Chapter 5 - Shadows on the Highway
Back at Owen and Mae’s house, the afternoon sun cast long golden rays across the hardwood floors. Ellie was curled up on the living room sofa, finally asleep without her baseball cap, the uneven patches of her shorn hair exposed against the floral pillowcase. The dark circles under her eyes had softened, but every time a car passed by outside on the gravel road, her shoulders would twitch in her sleep.
I sat at the kitchen counter with a cold cup of coffee, reviewing the financial records I had pulled up on my laptop.
For ten years, my mother had handled the bookkeeping for the shared family trust tied to the feed store property—a property my late father had left to be divided equally among his children. Whenever I was on the road for my tour company, Vivian always insisted on managing my quarterly distributions, depositing them directly into a joint account she claimed was "safeguarded against emergency audits."
Now, with Tessa Ward's legal assistance, I was finally looking at the raw statements.
My stomach churned as I scrolled through the line items. Over the last four years, tens of thousands of dollars had been siphoned out of my share of the trust into an external corporate account registered under a shell company named *Dalton Holdings LLC*.
And who was the sole registered agent of *Dalton Holdings LLC*?
Vivian Dalton.
She hadn't just been controlling my life; she had been systematically stealing my inheritance, keeping me financially dependent so I could never afford to move away from Stillwater or raise Ellie on my own terms.
My phone buzzed on the counter. It was an unknown local number.
I swiped and answered. "Hello?"
"Mara?" A breathless, shaky voice came through the receiver. It was a man I hadn't spoken to in over five years—Uncle Ray, my father's younger brother, who had been pushed out of the family business by Vivian long before I was born.
"Uncle Ray?" I whispered, surprised. "Is that really you?"
"Keep your voice down," Ray muttered urgently. "I heard about what happened at the police station. Word travels fast in Stillwater. Mara, you need to listen to me very carefully. Your mother is panicking. She's liquidating assets out of the feed store safe right now."
"Liquidating assets?" I asked, frowning. "What are you talking about?"
"She knows Tessa Ward is coming for her financial records," Ray explained quickly. "Your father kept a hidden ledger in the basement office behind the grain silos—a paper trail of everything Vivian took from you and your sister over the decades. If she gets to that ledger before the court order is served, she'll burn it."
I gripped the edge of the counter. "Where is it hidden?"
"Behind the old corrugated metal paneling in the back storage room, right behind the vintage tractor parts," Ray said. "Mara, be careful. She's desperate. A cornered animal bites twice as hard."
Before I could ask anything else, the line went dead with a sharp click.
I stared at the screen. The feed store. The very place where my nightmare had started yesterday.
If I waited for the sheriff to execute the search warrant tomorrow morning, Vivian might destroy the evidence that proved she had been stealing my livelihood for years. More importantly, that ledger might contain answers about why she hated me so deeply—and why she was so determined to break Ellie's spirit the exact same way she had tried to break mine.
I looked over at the sofa. Ellie was still sound asleep, breathing softly. Mae stepped out of the kitchen with a fresh towel, noticing my tense posture.
"Everything alright, honey?" Mae asked softly.
"Mae, I have to go back," I said, closing my laptop with a quiet snap.
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"Back where? To the feed store?" Mae’s eyes widened in alarm. "Mara, your mother has a restraining order, but you know she doesn't care about court orders when she's on her home turf!"
"If I don't get that ledger tonight, she'll erase every trace of what she stole from us," I said, grabbing my car keys from the hook by the door. "I'll be fast. I just need to get in, find the panel, and get out before anyone even knows I'm there."
