Chapter 4 - STORAGE UNIT 112
By morning, Storage Unit 112 had become the center of everything.
Police got there quickly.
Not quickly enough.
Someone had cut the storage facility camera feed for exactly twenty-eight minutes before officers arrived.
Still, the unit was not empty.
Inside were partial ledgers, copied wire records, a sealed envelope for Emily, and a USB drive.
The sealed note from Peter read:
If this reaches Emily, then the Carters have moved sooner than I expected. The money is real. The signatures are false. And the land was never theirs to leverage.
The land.
That phrase kept returning.
Ryan, now officially pulled back from the case because of his history with Emily, still found ways to pass her information through Nora and through sheer stubbornness.
The blood on the bag in Emily’s trunk was Peter’s.
The gun matched the warehouse shooting.
A wounded warehouse guard had described the shooter as a woman in a white blouse and dark trousers.
Emily’s work clothes.
Someone had dressed like her.
At noon, Thomas called.
“I need to meet you,” he said.
“No.”
“Yes,” he replied quietly. “Because your mother is better at this than I am.”
Against every reasonable instinct, Emily agreed to meet him in a church parking lot—with Ryan watching from down the block.
Thomas looked exhausted.
He handed Emily a photocopied trust abstract.
She scanned it once and froze.
Provisional beneficiary designation: Emily Carter.
Her name was on old land paperwork connected to Willow Creek.
“My grandmother put land in trust for me?” Emily asked.
“Your mother’s mother did,” Thomas said. “Not for Valerie. For you.”
“Why?”
He looked toward the church doors.
“Because your mother was never supposed to control it permanently.”
Then he added something that made Emily go cold:
“If you want to stay alive, figure out why your name was tied to Willow Creek before your mother did.”
When Thomas drove away, Emily stood holding the paper with rain blowing across the lot.
Ryan appeared beside her.
“What was that?”
May you like
Emily looked down at the trust abstract.
“The biggest project my family has ever built,” she said, “may be standing on land that was never really theirs at all.”
