Chapter 3 - THE CASE THEY WERE BUILDING
The doctor asked Caleb to leave while she examined me.
He objected until the police officer stepped between us.
Alone, I answered questions about the date, the president, my medications and the route from my house to the hospital. I missed none of them.
The doctor wrote that I was alert, oriented and capable of making my own decisions.
That did not make Caleb’s petition disappear.
My attorney, Mara Chen, arrived before I was discharged. She read the draft and pointed to six incidents offered as proof of my decline: a missed cardiology appointment, an unpaid electric bill, a kitchen fire, repeated medication errors, a damaged car and “increasing hostility” toward Bianca.
The kitchen fire had been a smoking dish towel.
I had paid the electric bill, but Caleb had changed the online password.
My car had been scraped while Bianca borrowed it.
The medication errors bothered me most. Twice that month, pills had appeared in the wrong compartments of my organizer. Caleb blamed my memory and began photographing the mistakes.
Mara looked at the bruise forming beneath my stitches.
“Who had access to your medication?”
“All three of us.”
“Who scheduled your appointments?”
“Caleb.”
“Who receives your electronic bills?”
“He changed them to his email after Arthur died.”
She closed the petition.
“This isn’t proof that he manipulated anything. But it is enough to stop treating these events as separate.”
I returned home with Margaret rather than ride with my son. Bianca and Caleb had already gone ahead.
When we arrived, Arthur’s records were missing from the kitchen table.
The black envelope remained.
So did one page Caleb had overlooked beneath the refrigerator.
It showed the transfers had not gone directly to his failed startup. They had passed through a property-management company named Harbor Elm LLC.
I recognized the address.
It belonged to the private memory-care facility Bianca had threatened to send me to.
Margaret helped me photograph the page. Then I called Ruth Kaplan, the accountant named in Arthur’s letter.
“I need to know what Harbor Elm is,” I said.
May you like
Ruth did not ask why.
She only said, “Don’t confront Caleb until I show you what your husband found.”
