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“Alex, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Sit down.”
“I’m not your prisoner.”
“No. But until police arrive, nobody goes upstairs and nobody touches anything.”
Derek’s jaw tightened.
And that’s when I noticed something I’d missed before.
A faint reddish line ran along his cheek.
It was partly covered by what looked like makeup.
A scratch.
Clara kept her nails long.
I looked at Derek.
He looked away.
Then Aunt Beatrice turned her back to us.
She pulled out her phone and began typing.
For some reason, I watched her.
Just before she locked the screen, I caught four words.
He’s starting to suspect.
My stomach dropped.
“Who were you texting?”
She froze.
“No one.”
“Show me.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Beatrice.”
“This is my private phone.”
Then the first siren sounded outside.
Derek immediately tried moving toward the back staircase.
I stepped in front of him.
“Nobody goes upstairs.”
His voice became low.
“You have no idea what you’re doing.”
I stared into his eyes.
“That’s becoming very obvious.”
Less than a minute later, two patrol officers entered the house.
Officer Medina, a woman in her forties, immediately took control of the room.
Everyone was separated.
The funeral preparations were stopped.
When Aunt Beatrice protested, Officer Medina looked directly at her.
“Until we establish that this was a natural death, nobody removes the deceased from this property.”
Beatrice suddenly became pale.
And somehow, that frightened me more than anything else.
I told Officer Medina everything.
My business trip.
The fact that nobody had notified me.
Lily’s accusations.
Clara’s missing phone.
Where we’d found it.
Derek’s scratch.
My father’s desperate attempts to point us upstairs.
Then I handed Officer Medina Clara’s phone.
She looked at it.
Then she looked at me.
And the expression on her face told me something I wasn’t prepared to hear.
“Mr. Henderson,” she said quietly, “I think we need to find out what your wife was trying to tell you before she died.”
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