Chapter 9 - The champagne was meant for Rebecca
The server remembered one more detail after reviewing event photographs.
Charles had pointed to one specific flute and said, “That one is for Ms. Hale. She doesn’t like a full pour.”
The server thought nothing of it.
Rebecca often drank very little.
Photographs confirmed the flute on the tray had a smaller pour than the others.
That was the glass Ava knocked over.
When confronted with the evidence, Charles changed his explanation again.
He said Rebecca was “high-strung” and that a small amount of propranolol would simply calm her.
The detective stared at him.
“You put prescription medication into another person’s drink without telling her?”
Charles’s lawyer tried to stop the answer.
Charles had already said enough.
This act was much easier to prove than Caroline’s death.
His DNA on the capsule shell.
His prescription.
His direction identifying Rebecca’s glass.
Ava’s observation.
The recovered drug in the champagne.
And now his own partial admission.
Why Rebecca?
Because she had recently contacted Mason’s attorney asking to discuss Caroline’s last weeks.
Charles knew.
Someone in the family office had told him she would be at the reception.
He did not necessarily intend to seriously harm her.
That did not make it harmless.
He wanted her calmer.
Slower.
Less likely to confront anyone publicly.
It was the same philosophy investigators now suspected he had used with Caroline.
Medication as control.
Not medicine.
Not treatment.
Control.
Mason sat through the detective briefing in silence.
Then asked, “If Ava hadn’t knocked over the tray?”
The detective answered honestly.
“Rebecca likely would have consumed at least some of the dose.”
“Would it have killed her?”
“Probably not at the amount we recovered.”
Mason closed his eyes.
That distinction mattered.
No one needed to inflate the danger to make Charles’s behavior monstrous.
He had secretly drugged a guest.
He had apparently done similar things before.
And his granddaughter had been the one person in the room who noticed.
Mason went home that night and sat beside Ava while she colored.
“You saved Ms. Rebecca from drinking something Grandpa put in her glass.”
Ava looked up.
“Was it poison?”
He chose his words carefully.
“It was medicine she did not know was there.”
“That’s bad.”
“Yes.”
“Did he do that to Mom?”
Mason’s throat tightened.
“We’re trying to find out.”
Ava nodded.
Then asked the question he feared.
“Is that why Mom died?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He refused to give her certainty adults did not possess.
That was one of the first promises he made to himself after Charles’s lies began unraveling.
May you like
No more family answers invented for comfort.
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