Chapter 7 - The Deputy Who Looked Away
Deputy Grant recognized the man in the final clip before the image finished loading. His name was Harold Pike, the deputy who had led the first response. He had resigned six months after Robert's death and died the following year. The clip showed him taking the camera's main storage unit from behind the birdhouse, then leaving the memory card by mistake.
"He knew the camera worked," Grant said. "And he knew there was something on it."
The county had reopened the drowning case that morning. Grant arranged for the footage to be copied by a digital forensics team and for the original card to be sealed. She also contacted the medical examiner who had reviewed Robert's death. The examiner remembered a bruise behind Robert's ear that had been described as consistent with a fall, but he had not seen the dock photographs when he wrote the report.
That evening, Wren finally told me why she had kept the folder from Caleb. Two weeks earlier, he had asked her to sign a statement saying I had begun forgetting names and leaving the stove on. He promised she could live in the lake house after the sale if she helped him.
"I told him no," she said. "He said I was choosing you over my own father."
I took her hand. "You shouldn't have had to choose."
Her phone rang. Caleb's name appeared. She let it go to voicemail. A moment later, a message arrived.
You don't know what Grandma did to Grandpa. Ask her why he was going to leave her.
Wren looked at me, confused and afraid.
May you like
I had never heard that accusation before.
And for the first time, I wondered whether Robert had been keeping a secret from me, too.
