Part 2
My eight-year-old nephew didn’t leave his mom’s casket during the entire wake and kept repeating…
It was a small cell phone, one of those old models that hardly anyone uses anymore, wrapped in a clear plastic baggy and secured with medical tape to the inner lining of the maroon dress. It didn’t belong to Rebecca. Or at least, it wasn’t the one we all knew she had.
The phone kept vibrating in Emiliano’s hand, an alarm flashing on the screen with a single word: “ALMA.” I felt my legs go weak. My name. My dead sister had hidden a phone on her own body and programmed an alarm to go off during her own wake.
Omar took a step toward us, entirely too fast. “Give it to me,” he said, his voice no longer sounding like grief. It sounded like fear. Emiliano backed away on the chair, clutching the cell phone against his cloth dinosaur. I stepped between them without a second thought.
“Don’t touch him.” The entire living room filled with whispers. My mom began to pray louder, as if the Lord’s Prayer could keep her standing. Omar tried to slip back into his role as the grieving widower. “That phone could be anything. Rebecca was very anxious lately. She was making up stories.” Right then, I realized he already had a narrative prepared. My sister hadn’t just fallen. According to him, she was also anxious, confused, and prone to exaggerating. It was the oldest way to erase a woman: make her look unstable before anyone could listen to her. I carefully took the phone.
The battery was low, but it wasn’t locked. When I opened it, a voice recording appeared, saved from three days prior—the exact same night Rebecca had sent me that short audio clip.
I pressed play, my heart hammering in my ears. My sister’s voice came out low, punctuated by shallow breaths.
“Alma, if you’re hearing this, it’s because I couldn’t get out. Omar found the insurance papers and knows I changed the beneficiary. It’s not him anymore. It’s Emiliano. I also found transfers from Mom’s account to his. It wasn’t a loan. He stole it.”
My mom let out a sob and covered her mouth. Omar shouted for us to turn it off, calling it disrespectful to play audio clips at a wake.
Nobody moved. The recording kept playing.
“If he says I fell down the stairs, don’t believe him. The hallway camera recorded everything, but he thinks he deleted the footage. There’s a backup copy inside Emiliano’s dinosaur.”
Everyone spun around to look at the stuffed animal. My nephew hugged it tighter, his eyes dry and wide. Omar lunged at the boy. This time, my cousin Javier caught him by the chest and held him back. There was a crash against the wall, a knocked-over chair, and an aunt screaming for someone to call the police.
I took Emiliano by the hand and led him into my mom’s bedroom, locking the door behind us while the shouting match continued outside. The boy wasn’t crying. That worried me more than if he had completely broken down. He sat on the bed, and with clumsy hands, unpicked a seam on the dinosaur, pulling out a USB flash drive wrapped in cotton. “My mom told me that if she went to sleep and didn’t wake up, I should give this to you when it made the sound,” he said. He handed it to me as if it were a burning coal. “She also said not to believe my dad if he said she tripped.”
By the time the patrol car arrived, Omar had recovered part of his act. He claimed we were hysterical, that the boy was traumatized, and that I was trying to create a scandal out of poorly handled grief. But the phone was in my hand, the flash drive was in my blouse pocket, and half the family had already heard the recording. An officer requested to halt the closing of the casket until the District Attorney’s office arrived.
Omar turned pale. “You can’t do that. The burial plot is already prepared.” The female officer looked at him with a coldness that finally allowed me to breathe. “Precisely for that reason.”
My mom collapsed into a chair. I wanted to hug her, but Emiliano was still glued to my waist, and for the first time that night, I understood that my sister hadn’t just left me evidence. She had left me her son as an immediate responsibility.
At the police station, they played the flash drive. The video wasn’t long, but it was enough to change everything.
It showed the hallway of Rebecca and Omar’s house. She appeared walking down the stairs holding a folder. Omar caught up to her from behind. You couldn’t hear everything, but you could distinctly make out him saying: “You are not leaving me with nothing.” Rebecca tried to pull away. He grabbed her by the arm. The struggle lasted only seconds. Then, she fell. It wasn’t a clean slip. It was a shove, driven by rage, followed by silence. Omar walked down quickly, stood there staring, and then looked directly at the camera.
