I stood in the kitchen with the telephone in my hand.
The knocking came again.
Three times.
Slow.
Measured.
Then silence.
"Margaret?" Peter said through the phone.
"Someone is at my door."
"Do not open it."
"I won't."
I moved away from the entrance.
The person outside did not knock again.
I heard footsteps retreat.
Then the elevator bell sounded.
I waited.
Another minute.
Then another.
Finally, a police officer arrived.
He examined the note without touching it directly. Another officer photographed the hallway.
They asked me what had happened.
I told them everything.
The tea bags.
The complaint.
Daniel.
The solicitor.
The package.
The message.
The knock.
One officer wrote carefully.
The other looked toward the ceiling.
"Does anyone live directly above you?"
"Emily."
"Could she have seen anything?"
"Possibly."
They went upstairs.
A few minutes later, Emily came down with them.
She looked pale.
"I heard someone in the hallway," she said.
"When?"
"Just before the knocking."
"Did you see them?"
"No."
"Did you hear footsteps?"
"Yes."
"From where?"
"Near the stairs."
The officer looked at me.
"Not the elevator?"
"No."
That mattered.
The building had two stairwells.
The person could have entered from the side entrance and reached my floor without passing the lobby camera.
The officers checked the footage.
There was a gap.
The side entrance camera had been malfunctioning for several days.
That was inconvenient.
It was also another coincidence.
By now, I was beginning to distrust coincidences.
Peter called while the officers were still there.
He told me the sender of the brown package had been identified.
The mailbox had been rented using a false identity.
The name had appeared once before in a different case.
"What case?"
"I can't tell you yet."
I almost laughed.
"You people have a talent for saying just enough to make things worse."
"I know."
"Does Daniel know?"
"He does now."
I asked whether he was safe.
"He's staying with a friend."
That relieved me.
Then Peter added, "There's something else."
"What?"
"The tea bags."
I closed my eyes.
"What about them?"
"We examined the photographs."
"And?"
"The ones Daniel admits throwing were all landing in roughly the same area."
I knew where this was going.
"The others?"
"Different trajectory."
I said nothing.
"The angle suggests some were not thrown from Daniel's balcony."
My grip tightened around the phone.
"From where?"
"We're not certain."
"Could they have come from the opposite building?"
"Possibly."
I looked through the window.
The opposite building stood across the narrow street.
Its balconies faced ours.
If someone there had been throwing tea bags, they could have landed on mine.
They could also have landed on Daniel's.
"Why tea bags?"
"We don't know."
"Could they have been trying to make Daniel look responsible?"
"That's one possibility."
The officers were still speaking quietly in the hallway.
I suddenly remembered Daniel's second conversation with me.
You should be glad it's only tea.
At the time, I had heard arrogance.
Now I wondered whether some part of him had already been frightened.
But he had still thrown tea bags.
His guilt remained real.
So did the possibility that someone else had been using the same behavior to conceal something.
Peter asked whether I could come to the solicitor's office the next day.
I agreed.
That night, I slept badly.
Every sound in the hallway woke me.
At six, I gave up.
I made coffee.
Then I stepped onto the balcony.
The air was cold.
The street was almost empty.
I looked across at the opposite building.
Third floor.
Fourth floor.
Fifth.
Nothing.
Then I saw a curtain move.
I froze.
A man stood briefly behind the glass.
Dark jacket.
Baseball cap.
He looked toward my balcony.
Then he disappeared.
I went inside.
I called the police.
They arrived twenty minutes later.
By then, the apartment was empty.
The building manager confirmed that the unit belonged to a woman named Carla Reyes.
She had been living there for eight months.
Her apartment was directly opposite Daniel's former balcony.
I had never met her.
The officers went upstairs.
Carla answered.
She was visibly annoyed.
I watched from the stairwell.
Then one officer came down.
"She says she knows Mr. Hartley."
I felt my stomach tighten.
"How?"
"She worked at the same company."
That explained one thing.
It raised another.
I had always assumed Daniel's work life was uncomplicated.
Maybe I had been wrong.
Later that morning, Peter explained more.
Carla had worked in the same department as Daniel.
