I called BrightDay from the lobby after our meeting.
Jasmine Ortiz confirmed the two appointments but sounded alarmed when I mentioned Patricia.
She told me Patricia had called the company separately and claimed to be my authorized caregiver.
The record showed a request for access to the living room while I was upstairs.
I asked Jasmine to preserve the scheduling messages and employee notes.
By the afternoon, she had forwarded them to Detective Sato.
The first cleaner, Leo, remembered nothing unusual.
Fallon Rusk remembered a woman arriving halfway through her appointment carrying a canvas tote.
The visitor had introduced herself as Patricia, said she was checking on my recovery, and asked Fallon to clean the upstairs bathroom before returning downstairs.
Fallon said she had not seen Patricia enter the home because the front door was already unlocked for deliveries.
She had assumed Patricia was a family friend.
When Fallon came downstairs, the mantel clock had been moved and Patricia was standing near the shelves.
Patricia told her she had been dusting photographs.
Fallon did not notice a camera.
She did notice that Patricia asked which rooms I used most often.
“It seemed strange,” Fallon admitted when she later agreed to speak with Sato.
“But people say strange things around a sick relative.”
There was another detail.
Patricia had asked Fallon whether the cleaning service maintained a copy of client door codes.
Fallon told her the company did not store private codes in a central list.
That answer had apparently disappointed Patricia.
I felt ashamed that I had put a stranger in a position where she might be blamed for something she had not done.
Sato assured me that investigating a possible access point was not the same as accusing the employees.
Fallon had a job, a family, and a professional reputation of her own.
Patricia had exploited that trust as casually as she had exploited mine.
Chapter 8: The Watcher Across the Street
For three days Patricia did not appear outside.
Her curtains remained drawn, and her car barely moved.
I could see her porch from my front window, but I stopped looking because every glance made me feel trapped in the same argument.
Then someone slipped an envelope beneath my front door.
It contained a handwritten note from a neighbor named Helen Cho.
Helen lived across the street and spent her evenings restoring old radios in a small garage workshop.
She had seen Patricia carrying a canvas bag into my house during the second cleaning appointment.
