Chapter 6 - THE WOMAN FROM THE GALA
Thomas Wren had chaired our company board for eleven years.
Frank trusted him.
I trusted him.
He attended Jackson’s graduation, Frank’s funeral and every major family celebration. He had sat three tables from me during the wedding toast, wearing an expression of perfect concern.
When I announced the canceled transfer, Thomas had been among the first people to approach Jackson.
He told my son I was under terrible emotional strain.
He encouraged him to protect me from making irreversible decisions.
Now his face appeared in a photograph taken outside the lake house while Frank was dying.
Detective Brooks instructed us not to contact him.
Rebecca immediately froze his access to family-controlled accounts. Our cybersecurity director began reviewing years of company communications.
Thomas called me before we finished leaving the station.
“Margaret, we need to discuss the board meeting.”
“What board meeting?”
“The directors are assembling this afternoon to consider temporary leadership.”
“On whose authority?”
“The incapacity petition has created uncertainty.”
“The petition has not been granted.”
“The company cannot wait for a court.”
I looked at Detective Brooks. She nodded for me to continue.
“What are you proposing?”
“That you step aside voluntarily until your health questions are resolved.”
“And Jackson?”
“He is emotionally compromised by the situation with his wife.”
“What fortunate timing for you.”
Thomas became quiet.
“I am trying to protect Frank’s company.”
“You were at the lake house the night he died.”
Silence.
Rebecca’s eyes widened. She had not expected me to confront him.
I did not care.
Finally, Thomas spoke.
“You are confused.”
“I have a photograph.”
“Photographs can be misleading.”
“Recordings are more difficult.”
The line went dead.
Detective Brooks swore.
“You warned him.”
“He already knew we had the vault key. Adrian kidnapped Ethan because of it.”
“We might have tracked his movements.”
“Thomas has been tracking ours for years. Let him feel fear for once.”
My anger did not impress her.
“People make unpredictable choices when afraid.”
“So do mothers when their sons are threatened.”
Jackson stood near the station window.
“Can you arrest him?”
“Not based on the photograph alone. The recording supports extortion, but identifying the speaker and establishing chain of custody will take time.”
“He threatened to kill me.”
“We need evidence tying him to the threat.”
Ethan remained missing.
Finding him became the immediate priority.
Thomas did not attend the emergency board meeting. He sent a written statement claiming a family medical crisis prevented his participation.
The board delayed any leadership decision after receiving my independent cognitive evaluation and Rebecca’s evidence of forged medical reports.
We won a small battle.
The larger war continued.
That afternoon, Detective Brooks located Patricia Vale.
She was living under another name in a retirement community outside Charleston. Officers reached the address and found the apartment empty.
A neighbor reported seeing Patricia leave with two suitcases the previous evening.
Inside the apartment, investigators discovered photographs of Jackson dating back six years.
Natalie had been studying him before Frank died.
There were copies of his college records, old girlfriends’ social-media posts and psychological notes describing his grief after losing Frank.
One handwritten entry read:
Subject responds strongly to admiration. Conflict avoidance tied to fear of abandonment. Mother relationship close but vulnerable to accusations of control.
My son read the page twice.
“She researched how to make me love her.”
“No,” Judith said. “She researched how to make you dependent.”
Jackson walked out of the room.
I followed him to the parking lot.
He stood beside my car, breathing hard.
“Every memory is contaminated now.”
“She cannot change what you experienced.”
“She designed what I experienced.”
“Yes.”
“When she cried, I comforted her. When she said she was afraid you hated her, I defended her. When she said I was the first man who made her feel safe—”
He stopped.
“She knew exactly what to say.”
“That does not make you foolish.”
“It makes me predictable.”
“We are all predictable to someone who studies us without conscience.”
He looked toward the building.
“What did Dad write about me?”
“What do you mean?”
“In the letter. He said I had a dangerous need to believe people I love.”
“Your father was not insulting you.”
“He was warning you because he knew I wouldn’t listen.”
I could not deny it.
Jackson wiped his eyes.
“I told Natalie things about you. Private things.”
“What things?”
“That you felt guilty about leaving Dad that night. That you sometimes blamed yourself.”
“That is how she knew about the missing hour.”
He nodded.
“I told her about the succession clause, the wedding trust, your medication, the lake house and the argument you had with Dad.”
Each confession revealed another weapon he had unknowingly placed in her hands.
“I need the passwords to every account you shared,” I said.
“I will give them to Rebecca.”
“Good.”
“And I want to resign from Holloway Freight.”
“No.”
He looked surprised.
“I compromised the company.”
“You were manipulated in your personal life.”
“I introduced the Solstice acquisition.”
“And I rejected it.”
“Because you saw what I didn’t.”
“You will not become wiser by running away from the place where you failed.”
