Chapter 4 - The Second Mercer Who Was Supposed to Be Dead
By midnight, my mother was in handcuffs.
But the nightmare was only beginning.
My father was alive.
When officers brought Thomas Mercer out of the Vermont farmhouse, he was weak, bearded, and barely recognizable from the photographs hanging throughout our family estate.
DNA confirmation would take time.
I didn’t wait.
I flew to Vermont with Rebecca.
Elena and Lily remained under protection.
Three hours later, I walked into a hospital room.
The old man in the bed opened his eyes.
“Daniel.”
Nobody had called me by name in front of him.
I stopped.
“Dad?”
He cried.
So did I.
For nine years, I had believed my father died from complications following a stroke.
There had been a private cremation.
Again arranged by Margaret.
I should have seen the pattern.
But who suspects his own mother of manufacturing deaths?
Thomas told me the truth slowly.
He had discovered Margaret was moving money through Mercer subsidiaries.
Millions.
When he threatened to report her, she arranged for him to disappear.
His supposed death gave her control of his voting shares through a trust.
Elena had discovered irregularities years later.
That was why Margaret targeted her.
Not because she was poor.
Not because Margaret disliked her.
Because Elena had found something.
“I saw a transfer,” Elena told me later by phone. “Twenty-seven million dollars.”
Everything connected.
My father.
Elena.
Northstar.
Whitmore.
The fake deaths.
The shell companies.
Margaret hadn’t been protecting the Mercer family.
She had been stealing it.
But Thomas had one more revelation.
“There’s another person involved.”
“Who?”
He looked toward the door.
Then whispered:
“Your father-in-law.”
Elena’s father.
Robert Vale.
A man Elena believed had abandoned her when she was fourteen.
Suddenly the case was no longer about one powerful woman.
It was about two families.
May you like
And somewhere in the financial records was the reason Margaret had been willing to bury living people.
---
