Police waited nearby, though Derek did not know that.
I watched from the office above the warehouse floor.
At exactly nine p.m., Derek entered.
Alone.
He looked exhausted.
Unshaven.
His coat hung open.
“Hello?”
No answer.
He stepped farther inside.
“I came alone.”
His voice echoed.
“I know you’re here.”
His hands were empty.
Then he said something that made every person in the surveillance room look at me.
“If this is about my mother, I’ll tell you everything.”
Nora glanced my way.
I picked up the microphone.
I changed my voice slightly.
“Tell me about the lake.”
Derek froze.
“You first.”
“Why did you push her?”
His eyes closed.
When he answered, his voice was barely audible.
“Because I thought she could survive.”
Every nerve in my body went still.
Nora gripped my arm.
I leaned toward the microphone.
“You thought?”
“Yes.”
“You pushed a sixty-eight-year-old woman in a wheelchair into freezing water because you thought she could survive?”
Derek looked upward toward the darkness.
“I knew she was pretending.”
My breath stopped.
He continued.
“Not at first. But I figured it out.”
“How?”
“A glass.”
He laughed once.
It was a broken sound.
“She dropped a water glass three months ago. Amanda turned around to get a towel. Mom caught the glass before it hit the floor.”
I remembered.
I had forgotten.
Derek hadn’t.
“She thought I didn’t see,” he said. “I did.”
My hands began trembling.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because by then I knew Amanda was doing something.”
His face tightened.
“She kept changing Mom’s medication. She said doctors ordered it, but I checked. Some doses didn’t match.”
The room seemed to contract.
My illness.
The dizziness.
The confusion.
The sudden crashes after meals.
Amanda bringing pills in small white cups.
Derek continued.
“I started watching her. Then I found documents. Transfers. Emails with Martin.”
“Why didn’t you go to police?”
“I tried.”
My throat tightened.
“What happened?”
“Martin had records showing transfers approved from my work computer. He told me if I talked, everything would point to me.”
“Were you involved?”
“No.”
“Then how did he use your computer?”
“Amanda knew my passwords.”
Derek rubbed both hands over his face.
“I was an idiot.”
His voice cracked.
“I trusted my wife.”
Something inside me hurt at the word trusted.
Because I had trusted him.
“Why the lake?”
He looked down.
“Because Amanda had decided Mom had to die.”
Silence.
“She’d been increasing the medication. Mom stopped taking enough of it to stay sick, so Amanda realized she was improving.”
I remembered the day Amanda found two pills beneath my mattress.
Her expression.
Her sudden quietness.
“She told me,” Derek continued, “that there would be an accident. With me or without me.”
His voice became colder.
“Martin had already arranged everything. They were going to put the financial fraud on me afterward. Amanda would inherit through the will they forged, and I’d be the grieving son who eventually got blamed for stealing from his own mother.”
I could barely breathe.
“So you agreed to push her?”
“I pretended to.”
My vision blurred.
Derek swallowed.
“I remembered Mom used to swim competitively. I searched old articles. I knew how strong she had been.”
He laughed bitterly.
“I also knew that didn’t mean she could survive now.”
“Yet you did it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the alternative was worse.”
His voice suddenly rose.
“If I refused, Amanda was going to drug her that night. I had heard her and Martin talking. No accident. No chance.”
He paced once, then stopped.
“So I told Amanda the lake was better. Public trail. Easier explanation. What I didn’t tell her was that I loosened Mom’s coat, cut most of the wheelchair belt, removed the locking pin from the footrest, and chose the old dock.”
My heart pounded.
“Why that dock?”
“Because Mom taught me to swim there.”
My hand flew to my mouth.
Derek’s eyes were wet.
“There are reeds east of it.”
He knew.
He had always known.
“I didn’t know if she remembered. I didn’t know if she was strong enough. I didn’t know if she understood what I was doing.”
His voice collapsed.
“I whispered that I was sorry because I was.”
A tear moved down his cheek.
“I was putting my mother into freezing water and praying she was still the woman who taught me not to panic.”
No one in the surveillance room moved.
Then I asked the question that had been eating through me since the lake.
“Why did you leave?”
He stared at the floor.
“I saw bubbles moving east.”
I stopped breathing.
“I knew.”
His lips trembled.
“I knew she got free.”
I covered my mouth.
Derek continued.
“Amanda didn’t notice. I made us leave before she could.”
The twenty-four-minute delay.