He stared at me.
Frank had said similar things to both of us over the years.
Mistakes require repair, not disappearance.
Jackson returned to the investigation room.
By evening, cybersecurity analysts discovered that Thomas had accessed confidential trust records more than eighty times without authorization.
He forwarded documents to an encrypted account linked to Grant Mercer.
They also found payments from a Mercer-controlled company to Thomas’s consulting firm.
More than nine million dollars over four years.
The financial trail gave federal investigators grounds to join the case.
At seven-thirty, an agent named Daniel Cross arrived.
He specialized in elder fraud, trust manipulation and organized financial crime.
“Natalie and her family may have participated in at least five similar operations,” he explained. “The difference is that previous victims died or were declared incompetent before they could report the scheme.”
“How many deaths?” I asked.
“Potentially three.”
“Frank?”
“We will reopen the circumstances surrounding his death.”
Agent Cross placed a photograph on the table.
It showed a woman leaving a hospital in Arizona.
At first, I thought she was Natalie.
Then I noticed the age difference.
“Her mother?”
“Patricia Vale, nine years ago. The man in the wheelchair was Harrison Cole, a real-estate developer. Three months after this photograph, he signed control of his properties to Patricia. Two weeks later, he died.”
“Cause?”
“Heart failure.”
The same convenient answer used for Frank.
Another photograph showed Natalie at twenty-three, standing beside Harrison’s adult son.
“She dated the heir,” Agent Cross said.
“What happened to him?”
“He died in a boating accident the following year.”
Jackson turned pale.
“How many men has she married?”
“Officially? None before you.”
“Unofficially?”
“We believe she participated in long-term relationships under at least three identities.”
Natalie had not improvised the wedding attack.
She had been trained.
At nine that night, Agent Cross received a message through a secure tip line.
The sender included a photograph of Ethan sitting in a chair with his hands tied.
Behind him stood a digital clock displaying the current time.
The message read:
Red ledger for the witness. Midnight tomorrow. Instructions will follow.
“Can we trace it?” Jackson asked.
“The image passed through multiple servers.”
“Then we give them the ledger.”
Agent Cross shook his head.
“They may kill him after receiving it.”
“They may kill him if we refuse.”
“We prepare a controlled exchange.”
The photograph contained few visible details. A concrete wall. A metal chair. Part of a painted sign behind Ethan’s shoulder.
Our analysts enlarged the letters.
H—LLO—AY C—LD S—OR—GE.
Holloway Cold Storage.
My company owned seven refrigerated warehouses across the state.
One had been abandoned after a fire three years earlier.
Thomas had repeatedly argued against selling the property.
The warehouse stood twenty miles from the lake house.
Law enforcement teams moved immediately.
Jackson insisted on going.
They refused.
So did I.
We waited in a command vehicle nearly a mile from the warehouse while tactical officers entered.
At ten-fourteen, gunshots came through the radio.
At ten-sixteen, an officer reported one suspect down.
At ten-eighteen, they found Ethan alive.
Adrian Vale escaped through a drainage tunnel.
A second man was arrested.
He was a former Holloway Freight security employee dismissed for theft.
Ethan had a broken wrist, two cracked ribs and a deep cut above his eye.
Paramedics carried him from the building shortly before eleven.
I met the ambulance at the hospital.
“You saved the recording,” I told him.
He managed a weak smile.
“My grandfather died trying to protect it.”
“How did he die?”
“Someone ran his car off a bridge.”
The official record called Leonard Voss’s death an accident.
Ethan never believed it.
“My grandfather gave me a copy before he died,” Ethan said. “He told me that Mrs. Vale had been inside your family for years.”
“Why did you wait until the wedding?”
“He said they would disappear if confronted too early. Natalie had to believe the plan was working.”
“You took a terrible risk.”
“So did he.”
Ethan reached beneath the blanket and removed a tiny memory card taped inside the lining of his watch.
“They thought the recording was on my phone.”
“What is this?”
“Not the lake-house audio. Something newer.”
He told us that while working the wedding, he had placed a recorder beneath a service table near Natalie’s private bridal suite.
He hoped to capture proof of the plan.
The device recorded Natalie, Patricia, Adrian and Thomas Wren meeting three hours before the ceremony.
They discussed the sleeping medication.
They discussed the guardianship petition.
They discussed moving the family estate into offshore accounts.
Then Thomas asked what would happen to Jackson after the assets were transferred.
Patricia answered.
“He will suffer an accident during the honeymoon.”
My knees nearly failed.
Jackson had planned to fly with Natalie to a private island the morning after receiving the money.
The plane had been chartered through a company controlled by Grant Mercer.
May you like
Natalie’s voice followed on the recording.
“Make it painless. I did love him a little.”
