Chapter 9 - The Panic at the Harper Mansion
By 6:00 PM that evening, news of the frozen bank accounts had reached Aunt Evelyn.
Panic swept through the Harper family estate like a wildfire. Evelyn called Dale fifty times until he finally answered from his lawyer’s driveway.
They both knew that once federal forensic auditors reviewed Elijah’s complete records, every illegal transaction from the past three years would be exposed to the light.
Driven by sheer desperation, Evelyn drove her luxury SUV to Elijah’s old farmhouse in the dead of night.
She parked in the overgrown driveway with her headlights turned off, pulling a set of master keys from her purse. Inside the dark, dusty living room, Dale was already waiting with heavy plastic contractor bags and a high-powered paper shredder plugged into an extension cord.
"Did you get everything from the attic safe?" Evelyn hissed, her voice shaking as she pulled stacks of old bank ledgers from a hall closet.
"I'm getting it now!" Dale shouted quietly, sweating profusely as he dumped armfuls of bank statements into the shredder. "If the investigators see Elijah's real ledger from 2021, we aren't just looking at fraud—we're looking at grand larceny and tax evasion!"
Paper dust filled the air as the machine whined loudly in the empty house.
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They were so focused on destroying the paper trail that they failed to notice the white lights appearing through the front windows.
👉 What happened the moment Dale threw the most important ledger into the shredder?
