I've Been Trying to Stop It
PART 4: "I've Been Trying to Stop It"
Catherine came home at 4:07 PM.
She walked through the front door with her coat over her arm and her phone in her hand and the autopilot expression of a woman who has been performing normalcy for so long that the performance has become her default setting.
She stopped when she saw Méndez in the foyer.
Not because of the badge. Because of the look. The look that detectives give when they've already found what they came to find and when the conversation that follows is not going to be a conversation but a reckoning.
"Mrs. Whitfield, I'm Detective Rosa Méndez with the state police. I need to talk to you about your son."
Catherine's face didn't change.
That was the part that bothered Sofia, who was watching from the kitchen doorway with Oliver on her hip. Catherine's face didn't change. No surprise. No panic. No indignation.
Nothing.
The face of a woman who has been expecting this moment.
"The nursery," Catherine said. "Let's talk in the nursery."
---
They went upstairs. Méndez, Catherine, Dr. Park. Sofia stayed in the kitchen with Oliver.
The nursery door was open. The crib was still there, the sheets pulled back, the mattress pad folded to one side. The strip of cardboard with the tacks was on the changing table, sealed in an evidence bag.
Catherine looked at the bag. At the tacks. At the crib.
She sat down on the floor.
Not in the glider. Not on the window seat. On the floor, with her legs crossed and her silk blouse pulling at the buttons and her honey-blonde hair falling forward over her face.
"I've been trying to stop it," she said.
Méndez knelt in front of her.
"Stop what?"
"This. The things in the crib. The pins. The tacks. I've been finding them for two months."
"You've been finding them?"
"Every few days. Something new under the mattress. First it was a safety pin. Then a brooch. Then a sewing needle. I'd remove them. Check the crib twice a day. And they'd come back."
"Who's putting them there?"
Catherine looked up. Her eyes were red. Not from crying — from exhaustion. The deep, cellular exhaustion of a woman who has been fighting something invisible for two months and losing.
"My mother-in-law."
---
Eleanor Whitfield.
James's mother. Seventy-one years old. Lived in the guest cottage on the east side of the property — a separate building connected to the main house by a covered walkway.
Sofia knew Eleanor. She'd seen her twice. A tall woman with silver hair and the posture of someone who had been told she was important so many times that her spine believed it. She came to the main house for dinner on Sundays and occasionally walked through the nursery "to check on the baby" at times when Catherine wasn't home.
"Eleanor has a key to the main house," Catherine said. "She comes in when I'm out. When I'm sleeping. She has access to the nursery."
"Why would your mother-in-law hurt your baby?"
Catherine closed her eyes.
"Because she doesn't believe Oliver is her grandson."
The room went quiet.
"Six months ago, Eleanor found a letter in James's study. A letter from a man named David Chen. David is... was... someone I knew before James. Eleanor read the letter and decided that Oliver isn't James's son. That I had an affair and that Oliver is David's child."
"Did you have an affair?"
"No. David is a college friend. The letter was about a reunion. There was nothing romantic in it. But Eleanor read what she wanted to read, and once Eleanor decides something, evidence doesn't change her mind."
"Did you tell James?"
"James is never here. He works in New York three weeks a month. When I tried to tell him about the things in the crib, Eleanor was in the room. She told James I was 'having episodes.' That the postpartum depression was making me paranoid."
"The Haloperidol in your medicine cabinet."
Catherine flinched.
"Eleanor arranged that. She called Dr. Keane — he's her doctor, not mine — and told him I was experiencing postpartum psychosis. He prescribed the medication without examining me."
"You took it?"
"For two weeks. It made me foggy. Disconnected. I couldn't think clearly. I stopped taking it, but by then Eleanor had already convinced James that I was unstable."
"And the previous maid? Ana?"
"Ana found a safety pin in the diaper drawer. She told me. I told her to document it and keep quiet until I could figure out what was going on. Two days later, Eleanor told James that Ana was stealing jewelry. James fired her. I couldn't stop it."
Catherine looked at the evidence bag. At the twenty-six tacks on the cardboard strip.
"I've been checking the crib twice a day for two months. But she keeps finding new times to come in. When I'm in the shower. When I'm at appointments. When Sofia is cleaning downstairs."
"Why didn't you go to the police?"
"Because Eleanor Whitfield has donated two hundred thousand dollars to this town over the past decade. She sits on the hospital board. She knows the chief of police by his first name. Who would they believe — a woman with a Haloperidol prescription, or the woman who funded the new wing of the community center?"
Méndez stood up.
"They'd believe the evidence."
---
May you like
Keep reading Part 5 — because Detective Méndez doesn't arrest Eleanor that night. She does something smarter. She puts a camera in the nursery. And what the camera captures at 2 AM the following Tuesday is the most disturbing seventeen seconds of footage Méndez has seen in twelve years.
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