Chapter 4 - WHAT THEIR FATHER DID
Natalie did not remember crossing from the rink to the private conference room.
One moment she was gripping the boards.
The next, she was staring at her father’s handwriting on Tyler’s video screen.
Eleven years.
She had not seen it in eleven years.
Her father wrote capital N’s with the diagonal line doubled.
He turned lowercase r’s into tiny hooks.
The note looked exactly like him.
Dana enlarged the image.
“Could be copied.”
“It isn’t.”
“You cannot know that.”
“I do.”
Dana gave her a level look.
Natalie corrected herself.
“I believe it’s real.”
Better.
Marisol shut the conference-room door.
“What did your father do for work?”
“Commercial construction.”
“Only?”
Natalie frowned.
“He had contracts with arenas sometimes.”
Dana looked up sharply.
“What kind?”
“Renovations. Refrigeration systems. Electrical work. I don’t know.”
“Did he gamble?”
“No.”
Then Natalie remembered Saturday afternoons.
Football on television.
Her father circling numbers in newspaper sports pages.
Occasional envelopes of cash.
Nothing enormous.
Nothing she had questioned as a child.
“Maybe.”
Tyler was still on video.
He looked terrible.
“I told Mom we should call you when I found it.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Check Dad’s old storage facility.”
“It closed years ago.”
Dana had already found the property record.
“No,” she said.
Everyone looked at her.
“The company changed names.”
She turned her laptop.
HARBOR SELF STORAGE — FORMERLY CARTER INDUSTRIAL STORAGE
The account connected to unit 418 was still active.
Paid annually.
Owner listed as Evelyn Carter.
Natalie stared.
“My mother’s been paying for Dad’s storage unit for eleven years?”
Tyler rubbed his face.
“I’ll go.”
“No.”
“You think I’m staying here?”
“Yes.”
“For what? So Reed can find me?”
Dana cut in.
“Mr. Carter, you are a relevant witness in an active integrity investigation. If you go charging around, you contaminate evidence.”
Tyler stared at her.
“Are you the woman who froze my accounts?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“I’m the woman who requested it.”
Natalie almost smiled.
Almost.
Police accompanied Tyler to the storage facility two hours later.
Natalie could not go.
Official practice began at noon.
For the first time in her life, skating felt almost obscene.
Her family’s history was cracking open while she practiced footwork.
But when she stepped onto the ice, something changed.
The cold steadied her.
Blades demanded truth.
Either the edge held or it did not.
Either you committed to the jump or you fell.
There was no favorite child on the ice.
No excuses.
No family myth.
Her backup skates hurt.
She skated anyway.
After practice, Dana was waiting with photographs from unit 418.
The first showed construction tools.
The second, filing cabinets.
The third made Natalie sit down.
Boxes.
Dozens of them.
Each labeled with dates and competition names.
REGIONALS — 2012
JUNIOR GRAND PRIX — 2013
NATIONAL QUALIFIER — 2014
All years when Natalie was still a teenager.
“What was Dad tracking?”
Dana swiped to the next image.
Betting sheets.
Financial ledgers.
And newspaper clippings about figure skating.
Marisol whispered something in Spanish.
Natalie barely heard her.
The next photograph showed her father standing beside three men at an ice arena.
One was identified as the former owner of Northstar Athlete Consulting.
Another had been banned from two European betting markets.
The third was unknown.
Natalie stared at her father’s smiling face.
“No.”
Dana said nothing.
“My father hated cheating.”
“People are rarely one thing.”
“No.”
Natalie stood.
“He made me return a trophy once because a judge accidentally gave me another girl’s placement.”
“I’m not accusing him yet.”
“You don’t have to.”
The evidence was doing it for her.
Then Dana showed her the most recent box.
It had not belonged to her father.
NATALIE — 2026
Her mother’s handwriting.
Inside were printouts of Natalie’s competition schedule.
Photographs.
Bank records.
Copies of Meridian correspondence.
Natalie felt betrayed all over again.
“My mother’s been monitoring my investigation.”
“Possibly.”
A police officer had also recovered the blue velvet box.
Evelyn had apparently opened it inside the unit and left it behind.
Inside were her father’s wedding ring and an old photograph Natalie had never seen.
It showed twelve-year-old Natalie asleep in the back seat of the family station wagon.
Her father stood outside the car talking to someone.
The man’s face was visible.
Dana ran recognition through Meridian’s archived cases.
A match returned.
GERALD REED.
Current age: sixty-one.
Former sports bookmaker.
Informal consultant to Northstar.
Tyler’s “Reed.”
Natalie felt the air leave her lungs.
Reed had known their father.
This was not random.
Tyler had not stumbled into a modern gambling operation.
He had been pulled into something connected to their family years earlier.
“What happened to Dad?” Natalie asked.
“Car accident,” Tyler said from the tablet.
Natalie looked at him.
Their father died returning from an overnight construction job.
Police said he fell asleep at the wheel.
No other vehicle was involved.
Her mother had refused to discuss the accident afterward.
Dana carefully turned over another recovered photograph.
On the back, in Evelyn’s handwriting, was a date.
The night before their father died.
And beneath it:
Daniel told Reed he was finished.
Tyler whispered, “Finished with what?”
Nobody answered.
Then Dana’s phone vibrated.
She read the message.
Her expression changed.
“Your mother just used her credit card.”
“Where?”
Dana looked directly at Natalie.
“At the arena.”
Natalie stood.
“She’s here?”
Dana nodded.
“But she didn’t buy a ticket.”
“What did she buy?”
“A locker rental.”
They found locker 227 in the public concourse.
Evelyn was gone.
Inside sat one object.
A camel-hair coat with a repaired cuff.
Natalie touched it with shaking fingers.
It was her father’s.
Not a copy.
Not something similar.
The exact coat she remembered touching inside his coffin.
Pinned beneath the collar was a handwritten note from her mother.
I lied about what we buried Daniel in.
May you like
And below that:
Because Reed told me one day he might need to look dead again.
