Chapter 17 - The Girl in the Red Sweater
Rebecca refused to touch the photograph.
Detective Sloan arrived twenty minutes later.
She photographed the box, checked the doors, called a technician and asked the question neither Rebecca nor I wanted to answer.
“Who knows where you live?”
“Half the town,” Rebecca said.
“The apartment.”
“My clients. Daniel. Mara. A few friends.”
“And Lenora?”
Rebecca laughed without humor.
“Lenora knows everything.”
“She’s incarcerated.”
“That never stopped her before.”
The security camera over the bookstore entrance had recorded nothing.
That was impossible.
Rebecca checked the system twice.
Someone had disabled the camera for exactly eleven minutes.
Not destroyed.
Not unplugged.
Disabled through the administrator account.
The account belonged to Rebecca.
“I changed the password after the trial.”
Sloan looked at her.
“Who knew the old one?”
“No one.”
“Who knows the new one?”
“Me.”
I thought of Lenora’s network.
Doctors.
Social workers.
Hospital staff.
Lawyers.
June Merritt.
People who had lived for years inside other families’ private information.
Rebecca picked up the cassette after the technician placed it in an evidence sleeve.
“Can we play it?”
“At the station.”
“No.”
Sloan studied her.
Rebecca said, “If this is mine, I hear it here.”
Twenty minutes later, the cassette recorder sat on the bookstore counter.
Sloan pressed play.
Static.
Then a child crying.
Rebecca’s body became rigid.
A woman spoke.
Lenora.
“Rebecca, quiet girls get to come out.”
The crying continued.
“You want Mommy?”
The child gasped.
“Yes.”
“Then stop.”
A mechanical hum began behind the recording.
Rebecca closed her eyes.
The sound grew louder.
The child began screaming.
Rebecca grabbed the edge of the counter.
“Turn it off.”
I reached toward the recorder.
She stopped me.
“No.”
Her voice shook.
“Let it play.”
Lenora’s voice returned.
“If you scream, the machine stays on.”
The child tried to swallow her crying.
I could hear it.
Tiny breaths.
Tiny efforts to become silent enough to deserve a door opening.
Rebecca whispered, “Oh God.”
The tape continued for four minutes.
Then another woman entered.
“Lenora, you can’t keep doing this.”
“I’m teaching her regulation.”
“She’s four.”
“She’s manipulative.”
The second woman said something too quiet to hear.
Lenora answered clearly.
“Children learn fear faster than they learn rules.”
The tape ended.
Rebecca walked into the bathroom and vomited.
Later, she sat on the curb outside the bookstore.
The sun was beginning to rise.
“I remember the sweater.”
I sat beside her.
“Red?”
“My father bought it.”
She rubbed her hands together.
“She hated it because he bought it without asking.”
More pieces returned during the next week.
Not in order.
Trauma rarely respects chronology.
Rebecca remembered a basement.
A plastic chair.
Wet concrete.
A yellow laundry basket.
Lenora folding towels while Rebecca cried.
She remembered being told that good girls stayed quiet.
She remembered counting the holes inside the washing-machine drum.
Rebecca began avoiding places with laundry appliances.
The basement of the bookstore.
Hotels with washers near the elevators.
Elise’s house.
One afternoon she entered a grocery store, heard an industrial dryer behind the bakery and walked out without buying anything.
She hated herself for it.
“That’s what scares me,” she told me.
“The machine?”
“No.”
She shook her head.
“What it can make me do.”
Rebecca had built her adult life around independence.
She had survived adoption.
A mother who erased her.
An agency that lied about her.
Years of not knowing whether her memories belonged to her.
Now a simple sound could make her abandon a room.
“That’s power,” she said.
“She still has power.”
“She’s in prison.”
“My body doesn’t know that.”
That sentence followed me home.
Two days later, Rebecca agreed to see a trauma therapist named Dr. Leah Morgan.
Rebecca hated the first session.
“She asked how I felt.”
“Terrible woman.”
Rebecca glared.
“I told her I don’t want breathing exercises.”
“What did she say?”
“She said good because she hadn’t offered any.”
I smiled.
Rebecca almost did.
Then her phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
One image.
A photograph of a small laundry room.
No people.
No message.
Rebecca stared at it.
Then another image arrived.
Closer.
The inside of a washing machine.
Then a third.
A child’s hand pressed against the metal drum.
Rebecca dropped the phone.
I picked it up.
May you like
A final message appeared.
YOU WERE NOT THE ONLY GIRL.
