Chapter 8 - The Second Phone
Two phones.
I had one.
Where was the other?
Ethan thought hard.
“Mom said one was for you.”
“And the other?”
“For the police if you got scared.”
I swallowed.
“Where did she put it?”
He shook his head.
“She didn’t tell me.”
“Did she give you a clue?”
“She said blue bird.”
Blue bird.
Megan loved puzzles.
As children, she hid birthday presents and made me solve clues.
I hated it then.
I would have given anything to hear her laugh at me now.
My mother said, “Blue bird.”
Then she stood.
“The cabin.”
Our father had owned a small cabin outside Black Mountain.
After he died, Megan and I inherited it jointly.
There was a painted wooden bluebird nailed beside the porch.
We called the place Bluebird when we were children.
Daniel rarely went.
He hated the lack of cell service.
Lena immediately said, “You are not going alone.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good.”
We drove at dawn with Marcus Bell and two state agents.
The cabin smelled like dust, pine, and memories.
Nothing looked disturbed.
The bluebird sign hung crooked beside the porch.
Marcus checked it.
Nothing.
We searched inside.
Kitchen.
Loft.
Old cedar trunk.
My father’s desk.
No phone.
Then Ethan, who had been left safely with my mother, called me.
“Aunt Claire?”
“Yes?”
“Mom said blue bird sings when the lights go out.”
I stared at the cabin’s old breaker panel.
“Did she say anything else?”
“No.”
I walked to the hallway.
The cabin had emergency lanterns that turned on automatically when power failed.
One was shaped like a bluebird because my mother bought ridiculous things at craft fairs.
I flipped the main breaker.
Darkness.
Then the little bluebird night-light near the stairs glowed.
Marcus removed it from the wall.
Behind the plastic mount was a sealed cavity.
Inside was another phone.
Megan had been very busy being “unstable.”
The second phone contained fewer recordings.
More documents.
Photos of the basement.
Screenshots of texts.
A video filmed from inside her car.
Daniel stood outside the driver’s window.
“Megan, open the door.”
“No.”
“We are not doing this in the driveway.”
“I’m taking Ethan to Claire’s.”
“You’re not taking my son anywhere.”
“He’s my son too.”
“Then stop acting like someone a court would worry about.”
Megan’s voice shook.
“You gave Weller my private messages.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“You’re trying to build a custody file.”
Daniel leaned closer.
“If you leave this house with Ethan, I will make sure every judge in this county sees a medicated woman stealing a child during a breakdown.”
The video ended.
No murder confession.
But a clear threat.
Then came a photo of Daniel’s green coat hanging in the basement.
Timestamp: the morning Megan died.
The next file was a note.
COAT HAS BLOOD? HE SAID CUT FROM WORKSITE.
I looked at Marcus.
“The coat already had blood?”
“Maybe someone else’s.”
“Or hers later.”
“We need the coat.”
The second phone also contained a scheduled email draft Megan never sent.
To a forensic accountant in Charlotte.
Subject: Hart Mountain audit request.
Attached: her spreadsheet.
She had planned to meet him Friday.
She died Thursday.
That gave us motive related to money.
Then Marcus found a photo taken in the basement.
A contract.
Not a loan.
A trust amendment.
It concerned Ethan.
Megan’s father—our father—had left a modest education and inheritance trust for Ethan.
Not millions.
Enough to matter.
Three hundred eighty thousand dollars, scheduled to transfer fully to Ethan at twenty-five.
Until then, Megan was trustee.
If Megan died, I became successor trustee.
Daniel did not.
My father had done that because he disliked mixing marital property and inheritance.
Daniel had known.
The document in the photo tried to change the successor trustee from me to Daniel.
Megan had written across it:
NO.
That was another conflict.
Not enough to kill over alone.
But money plus control plus an audit plus a wife planning to leave creates a pattern.
Marcus’s phone rang.
He listened.
Then looked at me.
“They found the green coat.”
“Where?”
“Donation bin behind a church in Hendersonville.”
“Can they prove it’s his?”
“Label has his initials.”
My knees went weak.
“And?”
“There’s blood on the cuff.”
“Whose?”
“Testing.”
That afternoon, Daniel’s lawyer issued a statement that Daniel donated the coat weeks earlier.
Then the church surveillance video arrived.
The coat had been dropped off at 2:13 a.m.
The night after Megan died.
The person wore a baseball cap.
Face partly hidden.
But the truck was visible.
Dark pickup.
Same model that drove past my mother’s house.
Registered to Owen Hart.
— — —
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