Chapter 6 - THE BILL OF SALEThe words on the legal document swam before my eyes, refusing to make sense at first. My brain scrambled to process the dense legal jargon, the formal letterhead of a private family law firm in Columbus, and the chilling signatures at the bottom.
...and whereas the natural mother, Helen Brooks, being of compromised mental faculty and residing under temporary psychiatric hold, hereby surrenders all parental rights, custody, and claim to the infant female child (Claire Brooks)...
...in exchange for the financial settlement, lifetime medical care provision, and guaranteed perpetual residency of a secure cottage upon the Daniel Miller estate grounds...
I dropped the paper as if it had burst into flames.
A bill of sale. My father hadn't just divorced a mentally ill woman and put her away; he had bought her silence, her children, and her life, trading a lifetime of institutionalized isolation for a tiny, rotting shed at the back of his property line.
"My God," I whispered, backing away from the trunk until my spine hit a stack of cardboard boxes.
I reached blindly into the trunk and grabbed one of the composition notebooks. I flipped it open to a random page.
The handwriting wasn't my mother's neat cursive. It was Helen’s frantic, jagged scrawl.
October 12, 1994. I saw her today at the grocery store. She was wearing a little yellow coat with ducks on the pockets. Susan was holding her hand. My little girl doesn't know my name. She calls another woman 'Mommy.' Daniel walked past me in the parking lot and looked right through me like I was a ghost. I am not a ghost. I am right here.
I flipped to another page, my hands trembling violently.
May 3, 2002. Claire turned twelve today. I baked a small cake with one candle and left it on the stump at the edge of the woods. She didn't find it. The neighborhood dogs ate it instead. But I watched her through the kitchen window blowing out her real candles. She laughed. Her laugh sounds like mine used to sound before the white rooms and the pills.
Tears streamed down my face, hot and blinding. Every single photograph I had found—the birthday parties, the graduations, my wedding—flashed through my mind. I had thought she was a stalker. A deranged intruder lurking in the shadows.
She wasn't a stalker.
She was a mother who had lost everything, standing at the perimeter of a life that had been stolen from her, watching the daughter she was never allowed to hold grow up behind a pane of glass.
And my father and Susan had known. Every single day, they had looked out their back window and known that Helen was standing there, watching us, trapped in a silent, agonizing purgatory of their own creation.
Suddenly, a heavy thud echoed from the bottom of the attic stairs.
"Claire?"
My father's voice drifted up through the floorboards. It sounded thin, strained, and panicked.
"Claire, are you up there? You need to come down right now. The police... the police just found something in Helen's cabin."
My breath hitched. I scrambled to my feet, clutching the legal document in my hand, and rushed to the top of the attic stairs.
My father was standing at the bottom, looking up at me. His face was stark white, drenched in a cold sweat.
"What did they find?" I demanded, my voice cracking.
"Not in the woods," my father said, his voice trembling as he held up his ringing cell phone. "The state troopers just searched our basement crawlspace. The one behind the old furnace. The one we haven't opened in twenty years."
A cold dread, sharper and more terrifying than anything I had felt yet, pierced my heart.
"What's in the crawlspace, Dad?"
May you like
My father swallowed hard, his eyes welling with tears.
"Lily."
