CHAPTER 5:BLOOD AND PAPER
1096 Words
Victor came on a Thursday morning with two men and no appointment.
At eight forty three Clara's voice was already echoing from the ground floor. "Mr. Kross your cousin is at the front entrance. He says he's not leaving."
Aiden's chair scraped back. His door opened, he marched aggressively downstairs and his footsteps hit the stairs hard and fast and I dropped my folder and go after him.
I reached the ground floor just as Victor walked through the front door without being buzzed in. One of his men had his hand on the door. The other was already inside, standing to the left, arms crossed, eyes moving.
Clara was at her desk. She looked at me once then looked back at her screen.
"Aiden." Victor opened his arms. "Finally."
"You weren't invited in," Aiden said.
"The door was open."
"Marcus." Aiden didn't want to raise his voice. His security man appeared from the side corridor. "Nobody else comes through that door."
Marcus moved to the entrance. Victor's second man stepped forward and Marcus looked at him and he stopped moving completely.
Victor smoothed his tie, looked around and then he saw me and stopped.
"This her," he said.
"She works here," Aiden said. "That's all you need to know."
"Does she." Victor reached into his jacket and pulled out a document. He didn't unfold it. Just held it up. "I have a filing ready. Fraud, undue influence, manipulation of inheritance conditions. Everything goes public. Your name, her name, the arrangement, what she found in that archive, every single detail." He looked at Aiden. "Or we sit down right now and talk about what Edmund should have done with this estate."
"Get out Victor."
"I'll get out when we've"
"I said GET OUT." Aiden's voice cracked through the building. Clara's chair scraped back. One of Victor's men shifted his weight and Marcus stepped into him immediately, one hand flat on his chest.
Victor didn't move. He stood there and let the echo die and then said very quietly, "There is nothing you can do to me Aiden. Nothing. So lower your voice and listen."
"You have ten seconds to walk back through that door."
"Edmund is dead." Victor's own voice rose now, filling the room. "He is dead and he left this estate tied up in a condition that any court in this country would throw out in twenty minutes and I have been calling you for two weeks. Two weeks Aiden. Letters, calls, everything. You ignored every single one." He took a step forward and Marcus looked at Aiden for instruction and Aiden held up one hand and Marcus stopped. "So yes. Now we do it this way."
"You're not getting this estate Victor."
"Edmund didn't leave it to me because he was a stubborn dying old man!" Victor's voice bounced off every wall. "And the worst decision he ever made is standing right there pretending to be your employee!"
Aiden turned to Victor slowly. "Say that again."
"She was in the will." Victor said it like he had been carrying it for months and had finally put it down. "Edmund's original will. 2015. Daniel Hale's daughter. Named as a secondary beneficiary. Not the estate, not the main holdings but enough. Enough to matter." He looked straight at me. "You didn't know that did you."
My hands went cold. I didn't answer.
"Someone had that provision removed in 2019." Victor's voice kept rising. "Four months before Edmund put this ridiculous marriage condition in. Four months before her father died." He swung back to Aiden. "So you tell me. Who removed it. And why is she really here. And how convenient is it that the one woman you can't read happens to be the daughter of the man Edmund destroyed and happens to have her own name buried in a will she claims she never knew about."
"You have no idea what you're talking about," Aiden said.
"I have the original will." Victor pulled the document out and threw it on Clara's desk. It slid across and hit her keyboard. "2015 version. Page four. Her name." He fixed his jacket. "Seventy two hours Aiden. After that I file and it all comes out." He looked at me one last time. "Did you know about it. Or did someone use you the same way Edmund used your father."
He walked out. Both men followed. The front door slammed hard enough that the frame shook.
Clara stared at the document on her desk and didn't touch it.
Marcus looked at Aiden. Aiden looked at me.
"I didn't know," I said. "I came here for my father. That's all. I didn't know my name was in any will."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned and walked upstairs.
I waited until the room was empty. Then I walked to Clara's desk and picked up the document.
Page four and it was my name exactly like Victor said.
I had spent four years handling documents. Original contracts, forty year old agreements, letters that had passed through a dozen hands. I knew what age did to paper. I knew what 2015 looked like under fluorescent light.
This paper was not from 2015.
The ink sat wrong. The margins were off by two millimetres on the left side, the kind of error a person made when they were reformatting an existing template rather than working from an original. I turned it over. Checked the edges. Someone had built this. Had put my name in it and handed it to Victor and walked him through that door today knowing exactly what he would do with it.
Footsteps on the stairs behind me.
Aiden came down, crossed the room and took the document from my hand. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at me.
"Whoever made this didn't do it to expose you," he said. "They did it to replace you. Your name in a fabricated will, your access to the archive, your presence in this building by the time this reaches a court it won't look like you came here for your father." He set the document on the desk. "It will look like you came here to steal from this estate. And the person who built this has made sure that every move you have made since Thursday looks exactly like evidence."
I looked at him.
"You came here to clear your father's name," he said. "Someone has spent the last eleven days making sure
you will be the one in handcuffs instead."
- Writer
