Chapter 4 - The Poisoned Well
By 6:00 AM, the pediatric intensive care unit was quiet except for the rhythmic, soothing beep of Frederick’s vital monitors.
The IV fluids had worked miracles. Frederick’s fever had dropped to 99.4. His color had returned, the awful gray pallor replaced by the soft pink flush of healthy infancy. He was asleep in a high-sided hospital crib, his little fingers curled tightly around the embroidered blue bunny Amy had brought from home.
Amy was sitting in an armchair next to the crib, her hands wrapped in clean white sterile bandages. She looked smaller than I had ever remembered her, swimming in an oversized hospital fleece.
I pulled a wooden chair close to her, sat down, and took her bandaged hands gently between mine.
"Betsy was arrested in the parking garage," I told her softly. "She didn't make it past the security desk."
Amy didn't flinch. She didn't celebrate. She just closed her eyes and let two heavy tears trace down her cheeks. "Why did she hate me so much, Connor? What did I ever do to Teresa? From the day you brought me home to meet her, I tried. I baked for her. I cleaned her porch. When she had hip surgery two years ago, I drove to Hendersonville every day for three weeks to change her dressings and cook her meals."
"Because you couldn't be controlled," I said, kissing the tops of her gauze-wrapped knuckles. "Teresa doesn't want family, Amy. She wants subjects. When my dad walked out twenty years ago, she turned our family into a cult of personality. She ruled my brother, my cousins, and my aunts through financial debt and emotional guilt. When I met you, and when my business began to take off, she realized she was losing her grip on her golden goose."
Amy turned her head toward the window, looking out over the waking skyline of Nashville. "She started coming over every day the week after Frederick was born. You had just signed the contract for the Interstate 40 expansion and had to be on-site five days a week."
"She told me you asked her to stay," I said, my heart sinking. "She told me you were overwhelmed and wanted her guidance."
"I was recovering from an emergency C-section!" Amy cried, her voice cracking with remembered agony. "My incision was infected! The second day you left, she took my car keys off the kitchen counter. She told me I shouldn't be driving with my pain medications. Then she took my debit card, saying she would do the grocery shopping so I wouldn't strain myself."
Amy pulled her hands from mine and touched her face, trembling. "Then came the isolation. If my sister called from Ohio, Teresa answered the landline and told her I was sleeping and couldn't be disturbed. When the pastor from our neighborhood church stopped by with a casserole, Teresa met him on the porch and told him I was experiencing severe spiritual confusion and wasn't receiving visitors. She intercepted our mail. She threw away every bank statement, every utility warning."
"And the money?" I asked. "The three thousand dollars a month?"
Amy looked at me with deep sorrow. "Connor, I had to beg her for twenty dollars to buy Frederick infant Tylenol. She looked at me and said, 'Connor’s money isn't your personal piggy bank. He works in the heat while you sit in air conditioning doing nothing. If you want medicine, you earn it.' That’s when she brought in the chore lists."
The bile rose hot in my throat. "What chore lists?"
"She made me clean her silver. She made me wash the laundry for Betsy’s entire household. She brought over Mason’s work shirts for me to starch and iron! She told me that if I didn't keep the family happy, she would tell you I was sleeping all day and neglecting the house. I was so exhausted... I was so tired and foggy from the infection and lack of sleep that I actually started to believe her. I thought... I thought you knew. I thought you were punishing me for not being strong enough."
"No!" I dropped to my knees before her, burying my face in her lap, tears finally breaking through my own eyes. "No, Amy! Never! I thought I was providing for you! I thought I was giving you the peaceful life you deserved! I was killing myself on that highway job so we could pay off the mortgage before Frederick turned five! I didn't know... God help me, Amy, I didn't know."
Amy’s bandaged fingers gently stroked my hair. "I know you didn't. When you came through that back door yesterday... when I saw your face... I saw the Connor I married. Not the monster Teresa said you were becoming."
She reached beneath her hospital gown and pulled out a small, worn silver chain. Dangling from it was a tiny silver thumb drive.
I looked at it, confused. "What is that?"
"Three weeks ago, after she took my phone, I found an old audio dictaphone in your desk drawer," Amy whispered. "The one you used to use for your site engineering notes. For the last twenty days, every time Teresa entered this house, every time she threatened to take Frederick, every time she bragged about how she was going to 'handle' the deed, I had that recorder running in my pocket."
I stared at the tiny metal drive in her hand.
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"She thought I was broken," Amy said, her blue eyes suddenly blazing with an internal fire I hadn't seen in over a year. "She thought she had reduced me to a terrified girl on a kitchen stool. But I was protecting my baby. Every threat, every insult, every admission of theft is on this drive. She’s not going to get away with this, Connor. Not a single one of them."
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