Chapter 3 - The Forgotten Phone
The old phone showed four percent battery.
Elena knew every second mattered.
She lowered the screen brightness immediately.
The device had no active cellular service.
That meant calling anyone directly was impossible.
But the mansion had wireless internet throughout the property.
Elena opened the network settings.
Several familiar names appeared.
Harrington_Main.
Harrington_Guest.
Security_Private.
She tried the guest network first.
It required a password that had been changed recently.
Her stomach tightened.
Then she remembered Julian complaining about the main network password during dinner several weeks earlier.
Margaret had insisted on using the date the Harrington company was founded.
Elena entered the numbers.
Connected.
She almost laughed with relief.
The first thing she considered was contacting the police.
Her finger hovered over the browser.
Then she stopped.
What could she tell them?
That her mother-in-law accused her of stealing jewelry?
That she had been locked in a guest room inside the house where she legally lived?
Without evidence, Margaret would explain everything away as a family misunderstanding.
Worse, Margaret might destroy whatever proof existed.
Elena needed something undeniable.
She opened the browser and accessed the household security portal.
Julian had once shown her the system after a delivery driver entered the wrong gate.
He had logged in using his personal administrator account.
Elena remembered the password.
She entered it.
Access granted.
Dozens of camera feeds appeared.
Front gate.
Kitchen.
Garage.
East hallway.
West staircase.
Library.
Safe corridor.
Elena selected the safe corridor and searched recordings from the afternoon.
Two fifteen.
Two thirty.
Two forty-five.
Everything seemed normal.
Then she reached three ten.
The recording suddenly jumped.
3:10 p.m.
Then 3:21 p.m.
Eleven minutes were missing.
Elena stared at the screen.
There was no technical error notification.
No system outage.
Someone had deleted a specific section.
She checked the activity log.
A single administrator command appeared beside the deleted footage.
User: Security_Admin.
Elena knew who controlled that account.
Thomas Reed.
Margaret's head of security.
Thomas had worked for Margaret for fourteen years.
He was loyal to her before Julian ever married Elena.
A wave of anger moved through Elena.
This was no longer suspicion.
Someone had deliberately removed evidence from the exact period when the necklace disappeared.
She took screenshots.
The battery dropped to three percent.
Elena quickly uploaded the images to a temporary email account she remembered from college.
Then she noticed another file.
A camera near Margaret's private office had recorded movement at 3:17 p.m.
That footage had not been deleted.
Elena opened it.
The angle showed only part of the hallway.
A figure crossed the edge of the frame.
Silver hair.
Cream jacket.
Elena stopped breathing.
Margaret.
The woman who claimed she was across town at a charity luncheon had been inside the mansion during the missing eleven minutes.
Elena saved the image.
Two percent.
She turned off the screen.
Now she knew.
Margaret had lied.
Thomas had erased footage.
But knowing Margaret had been home was not enough.
Elena needed the necklace.
And she needed to understand why Margaret would frame her own daughter-in-law.
The answer, Elena suspected, was hidden somewhere Margaret believed nobody would ever search.
Her private office.
Elena looked toward the locked door.
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To prove her innocence, she would have to escape the room.
And she would have to do it without anyone knowing.
