Page 53 of The Vegas Rerun
Again, I’m merely playing along with Sarah to see how far she will go with this. I do want to know where Molly is though so it would help if Sarah does know that much at least.
“She got aggressive, and I tried to push her away. We were talking in the stairwell when she came at me, and I didn’t realize how close she was to the stairs. She lost her balance and fell. She’s gone to the hospital to be checked over,” Sarah says.
A muscle in my jaw ticks. Sarah pushed Molly down the stairs? She’s lucky I’m not the type to hit a woman or she would have a bust lip to match her nose.
I concentrate on pulling apart Sarah’s words instead of her body. None of this story sounds like Molly. She’s never been violent, and she never seemed to be the type to lash out. But Sarah does have a bloody nose, and something has clearlyhappened. I have no way of knowing the full story, but the evidence is unsettling.
And although I think Sarah is embellishing this part of the story too, and most likely twisting it to make herself look good and Molly look bad, I don’t think she’s lying about Molly being taken to hospital. It explains where she is and it fits with her falling down the stairs, which again is something I don’t think Sarah is going to make up because she would just look stupid when I asked Molly about it, and she tells me she hadn’t fell.
What I really want to do at this point is drop everything and go to the hospital to make sure Molly is ok. But first, I have to get to the bottom of this. Something has definitely happened, and I now have one employee covered in blood and another one in the hospital. I take a slow breath, trying to gather my thoughts. Ok, I’ve heard enough from Sarah. It’s time to see for myself what happened.
“Do you need to go to a doctor?” I ask.
Sarah shakes her head quickly.
“No, no, I’m fine. I was just a little bit shaken up is all,” she says. She dabs at her nose again, and I resist the urge to roll my eyes at her theatrics. She gives me a small, hopeful smile. “I can fill in for Molly while she’s at the hospital if you need me to.”
I don’t hesitate.
“No,” I say simply with no explanation, and no pleasantries.
She blinks, like she wasn’t expecting that. I guess I did a good job of looking like I was being taken in by her.
“Oh. Right. Well, if you change your mind, you know where I am,” she says, still not quite ready to give up.
“I won’t change my mind,” I assure her.
She presses her lips together, then nods her head.
“Ok. I’ll get back to work then, should I?”
I give a single nod of my head, and she stands up. She hesitates for a fraction of a second as if she wants to saysomething else, but she seems to think better of it. She crosses the room and leaves, the mixed scent of her perfume and her blood lingering in the air for a moment after she’s gone.
I move back to my own chair, and I sit there for a moment, my fingers steepled together, and my thoughts churning. Something isn’t right here. I’m not sure exactly how much of this Sarah fabricated, or exactly what happened between her and Molly, but I intend to find out.
CHAPTER 37
JOSHUA
I sitin the dim light of the security office, a small, almost forgotten room tucked away behind the IT department. I’m the only person with access to the room and the CCTV system, so it isn’t a room most people even know about.
The glow of the monitors paint my face with their flickering blue tinged light. It’s cold in here, colder than I remember the room being – even though rarely used, it’s only a small room and my body heat should have made it warm enough by now. I think that maybe it’s just me that’s cold. I’ve got this chill running through me that won’t go away—not until I know what really happened between Molly and Sarah. I have a feeling that whatever has happened between them, I’m not going to like it, but I need to know the real story and not just the she said, she said version of events.
Molly is in the hospital and knowing that she’s hurt pains me too. I should be there at the hospital with her. Every part of me screams at me to leave this and just go to her, to see her, to hold her hand, to hear her side of the story. Because whatever Molly’s side of the story turns out to be, I know she’s the one I willbelieve. But I guess that’s why I’m doing this, because I know I will struggle to be impartial and if I have actual footage of what happened, then I can’t be swayed one way or the other.
So yeah, I need the truth first, before I can go to the hospital and see Molly. This will be the definitive truth, not just the fragments I’ve heard, and not the whispers floating around the staff lounge – which didn’t take long at all to get going - or the cautious looks thrown my way like I might explode. I need to see it for myself.
There’s a tight knot in my chest as I pull up the CCTV software. Most of the staff likely don’t even know about the CCTV system because it’s been in place for so long, and those that do know it exists think the system only covers the building’s exterior. That’s by design. It’s easier to keep people honest when they don’t know they’re being watched inside too. The cameras in the stairwells and corridors are hidden, unobtrusive, practically invisible unless you know where to look. I didn’t think I’d ever use them for something like this, but I’m grateful to have them now that this has happened.
The current date and the time blink on the screen, a reminder of how recent this was - just an hour or two ago. It still feels unreal. I asked Frieda, one of my most trusted and long serving employees what happened, and she told me she didn’t see the actual incident, but she told me what she did see. I like that she sticks only to those facts, not adding in what Sarah told her after the event or anything like that.
She told me that Sarah said she had to speak to Molly about something and left their work area. Shortly after that, Molly and Sarah were seen heading toward the east stairwell together, and then only Sarah came back, shouting for someone to call an ambulance, saying that Molly fell.
Rumors are already flying that Molly was pushed, but Sarah has already said it was an accident, that Molly slipped. Noneof the people I’ve caught gossiping about Molly being pushed actually saw what happened. They just love the drama, I guess.
Having said that, there’s a part of me that thinks there might be something to what they are saying. It’s something to do with the look in Sarah’s eyes when she told me what supposedly happened. It wasn’t sadness that Molly got hurt, or even shock that she had found herself embroiled in this mess. It was a performance. A good performance, I’ll give her that. Someone who didn’t know her and Molly as well as I do might have taken it all in, but not me.
I whip through hours of footage on the CCTV system, fast forwarding through empty corridors, static shadows, the occasional orderly passing through. After that comes the early morning rush where everyone is rushing into work. People come and go down the hallways regularly after that and although I’m still fast forwarding, it’s at a slower speed than before. Lunch time comes bringing another rush hour situation and then it all calms down again. My fingers hover over the keyboard, skipping frame by frame now.
