AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Withdrawals and deposits by customers and most of the investments too, for a limited period at least.”
The room was silent for the longest time, the lap of the water against the hull the only sound drifting in from the open window. The dawn’s rays were lighting the sky, shafts of sunlight beginning to stream in and warm us.
Tristan cleared his throat. “I’ve been working on something different while we’ve been going through all this.” He spun around the old laptop of mine that he’d been using. “I’ve been trying to find some of the senior staff at ReimagINC so I can interview them. There aren’t a lot left. Two died, a few seemed to have simply walked away from the workforce—they don’t have profiles on LinkedIn or anything like that—and the others have names that are too common to be able to narrow them down by searching for them on social media. I found a few who could be them, but their presence is either locked down or just don’t give me enough information to rule them out.”
“How many have you been able to identify?” Flynn asked.
“None.” He shook his head, and a pit in my gut opened up.
“Does that make it more or less suspicious?” I asked, dreading the answer. On the surface, the company was operating well until Mum went missing. Things deteriorated rapidly from there, returns on investments plummeting and money disappearing faster than the speed of light. But it wasn’t all as it seemed.
“It’s not all that surprising, I suppose. The Gold Coast is fairly transient when it comes to its corporate workforce. A lot of people leave for the bigger cities or go overseas after working here.”
“Do we know how many people left in the lead up to the company going under?” Flynn questioned. “We should try to find them.”
“Realistically, we need to figure out how long the company was having problems previous to going under before we identify which employees to concentrate on finding,” Tristan lamented, his elbows on the table and his chin resting in the heel of his hand.
I sighed. I was reconstructing the accounts based on the transaction records I’d managed to pull from the Reserve Bank. “With the benefit of hindsight, months,” I answered. “Their payments back to investors started slowing down in the June of that year. By September it was in crisis.”
A knock on the door sounded, and Ry stepped in, effortlessly continuing our conversation. I wondered how long he’d been standing there. “Do you think Rosa would have known?”
“She had to have,” Tristan responded, and Flynn and I both nodded our agreement.
“From what we’ve gathered from her diaries, Mum had her thumb on everything going on. She was the centre of it all.”
“So keep digging. I think there’s a reason why things aren’t adding up.” Ezra was leaning on the door jamb, his hands in his pockets and his ankles crossed. He looked like the picture of relaxation, but the dark circles under his eyes and the tight lines around his eyes and mouth were a dead giveaway.
I cocked my head to the side and waited for him to continue.
“You’re now seeing the things that the investors were experiencing. Maybe the gut feeling you have isn’t unfounded. It’s not so open-and-shut.” He shrugged, downplaying his words.
“What?” I flicked my gaze to Tristan and Flynn before looking at Ezra again. “Open-and-shut?”
He smiled as if I was finally cluing onto something. “Yeah. Think of it like this—a director starts up this great company, people invest and make a fortune, but the economy changes. The company goes broke, and the director dies in quick succession. The investigations are wrapped up in a neat little bow, but there were shortcuts taken and other things like where the wreckage was found that just don’t make sense. Now that you’re looking into it, you’re finding those loose threads. Keep pulling at them and see what unravels. Keep looking just like Ash told you.”
“Mum died before the company went under.”
“It appears that way.” Ezra nodded. “But I think your parents shielded you from a lot, Zali, and it’s possible that you were too young to understand what was happening too. There was a lot of bad press and protests by investors who were demanding their money be refunded before your mum died.”
“Dad knew,” I rasped, stating the obvious. My gut sank. He’d said that if he was on the yacht, maybe he could have saved them. He’d told me that after Mum went missing, the company imploded. He’d sold everything that had Mum’s name on it and asked the solicitors to make it all go away.
“He wasn’t oblivious. But Zali, I don’t think he appreciated just how serious it was.” He paused and looked at Tristan, waiting for something. When Tristan nodded, Ezra added, “We don’t think he knew about the threats.”
My heart stopped and my lungs seized. “Threats?” I wheezed. What threats? No one had ever mentioned threats being made against Mum. My gut sank, a pit opening up and queasiness washing over me.
If Dad had known about them, if he’d suspected Mum could have been targeted, did he push the police to investigate? Did the police know? How did Ezra find out? If the police had treated it like a murder instead of an accident, would they have found evidence? Would they have kept looking? An accident was the easy choice. It also directed the blame onto Mum. But there were too many coincidences to be disregarded.
“Ry, do you think you’d be able to narrow down where the yacht went down based on where the wreckage was found?”
“Assuming it washed up at that beach, I might be able to, but if it was towed in, there’s no chance,” Ry responded, shaking his head and looking at me dubiously. “Why?”
“We need to find their remains to know whether they were targeted.” I looked between the four men standing and sitting before me.
“Zee,” Flynn started, his voice full of sympathy.
But I held my hand up, stopping him. “If there were threats and they got ignored, Mum could have been murdered. Their killer is walking around on the streets while my mum and brother are lying on the bottom of the ocean. I know it’s not the focus of what we’re doing here, but I need justice.”
“If we can get it, we will. This podcast isn’t the be all and end all of this investigation, love.” Tristan reminded me, his voice allowing no room for dispute. “I agree, if there’s a chance it wasn’t an accident, we need to try to find where the wreckage might have gone down so we can raise it and get it analyzed.” He winced before he added, “I don’t know how expensive that is, but I’d need significantly more research funding to make it happen. It’ll take a lot to get a grant for that, but I’ll find a way,” he promised.
