Chapter 3 - What Claire Really Did Before I Met Her
Claire had been a forensic accountant.
Not permanently.
By the time I met her, she worked as controller for a healthcare company in Connecticut.
But in her late twenties, she spent four years at Wexler & Dane, a New York forensic accounting firm specializing in internal corporate investigations.
I knew that.
I had never thought much about individual clients.
After the canceled wedding, I called Claire’s former colleague, Marcus Reed.
He remembered Vincent Vale immediately.
“That was a difficult engagement.”
“What engagement?”
Long pause.
“Ethan, I’m limited in what I can discuss.”
“Vincent’s dead. Claire’s dead. His daughter just smashed Claire’s belongings because she found something with his crest.”
That changed the temperature.
Marcus asked what I had found.
I described the photograph.
The note.
The black seal.
He sighed.
“Claire kept something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was she investigating?”
“The Vale Foundation.”
My chest tightened.
Natalie’s employer.
Marcus continued carefully.
Wexler & Dane had been retained privately by Vincent Vale after internal financial reports stopped making sense.
The Vale family’s wealth came primarily from commercial property and specialty manufacturing.
The foundation funded scholarships, housing programs, and arts organizations.
Vincent suspected that money allocated to legitimate programs was being routed through inflated vendor contracts.
Claire joined the team reviewing expenses.
The amounts were not astronomical by Vale standards.
That was partly why the problem survived.
Twenty thousand here.
Forty thousand there.
Consulting contracts.
Event expenses.
“Who was doing it?”
“We never reached a final public finding.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Marcus went quiet.
Then:
“Natalie was one of the people under review.”
I sat down.
At twenty-seven, Natalie worked in the foundation’s events department.
She approved vendors.
Several vendors had personal connections to her.
One belonged to a former college roommate.
Another to a boyfriend.
Another operated from a mailbox.
Claire found payments that appeared disconnected from services actually provided.
Rough total under scrutiny:
Just under $900,000 across three years.
“What happened?”
“Vincent terminated our engagement.”
“Why?”
“We believed he wanted to handle it internally.”
“Was Natalie charged?”
“No.”
“Was the money returned?”
“Some contracts were unwound. Some funds were reclassified. I don’t know the family’s full resolution.”
Then he told me something worse.
Claire had disagreed strongly with closing the investigation.
She believed records were being destroyed.
Vincent met with her privately.
That photograph may have been taken after one of those meetings.
“Did Claire keep copies?”
“She wasn’t supposed to keep confidential client files.”
“Did she?”
Marcus hesitated.
“She told me once that there were certain documents she would not leave in the Vale office because she was afraid they would disappear.”
The blue box.
My stomach turned.
“Did Natalie know Claire?”
“Yes.”
“How well?”
“They met during interviews.”
There went another lie.
Natalie had sat across from Claire.
Answered her questions.
Possibly hated her.
Then, years later, approached Claire’s widower at a charity auction and pretended she had never heard her name.
That was no coincidence.
May you like
The question was no longer whether Natalie knew my wife.
It was why she entered my life pretending she didn’t.
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