Chapter 6 - The Night Before the Funeral
Thomas Bell refused to speak inside the house.
Detective Chen moved everyone to the back patio while forensic technicians continued searching the rooms. Evening had settled over the garden, turning the glass doors into dark mirrors. Ryan could see his own reflection beside Maya’s: his olive-green shirt wrinkled, her light pink pajamas partly hidden beneath a borrowed coat, both of them looking like survivors of an accident that had not yet stopped happening.
Bell sat with his hands cuffed in front of him. Chen had not arrested him, but she had not trusted him either.
“Start with my father,” Ryan said.
Bell stared at the garden path. “Your father discovered Mrs. Vale had been moving money out of the family trust.”
“How much?”
“Nearly nine million dollars over six years.”
Ryan almost laughed. The number was too large to enter the mind normally.
“Where did it go?”
“Private investigators. Medical consultants. Legal retainers. Payments to people whose names I never saw. Your father thought she was preparing for a divorce.”
“She wasn’t,” Maya said.
Bell looked at her. “No.”
Ryan folded his arms. “How do you know?”
“The night before he died, your father asked me to drive him to Judge Reed’s house. They argued for almost an hour. When he came back to the car, he was shaking. He told me Evelyn had made plans for Ryan’s future children before Ryan was even married.”
A chill moved through Ryan.
“What plans?”
Bell’s gaze dropped. “Control of the trust passed to you at thirty-five, unless you were declared incapacitated or unfit to manage family interests. If that happened, a temporary trustee would be appointed.”
“My mother.”
“Yes.”
“And Oliver?” Maya asked.
“Your son is the next beneficiary. If Ryan loses control, the guardian of Oliver gains influence over every distribution made for him.”
Maya’s hand tightened around Ryan’s.
Bell continued. “Your father believed Evelyn planned to remove both of you. Not kill you. Discredit you. Separate you. Make the court believe Maya was dangerous and Ryan was emotionally compromised.”
“Why record himself?” Ryan asked.
“He knew no one would believe him without proof. He made a statement on an old digital camera and hid it somewhere in the nursery wing. The room used to be your childhood bedroom.”
Ryan remembered the night before the funeral. Evelyn had insisted that workers renovate the nursery immediately, even though Maya was still pregnant and had wanted to wait.
“She was looking for it,” he said.
Bell nodded. “For eighteen months.”
“Then why place cameras everywhere?” Chen asked.
“To watch them search. To hear whether they found it. To build evidence against Maya at the same time.”
“Why come back now?”
Bell looked toward the dark windows. “Because Evelyn called me this morning.”
Ryan’s voice hardened. “You still work for her.”
“I stopped working for her after your father died.”
“But she called you.”
“She told me to retrieve a folder from the nursery and destroy anything hidden with it.”
“The medical folder?” Maya asked.
Bell nodded. “I entered before dawn using a phone she gave me. I took the folder, but I did not destroy it.”
“Where is it?”
“In a storage locker near the train station.”
“And the pills?”
“I did not put them there.”
“You expect us to believe that?” Ryan demanded.
“No. But the cameras will show it.”
Chen leaned forward. “Did Evelyn tell you why she needed the medical records today?”
“She said Maya was about to be evaluated.”
“By whom?”
Bell hesitated. “A doctor named Adrian Kessler.”
Maya’s face changed.
Ryan turned to her. “You know him?”
“He treated me after Oliver was born.”
“You never told me that.”
“It was one appointment. Your mother arranged it while you were away. He said I had postpartum psychosis.”
“Did you?”
“No.” Her voice cracked. “I was exhausted. Frightened. Oliver was in the hospital. Evelyn kept telling me I heard him crying when he wasn’t. Kessler asked questions for fifteen minutes and wrote a prescription I never filled.”
Bell closed his eyes. “That prescription was filled.”
Maya stared at him.
“Not by me.”
“No,” Bell said. “By Evelyn.”
The back door opened. A forensic technician stepped onto the patio holding a tablet.
“Detective, we recovered ninety-two minutes from the nursery memory card.”
Chen stood. “Anything useful?”
The technician looked at Maya.
“You need to see who entered the nursery at 5:51 this morning.”
The analysts found another anomaly in the nursery video. At 5:57, the disguised woman paused beside a framed family photograph and touched Ryan’s face through the glass. The gesture was tender, almost reverent, and nothing like Evelyn’s usual movements.
That detail disturbed Maya more than the pills. “Why would she do that?”
Ryan had no answer. If the figure was Evelyn, the tenderness was performance for an unseen audience. If it was another woman, then the crime contained a personal longing they did not yet understand.
May you like
Chen marked the frame for biometric review. She also noticed the woman favored her right leg, a slight hesitation on each step. Maya had broken her left ankle at sixteen and favored the opposite side when tired. It was the first objective indication that the figure was not Maya and perhaps not Evelyn either.
A third person had entered the story, though they still did not know her name.
