“Mrs. Reeves,” Maria said to my grandmother. “You might want to sit down. The evidence Mr. Walls provided? It’s not adding up.”
It started with the cash. The $800 my father found in my drawer. He claimed it was proof of theft.
Maria pulled the bank records. The withdrawal happened at 2:47 p.m. on October 14th.
Maria pulled the ATM surveillance footage.
The person withdrawing the cash wasn’t me. It was a young woman in a North Face jacket with a messy ponytail. It was Karen. Clear as day.
And my alibi? Ironclad. At 2:47 p.m., I was in fifth-period Chemistry, learning about covalent bonds. My teacher marked me present. Thirty witnesses saw me. I couldn’t have been at the bank.
Then the burner phone. Maria tracked the purchase to a convenience store. The security footage showed Karen—wearing yoga pants, her distinct white sedan with the dented bumper visible through the window—buying the phone with cash four days prior.
And the pills? Traced back to a pharmacy on Oak Street. Prescribed to Trent Barlow.
Here was the kicker: Trent had filed a police report claiming those pills were stolen from his car. But he filed the report on October 17th—three days after I was kicked out.
If the pills were in my closet on the 14th, why did Trent wait until the 17th to report them missing? Because he needed to cover his tracks to get a refill.
The deeper Maria dug, the uglier it got. Karen hadn’t just framed me; she had been forging checks in my father’s name for two years. Small amounts. Fifty dollars here, a hundred there. Totaling nearly $18,000.
My grandmother hired Leonard Vance, a ruthless family law attorney. He filed for permanent guardianship and a civil suit for fraud.
The walls were closing in on Karen. And then, the roof collapsed.
