Hannah and Aunt Martha drove to the Pennsylvania State Police barracks in Harrisburg. The imposing stone building felt far removed from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster. We sat in a sterile waiting room for almost an hour before being led into a small office.
“These are thirty years of duplicate financial ledgers,” Martha stated, placing the steel bread box on Detective Kincaid’s desk. The contents spilled out, thin notebooks and loose papers.
Kincaid, now in plain clothes, nodded, his gaze methodical as he examined the documents. Within days, state forensic accountants were poring over the records. They uncovered a complex web of illicit shell corporations, all meticulously designed to hide commune tithes from federal taxes.
“This is bigger than we anticipated, Mrs. Gable,” Kincaid told me over the phone a week later. His voice was clipped. “We’ve opened an official fraud investigation. A temporary freeze has been placed on all Covenant operational bank accounts.”
The immediate impact was swift and brutal. Stripped of his liquid funds, Ezekiel Gable escalated his public smear campaign with a furious intensity. Fifty uniformed commune members picketed outside the Harrisburg police station, holding crude signs accusing me of treason and Samuel’s murder. Their faces were grim, their chants unsettling.
“He’s desperate,” Martha said, watching a news report from her cottage. “His entire empire is built on those funds.”
Kincaid called again. “The ledgers confirm fraud, but Ezekiel’s lawyers are fighting the asset freeze hard. To secure an arrest warrant for him, we need more. We need Abigail’s original physical journals. We believe she kept them in her private chapel office within the compound.”
I thought of the familiar path to the chapel, the silent reverence of the place. Now it held the key to Ezekiel’s downfall, and perhaps, the truth about Samuel.
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