Chapter 8 - The Mistress with the Black PurseNatalie Crane refused to speak for six hours.
She sat in an interrogation room wearing stolen hospital scrubs, her wrists cuffed to the table, her expression empty but furious.
Detective Brooks placed the syringe evidence photo in front of her.
“You walked into a guarded hospital room dressed as a nurse and tried to inject a woman who had already survived one murder attempt,” Brooks said. “That is not loyalty. That is stupidity wearing comfortable shoes.”
Natalie stared at the wall.
Hale sat across from her. “Victor is gone. He left you behind.”
Her jaw flexed.
“He wouldn’t.”
Hale slid another paper across the table.
Bank records.
Victor had emptied three accounts overnight.
None included Natalie.
“He took the money,” Hale said. “He took his passport. He took a plane. He did not take you.”
Natalie’s eyes flickered.
There it was.
The first crack.
Brooks leaned in. “He asked you to risk prison while he ran.”
“He loves me,” Natalie whispered.
“No,” Hale said. “He uses people. Ask his wife. Ask his daughter. Ask his mother, who is sitting in county lockup right now pretending she doesn’t know she raised a monster.”
Natalie’s eyes filled, but she blinked the tears away angrily.
“You don’t understand. Sarah was going to destroy everything.”
“By exposing stolen charity money?”
Natalie looked at him sharply.
Hale nodded. “We know.”
Natalie laughed once, bitter and small.
“You think this started with money?”
Hale waited.
Natalie looked down at her cuffed hands.
“It started with Emma.”
At the hospital, Sarah sat up straighter when Hale called.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
Hale’s voice came through the speaker. “Natalie says Victor discovered something about Emma’s trust six months ago.”
Sarah’s fingers tightened around the phone.
“My father’s will?”
“More than that.”
Sarah looked at Claire, who was sitting near the window.
Claire’s face had gone pale.
Sarah noticed.
“Claire?”
Her sister’s eyes filled with fear.
“What do you know?”
Claire stood slowly. “Sarah, I swear I didn’t know until after Dad died.”
“Know what?”
Claire covered her mouth.
Sarah’s voice sharpened. “Claire.”
Claire whispered, “Emma isn’t just your beneficiary.”
Sarah’s heart began to pound.
“What are you talking about?”
“Dad named her as the sole future owner of the foundation. Not because she was your daughter.” Claire swallowed. “Because she was his.”
Silence filled the room.
Sarah stared at her.
“That’s impossible.”
“I don’t mean biologically,” Claire said quickly. “I mean legally. Dad filed adoption papers before he died. Secretly. He made Emma his legal heir.”
Sarah shook her head. “Why would he do that without telling me?”
“Because he suspected Victor. He knew Victor was using you. He wanted to protect Emma in case something happened.”
Sarah’s eyes filled with a different kind of grief.
Her father had died suddenly three years earlier after a stroke.
Or at least that was what she had been told.
Hale’s voice came back through the phone.
“Sarah, Natalie says Victor believed if Emma died after you, the assets would revert to him as surviving spouse through a loophole Lorraine’s lawyers created.”
Sarah could not breathe.
Claire whispered, “Oh my God.”
Emma walked in carrying a paper cup of apple juice.
She stopped when she saw the adults’ faces.
“What happened?”
Sarah forced herself to smile, but it broke halfway.
“Nothing, baby.”
Emma looked at Detective Hale through the phone.
“Did Daddy do something else?”
No one answered.
Emma set down the juice.
Then she reached into the pocket of her cardigan and pulled out something small.
A flash drive.
Sarah gasped.
Emma looked at her mother.
“Grandma took the picture frame,” she said. “But I switched the flash drive before she came upstairs.”
Hale’s voice changed.
“Emma, where did you hide the real one?”
Emma held it up.
“In my stuffed bunny.”
For the first time since the funeral, Sarah laughed and cried at the same time.
May you like
Victor had underestimated his wife.
But he had completely failed to understand his daughter.
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