Charade (Swept Away, #1.5)(3)

Fight on like your beloved Mary, Queen of Scots.

All my love,

Papa

I read the letter three times in a row and then dropped it onto my lap in shock. I could barely understand what my father had written. He thought Mom been murdered? How could that be? Who would want my father incapacitated, and who was ruthless enough to kill an innocent woman to do it? And why had he mentioned Mary, Queen of Scots? True, I was a historian, but my real passion was old movies, not Elizabethan England.

I knew that Queen Mary had been executed by Queen Elizabeth because Mary had claimed she was the legitimate sovereign and of England and Elizabeth had seen her as a threat to the throne. Had someone seen my mother as a threat or—if the name was my father’s way of issuing a cryptic warning—did someone see me as a threat? I closed my eyes and tried to calm my thoughts. Oh, how I wished that I was able to talk to my father now! I was angry at him for not giving me more information. I looked into the boxes again and sighed. There was so much paperwork to go through. It was a daunting task, especially because I didn’t know what I was looking for. However, I was a historian—I knew how to research and I knew how to look for clues. My studies required me to make assumptions and draw conclusions from facts and patterns that I saw in my research. This would be no different.

I thought back to the lateral thinking games my father and I would play when I was younger. He always wanted me to be aware that word choices were clues, even if they didn’t appear so at first. There were many reasons why people couldn’t say what they wanted to say and you had to look beyond the words, he always told me. Many people talk in code and he often liked to test me in that way. I knew that the last sentence of his letter had to be a clue. “Fight on like your beloved Mary, Queen of Scots” meant something deeper. I just had to figure out what.

In fact, I needed to figure out what was going on with everything. What did his whole letter mean? Who would have had my mother killed? Once I came up with some answers, I could decide what to do next. I stared at the papers in the box and sighed again. It was going to be a long day.





two

Shock affects different people in different ways. It can set you back or it can spur you forward. My father’s death and the mystery he’d left behind ignited something in me, a curiosity and a deep desire to find out the truth about my mother’s death. I’d taken a leave of absence from my job and had dedicated myself to figuring out exactly what my father had been hinting at.

It had taken me a week of reading through the paperwork before I realized that there were several names that kept popping up on my notepad. The two that seemed to be of the most importance were Jeremiah Bradley and Arnold Maxwell, founders of Bradley, Inc. Their names were vaguely familiar to me—at least Jeremiah Bradley’s was. Bradley, Inc. was one of the largest corporations in the world. Everyone had heard of it, even if they didn’t know exactly what it did. I knew my father had worked for the company as an inventor when I was growing up, but I hadn’t realized how close he had been to the founders. In fact, I’d never even heard of Arnold Maxwell before. I vaguely remembered my father talking about his old friend Arnold and how he’d wanted to have a long conversation with him, but I couldn’t really remember much else of what my father had said.

As I studied the different patents my father had been issued, I quickly came to the assumption that he had been the creative force behind much of Bradley, Inc.’s earliest success. In fact, if I was reading correctly, Bradley, Inc. was in fact started as Bradley, London & Maxwell, which indicated to me that my father wasn’t just an employee—along with Maxwell and Bradley, he had been an owner of the company.

It was when I found the dissolution papers and a contract stating that my father was taking back all of his patents that my heart started racing. The paperwork was dated a week before my mother’s death. I knew in my heart that it couldn’t have been a coincidence. Unfortunately, it wasn’t clear what happened next. Did my father sell his patents? How had Bradley and Maxwell responded to my father’s request? What did my father do after that? None of the papers in the box answered those questions. And the Internet was no help. I’d always found it funny that, with as much information as Google and other search engines held, they never held what you were really looking for. There were no trade secrets, no explanations of deathbed confessions. Only what people wanted to be found.

A search of Jeremiah Bradley turned up some old newspaper articles about his philanthropy, his corporation, and eventually his death a few years ago.

Searching the Bradley, Inc. website told me that the new CEO was Jeremiah’s first-born son, a man by the name of Mattias Bradley. However, the blurb was short and there was no other real information to be found on him anywhere. Not a photo to be seen. I thought it was strange, but I guess when you have that much money, it’s easy to remain private.

However, a search of Mattias Bradley did give me one lead. He had a younger brother. A brother who didn’t care so much about his privacy. A brother by the name of David Bradley. He was all over the Internet. A handsome man in his photographs, he had boyish good looks with differing lengths of dark brown hair and wide, expressive green eyes. He looked like he didn’t have a care in the world, aside from which party he was going to attend on any given weekend. I knew that if I wanted more information about what had happened to Bradley, London & Maxwell and more information about my mother’s death, I was going to have to gain access to Bradley, Inc. and their files. And David Bradley was going to be the one to get me that access. I just had to meet him.