Chapter 5 - The Audit
The next morning, the Milbrook sun rose through a blanket of grey, bruised clouds that promised more rain.
I didn't sleep. I spent the remainder of the night sitting upright in the armchair in my old bedroom—the room now stacked to the ceiling with rubber storage bins labeled CHRISTMAS 2012 and LYDIA’S COLLEGE APPAREL—plugging my laptop into my portable hotspot and syncing the security camera feed from the kitchen.
It worked. The download was flawless.
I watched the footage on my 13-inch screen at 6:00 AM, sitting in the half-light with my headphones on. I watched myself walk into the kitchen at 2:14 AM. I watched Lydia enter two minutes later. I watched her admit—in high-definition audio—to stealing my EpiPen, to poisoning me at the bake sale when we were nine, and to orchestrating my potential death under the guise of an “accident.”
I exported the file to three separate encrypted cloud storage accounts and emailed a copy to my corporate lawyer in Boston with explicit instructions: If you don’t hear from me by Friday noon, hand this directly to the Milbrook Chief of Police and the Massachusetts State Police.
With the insurance policy secured, I turned my attention to the second part of Dad’s warning: “I think she’s been taking money... Transfers. Checks. Papers she says I signed.”
Dad’s home office was located on the ground floor, right off the formal dining room. It was a dusty museum of mid-century corporate life—heavy mahogany desk, rotary-dial backup phone, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined with dusty ledgers, and a filing cabinet with a mechanical brass lock.
At 9:30 AM, Lydia and Mom left the house to pick up a prescription at the CVS and stop by the local farmers market for organic produce. The moment their Subaru backed down the gravel driveway, I was out of the den and at the door of Dad’s office.
The brass lock on the filing cabinet wasn’t locked; Lydia must have assumed Dad was too weak to ever check it, or she simply had the key tucked away and didn't bother securing it daily. I pulled the top drawer open.
It was a disaster of disorganization—old tax returns from 2018, appliance warranties, medical bills from Dad’s initial hip replacement three years ago.
I started pulling folders out one by one, laying them across the mahogany desk.
It took forty minutes of methodical sorting before I found what I was looking for. Tucked inside a plain manila folder labeled HOUSEHOLD MAINTENANCE was a stack of bank statements from Milbrook National Bank, along with a series of cashier’s checks and power-of-attorney assignment forms.
I flipped open the statements.
My breath caught.
Over the past fourteen months—coinciding almost exactly with Dad’s declining health and subsequent immobility—over $280,000 had been systematically siphoned out of his and Mom’s joint retirement savings account.
The transfers weren't subtle. They were made in chunks of $10,000 to $25,000, routed through an intermediary LLC called Miller Holdings Consulting—a corporate entity I had never heard of.
I pulled out the power-of-attorney document attached to the back of the most recent statement. It bore a signature purporting to be Richard Miller.
I stared at the signature.
It was a clumsy, childish forgery. Dad had written cursive with a distinct, sharp upward slant on his capital Ms ever since he learned Palmer method penmanship in the 1960s. The signature on the legal document was rounded, labored, and completely flat. It looked like someone holding a pen in their non-dominant hand trying desperately to copy a sample line.
Lydia hadn't just been stealing his money. She had stripped my parents clean. When Dad died, Mom would be left destitute, entirely dependent on Lydia’s “generosity”—which, given her current trajectory, meant a cheap nursing home in rural Vermont while Lydia pocketed the proceeds of the house sale.
I whipped out my phone and photographed every single page—every fraudulent check, every forged signature, every bank statement showing the bleeding of their accounts.
As I snapped the final photo of the power-of-attorney form, the front door unlatched in the hallway.
Voices.
“...and she had the nerve to ask why I bought the organic kale instead of the standard,” Mom’s voice echoed from the foyer, followed by the clatter of grocery bags hitting the kitchen counter.
“Don’t worry about her, Mom,” Lydia replied, her voice sickeningly sweet. “She’ll be gone by tonight. I made sure of it.”
May you like
My blood ran cold. Made sure of it?
I shoved the folders back into the filing cabinet, pushed the drawer shut, and slipped out of the office just as footsteps approached the dining room threshold.
