By the following morning, Grant had sent three messages to Dad and two to Vanessa. The wording changed each time, but the request remained the same: stop the investigation, return the disputed paperwork, and keep the matter within the family.
Dad forwarded every message to Martin without responding.
Vanessa called me just after eight. She sounded frightened and said Grant had left the house before dawn, taking his briefcase and several folders from his desk. She didn't know where he had gone, but she suspected he was trying to find the missing verification page.
“Did you ask him where he was going?” I said.
“He told me he needed to fix things before Dad made another mistake.”
I closed my eyes.
“Vanessa, your father is not the one who keeps making mistakes here.”
“I know.”
“Then stop helping Grant explain them away.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“I haven't spoken to him since last night.”
I wanted to believe her, but I told her that Martin needed the full account, including anything she knew about the folders Grant had taken. She agreed to contact the attorney directly.
Dad was already dressed when I arrived at his house. He had prepared coffee and laid the current estate documents in a neat stack beside the telephone. The sight of the paperwork made me think of how ordinary this all would have been if Vanessa had simply asked him about the will instead of declaring him dead.
Dad poured himself a cup.
“Martin says the bank's review is moving forward,” he told me. “He wants us to keep our records together in case they ask for anything else.”
“Do you think Grant will cooperate?”
Dad looked at the front window.
“I think he'll cooperate if he believes it helps him. Whether he'll tell the truth is another question.”
At nine fifteen, the doorbell rang.
A woman stood on the porch holding a padded envelope. She introduced herself as Rachel Morgan, a former administrative assistant at the financial services firm where Grant had worked. She said Laura Bennett had given her Martin's contact information and suggested that she speak to us about the missing verification page.
Dad invited her into the living room but asked her to wait while he called Martin. The attorney arrived twenty minutes later and took a seat at the table.
Rachel placed the envelope between them.
“I don't want to get involved in a family dispute,” she began. “But I recognized the reference number in the documents Laura showed me. I handled the filing system when Grant worked there, and I remember a form that went missing.”
Martin asked her to explain what she personally knew.
Rachel said Grant had been responsible for preparing several client authorization forms during his final months at the firm. One file had been returned because the verification page was incomplete. Rachel had logged the missing page in the firm's internal system and requested a corrected version.
Instead of providing one, Grant asked her to remove the file from the active queue.
She refused because the record had to remain complete.
A few days later, she discovered that the paper copy of the verification page had disappeared from the folder. She reported the discrepancy to her supervisor, who instructed her to preserve the electronic record.
“Did you keep a copy?” Martin asked.
“I kept the filing receipt and the internal note. I didn't keep the client's private information. I wasn't allowed to.”
She opened the padded envelope and removed two printed pages. One was a filing log showing that the original verification page had been received. The other was an internal note recording that the page had been removed from the physical file before the authorization process was completed.
Martin examined both pages carefully.
“Do these records identify the person who removed it?”
Rachel pointed to a line near the bottom of the filing log. It listed Grant's employee identification number beside the time the file had been accessed.
Dad leaned forward.
“Does this prove he took the page?”
“It proves his account accessed the file at that time,” Rachel replied. “The physical page was missing when I checked it later. I can't tell you what happened after that.”
Martin nodded approvingly.
“That's an important distinction.”
Rachel said she had not wanted to contact anyone while she was still employed at the firm. She had left several months earlier, and when Laura mentioned Grant's name in connection with the family dispute, she realized the missing page might be relevant.
“Did Grant ever tell you why he wanted the page removed?” Martin asked.
Rachel shook her head.
“No. But he asked me whether a verification page could be reconstructed from an electronic record. I told him that would require proper authorization and documentation.”
Dad looked at Martin.
“That sounds like what he asked Peter.”
“Yes,” Martin replied. “It appears to be a consistent pattern.”
Rachel agreed to provide a signed statement and explain how she had obtained the filing records. Martin told her that the documents would be handled carefully and that she should not contact Grant about the matter.
After she left, Dad sat quietly, staring at the filing log.
“We now have evidence that he removed a verification page from a file at work,” I said.
Martin corrected me gently.
