Chapter 2 - The Things the Cameras Saw
At the hospital, Elena slept beneath a heated blanket while a nurse photographed every bruise. Andreas sat beside the bed with his damp shoes planted on the tile and watched rainwater drip from the hem of his jeans.
Detective Lena Rowan arrived at six. She was short, silver-haired, and carried a notebook that looked older than Andreas.
“I’m sorry we’re meeting this way,” she said.
“I’m not.”
Rowan studied him. “You’re not sorry?”
“I’m not sorry I came home.”
“That’s different.”
Andreas looked at Elena. “I’ve been telling myself I had no choice but to leave. The client was in Seattle. The deadline was real. Marina said she could handle everything.”
“Many people say that right before telling me the truth.”
He handed over the recording. Rowan watched it without expression. When Marina said Elena had been agitated, the detective paused the video.
“Did your mother have a history of being violent?”
“No.”
“Confusion? Hallucinations?”
“She had a severe stroke six months ago. Her speech was damaged. Her mind wasn’t.”
Rowan nodded. “That distinction matters.”
Andreas pulled up the security footage from the cameras he had installed two weeks earlier. He had called them discreet, but the truth was uglier: he had placed them because he did not trust the silence in the house.
The first clip showed Marina dragging Elena's wheelchair from the living room at 8:14 the previous morning. Elena's left wheel caught against the rug. Marina yanked the chair backward so sharply that Elena's head struck the cushion.
“There,” Andreas said.
Rowan wrote something down.
The next clip showed Marina holding a spoon near Elena's mouth. Elena turned away. Marina waited, then shoved the spoon between her lips. When Elena coughed, Marina slapped the table.
“Swallow,” Marina said on the recording. “You don’t get to make everything difficult.”
Andreas closed his eyes.
“There’s more,” Rowan said.
The footage continued. Marina entered the house through the back door after midnight, carrying a canvas satchel. She went straight to Victor’s old study, the room Andreas had left locked since his father died.
“Did she have a key?”
“I don’t know.”
“You hired her.”
“She said my father gave her one.”
“Your father was dead.”
“He gave it to her before that.”
Rowan rewound the clip. Marina opened the study door, went inside, and emerged eleven minutes later with nothing in her hands. But her face had changed. She looked alarmed.
At the hospital, Elena stirred. Andreas rose quickly.
“Mom?”
Elena reached for the bedside table. Her fingers knocked against the plastic cup. Andreas gave her a pen and a pad.
She made three crooked marks, then stopped. Her right hand shook too badly.
“Take your time.”
Elena drew a square. Inside it, she wrote a line that bent like a fence post. Then she tapped the paper, tapped the window, and pointed toward the direction of home.
Rowan leaned closer. “Is that a map?”
Elena nodded.
Andreas drove home with June riding beside him. They found the kitchen spotless, the hose coiled, and Elena’s wheelchair cushion drying in the laundry room. Marina had left behind one thing: a small silver key on the counter.
It opened the locked study.
Inside, Victor's desk had been disturbed. Dust marked the outlines of missing papers. Behind the desk, scratched into the baseboard, were four uneven letters.
E L E N.
Andreas touched them. The wood was freshly cut.
His phone rang. The number was blocked.
May you like
“You should not have come home,” a man's voice said.
Then the caller added, “Your mother knows what is behind the fence.”
