Page 13 of One Last Lie

“It’ll only take a moment.”

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, then no.”

“I’m only trying to help, Isabella.”

“Well, I didn’t ask you to. Maybe you thought that’s what I did, but it isn’t.”

She doesn’t explicitly mention the note, but I know that’s what she’s referring to.

"Isabella?" Samuel asks, "Why are you so mean to Mary?"

“Watch your movie, kid,” she says.

I can see I won’t convince her to talk to me yet. I fear I may have taken on more responsibility than I can shoulder.

I sigh and say, “I’ll be back to check on you two in a moment.”

"Bye, Miss Mary!"

“Goodbye, Samuel.”

Isabella remains silent.

“Isabella?” I ask. “Where do you usually keep medicine?”

“Closet. When we have it.”

“Which closet?”

“The one on the wall next to the room.”

“Which room?”

She rolls her eyes and gets to her feet. She leads me to a closet fifteen feet from Samuel's room and opens it, then gestures dramatically at a shelf. There are several half-empty bottles of prescription pills on the shelf, along with bandages and antibiotic ointment. At least they aren't utterly out of supplies.

The pills, though. I wonder who those are?

I thank Isabella and wait for her to stomp off before I look at the prescription bottles. They’re fairly straightforward: an antidepressant, a painkiller, something for blood pressure and something for heartburn.

One thing is peculiar. Each bottle has Dr. Simon Trent as the prescribing physician.

I wonder. Could Simon have been anxious because he knows he poisoned Johnathan? The cause of death reported in the news was a heart attack, but perhaps the heart attack was a result of an adverse reaction to a medicine Simon prescribed.

It’s too soon to tell. I need to look deeper.

But it’s clear that something was festering in this house long before Johnathan’s death.

CHAPTER FIVE

Elijah returns an hour later. He is subdued and doesn’t meet my eyes at first.

“I’m sorry for being angry earlier. I just… it’s been hard.”

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“No,” he says quickly. “Thank you. I just… I’m going to hang out with Samuel and give Isabella a break. She’s been taking care of him a lot since Dad died.”

I smile at him. “I’m sure she’d appreciate that. Thank you.”

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