PART 4 — The Company My Sister-in-Law Owned Quietly
The next morning, I opened a cardboard box I had not touched since Dad’s funeral. It held company reports he had mailed to me each year, usually with brief notes in the margins. I owned twenty percent of Harbor Point Marine Services. Grant owned the rest and ran it day to day, but Dad had insisted that both of us receive regular financial information.
After Dad died, the reports grew thinner. Grant blamed his bookkeeper’s workload, and I let months pass without pressing him. Sitting at my kitchen table with the new statements beside Dad’s old ones, I could see when the payments to Starline began. They started eleven months earlier and rose sharply just before Grant bought the June Star.
Mara arranged a meeting with me and an accountant who reviewed closely held businesses. His name was Peter Walsh, and he had worked with my firm on other matters. I showed him the records I had received as a shareholder. Peter noted that Starline had charged Harbor Point for “client hospitality,” dockage, and vessel access. The invoices did not explain which clients or jobs those costs served.
I called Grant’s longtime office manager, Ruth, to ask for the missing monthly reports. Ruth had known Dad since the rented-shed days. She sounded relieved to hear from me, then careful. She could send records to an owner, she said, but Grant had told the staff to direct questions about the yacht to him. I asked her to send only what she was authorized to share.
An hour later, she emailed the company’s financial reports and copies of meeting minutes. I searched for any vote approving payments to Starline. There was none in the records Ruth provided. I also found a draft notice of a special shareholders’ meeting scheduled for the following month. One agenda item proposed issuing new shares to raise capital, which could reduce my ownership.
I had once believed that if Grant wanted more of the company, he would ask me directly. We had argued before about money and Dad’s decisions, but I thought we knew the line between arguing and hiding records. Now I was examining a proposed share issue for a meeting I had not yet been invited to attend.
Noah spent that afternoon building a harbor out of blocks on the living room rug. He made a separate dock for smaller boats and gave each one enough space to turn. Every so often, he asked whether I had heard from Luis. Luis had been kind to him on the yacht, letting him watch the radar before lunch. I said Luis had helped us reach shore quickly.
Noah thought about that, then asked if he could send Luis a thank-you note. We wrote one together. Noah drew the June Star with an ambulance waiting on the dock, then frowned and drew a second picture on the back: Luis standing at the helm while the boat headed home. He chose that side for the note. I understood why.
By Thursday, the police had arranged for Noah to speak with a trained interviewer. I took him to the appointment and waited nearby. Afterward, he wanted a plain hamburger and no conversation about boats. I respected that. As we ate, he told me he had remembered one more detail: Celia had said, “The doctor will keep him there until morning.”
I passed that along to the investigating officer. She did not tell me what conclusion to draw from it. I tried to follow her example. Celia’s words could mean she expected Noah to become ill. They could also be disputed or explained. I knew what Noah had experienced, but I wanted the investigation to establish what had happened without asking him to carry it alone.
Mara contacted Grant’s lawyer about the business records. That evening, Grant sent me a long email accusing me of trying to take control while he was under stress. He said Starline owned the yacht and had leased it to Harbor Point for marketing events. He described the arrangement as ordinary. He did not explain why Celia had never disclosed her ownership to me.
I remembered the lunch invitation differently after reading that. Grant had wanted me aboard the yacht the day before the bank signing. He had shown me the boat and introduced me to Luis, who thought it belonged to the business. Perhaps Grant hoped seeing it would make the purchase easier to accept. Perhaps he had planned to keep calling it a workboat.
Peter’s preliminary review arrived the next morning. The payments to Starline totaled $184,000 over eleven months. Several had been made when Harbor Point was late paying suppliers. Peter cautioned that the records alone did not establish whether the payments were improper; he needed contracts, invoices, and evidence of services. Mara requested those documents formally.
Minutes after Grant received the request, Ruth called me from outside the office. He had asked her to prepare a new set of board minutes approving the Starline arrangement as though the decision had been made months ago. She had refused. Then she told me something else: Grant had instructed her to delete an old folder of emails. She had kept it.
END PART 4
