Chapter 8 - The Woman in the Yellow Blanket
Security cameras showed a woman in a maintenance uniform entering Emma’s school twenty minutes after Michael reported her missing.
She carried the metal box out beneath a rolling trash bin.
Her face was hidden.
But her getaway vehicle belonged to a Whitmore Holdings subsidiary.
Evelyn denied any knowledge of it.
Michael blamed a corporate employee.
Daniel blamed neither.
He simply made one phone call.
Two hours later, an attorney arrived carrying a duplicate inventory of everything Linda Carter had placed in the box.
Linda had contacted Daniel’s law firm eighteen years earlier, shortly before her death. She refused to reveal Emma’s location, but she deposited copies of several documents under instructions that they could be released only if Emma was found.
The attorney opened the file.
The first document was Emma’s original birth certificate.
Mother: Rebecca Anne Hayes.
Father: blank.
The second was a handwritten letter from Linda.
Emma asked Daniel to read it aloud because her hands were shaking too badly.
“Rebecca came to us terrified,” he began. “She said powerful people had killed to control Northstar. She begged us to protect her child. Two days later, Rebecca disappeared.”
Emma covered her mouth.
Linda wrote that she and her husband changed the baby’s name and moved three times. They never contacted Daniel because Rebecca warned them that the Hayes family might be watched.
Daniel paused at the final paragraph.
“What does it say?” Emma asked.
His voice became rough.
“Linda believed someone inside Northstar betrayed Rebecca.”
“Who?”
“She didn’t know. But Rebecca left one clue.”
The attorney removed a small cassette tape from the file.
Daniel stared at it.
“A recording?”
The attorney nodded.
“A copy. The original was in Emma’s box.”
They found an old player through the hospital’s records department.
Static filled the room.
Then a young woman’s frightened voice emerged.
Rebecca.
“If anything happens to me, the person helping Evelyn Whitmore is someone my brother trusts.”
Daniel went still.
Rebecca continued.
“He has access to the trust documents. He knows my daughter’s identity. And he knows Daniel will never suspect him.”
The recording ended before she spoke the name.
Emma looked at Daniel.
“Who had access?”
Daniel’s face had changed.
Not with confusion.
With betrayal.
Only three people had known the trust’s structure.
Daniel.
Rebecca.
And Northstar’s longtime general counsel, Samuel Pierce.
May you like
The same Samuel Pierce whose law firm had sent Emma the letter.
👉 The man supposedly helping Daniel find Emma may have been guiding the Whitmores to her all along.
