Read Chapter 11: The Inheritance

The morning sun cut through the tall windows of the manor’s library, laying pale stripes across the leather-bound volumes that lined the walls. Camille had spread the journal open on the mahogany desk, her finger tracing the passage where their father had named Pierre Lefèvre as the ringleader of the smuggling operation.

Élodie stood by the window, arms crossed, watching the garden where Inès walked slowly among the roses. “You’re going to call your contacts in Paris.”

“I’m going to do better than that,” Camille said, pulling out her phone. “I’m going to call the archives in Cherbourg. If a scandal was hushed up, someone kept records. And I know the deputy archivist.”

She dialed. Élodie turned from the window as the call connected.

“Claire? It’s Camille Bélanger. Yes, I know it’s been years. I’m in Normandy, dealing with my mother’s estate.” She paused, listening. “I need a favor. Do you have access to the old maritime police records? Around 1982, 1983. Something involving a Pierre Lefèvre.”

Élodie’s expression shifted—surprise, then grudging respect. She moved closer as Camille listened, her fingers drumming on the desk.

“What do you mean, sealed?” Camille’s voice tightened. “Who sealed them?” Another pause. “The family requested it. Can you access them anyway? Off the record. Claire, this is important. It’s about my father.”

The conversation stretched. Camille’s jaw worked as she listened, then she exhaled slowly. “Fine. Send what you can find. I’ll wait.”

She hung up and set the phone down. “The official records are sealed. A request by the Lefèvre family, made in 1984. But Claire remembers something from her own research—an old newspaper report from the *La Presse de la Manche*, dated three weeks before our father disappeared.”

“The one about suspicious boats on the coast,” Élodie said quietly.

Camille looked at her sharply. “You knew about that?”

“Everyone knew about it. It was a scandal that never went anywhere. The police investigated, the paper hinted at names, and then suddenly it all stopped.” Élodie’s voice carried a heavy weight of memory. “Maman wouldn’t let us read the papers that week. She burned them.”

Inès appeared in the doorway, her face flushed from the garden. “What are you two talking about?”

“Smuggling,” Élodie said. “Our father was investigating a ring run by Pierre Lefèvre, and the whole thing was hushed up three weeks before he vanished.”

Inès’s hand went to her throat, where the locket no longer hung. “Pierre Lefèvre. The man in my locket.”

Camille nodded. “The same. Now we just need to prove it.”

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The archives responded faster than Camille expected. By late afternoon, her phone chimed with a digital file—a scan of a yellowed newspaper clipping from August 1982. She read it aloud, her voice steady but tight:

“ *‘Coastal authorities report increased activity of unlit vessels in the waters near Grandcamp-Maisy. Local fishermen describe seeing cargo transferred at night, though no arrests have been made. One witness, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the operation as “well-organized, with connections beyond the shore.”’* ”

She looked up. “That’s three weeks before Papa disappeared. The question is, why was the last paragraph cut off?”

She expanded the scan. The bottom of the article had been torn away, the remaining text dissolving into a water-stained smudge. But beneath it, in pencil, someone had written a note—her mother’s handwriting, unmistakable even in the grainy scan.

*“They paid the paper. The editor was bought.”*

Élodie let out a sharp breath. “So Maman knew. She was already investigating before she found the journal.”

“She was watching,” Camille corrected. “The journal entries we read—they were her notes. She was trying to pick up where Papa left off.”

Inès sat down heavily. “And now we know why Maître Lefèvre is handling the estate. He’s been watching over her investigation the whole time.”

The thought hung in the air, heavy and uncomfortable. Camille was about to respond when Élodie’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen and frowned. “It’s the bank.”

She answered, her face unreadable. “Oui? Oui, c’est Élodie Bélanger.” She listened, her eyes widening. After a moment, she pulled the phone from her ear and stared at it as if it had betrayed her.

“What is it?” Inès asked.

Élodie’s voice came out as a whisper. “They wanted to confirm a transfer. I asked about the account balance. It’s—” She paused, shaking her head. “It’s over six hundred thousand euros.”

Camille’s chair scraped against the floor as she stood. “That’s impossible. Maman kept a modest garden nursery for thirty years. She paid for the bakery roof repair with a small business loan.”

“The loan from R.B.,” Inès said slowly. “The same initials in the ledger.”

Élodie looked between them, her composure cracking. “This isn’t from the nursery. The bank said the account has had regular large deposits for the past twenty years. Monthly.”

“From where?” Camille demanded.

Élodie’s face paled. “They said the deposits came from the same source every month. A private account in Le Havre, under a trust. The trustee’s name is—” She looked down at her phone again, as if the name might have changed. “Édouard Marchand.”

Camille’s blood ran cold. “Marchand? As in the shipping company Marchand? The one that bought half the fishing fleet in the eighties?”

“I don’t know,” Élodie said. “I didn’t ask that.”

“Why would a shipping magnate be sending Maman money for twenty years?” Inès’s voice trembled. “Unless it was connected to Papa’s disappearance. A payoff.”

“Or hush money,” Camille said. She paced the length of the library, her mind racing. “If Marchand was connected to Lefèvre’s smuggling ring, and Papa was about to expose them, then silence would have had a price.”

“But Maman took his money,” Élodie said, the accusation in her voice sharp. “She sat in this manor, took his deposits, and never told us.”

“Or she took the money to fund her own investigation,” Camille countered. “You read the journal. She found the satchel. She started looking. She needed resources for that.”

“She needed to tell her daughters,” Élodie shot back. “She needed to trust us.”

Inès stood abruptly, her chair scraping back. “Stop it. She kept secrets because she was protecting us—or she thought she was. We can argue about her choices later. Right now, we need to decide what we’re going to do with this.”

She pointed at the phone in Élodie’s hand, the journal on the desk, the locket that no longer hung around her neck. “We have evidence of a smuggling ring, a hushed-up scandal, a dead notary who ran the operation, and a mysterious trust fund tied to Papa’s disappearance. And we have Maître Lefèvre, who’s been managing Maman’s affairs for decades and has probably known about all of it.”

Camille stopped pacing. She looked at both her sisters, the years of distance between them suddenly bridged by a shared purpose. “Then we confront him. Tomorrow morning. We walk into his office with the journal, the ledger, and the newspaper clipping, and we demand the truth.”

“What if he doesn’t crack?” Élodie asked. “What if he’s part of it?”

“Then we make him understand we’re not letting this go,” Camille said. Her voice was steel. “Our mother left us a trail to follow, and we’re going to follow it to the end. I don’t care whose family it implicates.”

Inès looked at the journal on the desk, its final page still open to their father’s unfinished sentence. “Attends,” she said softly. “That’s what Maman wrote. Wait.”

“We’re done waiting,” Camille said. She pulled out her phone and began drafting a message to Maître Lefèvre’s office, requesting a meeting for the following morning. “Pack your things. We’re going to Bayeux.”