Chapter 2 - The Backup CameraParamedics arrived in seven minutes.
Police arrived in nine.
Eleanor spent those nine minutes rebuilding her face.
By the time Officer Maya Brooks entered the estate, Eleanor was composed.
Shocked.
Concerned.
Almost maternal.
“She slipped,” Eleanor said.
Sarah was on a stretcher.
“She pushed me.”
Eleanor gave a wounded laugh.
“She’s terrified. Of course she’s confused.”
Arthur stood near the front doors.
Officer Brooks turned to him.
“You called?”
“Yes.”
“What did you see?”
“Mrs. Vance place both hands on Sarah’s shoulders and push.”
Eleanor snapped:
“He works for me.”
Arthur answered without looking at her.
“Not anymore.”
That silenced the room.
At the hospital, doctors found Sarah badly bruised but stable.
The baby’s heartbeat remained strong.
Her husband, Ethan Vance, arrived twenty minutes later.
He rushed to the bed.
“What happened?”
Sarah looked at him.
“Your mother pushed me.”
His face emptied.
“No.”
Sarah stared.
Not anger yet.
Just disbelief.
Arthur stood in the doorway.
“She did.”
Ethan turned.
Arthur had known him since he was six years old.
Arthur had taught him to tie a tie.
Driven him to school.
Waited outside the emergency room when Ethan broke his wrist at fourteen.
Ethan trusted him.
That was why the next words hurt.
“I saw her do it.”
Ethan sat down.
Then his phone rang.
Eleanor.
He did not answer.
Officer Brooks arrived with an update.
“The main terrace camera was disabled at 3:12 p.m.”
Sarah closed her eyes.
Ethan asked:
“So there’s no video?”
Arthur cleared his throat.
“There may be.”
Everyone looked at him.
He explained the old system.
Ethan’s grandfather, Charles Vance, had installed a separate analog backup after a burglary twenty-five years earlier.
Most of the family believed it had been removed.
Arthur knew better.
It recorded to a sealed cabinet behind the reception-hall clock.
Ethan stared.
“My mother knows about every system in that house.”
Arthur shook his head.
“She knows about the new ones.”
Officer Brooks said:
“And the old one?”
Arthur’s expression changed.
“Your grandfather never told her where he moved the recorder.”
Then Brooks’s phone buzzed.
An officer at the estate.
She listened.
“What?”
Her eyes moved to Ethan.
“The clock cabinet is open.”
Arthur went still.
May you like
Brooks continued.
“And the recorder is gone.”
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