Chapter 4 - The Envelope on the Floor
Chaos erupted across the sixth-floor marble lobby the second my father hit the travertine tiles.
While Chloe shrieked and backed away so her white boots would not touch him, and Gwendolyn stood frozen clutching her handbag, I dropped straight to my knees beside Samuel and loosened his tight collar.
His skin was clammy and gray, his breathing shallow and rapid as he clawed weakly at his left arm.
"Elena, call an ambulance to the north entrance right now and bring the emergency defibrillator kit from the breakroom," I shouted over my shoulder while pressing two fingers against my father's racing carotid pulse.
Even as I tilted Samuel's head back to keep his airway clear, my eyes dropped for a fraction of a second to the floor beside his knee.
When Samuel had stumbled against Evan Cole on his way down, he had knocked open the zippered bottom compartment of the worn brown leather briefcase Samuel had carried since I was a child.
Lying face-up on the white marble right beside my shoe was a thick, yellowed manila envelope sealed with brittle red wax and addressed in my late mother's unmistakable handwriting: TO THE MARICOPA COUNTY CORONER—ONLY TO BE OPENED IF CLARA MERCER DIES BEFORE HER FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY.
Evan Cole spotted the yellowed envelope at the exact same instant I did.
Forget helping the sixty-year-old man having a cardiac episode on the floor—Evan lunged forward past Gwendolyn and reached down to snatch the envelope away from my knee.
Before Evan's manicured fingers could touch the paper, I scooped the envelope off the marble with my left hand and shoved it deep inside the zippered inner lining of my blazer, while Julian Vance stepped squarely in front of Evan to block him.
"Get your hands off that document, Paige, it belongs to your father's estate," Gwendolyn hissed, her voice cracking with sudden, unmistakable terror as she ignored her gasping husband on the floor.
"Why does a dead woman's letter to the county coroner terrify you more than your husband having a heart attack right in front of your feet, Gwendolyn," I asked coldly, grabbing the two sheriff's deputies by their sleeves as paramedics burst out of the service elevator with a rolling stretcher.
Samuel gripped my wrist with trembling, ice-cold fingers as the paramedics lifted him onto the gurney and slipped an oxygen mask over his face.
"Do not let her come in the ambulance with me, Paige," my father rasped weakly beneath the plastic mask, his wide, bloodshot eyes darting in sheer panic toward Gwendolyn.
"She put something in my coffee thermos this morning at the house—the same bitter drops I smelled in your mother's teacup the night she died," Samuel choked out before the paramedics wheeled him rapidly into the elevator.
Only Julian Vance and I had been kneeling close enough to hear what my father whispered beneath the hiss of the oxygen tank, and the words turned my blood to solid ice.
Nine years ago, the doctors had told us my forty-one-year-old mother died in her sleep from sudden, unexplained viral myocarditis.
And who had been the live-in private home-care nurse hired to look after my mother during those final three weeks of flu-like exhaustion?
Gwendolyn.
I stood up slowly as the elevator doors closed behind the paramedics, watching Gwendolyn and Evan whisper furiously to each other in the corner of the lobby before hurrying down the stairwell to intercept the ambulance at the hospital.
"We are not going to the hospital yet, Julian," I said, walking straight past Evan's bewildered private guards into the fire stairwell and pulling the yellowed envelope from my jacket as we reached Julian's locked luxury sedan in the underground garage.
Inside the car, with the doors locked and the engine running, I broke my mother's nine-year-old wax seal and slid out three pages of laboratory chromatography charts from a private toxicology lab in Tucson, along with a handwritten letter dated four days before her death.
"Read this aloud, Julian," I whispered, my hands shaking so hard the paper rattled.
"My name is Clara Reed-Mercer, and over the past fourteen days I have had my blood secretly tested after experiencing severe cardiac arrhythmia," Julian read in a hushed, horrified voice.
"The tests confirm fatal levels of digoxin and crushed oleander alkaloids are being mixed into my evening chamomile tea by my husband's mistress, Nurse Gwendolyn Brooks, so they can collect my life insurance and seize the Phoenix property."
"Because my husband Samuel controls my phone and car keys, I have hidden the original poisoned tea samples and the master encryption key to my family's real fortune inside the false sub-floor beneath the window seat of my daughter Paige's upstairs bedroom."
I stared at the letter as the entire puzzle of the last nine years—and the sudden urgency of Tuesday night's dinner ultimatum—slammed together with blinding clarity.
Gwendolyn and Chloe had not demanded my upstairs bedroom on Tuesday night for natural light or social-media videos!
When Samuel and Evan applied for the one-million-dollar loan last week, they must have found a reference to my mother's hidden vault key in Samuel's old safety-deposit box, and they needed me out of that bedroom immediately so they could tear up the oak floorboards beneath my window seat!
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Pulling out my phone, I opened the hidden nanny-cam security app I still had linked to the smoke detector in my old Phoenix bedroom, and my breath caught in my throat.
On the live high-definition video feed, Chloe was standing in the middle of my old bedroom with a heavy iron crowbar, and sitting open on the torn-up oak floorboards in front of her feet was my mother's steel sub-floor vault box—just as a black canister of arson accelerant was set down beside the curtains.
