Chapter 3 - The Forgotten Archive
The sun was rising over the gray concrete skyline of the city when Detective Delgado arranged for me to have twenty minutes alone with my mother in the prison's legal visitation room.
There was no glass wall this time, but two armed guards stood at the perimeter.
My mother sat at the metal table. Her hands were still bruised from the restraints she had worn the night before, but the dead, hopeless look in her eyes had been replaced by a fierce, protective light.
"Maya," she said, reaching across the table to grip my hands. Her skin was rough, calloused from years of prison labor, but her touch was warm. "You have to stop torturing yourself. I know what you’ve been thinking. I saw it in your face last night."
Tears spilled over my lower lashes, burning my cheeks. "I didn't answer your letters, Mom. For six years, you wrote to me every single month, begging me to believe you. And I let you rot here because I was too cowardly to question the police."
"You were seventeen years old!" my mother choked out, squeezing my fingers so hard her knuckles turned white. "You were a child who had just lost her father! You had a two-year-old baby brother to raise all by yourself! I never blamed you, Maya. Not for a single second. Every letter I wrote wasn't to convince you—it was just to remind you that I loved you."
I buried my face in her hands, weeping silently as six years of buried grief and guilt poured out of me. She stroked my hair, humming a soft, familiar lullaby she used to sing to me when I was a little girl in our old house on Elm Street.
After a few moments, I wiped my face, pulling myself back into a state of sharp focus. "Mom, we have less than forty hours left. Victor’s lawyers are already filing motions to dissolve the stay. If we don't find concrete physical proof connecting Victor to the murder weapon or the crime scene, the Governor won't grant clemency."
My mother looked down at the metal table, her brow furrowing in deep thought. "The knife... the knife they found under my bed was a standard ten-inch chef's knife from our kitchen set. But Arthur was an avid collector of antique pocket watches and military memorabilia. That night, before Victor came over, Arthur and Victor had a massive row in the study."
"About what?"
"About the company's financial audit," my mother said, her eyes lighting up as the memories returned. "Arthur found out Victor had been forging his signature on transport manifests. Arthur kept a private leather ledger in his desk safe where he logged every discrepancy. The night of the murder, after the police arrested me, that leather ledger was missing from the safe."
"The police never reported a leather ledger in the crime scene inventory," I said, recalling the legal documents I had read during the trial.
"Because Victor took it when he put the knife under my bed!" my mother realized, leaning closer. "Maya... your father had a secondary office. A small rental unit near the riverfront where he kept duplicate records of all his personal files. He told me about it two days before he died, in case anything ever happened to him. I forgot... dear God, with the shock of the arrest and the trial, I completely forgot about it!"
I stood up so fast my chair screeched against the floorboards. "Where is the rental unit, Mom?"
May you like
"1402 River Road, Storage Locker 8B," she said, her voice shaking with desperate hope. "The key... Arthur kept it hidden inside the lining of his old leather flight jacket."
"The flight jacket," I whispered. "It’s been sitting in a storage box in my attic for six years."
