Chapter 6 - What Was in the Glass
Back at the hospital, Elena was sitting upright when I arrived. She looked exhausted, but the first thing she asked was whether I'd eaten. I wanted to be furious with her for worrying about me. Instead I held her hand and admitted I'd been wrong about my mother.
“You were asking me to listen,” I said. “I kept asking you to make peace.”
Elena watched a nurse adjust the monitor. “She knew exactly which words would make you doubt me.”
We sat with that truth until Detective Park arrived with news from the lab. The glass Elena had knocked from Alma's hand had been recovered beneath the nightstand. It contained water mixed with a prescription sedative. The medication was not prescribed to Elena.
“She tried to make me drink it,” Elena said quietly. “She called it something to help me calm down.”
Park asked for permission to photograph the faint bruises around Elena's wrist. Elena nodded, then asked to see the pictures herself. I realized she needed proof as much as the detective did. Pain was one thing; having your own family tell you it hadn't happened was another.
A nurse entered with a bouquet of white lilies. The delivery card read, FORGIVE THE CONFUSION. LOVE, MOM.
I carried the flowers straight to the hallway.
At the nurses' station, a clerk told me the person who ordered them had also tried to update Elena's emergency-contact information. I asked whose name she'd given.
“Mrs. Alma Hernandez. She said she had power of attorney.”
“She doesn't.”
The clerk showed me a faxed document. At the bottom was a signature that looked like Elena's until you saw the way the final letter curled. Elena always wrote her name in a sharp, straight line. This signature ended in a loop.
Park took a copy and asked the hospital to preserve the fax logs.
When I returned to the room, Elena was staring at a photo on her phone. It showed our bedroom dresser with its bottom drawer removed and a narrow space behind it.
“I didn't hide the folder there because I thought Alma was clever,” she said. “I hid it there because I thought you'd come home before she did.”
I asked whether there was anyone else who knew about it.
May you like
Elena turned the screen toward me. A message had arrived from an unknown number at 11:42 that morning:
I KNOW WHAT YOU HID. NEXT TIME, THE DOCTOR WON'T GET THERE IN TIME.
