Chapter 4 - THE LOCKER KEY
I didn't open the door. I shoved the gold hospital bracelet and the rusted key deep into my jeans pocket and backed away from the entryway.
"Go away, Charles!" I shouted through the heavy oak door.
"Margaret, please. The press is having a field day. If our stock plummets, you and Olivia lose everything too!"
"I already have everything I need!"
He banged a fist against the wood. "Rebecca is lying! She’s an extortionist. I only paid for her clinic because she threatened to ruin the business! Margaret, she’s not just my mistress. She’s the daughter of Thomas Hayes."
I froze in the hallway.
Thomas Hayes. He was the lumber supplier who had sued us twenty years ago, claiming Charles stole his proprietary treatment process. The lawsuit ruined Thomas. He lost his business, his home, and eventually, his life to a heart attack.
"She targeted us, Margaret!" Charles pleaded through the door. "She seduced me to destroy what we built. Let me in!"
I stared at the door. If Rebecca was Thomas Hayes’s daughter, her motive for destroying Charles made terrifying sense. But that didn't explain my mother’s hidden carving, or the hospital bracelet in his coat.
"I'm calling the police, Charles," I said coldly.
Footsteps retreated from the porch, followed by the screech of tires pulling out of our driveway.
I didn't sleep that night. I sat by Olivia's door, clutching the rusted locker key.
The next morning, I dropped Olivia off at school and drove straight to St. Jude’s Medical Center, the hospital where my mother had spent her final days.
The key had a small number engraved on the back: B-42.
I bypassed the front desk and walked down to the basement, where the staff and long-term storage lockers were kept. The hallway smelled of bleach and old floor wax.
I found locker B-42. My hands shook as I inserted the rusted key. It turned with a sharp click.
Inside was a single, faded manila envelope.
I opened it. Inside were not business documents or share transfers. It was a stack of my mother's medical charts from her final week, stamped with the word CONFIDENTIAL.
Clipped to the front was a handwritten note from a nurse I didn't know.
“Mrs. Parker, as you suspected, your medication is being altered. Someone has been switching your heart medication with a heavy sedative. I have secured the blood work.”
My breath hitched. Charles didn't just steal from her. He expedited her death to stop her from finalizing the share transfer.
But as I pulled the blood work out of the envelope, a small object slipped out and clattered onto the linoleum floor.
I bent down and picked it up.
It was a child's drawing. Crayon on construction paper. It was a picture Olivia had drawn when she was five years old, of our family standing outside the furniture store.
Except someone had taken a red marker and crossed Charles’s face out.
May you like
And on the back of the drawing, in Rebecca’s handwriting, were three words:
He is mine.
