Page 1 of Justice Denied

ChapterOne

Jetta Ainsley stood at the kitchen counter sorting through the mail from the past two days. She’d forgotten to empty her mother’s mailbox after a long day spent clearing out the three bathrooms in the house. She rubbed her lower back with one hand while tossing grocery store flyers and postcards from political candidates into a growing pile for the recycle bin.

She separated the bills into a stack to take to Mom, who was in a rehab facility recovering from a nasty leg break after tripping and falling on the escalator at a crowded shopping mall. A battered envelope with a barely legible address piqued her curiosity. She used her mother’s letter opener to slit the brown envelope and dumped the contents onto the counter.

The top paper was a typed, undated note addressed to someone named Jay. Jetta gasped as she realized the letter had been written to her late father. Who would be so cruel as to send a letter to a long-dead man?

Before reading the missive, she checked the envelope for the postmark. Uncertain she’d read the year correctly, she used her phone’s camera to zoom in on the numbers. Sure enough, the postmark bore a date fifteen years ago—two days before her father’s death of a heart attack.

Jetta started a text to her mother to let her know about the envelope but decided to read the papers first. After all, her father was deceased, so it wasn’t like she was violating anyone’s privacy. Given the doctor’s strong recommendation to move to a home with one-level living, Mom had been a little down lately. To leave the home where her mother had spent most of her married life and raised five children hadn’t been an easy one. But at least Jetta had been able to step in and help with the clear out while Mom concentrated on healing.

The letter’s opening words puzzled her.

Dear Jay,

I’m sorry. It’s all my fault you’re in this mess. Believe me when I say I had no intention of blaming you. I’m too much of a coward to confess my part in all of this, but my conscience wouldn’t let me do nothing, and so I’m sending you what I can. I know it’s not enough to completely exonerate you, but it should point FinCEN in the right direction.

No signature adorned the printed page, leaving her no clue as to the author’s identity. Jetta shuffled through the rest of the papers. Account statements from a Cayman Island bank plus several Excel spreadsheets. The numbers meant nothing to her. While her father had been a whizz with digits, she hadn’t inherited his acumen with math. But why would someone send Dad financial documents and apologize for not doing more to exonerate him—from what, Jetta hadn’t a clue. She decided not to text Mom but would bring the papers during her visit tomorrow morning. That way, Mom wouldn’t be able to brush her off like she’d done whenever Jetta asked questions about Dad, who had had a fatal heart attack when Jetta was eleven.

Bingley, her golden retriever mix, bumped her leg, his signal for attention. She scratched his head and glanced at the stove clock. Five fifteen. Time for a quick ball toss in the backyard before she thought about what to eat for dinner.

When she headed to the back door, Bingley pushed ahead of her, his tail wagging. Once outside, she threw the battered tennis ball across the yard, sending Bingley racing after it with a happy bark. He would chase the ball for as long as she tossed it, and she had to admit her oldest sister Jenna had been right in convincing Jetta to adopt the dog when she moved back to the family home six months ago. It had been almost as if Jenna had known Jetta would need a companion as she sorted through the detritus of their parents’ lives.

Bingley trotted up and dropped the ball at her feet. Jetta obliged with another toss, this time sending the ball to the back fence line with the canine in hot pursuit. Her dog panted up, the ball once more in his mouth. She gave it another throw, the rhythm of the game more soothing than she’d anticipated.

But her mind refused to settle down, her thoughts swirling around the mysterious envelope. She flung the tennis ball again to the far corner of the yard, Bingley running all out. Maybe she would finally learn some new information about Dad. While she missed him, she had more memories of her life without him than with him. That had definitely played into volunteering to sort through their parents’ things ahead of putting the house up for sale. Her four older siblings—sixteen, fourteen, twelve, and ten years older than her—had had more time with Dad, although they too rarely talked about the man who had raised and loved them.

Jared, the oldest, had rebuffed her attempts to find out more about their father, while Jenna, the next sibling down, had flat out refused to discuss “the man who ruined our lives.” Jason, preoccupied with his twins and business, never had time for serious conversation. Jade, the youngest of her siblings, had shared the most, but even Jade hadn’t been able to fill in many of the blanks in Jetta’s mind. All of her siblings had either been in college or living on their own at the time of their father’s death.

Bingley nudged her leg with his nose, reminding her to uphold her end of the game. She picked up the tennis ball and complied. Her phone rang, and she pulled it out of her back jean pocket to check caller ID. Jason, the brother who came behind Jenna in birth order. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Just checking in to see how my sis is doing.” A shouting match in the background, the voices high and childlike, made her grin. Mervin and Millicent, no doubt.

“I’m doing okay.” She took the ball from Bingley and walked back to the outside storage bin to deposit it, signaling playtime was over. “Got through the bathrooms today.”

“Find anything interesting?”

She sank into a plastic Adirondak chair as Bingley sniffed along the far-left side of the fenced yard. “Not really, just a lot of expired medications.”

“You know Mom never thought expiration dates applied to her.”

“So true. Didn’t she try to give you an antacid that was eight years old?”

“Yes, she did, telling me there wasn’t anything in there that could ‘go bad.’” He laughed. “I refused and later secretly toss the bottle in the outside garbage can.”

Jetta leaned her head against the chair back. “I did find a bottle of antidepressants with Dad’s name on it under the sink in the ensuite bathroom off Mom’s room. The medication inside had turned to mush, probably because of the moisture of the bathroom, but the label was still legible. I didn’t think Dad had been depressed.”

Jason sighed. “I forget how young you were when he died, so you probably have no idea.”

When he didn’t continue, she pressed. “No idea about what?”

“That Dad had been accused of embezzling millions of dollars but had a fatal heart attack before anything came of it.”

“Wait, what?” Jetta sat bolt upright, her stomach churning at the news. How could her family have not told her this vital piece of their history? “What are you talking about?”

“I told the others we should have said something to you, but none of us wanted to revisit that particular time.”

“I’ll address the idiocy of that statement later—spill it. Now.” Bingley sank on his haunches, laying his head in his lap. She smoothed his silky ear while she listened to her brother tell her about how Topher Robotics, where their father had worked as chief financial officer, had presented evidence he had siphoned off millions over a five-year period, cooking the books to hide the withdrawals. “I can’t believe none of you told me about this. It must have been big news.”

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