“There was!” Jenny said, more strongly now, more like Laura would have, Tex thought.
It was very disconcerting, seeing two of them together, features so familiar and dear. It was even more disconcerting watching Jenny struggle with her otter companion.
“What happened to it?” Laura asked, incredulously.
Jenny seemed to rally herself. “Fred very carefully managed it away for us, so it looked like it was just bled away on the market, or lost to taxes, but it was really going into his accounts. And he didn’t tell us about the life insurance at all. But I caught him, and I figured out what he’d done.”
“Your laptop. He blew up your laptop after he saw that I’d accessed your accounts.”
Laura’s mirror nodded firmly. “He’d do that,” she agreed.
“And the boat,” Laura said, “He blew up the boat after I told him that I had everything I needed on the cloud. I was just talking nonsense, but he thought I’d figured out what you had figured out, and was going to expose him.”
“I had enough on him to send him jail for a very long time, and we would have been very rich indeed. Mom and Dad’s life insurance policy alone would have set us both up for life. We were millionaires, Laura. We just didn’t know it.”
With a moan, Jenny’s eyes rolled up into her head and she slowly shifted into an otter who took two wobbly steps and fell at Laura’s feet.
Chapter 27
Jenny was alive! She was real, and whole, at least in body, and she was somehow now a shifter. What’s more, they were apparently much richer than Laura had ever realized was possible. She gathered the dazed little otter up and cradled her gently. “Are you okay?” she asked plaintively. How cruel would it be to get her sister back, just to lose her so soon?
Gizelle stepped forward with the towel she had the otter wrapped in previous
ly. “There isn’t much room in one mind,” she said cryptically. “But your sister is still there.”
“I won’t let him get away with any of it,” Laura promised her armful of unconscious otter, wrapping the towel gently around it.
Tex gave Fred another shake, only needing one arm and a grip at the back of his neck to make him plead for mercy.
“Enough!” Fred croaked.
Laura could only imagine the restraint that Tex was showing, given the fury on his expressive face.
She could relate!
“I loved your Dad like a brother,” Fred explained to Tex sullenly. “But he got everything that should have been mine. He was a shifter, I wasn’t. He got your Mom. He got two beautiful daughters. He got the partnership at the firm. Sure, I got rid of them, but I raised you two like you were my own after that, or I would have, if you hadn’t gone haring off after high school. I set Jenny up at our firm when she graduated, and her thanks for that was getting a partnership offer that should have been mine.”
“If they offered her a partnership, Jenny earned it,” Laura snarled.
Fred ignored her, continuing his confession. “I knew that she was onto the insurance money before I got her text that she was going to be bailing you out again. I thought I could get her out of the way, and do with Laura what I’d failed to do with Jenny. She would confess her masquerade once it got hard to maintain, and I’d protect her and she’d be the grateful daughter I deserved.”
“Then why did you try to poison me with rattlesnake venom?” Laura demanded. “This is not the way to earn a daughter’s love, not that any of this was.”
Fred spread his hands innocently, and this innocence was more believable than his earlier show. “I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t try to hurt you until you gave me no choice.”
Laura didn’t want to believe him, but the latte was such a different attempt than the others that Fred had confessed to. And however twisted his motives, he had followed them.
“Where would I even get rattlesnake venom?” he asked. “It’s not like they sell it in the gift shop!”
“Then who did?” Tex growled. Laura could tell that it was taking all of his self-control not to flatten the odious man.
“It was probably my cousin,” said a new voice. Laura turned to see the man in sunglasses from the mainland bazaar she’d overheard mentioning Shifting Sands. He was walking up the steps from the beach with Bastian.
“Who are you?” Scarlet, Tex, and Laura asked together.
“I saw you on the mainland asking questions about the resort,” Laura added suspiciously.
Bastion explained, “He pulled up in a boat and demanded to see Scarlet.”