Chapter 41 Chapter 41 Harrison's Secretary Aria Hartwell.

Chapter 41 Chapter 41 Harrison's Secretary Aria Hartwell.
Chapter 41
Harrison's Secretary
Aria Hartwell.

I was disappointed while attending Harrison's funeral because it was small and badly attended, which felt kind of cruel for a man who had spent thirty years in service to other people's families.

I counted eleven people as I sat of the back of the chapel, including myself. There were no faces I could recognize except for the woman who sat at the front seat with the rest of the people, who I assumed we Harrison's relative.

The woman was Harrison's secretary and she'd been the one who ushered me into his office the evening I got the flash drive. I made sure to keep sight of her during and after the funeral so I would hear everything from her mouth.

I found her afterward near the small refreshment table.

"Hello, ma'am," I said gently. "I'm Aria Hartwell. Richard's daughter. I'm so sorry for your loss by the way."

Her face changed immediately in recognition. "Oh, I know who you are, sweetheart." She clasped my hand with both of hers. "Harrison spoke about you often. He was very fond of your father."

"I was fond of him too." I said, letting that feeling sink in. Letting myself feel the absence of my father in my life, just as this one happened. Harrison's secretary paused while rubbing the back of my hand, and that was where I found my courage to proceed. "Can I ask you something? About the weeks before the fire?"

She looked around briefly, then nodded. "What is it you'd like to know?" She leaned closer. "Because the police have already scrambled my head with their rigorous questioning for the last few days."

"I'm so sorry about that." I said genuinely. I meant every word I said, then, I began seriously. "Had anything unusual been happening? Any visitors he wasn't expecting, calls that concerned him?"

She was quiet long enough that I knew the answer before she gave it. "He had been receiving some calls," she said carefully. "He didn't tell me who from, but I could always tell when they came in because he would close his office door, which he never normally did."

"How recently?"

"The last month or so." She turned the tissue in her hands. "And then about two weeks before the fire, he prepared something. A sealed document. He was very particular about it — had me witness the sealing myself and he said..." She paused. "He said if anything happened to him before he could deliver it, I was to call you personally."

My chest went tight. "He prepared a document for me? Was it from my father? Did it have something to do with his will? What about the document? Where is it now?"

"Gone." Her expression fell and her voice broke as she said the words. "Everything was in that office. Thirty years of Harrison's work, all of it." She pressed the tissue to her mouth again. "I'm so sorry, Miss Hartwell. Whatever he wanted you to know, he wanted very much for you to know it."

I drove back home with that conversation playing over and over again in my mind.

Harrison had prepared something for me. Someone had burned his office before it reached me. My father's house had been burned. My apartment had been burned. Anywhere that had existed and connected my father's properties to any kind of truth had been burned down.

As I drove carefully, my phone rang. It was Harrison's secretary and I swiped on my screen really fast in case she remembered anything.

"Hello?" I answered immediately. "Do you remember anything now?" I asked hurriedly without as much as a greeting because I saw her not less than five minutes ago.

"Yes, ugh, when you talked about arguments..." She belched loudly which suggested that she had been drinking. "Your step uncle and him argued a lot over the last days of his demise."

"Cassian?" I felt my blood run cold.

Why was my suspect lost pointing towards him again?

"Yes, Mr. Kent." Her voice came in firmer this time. "I got something while I was walking past the office. I think it had something to do with the death of your father which wasn't something that happened out of natural causes." She paused to cough before continuing. "They were yelling something about toxicology reports, and I think Mr. Kent was against letting you know about it while Mr. Harrison wanted you know the truth. And there was the will..."

"The will..." I repeated, absorbing all the information that she was handing out. It was probably the alcohol that made her remember enough to loosen her tongue. "They argued about the will?"

"Yes. Mr. Harrison was concerned that the will had been altered, but he wasn't certain which part of it was altered..."

That was why he wanted me to have a look at it because I knew my father better. I knew how he constructed his grammar and how he would alter something of there was any need for it. I had taken lessons from him when I turned eighteen and he told me to draw up my own will.

"What did he and Cassian argue about specifically about the will apart from it being altered."

"Mr. Kent was constantly telling him that no part of the will was altered, and he was being paranoid for no reason."

Paranoid for no reason? When Harrison had worked with my dad for almost thirty years? I scoffed and shook my head about it.

"About the toxicology report? Toxicology means poison, right? It has something to do with that... And when you say my father didn't die of natural causes, did you mean to say he was poisoned?"

"Yes, Miss Hartwell." The pitch of her voice went slightly up. "That's exactly what I'm saying."

I sat with that information as I drove until I reached my mother's house. Cassian was hiding a whole lot from me, and currently he was in Paris on a honeymoon with his wife.

I didn't know how I felt about that,. I didn't know if I could even trust him anymore until I knew the truth. I would be entirely broken if I ever found out that I rolled in the sheets with a man who could have possibly killed my father and altered his will.

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