Chapter 4 - THE CAMERA
“I wasn’t in Noah’s room at 2:13,” I said.
Alexander looked up from the phone. “I believe you.”
“Then why send that?”
“To make us argue.”
He called the head of security, Marcus Hale. Marcus checked the hallway cameras while I stood in Noah’s doorway, listening to the little boy breathe.
At 2:13 that morning, I had been asleep. I remembered because Noah’s fever had broken before midnight, and I had finally gone to my room. The camera footage showed someone in a black uniform entering his room.
The person’s back was to the lens.
“She’s about Emma’s height,” Marcus said.
“Can you get another angle?” Alexander asked.
“The camera by the nursery stairwell stopped recording at 2:08.”
I looked at the screen again. The woman carried a small white bottle.
“What is that?” I asked.
Marcus enlarged the image. The label blurred.
Alexander was already moving.
We woke the on-call pediatrician and checked Noah. He was sleeping normally, with no sign that he had been given anything. The doctor said we could let him rest, but asked us to keep watch and call if anything changed.
I searched the shelf above his dresser. His fever medicine was there, unopened since the previous evening. Beside it sat a bottle I had never seen.
Marcus put on gloves and bagged it.
Alexander read the label through the plastic. “Lavender sleep spray.”
“I don’t use that,” I said. “Noah hates the smell.”
“Who bought it?”
Mrs. Bell handled most household supplies. So did three other staff members.
By dawn, the rumor had changed. An anonymous account claimed I had gone into Noah’s room at night to make him dependent on me. The account posted a cropped still from the security footage.
My face wasn’t visible, yet people had already decided it was me.
I watched Alexander read the posts over breakfast.
“I can make a statement,” he said.
“Say what? That I didn’t do it? Whoever sent that picture has another one ready.”
He set down his phone.
“What do you suggest?”
“Find the person in the uniform.”
Marcus returned with a small victory. He had recovered footage from a camera in the laundry corridor. It showed the woman returning from Noah’s room and walking past a mirror.
Her face appeared for less than a second.
Mrs. Bell.
Alexander exhaled. “We have her.”
But Marcus didn’t look relieved.
“The timestamp on this camera is different,” he said. “It reads 1:13.”
“An hour off?” I asked.
“Exactly one hour.”
He opened the settings report. Someone had changed the system clock during the night.
Then the house phone rang.
May you like
Alexander answered on speaker.
A woman’s voice said, “If you release that footage, I’ll release the rest of what Emma did before she came to Sterling House.”
