PART 2: Still Active
Everyone started talking at once. I let them go for a few minutes, then rapped my knuckles on the table.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “We have no proof they’re alive. But this does suggest they were planning something.”
“They were planning to leave,” Callum said. “There’s over forty thousand dollars here. Enough to start over with us.”
“But why?” Josie asked. “What would make running feel like the only option?”
“There has to be more,” Marnie said, standing. “Willa, show us exactly where you found it.”
So we all trooped down to the basement and began digging through old boxes and junk. It felt like hours before Felix called out, “Grandma?”
He was standing by the far wall, holding a folder. I took it and opened it beneath the bare pull-chain bulb. A chill ran down my spine.
It was packed with bills, statements, and final notices. I had gone through everything after they died, or everything I had access to. None of this had been there. My son must have hidden it before they ran.
“They were in trouble,” I said.
At the back was one handwritten sheet of lined paper: a bank account number and routing information, and beneath it, in Renee’s neat writing, Don’t touch anything else.
“Does that mean there’s more money?” Callum asked over my shoulder.
“Only one way to find out.”
The next morning I went to the bank alone.
“I’m here about my son,” I told the woman at the desk. “He passed away ten years ago, but I found this account number among his things. I just need to understand what it was.” I handed her a copy of the death certificate and the number.
She typed it in and frowned. “Ma’am, are you sure that’s correct? Our records show this account is still active.”
I blinked. “What does that mean?”
“It means there’s been recent activity.”
When I got home, all seven were waiting in the hallway.
“Well?” Callum asked.
I shut the door and sat at the kitchen table. “The account is still active.”
“I told you they were alive!” Willa said.
Callum shook his head. “No. There has to be another explanation.”
“There isn’t,” Willa said, with so much anger in her voice that it startled me. “Recent activity, Callum! Who else would be using it? And why were only our documents in that box, not theirs?”
Callum turned to me, no longer angry. Desperate. “But if they took off, why didn’t they take us? Everything was prepared.”
“Maybe something changed,” Josie whispered.
“Maybe they realized it was too hard to disappear with seven kids,” Felix muttered.
Willa’s face hardened. “So they left us.”
I was furious and more shocked than I had ever been, but I knew one thing for certain.
“Since they’re alive,” I said, “I think we should ask them what happened.”
“How?” Callum asked.
“We make them come to us.”
The next day I went back to the bank and asked to speak with the branch manager.
“I want to start closure proceedings on this account.”
He frowned. “That could trigger immediate alerts to anyone currently using it.”
“Good.”
He studied me, then nodded once. I handed over the paperwork I’d carried from office to office when I handled my son’s affairs a decade earlier.
Three days later, someone knocked on the front door.
The man on my porch looked older and smaller than I remembered, but he was undeniably my son. Renee stood half a step behind him, thinner, her eyes darting.
