Vanessa had signed them because her mother told her they were routine forms.
Some signatures were hers.
Others were not.
There were also records showing that Vanessa had administered medication.
An excessive amount had been recorded on three occasions.
“She told me I could go to prison,” Vanessa said. “She said Eleanor would be moved somewhere I could never find her.”
Maxwell looked toward Nora.
The investigator’s expression gave nothing away.
“Did you believe her?”
“Yes.”
Vanessa laughed once, miserably.
“Mother had spent my whole life demonstrating what happened when people disappointed her. I thought that was what power meant. Being able to make your version become the truth.”
She had stayed.
Through university courses taken locally. Through jobs Cecilia arranged and quietly ended. Through relationships that failed because she disappeared every evening and could never explain why.
Greyhaven was thirty minutes from her mother’s house.
She drove there after dinner.
Every night.
“Why keep going?” Maxwell asked.
Vanessa looked at Eleanor.
“Because if I stopped, she would have no one who remembered she was a person.”
The first real change came eleven months before the wedding.
A new nurse arrived at Greyhaven and questioned the medication schedule.
She lasted four days.
But before she left, she told Vanessa to look carefully at the labels.
Vanessa began photographing them.
She photographed charts, locked cabinets, delivery receipts, the dates Voss visited, and the bruises on Eleanor’s arms.
She learned which staff members were careless with passwords and which doors did not quite latch.
She did not become fearless.
She became organized.
Nora stepped forward.
“She contacted our office nine months ago.”
Maxwell turned.
“Nine months?”
“We opened an investigation into Greyhaven’s billing and ownership. The records we obtained described a patient under a different name. Access to the facility was tightly controlled, and its management produced apparently valid treatment orders.”
“So you left her there?”
“We were working to establish her identity and obtain records that hadn’t been altered.”
Nora did not ask him to accept that.
Maxwell did not.
Vanessa continued.
“Then Mother told me you were coming home for the foundation anniversary.”
He remembered that evening.
Vanessa in a blue dress. Their conversation on the terrace. How easily she seemed to understand grief.
He looked at her.
“Was that arranged?”
“Yes.”
The answer hurt worse than he expected.
“By you?”
“By Mother.”
“Why?”
Vanessa glanced at Eleanor.
His mother closed her eyes.
“Because I was becoming expensive,” she said.
Before the crash, Eleanor had discovered money disappearing from the Anderson Foundation.
Its residential care program paid for vulnerable adults who had nowhere else to go.
Greyhaven was one of its principal providers.
Patients stayed longer than expected. Services multiplied on invoices. Property belonging to residents passed into companies whose names changed before anyone could ask questions.