“We have evidence that he accessed the file before the page was found missing. We have Rachel's account of what she discovered afterward. It supports the concern, but we still need to establish whether that page is the one connected to your father's paperwork.”
Dad nodded.
“How do we do that?”
“By comparing the reference numbers, dates, and document history. We should also ask Grant to produce every version of the form he prepared.”
Martin began organizing the evidence into separate folders. One contained the bank inquiry, another the disputed authorization form, and a third the records from Grant's former workplace. He wanted to keep each source distinct so that no one could claim the investigation relied on a single ambiguous document.
While he worked, Dad walked into the kitchen and returned with a photograph of himself and Vanessa taken when she was about ten. She was sitting on his shoulders at a summer fair, laughing with both hands raised.
He placed it beside the paperwork.
“I keep wondering when she stopped seeing me as her father and started seeing me as a future inheritance.”
Martin looked at the photograph.
“People can make terrible decisions without understanding how far they've gone. That doesn't excuse the decisions, but it may explain how they reached them.”
Dad nodded slowly.
“I know. But understanding someone isn't the same as trusting them.”
Later that afternoon, Martin received a response from the bank. The institution confirmed that Grant had not successfully submitted an authorization form, but the inquiry record indicated that he had claimed to possess documentation supporting his request.
Martin asked Grant to provide the document he had referred to.
Grant's response arrived through his attorney. He claimed he had never represented himself as having formal authority over Dad's accounts and that his questions had been misunderstood. He said he was willing to provide any relevant documents once the scope of the inquiry had been clarified.
Martin wasn't satisfied, but he acknowledged that the response needed to be reviewed rather than dismissed.
Dad read it twice.
“He's still trying to make this sound like a misunderstanding.”
“That's his position,” Martin said. “Our job is to preserve the evidence and establish what happened.”
That evening, Vanessa came to Dad's house alone. She looked exhausted and carried a small cardboard box. She said Grant had left several papers in their home office, and she had brought them because she believed Martin needed to see them.
Dad didn't touch the box.
“Have you examined what's inside?”
“Only enough to see that they're related to the form.”
“Did you remove anything?”
“No.”
Martin was called and arrived shortly afterward. He photographed the box and documented the papers before opening it. Inside were several printed drafts of the authorization form, handwritten notes, and a folded sheet of paper bearing the same reference number as the document found in Dad's study.
The folded sheet contained a section labeled VERIFICATION.
But the signature line was blank.
Martin examined the page and compared it with the filing records Rachel had provided.
“This may be another draft,” he said. “We need to determine when it was created and whether it was ever intended to be completed.”
Vanessa looked at the page.
“I've never seen this one.”
Dad turned toward her.
“Are you certain?”
She nodded.
“Grant kept his paperwork locked away. I only found the box because he left it open.”
Martin asked her to provide a written account of how she had found the documents and to avoid handling them further. She agreed.
Then he noticed a handwritten note on the reverse side of the verification page.
It contained three words.
“Get original Friday.”
Dad stared at the note.
“Who wrote that?”
Martin examined the handwriting.
“I can't identify it from this alone.”
Vanessa covered her mouth.
“I don't know what that means.”
Dad looked at her for a long time.
“Neither do I.”
But the note suggested that someone had wanted the original verification page by a specific date. The timing matched Grant's visit to Dad's study and the morning he contacted the bank.
Martin placed the page in a separate sleeve.
“We need to find out who wrote this and what they meant by ‘original.’”
Dad nodded.
For the first time, the investigation had produced something that connected the missing page to the Friday timeline directly.
Yet the person who had written the note remained unknown.
As Martin prepared to leave, Vanessa stopped him.
“There's something else I haven't told you.”
Everyone turned toward her.
She looked at Dad, then at the documents on the table.
“Grant wasn't the only person who wanted the house.”
Click here to continue reading: PART 16: Vanessa Named the Person Who Had Been Pressuring Grant, and Dad Realized the Fight Over His House Had Started Long Before the First Lie
My Sister Announced Our Father’s Death While He Sat Across From Me, and Her Next Words Revealed What She Really Wanted
Part 15 of 20
