Chapter 4 - The Doctor Who Erased a Death
Marcus Hale agreed to meet me at St. Vincent’s old surgical wing.
Not the hospital where he currently worked.
The abandoned one his foundation was supposedly renovating.
That alone told me not to trust him.
I left the kids with my neighbor, Mrs. Alvarez, and told her to call the police if Vanessa came near the house.
Vanessa did not argue.
That scared me more than if she had.
Hale was waiting in a dark consultation room with one lamp on.
He looked seventy overnight.
I put Claire’s death certificate on the desk.
“Tell me the truth.”
He stared at his signature.
“The signature is mine.”
“So Claire died.”
“No.”
I almost hit him.
“You signed a death certificate.”
“I signed a legal death. Not a medical one.”
“That sentence doesn’t exist.”
“It did for us.”
He rubbed his face.
“Claire came to me thirteen months ago. She said people on the Carter Medical board were using her identity to move money through shell vendors. She had found evidence. She believed they were going to kill her.”
“So you declared her dead?”
“She asked me to.”
I stared at him.
“Why?”
“To freeze her shares. Remove her access. Make her useless to them.”
“Then why say she died from a head injury?”
Hale looked at me.
That answer took longer.
“Because she had one.”
My stomach tightened.
“How?”
He looked toward the door.
“You don’t remember?”
The room seemed to shrink.
“Remember what?”
Hale opened a locked drawer and took out a photograph.
Claire lay unconscious at the bottom of a staircase.
Blood beneath her head.
At the top of the stairs stood a man.
Me.
I could not feel my hands.
“That isn’t what it looks like,” Hale said.
“Then what is it?”
“You and Claire fought that night.”
“About what?”
“You truly don’t remember.”
I grabbed his collar.
“Stop saying that.”
His eyes filled with something close to pity.
“Daniel, you lost forty-seven minutes that night.”
My grip loosened.
“What?”
“Your father had been dead six weeks. You were taking medication for sleep. I prescribed it.”
“I stopped taking it.”
“No.”
Hale swallowed.
“Vanessa kept putting it in your coffee.”
The door behind us clicked shut.
Hale’s face changed.
He whispered, “We’re not alone.”
---
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