Chapter 4 - Eighty-Seven SecondsTwo days after the bathroom incident, Natalie entered the mansion accompanied by Detective Price and a locksmith.
The house smelled of damp wood and industrial cleaning solution.
Professional water-remediation workers had already removed sections of saturated carpet after the police completed their initial scene documentation.
Several rooms remained sealed off.
The grand staircase, once the centerpiece of Natalie's home, had become something she struggled to look at.
Detective Price stopped beside the seventh step.
“You said you found part of a toy here?”
“A wheel. From Emily's wooden horse.”
“Did you pick it up?”
“No.”
The detective nodded.
“We recovered it during the initial response.”
Natalie looked toward the upper landing.
“Can we go to Bradley's study?”
“Yes. But let us handle anything potentially relevant.”
They climbed together.
The study door stood open.
Bradley's computer was gone.
So were several folders from his desk.
The blue notebook was nowhere to be seen.
Natalie stared at the empty space beside the window.
“He's been here.”
Detective Price examined the room.
“Do you know when these items disappeared?”
Natalie shook her head.
She had not entered the study for weeks before the incident.
Bradley had insisted that he needed privacy.
Now the word sounded different.
Privacy.
Control.
Secrecy.
They were not the same thing, but Bradley had used one to disguise the others.
Downstairs, a security technician named Marcus Bell met them in the library.
Natalie had hired his company to install cameras shortly after David died.
The system covered entrances, hallways, and the exterior grounds. There were no cameras in bathrooms or bedrooms.
Marcus opened his service laptop.
“I've checked the local recorder,” he said. “Most of the footage is still there.”
“Most?”
He turned the screen toward Natalie.
The upstairs hallway camera had stopped recording shortly before the bathroom incident.
The interruption lasted eighty-seven seconds.
Natalie felt her hands go cold.
“Was there a power failure?”
“Not a house-wide one.”
“Could someone have turned it off?”
Marcus hesitated.
“The recorder logs show an administrator command. We're preserving the system so the police can analyze it.”
“Whose account?”
“The one registered to Bradley Shaw.”
Detective Price asked him to explain the access logs without changing anything on the device.
Marcus complied.
The command had been issued from a device connected to the home's internal network.
Natalie stared at the missing eighty-seven seconds.
She imagined everything that might have happened during that gap.
Emily's small hand reaching for the wooden horse.
Bradley's grip around her arm.
The bathtub.
The splash.
A minute and twenty-seven seconds.
An impossibly short amount of time to destroy a child's sense of safety.
“Does this prove he planned it?” Natalie asked.
Detective Price answered carefully.
“It proves someone using that account interrupted the recording. We still need to establish who did it and why.”
Natalie nodded.
She was learning to distinguish what she feared from what she could prove.
Before leaving, Natalie visited Emily's bedroom.
It looked painfully ordinary.
Stuffed animals lined the bed.
A drawing of a rainbow hung crookedly above her desk.
On the nightstand stood David's photograph.
He was holding baby Emily in a hospital room, smiling with exhausted joy.
Natalie picked it up.
“You would have seen it,” she whispered.
Then she stopped.
Would he?
David had trusted people who betrayed him.
He had ignored warnings too.
Perhaps the mistake was not unique to Natalie.
Perhaps everyone saw what they were prepared to believe.
She turned toward the closet.
A small pink suitcase sat beneath Emily's winter coats.
Natalie opened it.
Inside were drawings, three dolls, and a birthday card Bradley had given Emily the previous summer.
To my favorite little girl. Love, Daddy Brad.
The handwriting made Natalie feel ill.
At the bottom of the suitcase lay a folded drawing.
It showed a large blue house, a yellow sun, and three stick figures.
One figure had been scratched out with a dark crayon.
Natalie unfolded it carefully.
On the back, Emily had written several shaky letters.
DADDY IS MAD.
Natalie sat on the floor.
For months, Emily had been communicating distress in the only ways she knew.
And Natalie had been translating those warnings into excuses.
Later that afternoon, Marcus telephoned with additional information.
He had found an older service ticket.
Someone had requested changes to the upstairs camera coverage six weeks earlier.
“Bradley said the system was waking him up with notifications,” Marcus explained.
“What did he ask you to change?”
“To disable motion alerts outside his study. We refused to disable recording without the account owner's approval.”
“I'm the account owner.”
“Exactly.”
Natalie closed her eyes.
“So he couldn't turn off the whole system.”
“Not through us. But he knew the administrator password.”
“How?”
“You listed him as an authorized household user last September.”
The month after their wedding.
Natalie remembered sitting beside Bradley on the couch while he offered to manage the home's technology.
Another helpful gesture.
Another door she had opened.
Before ending the call, Marcus mentioned something else.
“The hallway camera did record a few seconds before it went offline. The police have the original file.”
“What does it show?”
“Emily going toward Bradley's study.”
“Was she carrying anything?”
“A little wooden horse.”
Natalie pressed her hand over her mouth.
Marcus continued.
“She was smiling, Mrs. Carter.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“She was smiling when she went inside.”
That night, Detective Price sent Natalie a request to identify several household objects visible in photographs from the study.
One item made Natalie stop.
It was a small dark-red envelope recovered from a drawer that Bradley apparently had not emptied.
Across the front, in David Carter's familiar handwriting, were four words:
FOR THE DAY THEY LIE.
Natalie immediately called the detective.
“I know that handwriting.”
“Is it your late husband's?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what the message means?”
“No.”
The detective paused.
“Mrs. Carter, there's something else written inside the flap.”
Natalie waited.
“It's a name.”
“Whose name?”
“Warren Pike.”
Natalie knew that name.
May you like
Warren Pike had been David's business partner.
And he had been the man who introduced Bradley Shaw to her.
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