Chapter 3 - The House Kept Its Secrets
By midnight, the police had sealed the laundry room with yellow tape, and the hospital had moved Owen to a monitored nursery. Daniel sat at the kitchen table with both hands wrapped around a cup of untouched coffee. He kept reading the message about Rebecca as if the name might rearrange itself into something easier.
“Who is Rebecca?” I asked.
He rubbed his eyes. “My sister.”
“You have a sister?”
“Had.”
The answer fell between us like a locked door.
Daniel had always spoken about his family as if it consisted of himself and Lenora. Elise had once said he had grown up in a house where questions became punishments, but he had never mentioned a sister. I thought perhaps she had died young. Now I wondered why the name had been sent from a hidden contact at the exact moment his son was taken from a washing machine.
Before Daniel could explain, Detective April Sloan returned with a technician. She was a compact woman with tired eyes and a notebook held tightly against her chest.
“The washer was unplugged before the baby was placed inside,” Sloan said. “That means it wasn’t an accident involving a running cycle. Someone prepared the space.”
Daniel looked toward the taped doorway. “There was a towel under him.”
“A clean towel. The inside of the drum had been wiped down, but we found fibers from a blue blanket caught in the gasket.”
“Owen’s blanket,” I said.
Sloan nodded. “We also found residue consistent with liquid medicine on the edge of the blanket. Not enough to prove who administered it, but enough to raise concern.”
Lenora had been taken to urgent care for her head wound. The officers planned to question her again after she was examined. Sloan asked if we knew of anyone who could have entered the house.
“My mother has a key,” Daniel said.
“Anyone else?”
He hesitated. “My cousin Tessa used to have one. Elise changed the locks after the baby was born.”
“Why?”
Daniel’s silence lasted too long.
I answered for him. “Elise was afraid of Lenora.”
Detective Sloan wrote that down without looking surprised.
The technician had found something in the hallway camera. Daniel had installed a small doorbell device after a series of package thefts. Lenora had covered its lens with her palm when she entered at 3:26 that afternoon. The recording showed her arriving alone with a canvas laundry bag. When she left forty-four minutes later, the bag was gone.
“What was in it?” Daniel asked.
“We don’t know,” Sloan said. “But the bag was visible when she entered, and it was not visible when she left.”
The camera had recorded audio for the first few seconds before Lenora blocked it. Her voice drifted through the hallway.
“You should have listened to me the first time.”
There was another voice, faint and distorted by the door.
“I’m not giving him to you.”
Daniel stood so quickly his chair scraped the floor.
“That’s Elise.”
Sloan replayed the clip. The second voice was definitely female, but the recording was too damaged to identify. Elise had been in the hospital when Lenora entered. The house had been empty, which meant someone had either recorded an earlier conversation or the audio had been planted.
“Could she have been here earlier?” Sloan asked.
“No,” Daniel said. “I drove her to the hospital myself.”
The detective looked toward the kitchen counter. “Your sister’s phone may tell us more.”
Daniel opened the message history again. Several photographs had been deleted recently, but the cloud backup had not synchronized. He connected the phone to his laptop while Sloan watched.
The first restored image showed Elise’s hand holding a blue folder. The folder had a hospital logo on it. The next image showed a handwritten list of dates, names, and amounts of money. At the bottom, in Elise’s handwriting, were the words: Rebecca Voss — not dead.
Daniel stared at the screen.
“That’s impossible,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because my mother told me Rebecca died when I was nine.”
Sloan took a photograph of the screen. “Who would Elise have been investigating?”
Daniel did not answer. His phone began ringing. The caller identification showed Lenora’s name, though she was still at the clinic.
He answered on speaker.
Lenora’s voice was steady. “Daniel, come to the old house before the police find the wrong story.”
“What did you do to Rebecca?”
May you like
There was a long pause.
Then Lenora said, “Your wife found the first grave. She hasn’t found the second.”
