My Toxic Mother Brought A Moving Truck To Steal My Lake House In Front Of Her Church Friends—Until I Handed Her An Envelope That Ruined Her Life / Chapter 17 / 80

Chapter 17 - The Ghost of the Past

For forty-eight hours, the local news covered nothing else.

*“Mega-Church Financial Scandal Rocks Kootenai County.”*

*“Pastor and Prominent Matriarch Named in Federal Land Fraud Ring.”*

The news vans staked out the Living Waters campus, filming congregants weeping outside the padlocked sanctuary gates. Thaddeus Sterling was held without bail due to flight risk concerns involving offshore accounts in Belize. Evelyn had retreated into her suburban split-level home, drawing the blinds and ignoring the process servers who hammered on her door three times a day.

Leo came over to the lake house on Thursday afternoon. He had spent the morning at the trade school, his hands covered in grease and soot, but his eyes were clear, steady, and entirely free of the haunted paranoia that had plagued him when he first arrived.

We sat on the stone steps by the dock, the lake lapping gently against the wooden pilings, sharing a plate of sandwiches.

"She called me last night," Leo said quietly, watching a pair of mallards drift past the reeds.

I set my sandwich down, my senses instantly on alert. "Evelyn?"

He nodded. "From a payphone at a gas station down on Highway 95. She was crying. Snot running, voice cracking. She said if I testified against her at the federal grand jury, God would strike me down with cancer. She said family blood is an eternal covenant, and that I was betraying the only woman who ever loved me when my own father didn't want me."

My chest tightened with sudden, violent protectiveness. "What did you say to her, Leo?"

Leo turned to look at me. A faint, sad smile touched the corner of his mouth.

"I told her that my father was an addict because she raised him to believe he was worthless unless he obeyed her. And then I told her that if she ever called me again, I’d hand my phone over to Agent Miller and tell him about the three envelopes of cash she hid in Grandma's crawlspace four years ago."

I stared at him, stunned. "Grandma’s crawlspace?"

"Under the water heater," Leo said, looking out over the bay. "I helped her move the metal strongboxes when I was fourteen. She told me it was emergency hurricane money. It was seventy thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills, Riley. Grandma was still alive, living in that squalid nursing home room with a broken television, and Evelyn was stashing boxes of cash under the floorboards."

The cruelty of it knocked the breath out of me. Helen Vance had spent her final years begging for extra heating pads, while her daughter was stockpiling stolen cash like a dragon hoarding gold in a damp cellar.

"Did you tell Marcus?" I asked.