My stomach tightened as I opened the envelope and stared down at a bank statement. My parents had never been wealthy. They’d lived simply, worked hard, saved where they could, and I’d thought they’d paid everything they owed. Or that’s what I had always believed until this past week. But this account, there were deposits going into it, large and regular. And the amounts didn’t match anything I knew from their income.
In fact, other than their names on it, I didn’t recognize anything about the account. I had supposedly been given everything after my parents’ joint funeral, but it would seem not.
I swallowed hard and continued rifling through them. The statements went back years, each month new payments coming in for the same amount. This had to be the payments from the cartel for using their land, though I guess I had expected it to be in cash, what with it being money from drug deals and such.
I grabbed my phone, my hands shaking and after a maze of automated menus and security questions, a polite clerk finally came on the line and I explained about my parents’ passing and the account details I had just found. I went through some security questions with her and then she informed me that I was the sole beneficiary of the account.
I swallowed, confused and terrified.
“Is the account still active?” I asked.
“Yes, Ms. Hayes, I can confirm the account is active, though there hasn’t been any payments in or out of it for almost two years now. Would you like the current balance?”
“Yes please.” I braced myself, not knowing exactly what to expect.
“Two point five million,” the clerk said with missing a beat.
She said it coolly and calmly, like she hadn’t just made me a millionaire. With those four simple words, that was anything but simple.
I blinked. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”
“Two point five million dollars,” she repeated, slowly.
My pulse thudded in my ears. I sat down hard on the edge of my father’s desk.
“That can’t be right.”
“It is. Would you like any of it transferred to the other account?”
I froze. “Other account?”
“Yes. The monthly transfer was stopped two years ago, but if you’d like to resume it, I can arrange that.”
My mouth went dry. Two years ago…that was just before my parents had died. No, not died. That was when they had been murdered. But they had stopped the transfers prior to them dying. In which case it only confirmed to me one thing, they had been murdered because they had stopped the payments to the other person.
“Whose name is on the other account?” I asked, my voice sounding hollow and far away, like the air in the room was too thin, and not enough oxygen was going into my lungs.
“Peter Anthony, ma’am.”
The name meant nothing. No relative. No family friend. No one I’d ever heard my parents mention before.
“Would you like me to resume the transfers?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Don’t transfer anything. Don’t restart anything.”
“Of course. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“No,” I whispered, and hung up.
I sat there for a long time, staring at the papers spread across the desk. Two and a half million. Secret transfers. A stranger’s name.
My parents—my quiet, ordinary, hardworking parents—had been hiding something enormous. And now I was sitting on top of it with no idea who might come looking. Actually, that wasn’t true. I knew the cartel was involved, but they only seemed interested in killing me so they could get to my land.
I suddenly realized that it had to have been this Peter Anthony person that had killed my parents. The cartel were happy with the system they had in place. They had the route and my parents had their money and then this Peter Anthony had his money transfers…and then the transfers to him had stopped, so he had killed them.
Now the cartel wanted the land—the route, and they wanted me dead. But what would Peter Anthony get out of it?
I wondered briefly if I could just walk away from the ranch. I was a millionaire now, did I really need the ranch? Surely I could save myself a whole lot of trouble by just handing it over to them and leaving. But when I looked out the window at the land I had grown up on, the land that soothed my soul, that I had been desperate to come back home to, I knew I couldn’t.
Maybe the cartel would take the money instead?
I rubbed my hands over my face, already knowing they wouldn’t. The money—the millions—that was moneyfromthe cartel, obviously. Money they had been paying my parents so they could use our land. 2.5 million was a drop in the ocean to them. But the other transfers out of the account, to Peter Anthony, that was something. Maybe someone else might know who he was. And if they could find out who he was, maybe they could stop all of this.
“Who the hell are you, Peter Anthony,” I murmured, “and what did my parents get mixed up in?”
I looked back out the window, watching the unfamiliar biker shift his weight, scanning the tree line, and I knew where I needed to go and who I needed to speak to. It was just a matter of convincing the giant man on my porch to let me.
