Chapter 5 - The Midnight Call
"David!" Eleanor shrieked into the phone before I could even draw breath. "Thank God you picked up! What on earth is wrong with your bank? We are standing here in the middle of a five-star resort in South Beach, and your cards just declined our New Year's dinner! The hotel manager is being utterly insolent, threatening to call the police over a few thousand dollars! Pick up your mobile app and fix this right now! It is completely humiliating!"
I held the phone slightly away from my ear. In the background, I could hear Chloe screaming about suing the hotel and Mark loudly demanding to speak to the general manager.
I didn't raise my voice. I kept it as flat and cold as a frozen lake.
"Are you finished, Eleanor?"
The line went completely dead for two seconds. My mother never liked it when I called her by her first name. It meant the line had been severed.
"David?" Her tone shifted slightly, losing its performative outrage and taking on a forced, defensive sweetness. "Why are you calling me that? Why are you awake anyway? Isn't it five in the morning in Stuttgart?"
"I’m not in Stuttgart."
Silence. Even the ambient noise on her end seemed to drop.
"What do you mean?" she stammered.
"I'm in Brooklyn. At New York-Presbyterian Hospital."
"Why... why would you be there?" Her voice lost its foundation, trembling with the first realization that her cover had been blown. "Did Maya call you? David, listen to me, that ungrateful girl is exaggerating! We left her plenty of food! She is trying to drive a wedge between you and your family—"
"Maya didn't call me," I said, my voice dropping so low that the nurse at the end of the hall glanced over. "Maya couldn't call me. When I kicked open the door to our home three hours ago, my wife was slumped on the kitchen floor in her own blood, burning with a hundred-and-four-degree fever from a ruptured, infected surgical incision."
Eleanor gasped, but I gave her no room to speak.
"My son—my eleven-day-old son—was hypothermic in a bassinet without a blanket, dehydrated, starving, because you and your golden daughter stole his prescribed formula and loaded it into your luggage to give away to your friends."
"David, that’s a lie! We didn't steal anything—"
"I have every single second of footage from the living room and hallway cameras, Eleanor," I said, each word striking like a hammer on an anvil. "I saw Chloe rip the kettle out of Maya's hands. I saw Mark pack four hundred dollars of her recovery food into coolers. I saw you stand over my bleeding wife, telling her she was trash who married into this family for money."
"David... David, please, you don't understand the context," she began to weep, a shrill, theatrical sound designed to manipulate me as it had done my entire life. "I was only trying to teach her respect! She was disrespectful to your mother! I raised you! You can’t do this to your family over a stranger!"
"That stranger is my wife. And that baby is my son," I whispered into the receiver. "You left them to die so you could drink champagne on my dime."
"David! You can't leave us here! They’re going to arrest us!" she wailed, panic finally breaking through her vanity. "Pay the hotel bill! Please! Then we’ll come home and explain everything!"
"You're right about one thing," I said. "They are going to arrest you. But not for the hotel bill."
I pressed the red button, ending the call.
Then I blocked her number, Chloe’s number, and Mark’s number.
I looked up at the two NYPD officers who had been listening to every word from the doorway.
May you like
"Detective," I said, handing over the thumb drives. "They're currently at the 1 Hotel South Beach, Cabana 14. They won't be able to leave without paying."
***
