Chapter 5 - The Shadow of the Past
The next week was a battle of endurance. Callie spent every spare hour baking custom cakes to keep up appearances, while secretly scanning every single page of the documents she had retrieved from the vault.
One evening, a heavy rainstorm knocked out the power in the neighborhood. Callie lit candles around the living room, casting long, dancing shadows across the walls. The atmosphere seemed to trigger something deep within Geneva’s fractured memory.
She sat up straight in her chair, her eyes wide, staring at the candle flames.
"The fire," Geneva said, her voice dropping to a eerie, resonant pitch. "The fire at St. Jude’s. It wasn't an accident, Callie."
Callie rushed to her side, kneeling and holding her grandmother's frail hands. "What do you mean, Grandma? What happened at the church?"
"Joel..." Geneva whispered, her body beginning to tremble. "He wanted the church land. The parish refused to sell. He... he hired someone. A man named Marcus. They set the fire in the basement. I saw them, Callie. I was in the altar guild room, preparing the linens for Sunday. I saw Joel giving Marcus a gym bag full of cash in the parking lot while the smoke was rising."
Callie felt a chill run down her spine. "My God..."
"I threatened to go to the police," Geneva wept, her mind fully present in the horror of the memory. "That's when they started giving me those pills. The blue ones. Dakota said they were for my blood pressure, but they made me dizzy. They made me forget. They told everyone I was losing my mind. They used my memory against me so no one would believe me if I told them about the fire."
It all clicked. Geneva's Alzheimer’s was real, but it had been aggressively accelerated and weaponized by her own family. They had drugged her, isolated her, and when her mind finally did begin to fail naturally, they used it as the perfect cover-up to steal her land and silence her witness.
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"I wrote it all down," Geneva sobbed, clutching Callie's shirt. "In the red diary. In the box. Did you find it, Callie? Tell me you found it."
"I found it, Grandma. I have it all. It's safe," Callie promised, tears streaming down her face. She held her grandmother tight, rocking her back and forth in the candlelight as the storm raged outside. "They will never hurt you again. I swear it."
