PART 2
Minutes later, police sirens sounded outside.
As the officers approached, I noticed Aunt Beatrice standing near the hallway, typing a message on her phone. Just before she turned off the screen, I saw four words:
He’s starting to suspect.
At the same moment, Derek quietly moved toward the back staircase.
I stepped in front of him.
“Nobody goes upstairs,” I said. “Nobody touches anything.”
Derek lowered his eyes. There was a faint mark across one side of his face, as if he had hurriedly tried to cover it with makeup.
Something had happened upstairs before I returned.
I just didn’t know how much my family had hidden—or why the executive who signed my paychecks was about to become part of the investigation.
Detective Marisol Reyes arrived with two officers and a medical examiner. She was calm, direct, and probably in her late forties. While the others secured the house, she asked me to step onto the porch.
“Tell me exactly what you know,” she said.
“My wife is dead. My daughter says my brother frightened her and my mother took her phone. My father is trying to point us upstairs. My aunt wants to rush the funeral. And someone just texted that I’m starting to suspect something.”
Detective Reyes glanced through the window at the crowded living room.
“Has anyone moved your wife’s belongings?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has anyone told you how she died?”
My mother answered from behind me.
“A sudden cardiac event. Clara had been under enormous pressure.”
“Who called emergency services?” Detective Reyes asked.
Teresa’s mouth tightened.
“There was no point. She was already gone.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
The silence that followed was the first honest thing I had heard since arriving home.
There had been no 911 call.
No ambulance report.
No hospital record.
According to my mother, Clara had become unresponsive in the upstairs bedroom, and the family had contacted Aunt Beatrice instead.
Detective Reyes asked everyone to remain in separate rooms. She sent Lily with a victim-services counselor and a neighbor she trusted. Before Lily left, she held my hand tightly.
“Daddy, I tried to help Mommy,” she said. “She told me to remember the number three.”
“What number three?”
Lily looked toward my father.
“Grandpa knows.”
Arthur lifted his hand from the wheelchair armrest and pointed beneath the cushion again.
This time Detective Reyes helped me search.
