Chapter 3 - The Woman Everyone Trusted
The paramedics arrived within minutes.
Emily watched as they checked her parents, placed oxygen masks over their faces, and moved them onto stretchers.
One paramedic examined the mugs and pill organizer without touching them.
“Police should preserve this room,” he said. “Their conditions are too similar to assume coincidence.”
Emily followed the ambulances to the hospital.
For three hours, she sat beneath cold white lights while doctors ran tests. Her parents remained unconscious but stable.
A physician named Dr. Patel finally approached her.
“They appear to have been exposed to a strong sedative,” he explained. “We are still waiting for confirmation. The good news is that they are responding to treatment.”
“Could their regular medicine have caused this?”
“Not in both of them at the same time, unless something was mixed or administered incorrectly.”
Emily remembered Rebecca’s car.
She called her older brother, Daniel, who lived in Chicago.
Daniel answered after the fourth ring.
“What happened?”
Emily told him everything.
When she mentioned Rebecca, Daniel sighed.
“Don’t start accusing people.”
“I saw her car leaving.”
“Rebecca has helped Mom and Dad for years.”
“She was in their house right before they collapsed.”
“That doesn’t make her guilty.”
Emily looked through the glass wall toward her parents’ hospital room.
“You didn’t hear Mom’s voice.”
“And you’ve never liked Rebecca.”
That was true.
Rebecca had first appeared after Emily’s father injured his hand and needed help organizing insurance paperwork. She had been patient, generous, and unusually attentive.
Within a year, she was managing their savings, taxes, property records, and insurance policies.
Rebecca remembered birthdays. She brought flowers. She attended family dinners.
Everyone trusted her.
Everyone except Emily.
Whenever Emily asked questions about the accounts, Rebecca smiled as though speaking to a child.
“Your parents deserve privacy,” she would say.
May you like
Emily had eventually stopped asking.
Now she wondered whether that silence had nearly cost them their lives.
