The Hallway Camera
Chapter 02 - The Hallway Camera
Maya made it halfway down the aisle before Charles nearly collapsed. Guests gasped as Ethan and two ushers carried him into the sitting room. Vivian blamed excitement, age, and too much champagne, although Maya knew Charles had not touched alcohol. Grant insisted an ambulance would create a scandal and said the family doctor was already on his way.
While Ethan stayed beside his grandfather, Maya followed the clue in Charles’s note. Still in her wedding gown, she slipped into the estate’s security office, where monitors displayed every hallway. She searched the recordings from the previous week and found something that made her blood run cold.
At 2:13 every morning, Vivian entered Charles’s bathroom carrying two prescription bottles. She removed his heart medication, poured the tablets into a different container, and replaced them with pills from an orange bottle. On another recording, Grant met Vivian in the upstairs hall. He handed her revised documents and said, “Once the doctor declares him incompetent, you control the estate. The wedding gives us the perfect distraction.”
Maya copied the footage to her phone. Before she could leave, Vivian appeared in the doorway, her composure gone.
“You should have stayed downstairs,” she said.
Maya backed into the hall, keeping her phone hidden against her dress. Vivian followed and grabbed her wrist. The security camera above them captured every second. Vivian claimed Charles had promised her the house years earlier and accused Ethan of returning only for an inheritance. Maya told her the trust had been Charles’s decision, not Ethan’s.
Vivian leaned close. “By midnight, Charles will be declared mentally unfit. Grant will become temporary trustee, and I will own everything before anyone understands what happened.”
Maya activated her phone’s voice recorder. “And the pills?”
“For his own good,” Vivian replied. “A confused old man cannot fight a legal document.”
Footsteps echoed from the stairwell. Grant arrived, seized Maya’s phone, and deleted the video in front of her. He warned that if she accused them without proof, he would tell Ethan she had married him for the house. Then he escorted Vivian away.
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Maya waited until their footsteps disappeared. Her evidence seemed gone, but Grant had made one mistake: he had deleted the copy on her phone, not the original recording stored on the security system.
A red light blinked above the door. The system was still uploading every camera feed to Charles’s private cloud account. And Maya suddenly remembered who had given her the password two months earlier.
