Chapter 4 - THE MISSING CARD
I asked the detective directly.
“Who collected the camera?”
“Initial responding officers,” she said.
“Who touched it before that?”
“We’re reviewing scene photographs.”
Daniel said nothing.
I noticed.
The detective left to finish paperwork, and the silence between us turned sharp.
“You should say it,” Daniel said.
“What?”
“Whatever you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking I landed hard enough to taste blood, and in the middle of all that, the one piece of evidence I may have captured disappeared.”
He nodded once. “Fair.”
“And I’m thinking the FBI was already in my family’s courtyard before I hit the ground.”
“Also fair.”
“So did you take the card?”
“No.”
I studied him.
His face didn’t change. It wasn’t the overconfident flatness of someone offended by being questioned. It was something more controlled. An answer he was willing to repeat under oath.
“Then who?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Not good enough.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
That answer slowed my anger more than denial would have.
He stepped closer. “Walk me through the balcony. Slowly.”
So I did.
I told him how I had gone upstairs before the estate press announcement because Marcus had vanished with a blue folder I recognized from our father’s office. I told him I had found him near the second-floor balcony overlooking the courtyard. He’d been flipping through estate papers he should not have been holding alone.
“What did you see?”
“Not everything. I started raising the camera because the folder was open.”
“To what page?”
“I caught the words controlling beneficiary and trustee succession.”
Daniel’s eyes sharpened.
Estate language.
Not charity language.
Not general family paperwork.
Trust control.
“Then what?” he asked.
“I said, ‘What are you doing with Dad’s folder?’ Marcus turned. He looked at the camera. Then he looked at me.”
“Did he try to talk first?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
I could still hear it. Low. Furious. Disbelieving.
He had said, “You were supposed to sign and go.”
I hadn’t understood it then.
I understood it less now.
“Sign what?” Daniel asked.
“I don’t know.”
“But he thought you did.”
“Yes.”
The detective returned with scene photos on her tablet. In one wide shot of the courtyard, I could see myself on the ground, Daniel kneeling, Marcus above, Eleanor at the railing.
In another, taken seconds later, my broken camera lay near the stone planter.
In the third, the camera was bagged.
Daniel leaned closer.
“Go back.”
The detective did.
He zoomed the second image.
A cream-colored heel stood two feet from my shattered camera.
Eleanor’s shoe.
And beside it, just at the edge of the frame, was her hand.
Not on the camera body.
Inside my small silver evening clutch that had spilled open when I fell.
A clutch where I sometimes kept spare memory cards.
Daniel looked at me.
Eleanor hadn’t just taken something from my camera.
She may have taken something from my bag.
May you like
And if Marcus had expected me to sign something, then whatever I captured or carried upstairs was already part of a larger plan.
📖 The missing card pointed straight to Eleanor, but the next clue showed my brother expected me to surrender far more than a photograph. 👇
