Chapter Four: Whitmore
310 Words
Roland Whitmore ran Compliance on the eleventh floor, a soft-spoken man in his sixties who'd been with Halden Group since it was three people and a rented office. He agreed to meet Mara for coffee only after she mentioned Elise's name twice and watched something flicker behind his glasses both times.
"She asked me something, about six weeks before she disappeared," he admitted, stirring sugar into coffee he wasn't drinking. "About a set of acquisition numbers that didn't reconcile. A shell entity buried three layers down in a deal Julian's division closed last year. I told her to drop it."
"Why?"
"Because the last person who asked too many questions about Halden's numbers left the company very suddenly too. Before Elise. You'd be smart to leave this exactly where you found it, Miss—"
"Ellison. Mara Ellison."
"Miss Ellison." He said it slowly, like testing whether the name would hold. "You're not actually her, you know. Whatever people are calling you around that office. You don't have to inherit whatever she started."
"I'm not trying to."
"Aren't you?" He looked at her with something like pity. "You're sitting at her desk. Wearing — forgive me — a face people can't stop comparing to hers. Digging through a storage unit with the man she was in love with. If that's not inheriting her life, I don't know what you'd call it."
The words followed Mara home like a shadow with weight. That night, lying awake again — sleep had become a stranger these past weeks — she pulled up the unknown number's thread and, for the first time, asked something other than who are you.
What happened to her?
The reply came almost instantly, like whoever it was had been waiting.
Ask Julian where he was the night she disappeared.
He told the police one thing.
He told me another.
- Writer
