“Why did he stop in twenty eleven?” Jemma asked.
“When I turned eighteen in twenty ten, Warren asked Marilee to put me in contact with him. He wanted to change the account, so I had direct control of it. She stalled for almost a year, and when she never would comply with his request, he stopped adding funds to both accounts.”
Jemma held up her palm again. “Okay, wait. Marilee seemingly dropped you off in Savannah in nineteen ninety-five, and as far as we know, no one ever saw her again, but Warren continued to communicate with her, and he continued to send her money?”
I nodded. “Marilee, or someone pretending to be Marilee, sent Warren annual updates on both Avery and me, which were totally fake. At least the updates about me were fake. I can’t be sure if Marilee stayed in contact with Avery. The thing is that the communiqués were via email, so I guess that someone who knew the basics of the situation could have been pretending to be Marilee.”
“So the whole time you were living in Georgia with your father, Warren thought you and Avery were with Marilee.”
I nodded once again.
“Wow.”
“I know. It’s crazy. Warren admitted that he should have physically checked on us, but he was busy, and shortly after Marilee left with us, he married and had a family of his own. He was putting ten grand in my account and ten grand in Avery’s account, and someone was taking the money out each month. He assumed it was being used to raise us in the upper-class society we were born into.”
“So, at what point did Warren begin to believe that you weren’t with Marilee after all?” Jemma asked.
“After he stopped adding money to the two bank accounts, he expected that I, who was nineteen by this point, and Avery, who was seventeen, would reach out to him. Warren thought it might take a while, but he figured that someone would come around looking for more once the balance in the accounts dried up. No one ever did. He looked for Marilee at this point, but her family told him that she hadn’t been seen or heard from in years. He then looked for Avery and me but came up totally empty. It was at this point that he began to suspect that all of us were dead and that someone else had been draining the accounts each month.”
“Is that what you think happened?” Jemma asked me.
“I don’t know. I know I’m not dead, but I suppose for all intents and purposes, Ava Macalester has been dead since nineteen ninety-five. As for Marilee and Avery, I hope they are alive, but I’m no closer to figuring that out than I was when this whole thing started.”
Jemma tucked her feet up under her body. “I hate to say it, but it sounds like Marilee is the bad guy in all of this.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Adam and I discussed the fact that it really does look like she made up the whole thing about Warren killing my parents and being a threat to Avery and me so that the family would help her with us while she made away with our money. If I had to guess, she pawned both Avery and me off on kind and caring people in her life who would want to protect an innocent child, and then she spent the next sixteen years draining our bank accounts every month.”
“So why did she take you from Piney Point? Why give you to someone all the way in Georgia?”
“Adam and I aren’t sure, but if you remember, once she took us to Piney Point, she left and only popped in now and then. It was Winnie who took care of us. Adam suspects that Marilee was away making arrangements for the money during this time. He also suspects that someone in the family might have begun to suspect something was off, which caused Marilee to take us somewhere where no one would know who we really were. Either that or Marilee had a partner who was actually calling the shots. There’s still a huge void understanding what happened to us after we left Piney Point.”
“So if that’s true, it’s quite possible that Avery really is out there living the life she was handed with no idea who she actually is.”
“Probably,” I said. “Avery was just one year old when this all happened. I have limited memories that seem to randomly filter through, but she won’t have any. If she is alive, and I hope she is, I plan to try to find her. I have no idea how I’m going to do that, but I’m going to try.”
“And Marilee?” Jemma asked.
I shrugged. “I imagine Marilee is either dead or in the wind. No one in the family has seen or heard from her for years. Wilma either.”
Jemma picked up her wine and took a sip. “Talk about a crazy story.”
“Yeah.” I thought about the boxes. “But it hasn’t been all bad. Warren is a really nice man, as is his wife, Giovanna. I hope to meet them both in person soon. Plus, Warren told me that he has been hanging onto the money Avery and I inherited. It’s just sitting in a bank, waiting for one of us to claim it.”
“Are you going to claim it?”
“I don’t know. I guess maybe eventually. I would rather wait until Avery is found. In the meantime, Warren set up an account for me that I have access to so that I can make a withdrawal any time I need. He sent an envelope with information about this account as well as financial statements relating to the cash and investments he’s been managing for Avery and me. I haven’t had a chance to really
