Chapter 3 - Eleven Days Missing
The first time Jason nearly killed me, I apologized for frightening him.
I remembered waking beneath harsh hospital lights with a plastic tube in my chest and pain so deep that breathing felt like swallowing broken glass.
A nurse leaned over me.
"Mrs. Mitchell?"
I tried to answer.
No sound came out.
"You're in the hospital."
"You've been unconscious."
I looked at the white ceiling.
Something beeped nearby.
Then I remembered.
The stairs.
The argument.
Jason's hands.
I tried to sit up.
Pain tore through my ribs.
The nurse gently held my shoulder.
"Don't move."
"You're safe here."
Safe.
I almost laughed.
Jason was standing behind her.
He wore the same blue sweater he'd had on when he pushed me.
He held a paper cup of coffee and looked appropriately devastated.
"Baby," he whispered.
"Thank God."
The nurse turned.
"Mr. Mitchell, please give her some room."
Jason stepped closer anyway.
He took my hand.
His fingers pressed into the soft skin between my thumb and wrist.
Nobody else noticed.
But I understood.
Don't speak.
Not here.
Not now.
I closed my eyes.
And when the police officer arrived to ask about my fall, I told him I didn't remember.
For six years, I believed that single lie had destroyed my last chance to escape.
Now Daniel sat beside me in his office, opening a folder containing the report Dr. Reed had provided to investigators.
We had left the courthouse through a private exit.
Two journalists had tried to question us.
Daniel refused to comment.
One shouted, "Mrs. Mitchell, are you accusing your husband of attempted murder?"
I kept walking.
The answer was complicated.
Jason had hurt me so many times that I no longer knew which incident might legally qualify as an attempt to kill me.
But there was no confusion about his intent that night.
He had wanted to silence me.
Daniel spread three photographs across his desk.
I stared at them.
One showed our old staircase.
Another showed the damaged banister.
The third showed a dark stain near the bottom step.
"These were taken by the responding officer," Daniel said.
"I thought Jason had them destroyed."
"He couldn't destroy copies already stored in an evidence archive."
I touched the corner of the photograph.
I recognized the staircase.
I recognized the cream-colored wall.
And I remembered Jason kneeling beside me afterward.
"You made me do this," he said.
Then he called an ambulance.
For years, I had confused that call with mercy.
Now I understood he had been protecting himself.
Daniel opened another document.
"Dr. Reed says he was called to St. Catherine's on your second day."
"Jason told me he was there because we were friends."
"According to Reed, Jason wanted him to persuade the attending physician to change the cause of injury."
I stared at Daniel.
"Did he?"
"Not exactly."
"What does that mean?"
"The attending physician refused to alter her clinical notes."
"Jason couldn't change those records?"
"Not the original signed entries."
I looked down at the next page.
"But a separate insurance narrative was revised."
I read the sentence twice.
Then a third time.
Dr. Reed had helped submit an account suggesting that my injuries resulted from a fall during a household accident.
He had also approved a statement declaring me medically unfit to resume my executive duties.
That statement had allowed Jason to take temporary control over the company's internal approvals.
Temporary.
The word stood out.
Because the control had never returned to me.
I sat back.
"He used my injuries to take the company."
Daniel nodded.
"We believe that was part of it."
"Part?"
He hesitated.
Then slid another paper toward me.
It was a copy of an executive resolution dated eleven days after my hospitalization.
The resolution stated that I had voluntarily relinquished my voting rights because of an extended medical incapacity.
My signature appeared at the bottom.
I stared at it.
"I never signed this."
"We know."
"That isn't my handwriting."
"We have a forensic document examiner reviewing it."
I read the date.
June 14.
At 9:30 that morning, according to the resolution, I had appeared before two witnesses and signed away my voting authority.
At 9:30 that morning, I had been lying in intensive care.
Under heavy sedation.
With a chest tube still draining blood.
I looked at Daniel.
"Who witnessed the signature?"
He didn't answer immediately.
Instead, he turned the page.
The first witness was Jason Mitchell.
The second was Dr. Nathaniel Reed.
I felt a strange calm settle over me.
Not because the discovery hurt less.
But because something that had tormented me for six years finally made sense.
I had spent so much time wondering why I couldn't remember certain documents.
Why Jason insisted I had consented.
Why everyone acted as though I had willingly stepped away from the business I helped create.
I hadn't forgotten.
It hadn't happened.
Daniel watched me carefully.
"Iris?"
"I'm here."
"We can stop."
"No."
I took a breath.
"Show me everything."
He nodded.
The next document contained a list of corporate entities.
Some were familiar.
Mitchell Medical Technologies.
Mitchell Clinical Systems.
MHT Holdings.
Others weren't.
Ashford Biomedical Solutions.
Calder Research Group.
The Eleanor Price Foundation.
I pointed at the last name.
"Why did Jason create a foundation in Eleanor's name?"
Daniel folded his hands.
