Chapter 2 - The Locked Wing
At two in the morning, my mansion was as silent as a cathedral.
Vanessa had gone to bed in the guest suite down the hall—a traditional arrangement my mother had favored before her stroke, though Vanessa spent plenty of nights in my room—after taking a sleeping pill to preserve her "bridal glow." I waited until her breathing was deep and rhythmic before slipping out of my study in dark slacks and a black cashmere sweater, moving without a sound in my stocking feet.
Ryan, my head of security and a former Marine Force Recon sniper who had worked for my late father, was waiting for me in the shadows of the third-floor landing. He held a tablet in one hand, its screen dimmed to the lowest setting.
"There's no night nurse on duty, boss," Ryan whispered, his voice a gravelly bass that didn't carry past my ear. "According to the logs Vanessa gave you, there's supposed to be a twenty-four-hour rotational RN from St. Jude’s Private Care. I pulled the gate logs for the last ninety days. The agency nurses stopped coming twelve weeks ago."
A cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck. "Then who's been in that room with my mother?"
"A guy named Marcus Vance. Claims to be a specialist Vanessa hired privately. Only problem is, I ran his prints off a coffee cup he left in the security office last week. His real name is Marcus Vane. He lost his medical license in Nevada five years ago for running a pill mill and falsifying hospice records."
My vision blurred with a red, murderous haze. I didn't say a word. I walked straight to the heavy oak double doors of the East Wing and turned the brass handle.
It was locked from the outside. A deadbolt had been installed into the antique woodwork—fresh brass, barely three months old. I hadn't been up here late at night in months; whenever I visited at seven in the evening after work, Vanessa was always waiting outside to usher me in for ten minutes while my mother lay completely unconscious, before ushering me right back out so my mother could "rest."
Ryan stepped forward, produced a tension wrench and a rake pick, and had the deadbolt clicked open in four seconds flat.
I pushed the door open. The smell hit me first—not the sterile, clean scent of a well-maintained sickroom, but the stale, heavy odor of medicinal sedatives and neglect. The curtains were drawn tight. An IV bag hung from a chrome pole beside the grand four-poster bed, dripping a clear liquid into the fragile vein of my mother’s arm.
I walked to the bedside and clicked on the low amber reading lamp.
My mother looked like a shadow of the matriarch who had once sat on the boards of three philanthropic foundations. She was terrifyingly thin. Her silver hair was matted against the pillow, except around her face, where someone had recently brushed it—and I suddenly remembered the white towel Emily had been clutching to her chest earlier that day. Emily had been sneaking in here to wash my mother’s face and care for her when no one else was looking.
As the light hit her face, my mother’s eyelids fluttered. They didn't open with the vacant, brain-damaged stare Vanessa had described for months. They opened with sharp, agonizing lucidity.
When she saw me standing over her, without Vanessa behind me, tears immediately spilled over her sunken cheeks. Her left hand—the side that wasn't paralyzed—shot out with surprising strength and gripped my wrist like a vise.
"L-Lo..." she choked out, her tongue thick and sluggish from whatever was in that IV bag. "D-drugs... she..."
"Mom," I breathed, dropping to my knees beside the bed, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I immediately reached up and pinched the plastic clamp on the IV tubing, shutting off the flow of the drip. "I'm here. Don't try to talk too fast. Are you telling me you can understand me?"
She nodded frantically, sobbing without sound, her fingers digging into my skin. She looked toward the nightstand, where a leather-bound ledger sat beneath a stack of fashion magazines Vanessa had left behind, then pointed a trembling finger toward the wall safe hidden behind the oil painting of my father.
"She... stole..." my mother rasped, every syllable costing her immense physical agony. "Pois-on... Em-ily... saved me..."
"Emily?" I repeated, stunned.
My mother nodded again, her eyes wide with desperate gratitude. "Dumped... the pills... gave water..."
The puzzle pieces slammed together with the force of a freight train. My mother hadn't lost her mind to the stroke. Her speech was impaired, yes, and her body was weak, but her mind was intact. Vanessa and her fake doctor had been chemically restraining her—keeping her in a drug-induced coma whenever I was home so she couldn't talk to me, while systematically looting something from her behind my back. And Emily, my quiet, terrified housekeeper, had been risking everything to flush the oral sedatives and keep my mother hydrated and alive whenever Vanessa left the house.
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When Vanessa caught Emily in the room today, Emily hadn't been slacking off. She had been trying to keep my mother from dying of an overdose.
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