Chapter 2 - Her Mother Called Me a Dangerous Man
The emergency room doors closed behind Clara before I could follow her.
Doctors rushed her into a trauma bay at St. Francis Hospital while an obstetric team monitored our daughter. Clara’s heart rate was dangerously low, her breathing shallow, and her body temperature several degrees below normal.
She had not suffered cardiac arrest.
She had been heavily drugged.
A state trooper separated everyone from the chapel into different waiting areas. Helena and Marcus arrived with an attorney less than forty minutes later. Dr. Crane disappeared before the ambulance left the crematorium.
I stood at the nurses’ station with Clara’s wedding ring clenched in my fist when Helena walked toward me.
“This is your fault,” she said.
I stared at her. “You put a living woman in a coffin.”
“You attacked Marcus in front of witnesses and delayed emergency treatment with your hysterics.”
“I found her pulse.”
“You imagined what you wanted to imagine.”
A nurse looked over from behind the desk. Helena lowered her voice but not her anger.
“Clara had a complicated pregnancy. Stephen explained that certain postmortem movements can occur.”
“Then why did Stephen run?”
Her lips tightened.
Marcus approached with a red mark across his cheek where he had struck the coffin stand. “Our attorney says you assaulted me.”
“You tried to close the coffin on your sister.”
“I was protecting my mother from a violent man.”
“You kept checking the time because you needed Clara burned before anyone examined her.”
He stepped close. “Be careful.”
“You should have told yourself that this morning.”
Helena suddenly raised her voice.
“My daughter nearly died because this man isolated her from her family!”
Every head in the waiting room turned.
She pointed at me as though she were delivering a verdict. “Clara told us she was afraid of him. He controlled her appointments, her finances, and who she could speak to. Now he’s using her medical crisis to attack us.”
The lie was so smooth that several strangers looked at me with suspicion.
A trooper moved between us. “Mrs. Vale, step back.”
Helena’s eyes remained fixed on mine. “Ask Daniel why Clara changed the locks on her home office last month.”
I had not known she had changed them.
“Ask him why she stopped sleeping in their bedroom.”
That part was true.
For two weeks, Clara had slept in the nursery, telling me the firmer mattress helped her back. She had become distracted and secretive. She had taken calls outside and shut her laptop whenever I entered the room.
I had assumed she was anxious about the baby.
Helena saw the uncertainty on my face and smiled faintly.
“Even you didn’t know your own wife.”
The doors to the trauma unit opened before I could answer.
A doctor named Maya Patel walked toward me. “Mr. Mercer?”
I stepped forward.
“Your wife is alive. We’ve stabilized her breathing, and the fetal heart rate has improved.”
My knees nearly gave out.
“Can I see her?”
“Soon. She’s unconscious, and we don’t know when she’ll wake up. Toxicology found a combination of sedatives and a heart-rate medication in her system. Together, they slowed her pulse and breathing to an extreme level.”
“Could that make someone look dead?”
“To someone performing a careless examination, possibly. To a competent physician with proper equipment, no.”
We both looked toward the chair where Dr. Crane should have been sitting.
Dr. Patel continued, “The medication was administered within several hours of her arrival. We’re notifying law enforcement.”
Helena moved closer. “Clara had prescriptions.”
“Not for these doses.”
Marcus’s attorney immediately took him by the arm.
Evelyn sat alone near the vending machines, still wearing the black dress from the chapel. She had been trembling since we arrived. When Helena and Marcus were taken to separate interview rooms, Evelyn came to me.
“I need to tell you something,” she whispered.
“Tell the police.”
“I will. But you need to understand why Helena is trying to make you look abusive.”
She opened her purse and handed me a small silver key.
“Clara gave me this two weeks ago. She said if anything happened to her, I should give it only to you.”
“What does it open?”
“A safe-deposit box at First Connecticut Bank.”
I looked at the key. “What was she hiding?”
Evelyn glanced toward the interview rooms.
“She thought her father had been murdered.”
Clara’s father, Warren Vale, had died eight years earlier from what the family described as a sudden heart attack. Dr. Crane had signed his death certificate too.
He had also been cremated before sunset.
My stomach tightened.
“Why didn’t Clara tell me?”
“She said the moment you knew, Helena would see it on your face. She was trying to keep you and the baby safe.”
The doors opened again, and a nurse motioned for me.
Clara lay beneath white hospital blankets, connected to machines that measured every fragile beat of her heart. Her face was still pale, but it no longer looked lifeless.
I sat beside her and pressed her wedding ring into her palm.
“You were protecting me,” I whispered. “And I thought you were pulling away.”
Her fingers did not move.
A nurse entered carrying a clear evidence bag. Inside was the white maternity dress Clara had worn in the coffin.
“We found something sewn into the lining,” she said.
It was a memory card wrapped in plastic.
May you like
On the front, Clara had written one word.
DANIEL.
