If on Christmas Eve your family received sweaters and cookies while you were handed a rusty key worth $92 million, what would you do? My parents laughed in my face when I claimed it was real. Three months later, they stood in court begging me to drop the lawsuit. This is not a story about a senile old man. It is a calculated plan of revenge, and I was the only pawn he chose to flip the table.
My name is Scarlet Flores, and I am 29 years old. I work as an internal auditor for Marigold and Lantern Forensic Finance in Portland, Maine. My job, in its simplest terms, is to look at columns of numbers that appear perfectly normal on the surface and find the rot hidden underneath. I dig through receipts, cross-reference ledgers, and find the lies people tell themselves and the IRS. It is a quiet job for a quiet person. It requires patience, a lack of ego, and a high tolerance for uncomfortable truths. Perhaps that is why I was the only one driving north on Route 201, heading straight into a blizzard, while the rest of my family was likely still arguing over which outfit would look best on Instagram.
The wipers of my five-year-old Subaru were fighting a losing battle against the heavy, wet snow. Cedar Ridge was not really a town anymore; it was a collection of memories and dying pine trees about four hours north of civilization. My grandfather, Elliot Quinn, lived there in a cabin that predated my birth. The heating was temperamental, the cell service was non-existent, and the nearest Starbucks was forty miles away. To my parents, Paul and Linda Quinn, going to Cedar Ridge was a punishment. To me, it was the only place in the world that felt like it had a pulse.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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