There had been a dispute over confidential records.
Daniel had reported irregularities.
Carla had denied involvement.
An internal investigation followed.
She left the company.
Daniel remained.
"Was she charged?" I asked.
"No."
"Was she fired?"
"She resigned."
"Why did Daniel never tell me?"
"Because he didn't know whether she was involved in what happened afterward."
I thought about the tea bags.
The package.
The note.
The balcony.
The warning beneath my door.
It was beginning to form a shape.
But shapes could be deceptive.
I refused to decide before the evidence existed.
That afternoon, Daniel came to my apartment with Peter.
He looked exhausted.
"I should have told you," he said.
"You should have."
He nodded.
"Carla blamed me for the investigation."
"Did she threaten you?"
"Not directly."
"Then what?"
"She said I'd regret ruining her career."
"Did anyone else hear it?"
"Two coworkers."
Peter interrupted.
"We have statements."
Daniel sat down.
"I thought it was over."
"Why?"
"Because she left."
I looked at him.
"Leaving isn't the same as forgiving."
He nodded.
"I know that now."
We discussed the tea bags.
Daniel admitted that after the first few incidents, he had started throwing his own used tea bags over the railing partly because he wanted to convince himself the strange ones were not significant.
"You made the situation impossible to interpret," I said.
"I know."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I thought you'd think I was making excuses."
"I would have."
He almost smiled.
"Fair."
Then Peter placed a photograph on the table.
It showed the opposite building.
A balcony.
A person standing behind the railing.
The photograph had been taken by a private investigator several weeks earlier.
The image was blurry.
But the person was wearing a dark jacket.
And a baseball cap.
"That's her?" I asked.
"We can't establish identity from this image alone."
Daniel leaned forward.
"I've seen that jacket."
Peter looked at him.
"Where?"
"In the lobby."
"When?"
"Months ago."
I looked at Daniel.
"You saw her here?"
"Once."
"And you said nothing?"
"I wasn't sure."
Peter's expression hardened.
"This is exactly why uncertainty matters."
Daniel looked down.
"I know."
The conversation ended without a neat answer.
There were too many gaps.
Too many things Daniel had noticed but not reported.
Too many small incidents that had been dismissed because each one seemed harmless alone.
The next morning, the police searched Carla's apartment with a warrant.
They found nothing immediately connected to the tea bags.
But they found printed photographs.
Of Daniel.
Of his car.
Of the building.
And, among them, photographs of my balcony.
I felt cold when Peter told me.
"Why mine?"
"We don't know yet."
"Was I being watched?"
"Possibly."
I thought of the note beneath my door.
Stop asking questions about 4B.
The message suddenly made sense in the worst possible way.
Someone did not merely know about Daniel.
Someone knew I had started asking questions.
That meant the complaint, the solicitor, the package, and the warning were no longer separate events.
They were connected by information.
Someone had been watching.
And someone knew exactly how much I knew.
Peter told me the investigation was moving quickly.
But I had learned something during my years working with records.
The most dangerous gaps were not the ones where information was missing.
They were the ones where you assumed missing information meant nothing.
I went home that afternoon and opened the drawer.
The old complaint was still there.
I spread the photographs across the table.
Seven tea bags.
Seven dates.
Then I noticed something I had never noticed before.
The dates of the tea bags matched the dates Daniel had later told me he had seen the dark blue car.
Not every date.
But enough.
I stared at the photographs.
The first tea bag.
The second.
The third.
The fourth.
The pattern had been sitting in my drawer for months.
I simply had not known what I was looking at.
I called Daniel.
"I think we need to talk."
"About what?"
"The dates."
He was silent.
Then he said, "Margaret…"
"What?"
"I think I know why she used the tea bags."
"Why?"
"I think she wanted us to blame each other."
I looked at the photographs.
"Why?"
"Because while we were arguing, we weren't looking across the street."
Click here to continue reading: PART 8: The Truth Behind the Tea Bags Was Smaller Than the Fear It Created, Yet More Deliberate Than Either of Us Expected
The Small Brown Stain That Turned an Ordinary Morning Into a Problem I Could No Longer Ignore
Part 7 of 12
