Chapter 7
Part 7: Returning to the Crime Scene
The apartment was suffocatingly quiet when I unlocked the front door. The morning light cut through the dust motes, illuminating the exact state of chaos I had fled hours prior—the harrowing reality captured in Screenshot_16.jpg. The large, dark-framed wedding portrait still hung crookedly on the wall, the glass completely shattered in a violent burst directly over my painted face. On the bed, the damp, pink silk nightgown Clara had worn backward in her disorientation lay crumpled among the tangled white sheets.
I walked over to the wall where the red juice from the broken carafe had stained the paint. Looking closely, I noticed a small, metallic object wedged behind the baseboard directly beneath the impact site.
I knelt down, pulling it free with my pocket knife. It was a hidden, motion-activated surveillance camera, its tiny lens pointed directly at our bed.
My stomach dropped. My mother hadn't just been feeding me lies over the phone; she had been actively watching our home. I rushed to the kitchen counter, grabbing my laptop and plugging the camera's memory card into the reader.
The video files timestamped from three days ago showed Eleanor entering our apartment while we were both out. She didn't look for jewelry or cash; she walked straight to the entryway mail basket, pulled out a thick white envelope from the Pacific Northwest Women’s Clinic, and slid it into her trench coat pocket. Before she left, she adjusted the frame of our wedding portrait, positioning the glass carafe on the bedside table where an disoriented, falling person would inevitably strike it.
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She hadn't just predicted Clara's medical emergency—she had systematically prepared the environment to ensure it looked like a violent domestic dispute when I arrived.
"You monstrous woman," I hissed into the empty kitchen, my hands shaking as I copied the video files onto an external drive. I took a photograph of the physical camera in my hand, matching the grim perspective of Screenshot_16.jpg, documenting every single layer of the trap she had set for my wife.
