Chapter 2 - The Name You Never Forget
"What the hell did you just say to me?" I stood up, my knees cracking, the crowbar shaking in my right hand. "Caroline, there is a starved child living inside our drywall! Call nine-one-one right now!"
"No police," she hissed, stepping into the room and shutting the bedroom door firmly behind her. She locked the deadbolt with a quiet click. "You don't know what you're doing, Ryan. You have no idea what you're stepping into."
"Are you insane?!" I yelled, stepping toward her. "Lily, go to the bathroom. Lock the door."
Lily didn't move. She stood against the wall, chewing her thumbnail, watching us with an eerie, flat detachment that terrified me more than Caroline’s coldness.
Inside the wall, there was a scuffling sound. Wool scraping across unfinished floor joists.
I whipped back around, bringing the flashlight down to the opening. The little girl was crawling forward on her elbows and knees. She wasn't fleeing deeper into the darkness. She was coming straight toward the daylight. Straight toward me.
She poked her tiny, dirt-smudged face out into the bedroom air, squinting against the flashlight beam. Her eyes were an unmistakable, piercing steel-blue.
Exactly like mine.
Her cracked lips parted, dry saliva stringing between her teeth.
"Daddy?" she rasped.
The word detonated in the room like a grenade.
"Caroline," I said, my voice dropping an octave, my ears ringing with sudden static. "Who is this?"
"She's confused!" Caroline shrieked, suddenly losing her icy calm, rushing toward the hole and trying to push the girl back inside with the heel of her boot. "She's sick, Ryan! Don't listen to her, she doesn't know what she's saying!"
"Get your hands off her!" I shoved Caroline back. She hit the dresser, knocking over a jewelry box.
I knelt down in front of the little girl. She was shaking so violently her teeth clicked together. She reached her thin arm out of the hole, wrapping tiny, freezing fingers around my wrist. Her grip was desperate.
"Daddy," she whimpered, tears cutting pale rivers through the soot on her cheeks. "You said you'd come back when the snow stopped. You have the scar on your thumb. The one from the lawnmower."
My heart stopped beating.
I had that scar. A jagged two-inch line across my left thumb knuckle from when I was fourteen years old working landscaping in Cleveland. I had never told Lily about it. I had barely even mentioned it to Caroline in passing years ago.
"Who are you?" I whispered, my vision tunneling.
The girl reached under her filthy sweatshirt and pulled out something tucked into the waistband of her track pants. A water-damaged, dog-eared Polaroid photograph. She pushed it into my open palm.
I held it under the flashlight beam.
It was me. Ten years younger, twenty-two years old, sitting on the hood of my rusted Honda Civic outside an apartment building on West 112th Street in Cleveland. Sitting right beside me was a woman with long chestnut hair and bright green eyes, laughing into the camera, her head on my shoulder.
A woman named Maya.
My fiancée. The woman who supposedly died in an unsolved hit-and-run crash eight months before I ever met Caroline.
Lily stepped forward, her voice tiny and matter-of-fact. "Mommy brings her hot soup at night. Mommy told her if she made any noise, the man in the basement would cut her tongue out."
I slowly turned to look at my wife.
Caroline wasn't crying. She had backed up against the bedroom window, her hand buried inside her wool trench coat pocket.
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And when she brought her hand out, she wasn't holding a phone. She was holding a snub-nosed .38 revolver.
"Sit down on the floor, Ryan," Caroline said softly. "Right now."
