Claire showed me a scanned receipt with the words MARIGOLD HOLDING marked across the top.
My address appeared beneath an old parcel number.
“This house belonged to Mom before Dad transferred it into his name,” Claire said.
I had known the house came from family money but not that my mother once owned it.
Claire pointed at the receipt.
“The deposit follows the property, not the person.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It was a private storage arrangement.”
“Who arranged it?”
“Florence.”
The broken mailbox suddenly seemed less random.
I called Naomi, and she agreed to meet us at her office that afternoon.
Before leaving, I checked the mailbox post.
The wood had been drilled near the base and repaired with pale filler.
A small pink fleck of paint lay inside the hole.
I called Claire over.
“Did Florence do this?”
“I don’t know.”
I examined the cavity without reaching inside.
Somebody had removed a narrow object recently.
The top of the post had fresh scratches beneath the mailbox mounting plate.
The hammer had destroyed the box, but it had also exposed the altered post.
I finally understood Florence’s choice of target.
She had not been trying to hurt me through Hazel’s beloved mailbox.
She had been trying to make sure I noticed what someone else had already taken.
Chapter 6: The Lawyer Who Asked Better Questions
Naomi Sloane worked above a pharmacy on the town square.
Her office smelled of coffee and paper rather than polished furniture.
She listened without interrupting as I described Florence, the hammer, and the man pretending to be an adjuster.
She asked for the timestamps on my recordings.
Then she asked whether anyone had entered our front yard in the previous week.
I remembered a landscaping crew working across the street on Wednesday.
They had parked beside my mailbox for several hours.
Naomi wrote that down.
“I want to be careful about the photograph,” she said.
“Your mother being alive three days after she disappeared doesn’t establish what happened afterward.”
“I know.”
“It does mean somebody lied about when she was last seen.”
Claire looked toward the window.
Naomi turned the photograph over beneath a desk lamp.
She noticed faint pressure marks under the handwritten date.
“This may be a copy of a copy,” she said.
“We need the original.”
I asked what Marigold Holding meant.
Naomi explained that a now-defunct custodial company had provided small document lockers to local businesses.
Its assets had passed through two mergers before ending in a regional storage firm.
