The Inheritance

Chapter 6 — Rob

The call came at eleven that night, from the house phone in the study — the old black rotary Dad had refused to replace, its cord stretched long across the room like a leash.

Jack was in the study going through the box again, the papers spread across Dad’s mahogany desk under the green-shaded lamp. Twenty years in Portland had taught him how to read a ledger the way other men read a newspaper — slowly, line by line, looking for what wasn’t there. He didn’t look up when the door opened.

“You’re in his chair,” Rob said.

Jack glanced up. His little brother stood in the doorway in a Red Sox t-shirt and gym shorts, arms crossed, eyes red-rimmed the way they’d been all day at the cemetery. Rob had cried at the grave — the only one of them who had, besides Mother. Jack had stood dry-eyed through the whole service, and he’d felt every eye on him for it.

“Am I?” Jack said. “He won’t mind. He’s dead.”

Rob stepped inside and closed the door. “You shouldn’t joke about that.”

“Why not? He joked about worse.” Jack leaned back, the chair creaking under him. The leather was cracked with age, worn smooth where Dad’s shoulders had rested for thirty years. “Sit down, Robby. We haven’t talked in twenty years. Let’s talk.”

“Don’t call me Robby.” Rob didn’t sit. He picked up one of the papers from the desk — a photocopied ledger page — and stared at it without reading it. His thumb brushed the corner, and Jack noticed the scar across his knuckle, white and ridged. “What is all this?”

“History.”

“That’s what Claire said.” Rob set the paper down, aligning its edge with the desk corner the way Dad always had. The gesture was so familiar it hurt — a small, precise movement, the kind of thing you absorb without knowing it. “She says you’re making trouble about 1985.”

“Claire talks too much.”

“Claire’s worried about you.” Rob finally sat, dropping into the leather chair across the desk. He looked older than thirty-five — soft around the middle, thinning at the crown, a wedding band loose on his finger. A man who’d inherited an empire and the insomnia that came with it. “She thinks you’re going to do something stupid.”

“Something stupid. Like what?”

“Like tearing the family apart over something that happened when you were barely a year old.” Rob leaned forward, elbows on knees, and for a moment he looked like the kid who used to follow Jack around the yard begging to be included. “Look, Jack. I run the company now. Two hundred employees. Payroll, benefits, pensions. You start dragging Merritt and Sons through the mud and it’s not just Dad’s reputation that burns. It’s real people. Guys who’ve been with us thirty years. Guys with kids in college.”

“I’m touched. You care about the employees.”

“I care about everybody this touches.” Rob’s voice dropped. “Including you.”

Jack raised an eyebrow.

“I’m serious.” Rob rubbed his face with both hands. “I don’t know what you think you found, and I don’t want to know. But I’m asking you — as your brother — to put it down. Take the money. Dad left you a share. It’s not huge, but it’s real. Take it and go back to wherever you’ve been.”

“Portland.”

“Portland.” Rob nodded. “Take the money, go back to Portland, and let the dead stay dead.”

Jack studied his brother’s face. There was something underneath the concern — something tight at the corners of Rob’s mouth, a flicker in his eyes that kept sliding away from the box on the desk. Fear. Or calculation. At five years old, Rob had followed Jack everywhere, crying when Jack climbed trees too high, laughing when Jack let him win at checkers. This man was a stranger wearing his brother’s face.

“And if I don’t?” Jack asked.

Rob stood. He walked to the window and looked out at the dark lawn, at the shapes of the maple trees Dad had planted along the fence line, at the company trucks parked in the lot beyond. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, almost gentle.

“You remember the shed, Jack? Behind the garage. Where Dad kept the tools.”

The shift was so abrupt Jack didn’t answer for a second. The shed. The smell of motor oil and cut grass. The padlock clicking.

“What about it?”

“You remember what he did to you in there? When you were sixteen and you took his truck?” Rob turned around. His expression was empty. “I heard it from my bedroom. The window was open. I heard everything.”

Jack’s jaw tightened. He had not thought about the shed in twenty years. He had not let himself.

“I’m not threatening you,” Rob said softly. “I’m warning you. This family survived him. We built something. Claire, me, Mother — we made it work after he broke it. We buried him today, and maybe now we get to breathe. And you want to come home for three days and set it on fire.”

“It’s already on fire, Robby.”

“I said don’t call me that.”

Jack stood, the desk lamp throwing his shadow long across the rug. He walked around the desk until he was standing close to his brother — close enough to see the vein pulsing in Rob’s temple, close enough to smell the funeral on him, the lilies and the rain.

“Listen to me,” Jack said. “I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about the company. But three people died in 1985, and this family got rich on their ashes. A man, his wife, their teenage son. Somebody is going to answer for that.”

Rob stared at him for a long moment. Then something changed in his eyes — the concern drained away, leaving something colder, something that reminded Jack, horribly, of their father.

“Then you better make sure,” Rob said, “that you know exactly what you’re holding before you light the match.”

He walked out, closing the door softly behind him.

Jack sat back down in their father’s chair and stared at the closed door for a long time, his heart hammering against his ribs. Then, slowly, he reached for the ledger page Rob had touched — and noticed something he hadn’t seen before, something that made his blood run cold.

A phone number, written in the margin in faded blue ink. In a hand that wasn’t his father’s.

It was his mother’s.