Chapter 3 - THE CLAIMED PROPERTY
Evelyn had signed the hotel lost-property form.
Reason:
BELONGS TO FAMILY.
Thomas stared at the copy.
“Why didn’t she give it to us?”
Rachel asked Evelyn through counsel.
Her attorney, Lauren Pierce, responded.
Evelyn said she believed the inhaler was Natalie’s, collected it to spare Thomas additional distress, then accidentally left it in a moving box during the chaotic weeks after the funeral.
Plausible.
Cold.
But plausible.
Thomas asked:
“Where is it now?”
Evelyn’s lawyer produced it.
A blue inhaler in a sealed plastic bag.
Evelyn had apparently retained it for nearly a year.
Rachel sent it for examination.
Thomas wanted dramatic answers.
Fingerprints.
Poison.
A murder button.
He got none.
The inhaler was an ordinary rescue inhaler.
No foreign substance detected.
The canister still contained medication.
Its pharmacy sticker was gone, but manufacturing data narrowed the production period.
Then Natalie’s pharmacy supplied dispensing records.
Her most recent blue inhaler had been filled six weeks before the gala.
The recovered inhaler came from a manufacturing batch distributed nearly two years earlier.
It was not the inhaler Natalie had recently filled.
Thomas stared at Rachel.
“So Evelyn gave you the wrong one.”
“Or she found an older one.”
“Why would Natalie carry an old one?”
“We don’t know that she did.”
Then pharmacy records revealed another oddity.
Natalie had picked up two rescue inhalers six weeks before her death.
One for her purse.
One for home.
After Natalie died, Thomas helped clear her house.
He remembered finding one inhaler in the kitchen drawer.
That accounted for the home inhaler.
The purse inhaler had never been recovered.
Unless Toby was right.
Unless Evelyn had taken it.
Rachel then obtained hotel video metadata.
The gala ballroom itself had no useful interior security footage.
But a service-hall camera captured Evelyn leaving the ballroom at 8:41 p.m.
She was carrying her silver purse.
At 8:43, Natalie’s asthma attack began.
At 8:46, Evelyn returned.
Her purse looked fuller.
But that was not the detail that made Thomas stop breathing.
May you like
At 8:42, between those two moments, Evelyn had used her hotel staff access badge to enter a locked event office.
And Natalie had told Thomas the day before the gala that she had hidden “something important” in that exact office.
