Chapter 14 - The Day Emily Died
Emily had died after a sudden medical emergency at home. The official report said the ambulance arrived quickly and the doctors had done everything they could. I had never questioned the timeline. I had been too busy trying to keep Lily fed, bathed, and asleep while strangers carried flowers through the house.
Ben reviewed the old records and found a gap of twenty-three minutes between the first emergency call logged by the county and the call that reached the dispatch center. The report listed a second call from the estate, but the caller's name had been left blank.
"Could be a clerical error," I said, though I no longer believed in convenient errors.
Ben shook his head. "It could be. But Owen signed the property access log that night. He recorded leaving at 6:12. Nora saw his truck before the ambulance came. We need the original dispatch audio."
The county clerk said the audio had been archived and could be requested by the family attorney. Ben filed the request. Meanwhile, I searched the study for the missing blue folder. Behind a row of old tax binders, I found a small envelope with Emily's handwriting on it: For Daniel, if Lily is ever afraid to speak.
Inside was a note, not a letter. Emily wrote that she had found irregular payments from the children's charity to a vendor called Rosebridge Consulting. She suspected someone was using the charity to move money from the family trust. She had asked Ben to investigate quietly because she feared that confronting the wrong person would put Lily at risk.
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At the bottom she had written: Owen knows where the records are. Don't trust anyone who says the gate was never open.
I remembered the night Emily died: the porch light left on, the unfinished cup of tea, the ambulance crew moving quickly through the hall. Grief had made those details blur together. Now I wrote every memory down, not because memory was proof, but because it could tell Ben which records to request.