"At first, we believed it was a charitable organization."
"Isn't it?"
"It has charitable registrations."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"No."
He looked at me.
"It doesn't."
He explained that funds had moved between several affiliated companies.
Some transfers appeared to be legitimate payments for consulting or intellectual-property licensing.
Others lacked supporting invoices.
A few went to entities that seemed to have no employees, offices, or clear business purpose.
I listened carefully.
Then I asked the question that mattered most.
"How much?"
Daniel paused.
"Investigators haven't established the full amount."
"How much have they traced?"
"Approximately eighteen million dollars in transfers requiring further explanation."
My mouth went dry.
Eighteen million.
Jason had told me our company struggled to afford insurance increases.
He had cut employee benefits.
He had fired experienced technicians.
He had claimed that rising costs forced him to eliminate a patient-safety team I spent years building.
And all that time, money had been moving somewhere I couldn't see.
"Did Eleanor discover this?"
"We don't know."
"But you think she did."
"We think she discovered something Jason wanted concealed."
I looked again at the photograph of the staircase.
"He hurt me after I asked about the foundation."
Daniel nodded slowly.
"That's one of the connections we're investigating."
The memory returned with frightening clarity.
It was a Thursday evening.
I had found an internal budget showing a transfer to the Eleanor Price Foundation.
Eleanor had been dead for almost a year.
I asked Jason why her name appeared on an account receiving nearly half a million dollars.
He told me it funded a scholarship.
I asked which university administered the scholarship.
He said I was interrogating him.
I said I only wanted to understand.
He grabbed my arm.
I pulled away.
Then he asked whether I had been searching his private files.
I answered truthfully.
"These aren't your private files."
"They belong to our company."
Something changed in his face.
It wasn't anger at first.
It was calculation.
Then he stepped toward me.
I remembered backing toward the staircase.
The rest came in fragments.
His hand striking my shoulder.
My heel slipping.
The hard wooden edge.
The terrible impact.
And afterward, his voice.
"You should have trusted me."
Daniel closed the folder.
"That's enough for today."
I shook my head.
"There's something else."
"What?"
"The night he pushed me, Jason took my phone."
"Do you remember what happened to it?"
"He said it broke in the fall."
Daniel waited.
"But I had sent someone a message before the argument."
"Who?"
"Eleanor's younger sister."
Daniel straightened.
"Do you remember her name?"
"Marianne."
"Marianne Price?"
"Yes."
"What did you send her?"
I closed my eyes.
I could almost see the screen.
Marianne had contacted me after Eleanor's funeral.
She said Eleanor had been worried about something at work.
She asked whether I knew why her sister had been carrying copies of internal reports home.
I had been afraid to answer.
But the night Jason attacked me, I found the foundation transfer.
So I sent Marianne a message.
I think Eleanor was right.
Can we talk?
Daniel reached for his phone.
"Do you know what happened to Marianne?"
I shook my head.
"We lost touch."
He stood.
"Don't call her yourself."
"Why?"
"Because if she has information, we need to approach this carefully."
I looked at him.
"Do you think she's in danger?"
"I don't know."
His phone rang before he could say anything else.
It was Agent Sloan.
Daniel put the call on speaker.
"Rebecca?"
"We found the original admitting nurse from St. Catherine's."
My heart started pounding.
"The nurse who treated Iris?"
"Yes."
"Will she cooperate?"
"She's already given us a statement."
Sloan paused.
"And she remembers something that wasn't recorded in the final insurance file."
I gripped the edge of the desk.
"What?"
Sloan's voice softened.
"Iris, when you regained consciousness, you tried to tell her something."
I stared at the phone.
"What did I say?"
"She wrote it down in her personal contemporaneous notes."
I barely breathed.
Sloan continued.
"According to her statement, you told her, 'He pushed me because I found the missing patient files.'"
The room seemed to tilt.
Because until that moment, I had believed the foundation transfer was what triggered Jason's violence.
But apparently I had known something else.
Something I could no longer remember.
Daniel looked at me.
"Missing patient files?"
I shook my head slowly.
Then another memory surfaced.
A locked cabinet in Jason's old office.
A stack of medical incident reports.
And one page with an unfamiliar number printed in red.
417.
My hands began trembling.
"Daniel."
"Yes?"
"I think I know where Eleanor's records went."
He leaned forward.
"Where?"
I looked at the dark window.
"Not to a storage facility."
I swallowed.
"Jason put them somewhere nobody would ever think to look."
"Where, Iris?"
I raised my eyes.
"In the company archives."
Daniel frowned.
"That's the first place investigators would search."
"Not those archives."
I shook my head.
"The old paper archive."
"The one inside the laboratory we shut down after the contamination scare."
Then I remembered one more thing.
The facility hadn't been shut down because of contamination.
That was only what Jason told the employees.
May you like
It had been shut down three weeks after Eleanor died.
And the last person to enter the building had been me.
