Chapter 14 - The Deal Beneath the DealGrant Mercer was arrested first.
Not for Miles.
For conspiracy, fraud, and obstruction tied to the financial investigation.
His attorneys immediately began negotiating.
Rachel hated that.
“He helped her.”
Naomi nodded.
“Yes.”
“He wrote ‘make sure it looks natural.’”
“That sentence is terrible for him.”
“Then why negotiate?”
“Because prosecutors want Doris more.”
Rachel looked toward the interrogation-room window.
Mercer sat inside with two lawyers.
“Will he give her up?”
“He will if he believes she’ll give him up first.”
He did.
By evening Mercer admitted that Doris had secretly negotiated the western ridge transaction for years.
He claimed he never knew she intended to harm Miles.
When confronted with his email, he offered an explanation.
He thought she was planning a legal maneuver to remove succession obstacles.
“Make sure it looks natural” referred, he claimed, to Harold’s incapacity petition.
Nobody entirely believed him.
But he gave investigators financial records.
The true deal was larger than anyone realized.
Summit Vale was not merely buying development rights.
A second investor group had agreed to purchase water-access rights after closing.
A third planned luxury residences.
If every phase succeeded, Doris’s private entities could receive more than $18 million.
Harold stared at the numbers.
“Eighteen million.”
Rachel watched him.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking about every dinner.”
“What?”
“Every dinner where she complained about my mother.”
Harold’s voice cracked.
“Every time she said I never appreciated her.”
Rachel softened slightly.
“She wanted recognition.”
“She wanted revenge.”
“Both can be true.”
Harold looked at his daughter.
“I gave her too much power because I felt guilty.”
Rachel understood.
“For using her inheritance to save the company?”
“For everything.”
He sat down.
“I worked constantly when you were little. Doris raised you. Hosted investors. Managed crises. She made sacrifices.”
“So you stopped questioning her.”
“Yes.”
Harold’s eyes filled.
“And whenever someone did question her, I treated it like an attack on my wife.”
“Thomas.”
“Yes.”
“Grandma Evelyn.”
“Yes.”
“Me.”
Harold could barely say it.
“Yes.”
Rachel stared at him for a long moment.
Then said, “You didn’t make her kick Miles.”
“I know.”
“But you helped create a family where nobody could challenge her.”
Harold nodded.
That admission mattered more than another apology.
Meanwhile, police continued searching for Doris.
Two days passed.
Then three.
Miles returned to school remotely.
He refused to look at mountains on television.
He slept with his bedroom light on.
But he began talking more.
One afternoon his therapist asked what frightened him most.
“Falling again?”
Miles shook his head.
“Seeing Grandma.”
“Why?”
“Because what if she smiles?”
The therapist waited.
Miles’s voice lowered.
“She smiled after.”
“You saw her?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
Miles frowned.
“I don’t know.”
He had been falling.
He could not have seen her afterward.
The belief came from something else.
A memory.
Doris’s face immediately before the kick.
She had smiled then too.
Not happily.
Quietly.
As if a decision had already been made.
That night Miles woke from a nightmare.
Rachel sat beside him.
“She said she’d done it before.”
Rachel froze.
“What?”
Miles rubbed his eyes.
“Grandma.”
“When?”
“On the cliff.”
Rachel’s pulse quickened.
“What exactly did she say?”
Miles struggled.
“She said…”
He closed his eyes.
“I told her Grandpa would know.”
Rachel waited.
“And she said, ‘Your grandfather never sees what happens right in front of him. He didn’t twenty years ago either.’”
Rachel stopped breathing.
“Are you sure?”
Miles nodded slowly.
“Then I asked what she meant.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Nothing you need to worry about.’”
Thomas Bell had died twenty years ago.
Rachel immediately called Detective Shaw.
Within hours, investigators reopened the old Wolf Creek case.
They obtained Thomas’s autopsy report.
His death had been attributed to a fall from a horse.
But one detail stood out.
Thomas had suffered a severe injury to the back of his left knee before the major fall injuries.
At the time, it had been interpreted as contact with the saddle.
A retired medical examiner reviewed the photographs.
His conclusion was cautious.
But disturbing.
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The injury could also be consistent with being struck from behind.
Just as Miles had been.
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