Chapter 6 - Double Life
The porch felt as though it were teetering on the edge of an abyss.
I looked at my sweet, honest father. He had worked sixty-hour weeks his whole life, his knees ruined from crawling across plywood foundations, just to make sure I had college tuition, food on the table, and clean clothes. And Richard Whitmore had viewed him as nothing more than a convenient, disposable scapegoat—a poor man whose word would never hold up against a wealthy architect’s word in a courtroom.
Evan took a step toward his father, his chest heaving with fury. “You were going to send Samuel to prison.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a condemnation.
“Evan, no, you don’t understand!” Richard sobbed, breaking down entirely, dropping to his knees on the welcome mat. The facade of the powerful, cultured patriarch was gone, replaced by a sniveling, desperate shell. “The investments went bad! The tech stocks... the private equity fund in the Cayman Islands! They called my margins! I owed three hundred thousand to men who threatened to come to this house! I didn’t know what else to do! I was going to drop the charges after the insurance paid out! I swear to God, I was going to drop the charges!”
“Drop the charges?” Evan yelled, his voice cracking with agony. “He would have had an arrest record! He would have lost his contractor’s license! His entire life would have been destroyed so you could cover your gambling debts!”
Lorraine looked at her husband on his knees, then at Victoria Vance, then at the police officer holding the emeralds. For Lorraine, the world didn’t end with moral collapse; it ended with public exposure.
“You lied to me,” Lorraine whispered, her hands dropping to her sides. “The trip to Paris last fall? The renovation on the Hamptons cottage? The country club dues?”
“Paid with firm money,” Victoria said coldly. “Or borrowed against your primary residence. By the way, Lorraine, the bank served a notice of default on this house yesterday afternoon. It was delivered to my office by mistake because Richard changed the mailing address.”
Lorraine swayed on her feet. Her eyes rolled back slightly, and she had to grab the doorframe to keep from fainting. “Default? We’re... we’re losing the house?”
“Officer Ruiz,” I said, my voice completely devoid of pity. “Is an attempted fraudulent insurance claim combined with false accusations and evidence tampering enough to arrest him right now?”
Officer Ruiz reached behind her back and unclipped the steel handcuffs from her belt. The metallic click was the sharpest sound in the world.
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“Mr. Richard Whitmore, stand up and place your hands behind your back,” Officer Ruiz ordered.
“Wait!” Richard cried out, scrambling backward on his hands and knees across the porch floorboards like a crab. “Wait! There’s something else! You can’t arrest me—Lorraine knew! Lorraine was part of it!”
