For three years, sixty-eight-year-old Arthur Pendelton worked as a part-time handyman and cleaner for Silas Holloway, an eccentric neighbor who had not set foot outside his coastal Oregon cottage i...
“A phantom debt,” Marcus repeated the next morning, standing inside Silas Holloway’s cottage. The place was exactly as Silas had left it – meticulously clean, every item in its precise place, an almost sterile air clinging to the old wood. Sunlight, watery and thin, streamed through the dust motes dancing in the air.
I still felt the tremor of Marcus’s revelation from the diner. Greg’s claim was a lie. But how deep did it go?
“If the lien is fake,” I said, my voice tight, “what was he really doing?”
Marcus, ever methodical, had already started at Silas’s old roll-top desk. “We need to find out if this Kincaid ever had any legitimate dealings with Silas. Any paper trail.”
He pulled open a shallow drawer, revealing stacks of neatly bundled receipts, each labeled with dates and categories: “Utilities 2018,” “Maintenance 2019,” “Groceries July.” Silas, even in his paranoia, had been painstakingly organized.
“Your recluse neighbor,” Marcus murmured, his fingers gently sifting through the papers, “he was a creature of habit. Kept everything. That’s good for us.”
I watched him, a knot of impatience and dread twisting in my stomach. Every second spent sifting through old papers felt like a second stolen from Clara. I could almost hear the hospital clock ticking.
Marcus spent a good hour, quietly turning pages, making notes in his small pad. The silence in the cottage, punctuated only by the rustle of paper, was unnerving. Suddenly, he stopped. His hand, which had been moving steadily, stilled.
“Well, now,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion, but with a subtle tension I recognized. “This is interesting.”
He held up a thin, pale green slip of paper. It looked like a standard bank transfer receipt. “Here’s a series of monthly transfers. Small sums. To an account listed as ‘Kincaid Property Management.’”
“Greg’s company,” I stated, feeling a prickle of alarm. “He used to do odd jobs for Silas sometimes, before I came along. Minor repairs. But Silas paid him cash, always. He hated banks.”
Marcus frowned, his gaze fixed on the slips. “These aren’t cash receipts, Arthur. These are wire authorizations. And they’re dated monthly, for the past five years. Every single month, a transfer of $1,400.”
My jaw dropped. “One thousand four hundred dollars? Every month? For five years?” That was a fortune. I had no idea. Silas had been so private.
“Exactly,” Marcus said, laying out a row of the slips on the desk. He pointed to a faint signature line. “And here’s the kicker. This signature. It’s not Silas Holloway’s.”
He pushed another piece of paper towards me, a faded letter from Silas. The handwriting was distinctive, shaky but clear. I compared it to the signature on the wire authorization. They were clearly different.
“It’s a forgery,” I whispered, the words catching in my throat. My vision blurred with sudden, icy rage. Greg hadn’t just made up a half-million-dollar lien. He had been systematically stealing from Silas, month after month, for years. Siphoning his living allowance, right under his nose.
“He was using the old man’s reclusive nature against him,” Marcus concluded, his voice grim. “Silas never went to the bank. Greg simply forged the wire slips, claiming they were for property services, and the bank processed them. Fourteen hundred dollars a month. That’s $16,800 a year. For five years… that’s a total of eighty-four thousand dollars, Arthur.”
Eighty-four thousand dollars. The sheer audacity, the cold-blooded calculation of it. My neighbor, Greg Kincaid, was not just a greedy schemer, but a meticulous thief. The knowledge hardened something inside me, turning my desperation into a steel-cold resolve.
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