Denise, the securities investigator, opened her folder on the dock and read the first name on the list of Brandons victims, and Jeffs face went gray, and he turned to his brother and said, that is Mom.
The first name on the list of elderly people my brother in law the financial advisor had stolen from was his own mother, who had handed him her savings the same as I handed him my inheritance, and watched it vanish into a lake house.
My mother cleaned houses for thirty years and left me eighty five thousand dollars, every penny earned on her knees. Brandon offered to manage it at the funeral. Family rate, zero fees. A year later he told me markets go down, it is gone, and my husband Jeff told me not to make it weird at Thanksgiving.
It was not the markets. Three weeks after Brandon told me my mothers money was gone, he closed on a six hundred and forty thousand dollar lake house. I looked up the property records myself, and then I made a few phone calls, and one of them was to the state Division of Securities.
Denise Tran, the investigator, came to the housewarming as my guest, with a badge, and Brandons champagne glass hit the dock before she finished her sentence.
Eleven complaints so far, she told the party. Most of them over seventy. Client money moved from trust accounts into a personal account in March, the same week a certain lake house got its deposit. And the first name on the list was the one that sat Jeff down on his own brothers dock.
Their mother. Brandon had taken his own mothers savings along with everyone elses, and smiled at her across the Thanksgiving table while he did it.
A financial advisor who moves client funds into his own account to buy a lake house is not having a bad stretch in the market. He is committing a specific crime with a specific license number attached to it, and that license is the thing that makes the recovery possible.
The investigation is clawing back what it can, and a lake house sells for a great deal when a court orders it to. My mothers eighty five thousand dollars is part of what is coming back, along with the savings of eleven other people who trusted a man in a nice suit.
Jeff is not defending his brother anymore. It is hard to tell your wife not to make it weird once you have watched an investigator read your own mothers name off a victim list on your brothers dock.
Brandon lost the license, the lake house, and the family, in that order. His wife put down her champagne that afternoon and has not, as far as I know, picked his side back up.
My mother scrubbed floors so that I would have a start. A man in white linen nearly turned thirty years of her knees into a boathouse. The badge on my guests hip turned it back. My mother would have had no idea what a securities investigator was. She would have understood the result just fine. You do not get to keep what you took from the people who trusted you.