“What?”
“A photograph.”
My phone was already in my hand.
“Of the accident night?”
“No.”
The retired bookkeeper paused.
“Of the woman who contacted me six months ago.”
My stepmother.
The photograph had been captured by the security camera outside his home.
She had visited him.
Personally.
My father stared at the speaker.
“What did she want?”
“The backups.”
“Did you give them to her?”
“No.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That I destroyed them years ago.”
The retired man sighed.
“She didn’t believe me.”
I remembered the break-in at his storage unit.
My father asked the question all of us were thinking.
“What was she looking for?”
“Something your first wife discovered that didn’t concern your brother.”
We went silent.
My father frowned.
“What?”
The retired man spoke slowly.
“Your wife found two categories of false payments.”
“One was my brother.”
“Yes.”
“And the other?”
“I never identified the recipient.”
The forensic technician opened another folder on the memory card.
There were seven transactions.
Smaller than the brother’s theft.
Each payment had gone to the same shell company.
The first payment predated my mother’s death by six months.
The final payment happened three days afterward.
My father stared at the company name.
“I’ve never seen that.”
The retired bookkeeper said, “Your wife had.”
“How?”
“She called the state registry.”
The attorney searched the old corporate records.
The shell company had been dissolved eleven years earlier.
Its registered mailing address belonged to a small apartment building.
The original owner was listed.
A woman.
My father did not recognize the name.
Neither did my grandmother.
But his brother did.
His voice came quietly through the phone.
“I know her.”
My father looked toward the speaker.
“Who?”
“My girlfriend back then.”
The room went silent.
Then the brother added,
“And your current wife’s older sister.”
10
For a moment, nobody understood.
Then everyone understood at once.
My stepmother had always told us she met my father six years after my mother died.
That remained technically true.
But her family had known my father’s brother years before.
Her older sister had dated him.
The false vendor payments had passed through a company registered to that sister.
My father stood so quickly his chair nearly tipped.
“My wife knew my brother before she knew me?”
The brother sounded miserable.
“I didn’t know they were related until she contacted me.”
“How?”
“They used different last names.”
My grandmother asked, “Did your first wife know?”