Chapter 6
The foundation audit came next.
Celia’s old files were found in a storage cabinet the staff believed contained nursery decorations.
She had been gathering:
Vendor contracts.
Board minutes.
Donation restrictions.
Payments to Althea’s event consultants.
Security invoices from the night she vanished.
And one handwritten timeline titled:
If they say I ran.
Mara read it twice.
The document listed what Celia feared Althea would claim.
Unstable.
Unfit mother.
Paranoid about accounts.
Obsessed with separating Posie from Rourke.
The final line read:
She will use the kennel if I cannot get Posie out first.
That was the fourth clue.
Celia had anticipated the exact accusation.
Rourke asked to see the page.
Mara refused until it could be processed.
He accepted that.
Barely.
Then the audit confirmed Celia had been right about the foundation.
Money donated for child welfare programs had been routed through inflated consulting contracts, event staging, and a proposed therapy-dog facility that existed mostly in brochures.
Some services were real.
Some were not.
Althea had not simply stolen bags of money.
She had built an ecosystem where donors, vendors, family prestige, and criminal-adjacent cash blurred together.
Celia had scheduled a meeting with a state charities investigator and a federal prosecutor for the morning after she vanished.
That meeting never happened.
Althea claimed she knew nothing about it.
Her calendar told another story.
An entry for that same morning:
C problem / stop filing.
No one could prove what “C” meant yet.
May you like
Rourke knew.
So did Althea.
