Chapter 2 - THE SECOND VOICE
Evelyn moved before anyone answered.
“That's mine.”
She reached toward the shed, but the officer stepped across the doorway.
“Back up.”
“It's private property.”
“So is the woman you locked inside.”
Maya's fingers slipped from my sleeve as the paramedics moved her toward the ambulance.
I followed, afraid that looking away might somehow put her back on that floor.
My mother called after me.
“Caleb, tell him who I am.”
I kept walking.
Inside the ambulance, Maya stared at the ceiling while a paramedic secured an IV.
“Is the baby okay?” she asked.
“We'll have the hospital check you both.”
He said it gently.
He didn't promise what he couldn't know.
Maya turned her face toward me.
“The bottles weren't mine.”
“Don't worry about that.”
Her grip tightened.
“Listen to me.”
I went still.
“They drank them in front of me.”
My throat closed.
“Who?”
Before she answered, a blood pressure cuff inflated around her arm.
She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting a wave of nausea.
I held a basin while the paramedic leaned closer.
At the hospital, they took her through a set of double doors.
A nurse stopped me long enough to ask questions I should have been able to answer.
When had Maya last eaten?
How much had she had to drink?
Had she fallen?
I didn't know.
Detective Lena Ortiz found me beside a vending machine I had been staring at for ten minutes.
“Your mother is being taken in,” she said.
“We need your account of what happened.”
“Did you hear the recorder?”
“We're securing everything first.”
“Please. Maya said someone helped her.”
Ortiz wrote that down.
She asked for names of people who had access to our home.
I was listing relatives when a nurse called me back.
Maya lay beneath clean blankets with a monitor beside her.
The doctor said she was severely dehydrated and needed continued observation.
Then she turned a screen toward us.
There was movement.
A heartbeat.
Maya cried without making a sound.
I bent over her hand.
After the doctor left, she whispered, “Your uncle Martin.”
Martin handled our family accounts.
He had helped me bury my father.
“He brought the recorder,” Maya said.
“He wanted me to confess.”
“To what?”
May you like
She looked at me as if the answer might hurt worse than anything already done.
“Stealing money from you.”
