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But then the pictures change.
His wife’s smile comes less frequently. She’s seated and looks tired, as if standing might be more than her body can bear.
The final picture is a small one around Christmastime in front of a fireplace mantel decorated with stockings. She’s sitting on a chair, visibly too frail to stand, looking far older than her years. Dr. Siegel is standing next to her with his hand on her shoulder, still the ever-doting husband.
“I can see how much you loved your wife,” I say, pointing to the photographs on the wall.
He doesn’t respond.
“I hope I’m not speaking out of turn, but it looks like she was taken away from you in the prime of her life. My mom was around the same age when she was taken from me. She was my world—and the Cadells might’ve stolen her from me.”
Dr. Siegel’s face suddenly turns beet red. He tightly clenches his hands into fists and slams them on the table, dropping the Taser lighter on it.
“They killed her!” he shouts.
A gasp escapes me. “What happened?” I whisper.
He slumps back down in his chair with tears in his eyes, all the fight beaten out of him.
“I was a researcher at Bell doing patient interviews when I discovered the truth about TriCPharma drugs, the lives they stole, the families they ruined. Once the Cadells learned about my interviews, they came to the hospital asking me to stop. They said they were tinkering with a new formula to make the drugs less addictive. I was raised in the Bronx and could smell a con a mile away. I knew they were lying, but I was young and filled with bravado. Thought I could change the world by bringing down the bad guys, even when they threatened me. So they moved on to my precious Amelia, harassing her every time she left our house.”
“They killed her?” I ask.
He nods with watery eyes. “That morning, she called me from her office saying a guy had followed her to work. She saw him leaving the bathroom on the same floor as her office. She wanted to come home but had an important client meeting, so we planned for me to meet her at her office building right after it finished, and we’d walk home together. I wanted to protect her from being harassed. I never dreamt they’d …” He trails off in despair.
“What did they do?” I prod, because I need to know, and time is running out.
“A couple of hours after she phoned me about the guy that followed her to work, I got a call that she’d been admitted to the hospital because she ‘accidentally’ tripped in her office, hit her head on her desk, and suffered a brain injury.”
“Oh my God.”
“I ran to the hospital. The doctors didn’t know if she’d make it. She survived but had no memory of what happened. She also had no memory of how to do basic things like eat and talk,” he says, pointing to the pictures on the wall of her deteriorating. “I brought her home and tried so hard to bring her back to health, but she died a couple of months later in her sleep, of a stroke, common after a brain injury.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Did you ever tell the police about how she had called you and told you she’d been followed to work?”
The tears in his eyes dry out. He looks at the pictures of his late wife with hardened eyes. “I tried, but it didn’t matter. The Cadells pulled all the levers. If they wanted to make a police investigation go away, it went away. Amelia would still be alive if it weren’t for them … and me. I’ll never forgive myself.”
I look at this elderly man sitting before me, recalling his late wife. I think about all the years they missed out on together because of this evil family, and I feel heartbroken for him.
“It wasn’t your fault. It was the Cadells.”
He meets my eyes like he’s mulling something over.
“I have the interviews,” he finally says.
“Here?” I ask, the word catching in my throat.
He nods.
“Can I see my mom’s?” I say, almost breathless.
“Come with me.”
He stands up from the dining room table, passes the pictures of his wife on the wall, and stops at the very last one—the one at Christmastime, where she’s seated next to him, and he has his hand on her shoulder. He kisses his fingers and places them on her before moving on.
I follow him out of the dining room, up two flights of stairs, and into an attic. It’s filled with dusty boxes and old furniture, including broken lamps, a dresser missing a drawer, and a faded yellow old mattress.
He walks toward the back, stopping underneath a leaking window. There are a few wooden floor panels covered in black mold. He pries one open from the ground with his hands, revealing a hollowed-out secret compartment with dozens of VHS tapes.
