Chapter 5 - THE BROTHER THEY TRIED TO BUY
Audrey called Aaron from the quietest room she could find.
He answered on the third ring, cheerful and breathless. “Hey, Aud. I was going to call. I have good news.”
“Did someone pay you money from Holloway Residential Consulting?”
Silence.
“Aaron.”
“It's not what you think.”
“What do you think I think?”
“I got a consulting job. A short one. They wanted help checking a computer inventory. I thought it was a chance to put something on my résumé.”
Audrey closed her eyes. Aaron was twenty, bright and kind, and desperate to prove he could contribute more than another tuition bill to their household. She had worried for months that he was taking on too much debt.
“Who hired you?”
“A woman named Felicity. She said they needed someone good with spreadsheets.”
“Did you go to the Vale mansion?”
“No. I worked from the college library. She sent me a file with inventory codes. I organized them, and they paid me.”
“Did she ask you to use my name?”
“Not exactly. The file had a line saying FAMILY REFERRAL. She asked whether I had relatives in domestic service. I said my sister worked for a family in town. I didn't tell her where.”
Audrey breathed in slowly. “We need to speak to an attorney. This company may be involved in something serious.”
Aaron's voice changed. “Am I in trouble?”
“I don't know. But we're going to deal with it together.”
After the call, Audrey told Graham everything. He arranged for Aaron to speak with an independent lawyer before providing his records voluntarily to investigators. Audrey insisted on that. Her brother might have been naïve, but he was not a convenient suspect to be discarded because a wealthy family needed someone lower down the ladder to blame.
At the office, Aaron showed the team the spreadsheet. Rows of dates and coded item numbers filled the screen. On the surface it looked like a routine inventory list. Isabel noticed that several codes matched foundation payment identifiers from Clara's storage card.
“The spreadsheet may have been designed to map financial transfers,” she said. “Did they tell you what these numbers represented?”
“No,” Aaron said. “They said they were furniture shipments.”
He pointed to one row. “This one kept failing the formula check. It has a duplicate identification number.”
Isabel leaned closer. The duplicate referred to an account under a company called Northstar Community Care, officially listed as a provider of services to vulnerable children. Payments had been routed through that company into a private investment vehicle.
Aaron looked sick. “I thought I was fixing their data.”
“You were doing exactly the task they assigned,” his lawyer said. “The important question is what you knew and when.”
Audrey squeezed his hand beneath the table.
The spreadsheet contained a separate worksheet titled FAMILY. In it were names, addresses, employment histories, and medical information about staff connected to the Vale household. Audrey's name appeared near the top. The file included her brother's college and the amount of his outstanding tuition.
“Why would they collect this?” Audrey asked.
Graham answered quietly. “To identify pressure points.”
The words made her feel physically cold. Veronica's team had not simply been rearranging furniture or staff schedules. They were studying the people around Maisie and Tristan, learning which could be manipulated and which might resist.
Aaron's interview lasted almost two hours. He explained the spreadsheet formulas, showed how he'd received the assignment, and produced the email confirming the promised payment. He insisted on keeping copies of everything before handing the laptop to a forensic technician, a detail that surprised Audrey because her brother was usually careless with paperwork.
“I learned that from you,” he told her outside the office. “You keep receipts for things you bought four years ago.”
“Because things break after the warranty expires.”
“Because you're terrifyingly organized.”
For the first time that week, she laughed.
They walked to a café where their mother used to take them on birthdays. Aaron ordered hot chocolate, an old habit he refused to outgrow. Audrey bought a grilled cheese sandwich and broke it in half.
“I should've told you about the job,” he said.
“You're allowed to make decisions without telling me every detail.”
“You're always helping with tuition. I wanted to surprise you.”
“I know.”
“But now I may have helped bad people.”
Audrey looked directly at him. “You couldn't know what the numbers represented when they deliberately concealed it. Be honest with the investigators. That's how you help now.”
He nodded, then stared at his cup.
“Sometimes I think you stopped having your own life when Mom died.”
