate, and proof of kinship.
And the smile vanished from her face. The teller apologized, picked up an internal phone, and whispered something, glancing at Margaret with the look one gives a person who just brought a bomb into the bank. Twenty minutes later, a man in a well-tailored suit introduced himself as Nicholas Vedeneyev, the branch manager, and invited her into his office.
“This account is flagged in our security system,” Mr. Vedeneyev said, closing the door. “It was opened in 2010, not decades ago as the passbook might suggest. The current balance is…” He wrote a number on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk.
Margaret looked at the number and made a sound that was somewhere between a sob and a laugh. $750,000. Her grandfather, who lived in a simple lake house and wore the same flannel jacket for twenty years.
“There’s something else,” Vedeneyev continued, his expression grim. “In 2014, someone attempted to access this account using a power of attorney. The signature on the document did not match the sample we have on file. The name on the power of attorney was Susan M. Thompson.”
Three days later, Margaret received a call from a man she didn’t know. His voice was older but firm, with the cadence of someone used to speaking in courtrooms…
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