Chapter 4 - A Guest Knows Too Much
The police separated everyone before midnight.
Victoria was taken to a sitting room with two detectives. Daniel refused to answer questions without counsel, and Maya immediately warned Clara not to confront him alone.
But the party had already become evidence.
Guests were asked to remain in the mansion until statements could be taken. Half-finished champagne sat beside numbered evidence markers, and the glittering room looked less like a celebration than a stage abandoned after a crime.
Clara sat in Marcus’s study with an ice pack pressed to her shoulder.
Marcus stood at the window.
He had barely spoken since hearing Victoria say Daniel changed the plan.
“Say something,” Clara whispered.
He turned.
His face was pale with anger.
“I’m trying not to say the wrong thing.”
“To me?”
“To everyone.”
He crossed the room and knelt in front of her.
“I brought you into this house.”
“You didn’t push me down those stairs.”
“My mother did.”
The words sounded poisonous to him.
Clara took his hand.
“And my father may have helped her.”
Neither of them knew what to do with that symmetry.
A knock interrupted them.
Maya entered with Detective Elena Ruiz, a composed woman in her late forties with tired eyes and a legal pad already full of names.
“We need to ask Clara about the first fall,” Ruiz said. “But there’s something else you should hear first.”
She closed the door.
“One of your guests tried to leave through the catering entrance.”
Marcus frowned. “Who?”
“Dr. Andrew Bell.”
Clara knew the name.
Andrew was Daniel’s longtime physician and a family friend who had treated Clara’s sprained wrist after the staircase fall.
“He said he felt sick,” Ruiz continued. “But when an officer asked for his coat-check ticket, he dropped this.”
She placed a small plastic evidence bag on the desk.
Inside was a silver bracelet charm shaped like a key.
Clara stared.
“I’ve seen that.”
Marcus looked at her.
“Where?”
“The night I fell.”
Memory returned in fragments.
Darkness.
Pain.
A voice telling her not to move.
A hand near her face.
Something silver swinging from a wrist.
“I thought it was a nurse,” Clara said.
Ruiz’s expression sharpened.
“What happened after the fall?”
“Marcus called an ambulance.”
“I did,” Marcus said. “But before they arrived, Andrew was here.”
Clara looked at him. “He was?”
Marcus nodded slowly.
“He said he’d been driving nearby.”
Ruiz wrote something down.
Maya looked disturbed. “That’s convenient.”
Clara closed her eyes, forcing herself to remember.
Andrew had crouched beside her.
He had pressed two fingers against her neck.
Then he had said, very calmly, “She’s disoriented. Don’t let her talk. Keep her still.”
At the time it had sounded medical.
Now it sounded like control.
“There was something else,” Clara said.
Everyone waited.
“He gave me water.”
Marcus frowned. “No. I brought you water.”
“No. Before that.”
She looked at him.
“Andrew had one of the house staff bring a glass.”
Ruiz asked, “Did you drink it?”
“Two sips.”
Marcus’s eyes darkened.
“What happened?”
“I got very sleepy.”
Ruiz closed her notebook.
“We’ll pull the hospital tox screen if it still exists.”
Maya folded her arms. “What does Andrew Bell have to do with Northbridge?”
Julian appeared at the study door.
“More than I thought.”
He held a laptop this time, not the phone.
“I searched the old corporate filings while police were interviewing Dad.”
He set the laptop on the desk.
Thomas Keene, the registered agent for Northbridge Advisory Group, had listed a business address in Hartford.
That address belonged to Bell Medical Consulting.
Clara stared at the screen.
“Andrew’s company?”
Julian nodded.
“For nine years.”
Marcus paced once across the room.
“So Victoria, Daniel, and Andrew are connected to the same shell company.”
“Looks like it.”
Ruiz raised a hand.
“Connected is not the same as conspiracy. We need records, communications, money flow.”
“Then start with this.”
A new voice came from the doorway.
Everyone turned.
An elderly man in a catering uniform stood there holding a folded napkin.
Marcus recognized him immediately.
“Henry?”
Henry Lawson had worked at the Sterling mansion for thirty-one years before retiring. He sometimes returned for major family events because, as he liked to say, he trusted no one else with the silver.
His hands shook as he entered.
“I should have said something years ago.”
He placed the napkin on the desk.
Inside was an old brass key.
Clara looked at the stamped number.
B-17.
Henry looked directly at her.
“Your mother gave me that the week before she died.”
May you like
Clara stopped breathing.
“She told me if Daniel ever came looking for it, I was to lie.”
