Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Savannah CreekThe sun was barely cresting the jagged tree line of the Georgia coast when Tobias and I stole a rusted Ford pickup truck from the rail yard and drove back toward the city limits.
We didn't go back to my house. We drove straight to the home of Marcus Vance—our father’s former head of legal security and the only man in Savannah Creek who hadn't been bought off by the Sterling family.
When Marcus opened his front door at six in the morning, holding a shotgun and looking ready to shoot, his eyes went wide as saucers. He dropped the gun barrel, his jaw dropping.
“Good God in heaven,” Marcus breathed, crossing himself. “The police reported both of you missing in the wreckage. Garrett Sterling already filed the emergency probate papers at the courthouse an hour ago.”
“Garrett is going to have a very difficult morning,” I said, pushing past him into the warm foyer, my clothes still damp and smelling of river silt. “Marcus, I need your office, I need a secure burner phone, and I need every single financial ledger on the Sterling-Vance corporate merger from the last fifteen years.”
Marcus looked from me to Tobias—who was standing tall, walking without a trace of a limp—and a slow, fierce grin spread across the older man’s weathered face.
“It looks like the crippled boy learned how to walk,” Marcus murmured.
“Fifteen years of hiding in plain sight gives you a lot of time to audit the enemy, Marcus,” Tobias replied, slamming a heavy leather briefcase onto the mahogany dining table. “Let’s see what happens when we open the books.”
For the next four hours, Marcus, Tobias, and I tore through digital archives, bank records, offshore shell company registries, and medical reports. What we uncovered was a criminal conspiracy so vast it took my breath away.
Arthur Sterling hadn't just sabotaged my parents' car fifteen years ago; he had used forged debt documents to blackmail our board members into signing over the initial venture capital for Sterling-Vance Shipping. When my father threatened to go to the federal prosecutor, the brakes were cut.
And Garrett? Garrett hadn't just married me for the company. He had been funneling millions of dollars in corporate embezzlement funds directly into personal accounts shared with my half-sister, Penelope—accounts registered under dummy corporations designed to bankrupt the shipyard from the inside out.
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“The board meeting starts at eleven a.m. at the main corporate tower downtown,” Marcus said, checking his watch. “Garrett is scheduled to present the official death certificates and assume complete, unilateral control of the board. If you walk in there, Rosalind, you’re walking directly into a den of wolves.”
“Good,” I said, sliding my father’s vintage gold-plated fountain pen into the pocket of my jacket. “It’s time the wolves met the shepherd.”
