The brother hesitated.
“I think she was starting to figure it out.”
The financial records showed payments leaving the company.
Some were clearly linked to the brother’s gambling and private debts.
But the seven mysterious payments went through the shell company connected to my stepmother’s sister.
The dates matched periods when the brother claimed he was being pressured for money.
My father’s attorney began reconstructing the flow.
The brother had stolen.
But someone had helped him conceal where some of the money went.
Possibly the sister.
Possibly others.
“Was your wife involved back then?” the attorney asked.
My father’s brother said no.
“At least I never met her.”
“Could she have known through her sister?”
“I don’t know.”
My phone vibrated again.
The anonymous sender.
This time the message contained a single image.
An old photograph.
My stepmother.
Younger.
Much younger.
Standing beside her sister.
And beside them—
my father’s brother.
The timestamp placed it one month before my mother died.
I turned the screen toward everyone.
The brother swore.
“That was the fundraiser.”
My father stared.
“You said you didn’t know her.”
“I didn’t remember her.”
“She’s standing three feet from you.”
“There were fifty people there.”
My grandmother said, “But she remembered you.”
Another message arrived.
She remembered all of you.
My father called his wife.
Straight to voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
The attorney contacted police.
By evening, investigators were treating the old financial records as potentially connected to current extortion and attempted financial manipulation.
The anonymous sender still had not been identified.
I assumed it was my stepmother at first.
My grandmother disagreed.
“Why would she give us evidence against herself?”
“Maybe to scare Dad.”
“Then why tell us where the memory card was?”
Good question.
My father thought it might be the retired bookkeeper.
It wasn’t.
His brother denied it.
Then I remembered something.
The first photograph.
Taken outside the restaurant on the night my mother died.
If the temporary bookkeeper had been helping her, maybe he had taken it.
We sent it to him.
His response came twenty minutes later.
Not mine.
“Whose is it?”
A long silence.
Then he said,
“Your mother took photographs that week with a disposable camera.”
My grandmother frowned.
“Who developed them?”
“I did.”
My pulse increased.
“Were there pictures from that night?”
“Yes.”
“Who had the negatives?”
He paused.
“Your mother.”
No one spoke.
My mother had photographed the people around her before she died.