Chapter 5 - Mrs. Gable Had Seen the Chain
Mrs. Gable had lived beside my mother for fourteen years.
She wasn't nosy.
That mattered.
Three days before the incident, she'd seen Mom cleaning the porch.
A brass chain was coiled beside the pillar.
Mrs. Gable had joked about it.
“Getting a guard dog?”
My mother had answered, “Something like that.”
At the time, neither woman thought much of the exchange.
Now Mrs. Gable couldn't stop thinking about it.
There was more.
Mom had asked her an unusual question that Tuesday morning.
What time do you leave for bridge club?
Mrs. Gable normally left at noon.
That day the meeting was canceled.
Mom hadn't known.
That was why Mrs. Gable had been home when I arrived.
The chain.
The timing.
The clipboard.
The photographs.
The questions about the neighbor's schedule.
None of it looked impulsive anymore.
But Mrs. Gable gave me one detail that complicated everything.
“She kept checking on Emma.”
“What?”
“Through the window. Every couple minutes.”
That didn't fit the picture forming in my head.
If my mother wanted Emma seriously harmed, why monitor her constantly?
Mrs. Gable hesitated.
“I think Diana expected something specific to happen.”
The second alarm.
I remembered the words on the clipboard.
Suddenly another possibility occurred to me.
Maybe my mother hadn't been waiting to see whether Emma became sick.
May you like
Maybe she'd been waiting to see exactly when.
And that meant the money might not have been the real purpose at all.
