Chapter 6 - The Dark Attic
Ten minutes later, Vance walked over to the squad car where I sat shaking, clutching a thermos of hot coffee that Sarah Lin had handed me.
"We got him," Vance said through the open window, water dripping from the brim of his cap. "Julian tried to jump out of the second-story sunroom window into the garden. He had a duffel bag with sixty thousand dollars in cash, three stolen handguns, and four bricks of fentanyl. He didn't make it past the hedge."
"And the attic?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Vance’s face darkened. "Our forensic techs are inside now. Come with me, Natalie. I want you to identify a couple of Ava's belongings before the crime scene unit bags them. You don't have to look at the room if you don't want to."
"I want to see," I said firmly, stepping out into the cold rain.
I walked through the broken doorway of the house I grew up in. Every corner of this mansion held a ghost of my childhood—moments where Eleanor locked me in my bedroom for speaking out, times she told me I was 'too sensitive' whenever Julian stole my money or broke my things. The smell of expensive lavender potpourri couldn't mask the underlying rot anymore.
We climbed the grand spiral staircase to the third floor.
The attic guestroom door stood wide open. Inside, evidence markers littered the floor.
On the white oak floorboards near the threshold, a dark smear of dried crimson stood out like an obscenity. Directly above it, the sharp corner of the heavy wooden banister had a small patch of blonde hair stuck to the splintered grain.
Beside it lay a tiny purple plastic butterfly hairclip—Ava’s favorite. It was cracked in two.
"She was terrified, Natalie," Sarah Lin murmured softly from behind me. "She fought him. She didn't just stand there. She tried to pull away."
I walked toward the desk. On top of it sat an empty prescription bottle in Eleanor’s name, rolls of duct tape, and a child’s pink denim jacket—Ava's jacket from this morning. It was torn at the shoulder, soaked in blood at the collar.
Eleanor had stripped it off my child to hide the physical evidence from me. She had deliberately replaced it with Julian’s dirty navy sweater so I wouldn't see the bleeding until after Kelly was gone.
"They planned to blame Kelly," Vance said, pointing to a notepad found near the telephone. "Eleanor had already written out a narrative. If you went to the hospital, she was going to claim Kelly was driving recklessly and got into a minor fender bender, and that Kelly panicked. Eleanor was ready to sacrifice her youngest daughter to save Julian."
I stared at the pristine handwriting on the pad—my mother’s elegant calligraphy, plotting to destroy one daughter to protect a predator, while leaving her granddaughter broken and bleeding.
May you like
"She's a monster," I said, a strange, absolute calm descending over my heart. The fear that had kept me trapped for thirty-four years dissolved completely, burned away by a pure, protective fire. "She's not my mother. She's a monster."
***