Audrey opened her mouth to object and stopped. There was some truth in it. She'd worked weekends, refused invitations, and treated every unexpected expense as a threat to their survival. She loved Aaron, but loving him had become tangled with the belief that if she relaxed, something terrible would happen.
“You have your own future,” he said. “I want you to have one too.”
She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “We'll both try.”
On the way back, he asked about Maisie. Audrey told him the child was brave and frightened, a combination she'd learned to recognize in herself. Aaron offered to make a simple drawing game for her, something with colorful stars and counting. Audrey warned him not to turn it into an interview about what happened. He looked offended.
“I'm her guest, not a detective.”
“Good.”
“And I know the difference.”
“Even better.”
The lawyer reviewed the consultancy's agreement with Aaron and pointed out an unusual confidentiality clause that appeared to prohibit him from talking about any assignment, even if he discovered wrongdoing. She explained that such a clause did not erase his rights to cooperate with authorities or seek legal advice. Aaron said he had barely read it because the pay seemed so generous. Audrey recognized the shame on his face and refused to let it settle there. They copied the contract, marked the questions needing follow-up, and made a plan for him to respond through counsel if Felicity contacted him again. He left the meeting with less certainty about the world but more confidence in his ability to respond to it.
That evening, Tristan invited Audrey and Aaron to dinner in the small family room rather than the formal dining hall. Maisie ate macaroni and insisted everyone use the red napkins with embroidered snowflakes.
Aaron looked deeply uncomfortable at first. He kept straightening his shirt and watching for the moment the staff might ask him to leave.
“I'm sorry about the data,” he told Tristan when Maisie went to wash her hands.
Tristan put down his fork. “You took a legitimate-looking job and did the work you were asked to do. The responsibility for misleading you belongs with the people who hired you.”
Aaron looked at his sister. “She told me you'd say that.”
Audrey blinked. “I didn't know he'd say that.”
Tristan smiled faintly. “I'm learning.”
After dinner, Maisie asked Aaron to show her how spreadsheets worked. He opened a blank worksheet on a tablet and taught her to count the stars on the Christmas tree in little boxes. She decided the blue stars should be worth two points and the gold ones three. Aaron accepted the rule without question, and she declared him her favorite mathematician.
Audrey watched them from the kitchen doorway. Her brother had spent most of his life feeling like a problem she needed to solve. Seeing him make Maisie laugh reminded her that he was also a whole person whose talents mattered.
Tristan approached quietly. “Would you consider taking a few days off with Aaron? The household can manage.”
“I'm worried about Maisie.”
“So am I. But your safety matters too.”
Audrey thought about the threat under her door. “I can go to my aunt's place for two nights. It's outside the city.”
“Good. Graham can coordinate with you if there are updates, but nobody will pressure you to participate in interviews without counsel.”
She nodded. Then, surprising herself, she asked, “Do you miss Clara every day?”
Tristan looked toward Maisie, now building a paper star tower with Aaron.
“Yes,” he said. “Some days I miss the person she was. Other days I miss the ordinary things—her leaving teacups everywhere, singing off-key, laughing when she won at cards.”
Audrey waited.
“And lately,” he continued, “I miss the person I might have been if I hadn't hidden inside my work after she died.”
“Maisie still knows you love her.”
“She shouldn't have had to guess.”
Audrey didn't offer false reassurance. She just stood beside him until Maisie called them to inspect the tower.
The following morning, Graham received the results of the vendor interview. Felicity had supplied an additional detail: she had not been told Maisie's identity when she was assigned the chest. Veronica's written instructions called the person inside a “temporary guest.”
But the most revealing evidence wasn't in the instructions. It was in a voice message found on Felicity's phone.
A woman's voice said, “Once the child is out of the room, the trustee papers go in front of him. If he asks where she is, tell him she's asleep.”
The voice sounded like Veronica.
May you like
Then another voice, male and unmistakably older, replied, “And if the maid interferes?”
“Make sure she has something to lose.”
