Chapter 6 - The Files in the Attic
Three days after the arrest, Eleanor’s lawyer secured her release on a massive bail, pending a formal indictment. A temporary restraining order kept her away from me and Lucy, but the terror of her freedom hung over my head like a guillotine.
I knew that a simple allergy-tampering charge might be dismissed as a "tragic mistake" by a sympathetic jury who saw an elderly grandmother confused by modern packaging. I needed more. I needed proof of who she really was.
While Lucy was at school, Jade and I drove to my late father’s old house—the house I had grown up in, which had been sitting empty and untouched since his passing two years ago.
The air inside was cold, smelling of dust and old paper.
"Are you sure about this, Clara?" Jade asked, shining a flashlight up the narrow attic stairs.
"I need to find Trevor's medical records," I said, pulling my coat tighter around myself. "If she did this to Lucy to make herself the savior, she did it to Trevor first. I know she did."
We spent hours in the dusty attic, shifting through boxes of old tax returns, photo albums, and old school papers. At the very back of the eaves, behind a stack of broken furniture, I found a locked steel lockbox.
I didn't have the key. I grabbed a rusty claw hammer from my father’s old workbench and slammed it against the latch until the metal shrieked and gave way.
Inside were medical files. Dozens of them.
But they weren't just reports. They were handwritten journals in Eleanor’s precise, elegant cursive. I opened one from the year Trevor died.
May you like
October 14th: Trevor’s fever has subsided. The house is too quiet. Nobody called today to check on us. Gave him a half-dose of the solution in his tea. By evening, the vomiting returned. Pastor Thomas came by with a casserole. Everyone is so supportive of my struggle.
I dropped the journal, my breath catching in my throat. It was all there. A meticulous diary of manufactured sickness.
