Chapter 6 - The Ghost in the Ledgers
By Wednesday morning, the storm had moved inland, leaving behind a sky of crystalline, washed-blue brilliance. The marsh smelled of wet earth and sweetgrass.
In the small breakfast nook of the Sullivan’s Island cottage, Marcus Choi sat surrounded by three portable monitors, two laser printers, and half a dozen banker's boxes labeled APEX HISTORICAL: 2018–2022.
Lily was sitting across from him at the round oak table, happily spreading strawberry jam over a massive stack of buttermilk pancakes. She was wearing an old oversized Citadel t-shirt of mine that reached her knees, her hair gathered into two messy pigtails.
"Mr. Marcus?" she asked, her mouth slightly sticky with syrup.
"Yes, Miss Lily?" the accountant replied, not looking up from a spreadsheet containing twelve thousand lines of shipping manifest entries.
"Are you looking for buried treasure?"
Marcus paused, his fingers hovering over the ten-key pad. A small, genuine smile touched his usually severe lips. "In a way, yes. We're looking for where the pirates hid the gold."
"My daddy said pirates were brave," Lily remarked, cutting a piece of pancake with her fork.
"Your daddy had a very flawed understanding of maritime history," Marcus said dryly.
I walked into the kitchen, carrying a fresh mug of black coffee, and set it beside Marcus’s elbow. "Did you find the Hatteras records?"
Marcus clicked a key, and a high-resolution PDF of a banking statement from the Bank of the Bahamas appeared on his center screen.
"It took forty-eight hours to pierce the correspondent banking veil in Nassau," Marcus said, his voice dropping into a low, confidential murmur so Lily wouldn't hear. "Nathan didn't just commingle funds, Claire. He didn't just have credit card debt."
I leaned over his shoulder, studying the wire logs. "What am I looking at?"
"On May 14, 2022—six days before Nathan’s boat was found drifting off Cape Hatteras—a wire transfer for nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars left an escrow account controlled by Nathan Sterling in Charleston. It moved through a shell entity in Panama called 'Seaborne Logistics Ltd.,' and landed in an account at First Caribbean International Bank in Nassau."
I frowned. "Who was the beneficial owner of the Nassau account?"
Marcus clicked the mouse once more.
A scanned copy of a passport appeared on the screen.
It was a picture of Nathan Sterling. His hair was dyed brown, his signature mustache shaved clean, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a light linen shirt. But the bone structure—that heavy, square, arrogant Sterling jaw—was unmistakable.
The name on the passport was David Vance Campbell.
I felt the blood drain from my face so fast that the kitchen seemed to tilt on its axis. I had to reach out and brace myself against the back of Marcus’s chair.
"He's alive," I breathed.
"He was alive three weeks ago," Marcus corrected quietly. "Because on March 15th of this year, a recurring monthly maintenance fee for a luxury slip at the Port Lucaya Marina in Grand Bahama was paid from that exact account. The vessel name is The Southern Heir. A fifty-four-foot Hatteras motor yacht."
My mind raced through the last four years.
The tearful memorial service at St. Philip’s Church. The empty casket buried in the family plot beneath a massive granite headstone that Judith had paid twenty thousand dollars to engrave with the words: A NOBLE SON OF CAROLINA.
Grant weeping at the reception, putting his arm around Melissa, promising that he would be a father to Owen, that the Sterling name would never perish, that he would carry the weight for both of them.
And all the while, my father’s money had been feeding the engine.
Two million four hundred thousand dollars funneled to Melissa.
"Melissa knew," I whispered.
"Of course she knew," Marcus said. "Look at the outbound transfers from her Daniel Island account. Every three months, like clockwork, forty thousand dollars was withdrawn in cash from three separate branches in Savannah and Brunswick. You don't withdraw forty thousand dollars in cash every ninety days unless you're hand-delivering it across state lines or taking a private ferry to Freeport."
I looked across the kitchen at Lily.
She was humming to herself, carefully stacking three blueberries on top of a pancake corner before popping them into her mouth. She had both hands on the table. Her right hand, pink and healing, moved without hesitation, without the twitch of fear that had lived in her shoulders for eight years.
“Maybe you wouldn’t be so jealous if you’d given me a son.”
Grant hadn't just sacrificed our marriage on the altar of the Sterling name. He had turned me into the unwitting financier of his brother’s criminal escape, while treating me and my daughter like domestic ballast to be discarded the moment the checks cleared.
"Marcus," I said, my voice dangerously calm.
"Yes, Claire?"
"Can you print three copies of that Bahamas dossier?"
May you like
"Already running on printer two," he said.
"Call Sarah Vance," I told him, turning toward the hallway to get my purse. "Tell her we aren't just filing for a preliminary injunction today. Tell her we're calling the United States Marshals Service and the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service."
