Chapter 5 - The Severed Thread
The county jail's non-contact visitation room was separated by thick, scratched plexiglass. Daniel sat on the other side of the partition, wearing an orange jumper that hung loosely on his broad frame. In just four days, he had aged ten years. His eyes were sunken, surrounded by dark violet bruises of sleeplessness.
When he picked up the heavy plastic receiver on his side, his hand shook so violently he had to steady it with the other.
I lifted mine to my ear.
"You found the note," he said before I could speak. His voice came through the static-heavy receiver like crushed stones.
"Why didn't you tell me, Daniel?" I asked, feeling neither rage nor warmth, only an aching, boundless sorrow. "We met in college. We dated for four years. We built a life. How could you look at me while I was carrying our daughter and never tell me what your father did?"
Daniel pressed his forehead against the glass. A single, heavy tear tracked through the stubble on his cheek.
"Because if I spoke it out loud, it made it real," he whispered. "Nora, you don't know what it was like growing up in that house. You think my father was just a crazy old man? He was an absolute monarch. He convinced my mother that Clara died because of a spiritual debt. He made her pray on her knees on raw rice until her kneecaps bled, asking God to forgive her for bearing a 'tainted' child."
"And you?"
"When Maya was born," Daniel choked, his shoulders heaving, "and I saw those red patches on her cheeks in the delivery room, my entire soul went cold. I thought... I thought I had broken the chain. Harold hadn't mentioned Walter's book in twenty years. He seemed old. Frail. He had arthritis. I told myself he was past it."
"He had a rusted iron dart, Daniel!" I shouted into the receiver, slamming my palm against the counter. The guard at the back wall shifted, resting a hand on his holster, but I didn't care. "He had industrial duct tape! He had drawn a bullseye on our three-week-old daughter's face while you were upstairs taking a shower!"
"I thought he was making tea!" Daniel cried, weeping openly now, careless of the guards or the other inmates in the booths beside him. "He said he wanted to give Maya a warm bottle. I heard her cry, and I thought she was just colicky. When I ran downstairs and saw her on that board..."
He squeezed his eyes shut, his chest hitching violently.
"I froze, Nora. I wasn't a thirty-two-year-old man. I was five years old again, standing on the cellar stairs listening to my sister Clara scream in the dark. The paralysis... the absolute terror of him... it swallowed me whole. And in that five seconds of cowardice, you did what my mother and I could never do. You hit him."
I leaned in closer to the glass, looking straight into the eyes of the man I had loved for nearly a decade.
"I didn't hit him because I was brave, Daniel. I hit him because I am her mother. A mother does not negotiate with monsters. She destroys them."
"I know," Daniel whispered. "I know."
"Detective Rossi found something else," I said, watching him carefully. "In the root cellar. A registry from Pennsylvania. A property deed in Harold's name. What happened to Clara, Daniel? Did she really die?"
Daniel looked up, his red-rimmed eyes widening in sudden, raw confusion. "She died. We had a funeral. There was a tiny white casket."
"Did you see her body?"
"No," Daniel stammered, his mind racing backwards into childhood memories long buried. "It was closed-casket. Harold said her skin was too corrupt for church eyes. My mother... my mother had a complete breakdown at the cemetery. She tried to dig the grave up with her bare hands. That was why they put her in the sanitarium the first time."
"Daniel," I said, my voice hardening with an urgent realization. "Harold didn't kill her. Or if he did, he didn't put her in that grave."
Daniel stared at me, his mouth parting slightly. "What are you saying?"
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"The police exhumed the plot in Pine Crest Cemetery this morning," I said, delivering the news that Detective Rossi had shared with me only two hours ago outside the courthouse. "The coffin wasn't empty, Daniel. It was filled with five paving stones and an old leather-bound bible."
***
