Chapter 4 - THE BROKEN WATCH
I'm not the Morgan who signed.
I stared at the words scribbled on the cafeteria napkin as I navigated the afternoon traffic, constantly checking my rearview mirror for a dark sedan.
Five years ago, David had walked away from the Morgan Family Hospitality Group after a bitter feud with his stepmother, Evelyn Vance-Morgan, and his older half-brother, Julian. David had started his own small accounting firm. When Principal Whitaker had approached us six months ago about a charity drive for Pinecrest's cafeteria, David had volunteered to audit the books for free.
He hadn't been stealing the money. He had found out that his own family was using the school as a pipeline for their private behavioral facility—and they had forged his name on the corporate records to set him up as the fall guy.
"Mrs. Morgan?" Oliver's small voice came from the back seat. "Can we go to my house? Maybe my mom came home."
I looked in the mirror at his pale, hopeful face. I looked at the address David had written on the napkin: 412 Pine Street, Apartment 3B.
"Oliver, honey, what is your home address?" I asked softly.
"Four-twelve Pine Street," he answered immediately. "Why does your napkin have my apartment on it?"
My stomach knotted. David had gone to Sarah Hayes's apartment.
Ten minutes later, I pulled into the gravel parking lot of a rundown brick apartment building near the old factory district. I parked behind a rusted dumpster to keep my SUV out of sight from the street.
"Stay right behind me, both of you," I instructed, taking their hands as we climbed the exterior metal stairs to the third floor.
When we reached Apartment 3B, I saw immediately that the wooden doorframe had been splintered near the deadbolt. The door was pushed slightly ajar.
"Mom?" Oliver called out, trying to pull away from me to run inside.
"Wait, Oliver!" I held his shoulder firmly. I pushed the door open with my foot. "David? Sarah?"
Silence greeted us.
We stepped inside cautiously. The tiny living room had been completely ransacked. Couch cushions were slashed and thrown across the worn carpet, a bookshelf was overturned, and family photographs lay in shattered glass frames on the floor.
Oliver let out a quiet whimper and ran toward the kitchen. "Mom!"
I followed him, pulling Grace along. The kitchen was empty too, the back door leading to the fire escape swinging open in the cold breeze.
On the linoleum floor beside the kitchen table was a dark smudge of dried blood. And lying right next to it was a man's wristwatch with a cracked crystal face and a broken brown leather strap.
Grace gasped, dropping to her knees before I could stop her. She picked up the watch.
"Mommy, it's Daddy's watch," she whispered, her eyes wide with terror. "The one we gave him for Father's Day."
I took the watch from her trembling fingers. Turn it over, and the engraving was right there: To the world's best Dad, Love Jen & Grace. The watch hands were stopped at 1:15 PM—just an hour before David had called me at the school to warn me.
"He was here," I murmured. "He came to help your mom, Oliver, and someone took them both."
I pulled out my laptop from my work bag—I always kept it in the car for my home-health nursing shifts—and set it on the kitchen counter. I plugged the silver USB drive from Grace's coat into the port.
Two files popped up on the screen. One was a PDF document. The other was an audio file.
I clicked the PDF first. It was the internal ledger for the Crestview Behavioral Boarding School, owned by Evelyn Vance-Morgan. Ruth had been right—they were billing the state forty thousand dollars per child.
But as I scrolled to the second page of the PDF, my breath caught in my throat.
It wasn't just a financial ledger. It was a medical trial roster.
A major pharmaceutical company was paying the Morgan Hospitality Group three million dollars a year to conduct unapproved, phase-two psychiatric drug trials on children diagnosed with "severe behavioral defiance."
And every single child transferred from Pinecrest Elementary was on that trial list. Because their parents had been forced to sign away guardianship under duress, there was nobody to oversee what was being put into those children's bodies.
I felt physically ill. As a nurse, I recognized the chemical compound listed at the top of the chart. It was an experimental sedative that had been flagged by the FDA two years ago for causing permanent neurological damage in adolescents.
Mrs. Caldwell wasn't writing fake disciplinary reports on Grace and the other twelve children just to silence their parents about lunch money. She was manufacturing a paper trail of "behavioral defiance" so those children would qualify as test subjects.
With a shaking finger, I clicked on the audio file.
Through the laptop speakers came the sound of heavy breathing, followed by Sarah Hayes's terrified voice: "David, please, if Evelyn finds out I copied the medication logs from the clinic, she'll kill us. They already took my husband when he tried to go to the police last week—he didn't just walk out on us, they have him locked in the north wing at Crestview!"
Then came David's voice, strained with pain: "Sarah, listen to me. I hid the drive in Grace's coat at the school. If they catch up to us here, I'll lead them away from the building. You get to Jennifer at the hospital—"
The recording ended with the sound of a door splintering open, a woman's scream, and a heavy thud.
I slammed the laptop shut just as the floorboards in the living room creaked.
Someone had just stepped through the broken front door of the apartment.
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"Jennifer?" a smooth, familiar female voice called out from the living room. "I know you're in here, dear. My idiot stepson always was terrible at covering his tracks."
It was Evelyn Vance-Morgan. And from the heavy footsteps flanking her, she hadn't come alone.
