Chapter 14
I stared at the photograph until my hands went numb.
The date was from three weeks earlier.
Someone had been inside our house at night.
Dad read the file beside me.
It contained my school schedule, medical history, and names of my friends.
Dr. Hale had written notes about my behavior.
SUBJECT RESISTS MATERNAL REPLACEMENT.
HIGH RISK OF RECOVERED MEMORY.
I looked at Mom.
“What memory?”
She asked when the photograph had been taken.
I described the pajamas I was wearing.
Her face changed.
“You were wearing those the night I took you to the park.”
“They still fit.”
“No. Look at the sleeve.”
A tiny yellow flower had been sewn near the cuff.
Mom had repaired the same pajamas years ago.
The photograph wasn’t recent.
It had been taken the night Mom died.
I had been asleep when she carried Noah and me home from the park.
“Dr. Hale was in our house that night,” I said.
Dad shook his head.
“No one came inside.”
“You were home?”
Dad looked at Mom.
Melissa had called him back because Noah supposedly fell.
He arrived after Mom left.
When he entered, both children were asleep.
Melissa had been waiting in the kitchen.
“What did she give you?” Mom asked.
Dad remembered drinking coffee.
He woke on the couch two hours later.
By then, Mom’s car had gone over the bridge.
They had drugged him too.
The file included photographs of Dad unconscious.
Dr. Hale had taken them.
Another photograph showed Melissa pressing Dad’s fingers onto a metal wrench.
The evidence used to arrest Dad had been manufactured five years earlier.
“Why wait until now?” I asked.
Mom answered quietly.
“Because I came back.”
Melissa learned Mom was moving toward Dallas.
She needed Dad arrested before Mom reached us.
The child abuse, the suitcase, and the 911 call were parts of one plan.
Ruiz delivered the photographs to the prosecutor.
Dad’s murder charge was dismissed that afternoon.
Reporters surrounded the courthouse.
Dad made only one statement.
“My children told the truth when the adults around them failed them.”
He refused to discuss Mom.
Her survival had not yet been made public.
We hoped that would protect her.
It didn’t.
Someone leaked her hospital room number.
Cameras filled the lobby.
The hospital moved her to another floor.
During the confusion, the electricity failed.
Emergency lights turned the hallway red.
Dad grabbed Noah.
Rebecca grabbed me.
When the lights returned, Mom’s bed was empty.
Her IV line lay on the floor.
The window was locked.
The guards outside remembered nothing after drinking coffee delivered by an orderly.
A hospital camera showed Dr. Hale pushing Mom through a service corridor in a wheelchair.
He wore a surgical mask.
They disappeared into the underground garage.
Ruiz issued an alert.
Dad blamed himself.
“I left her alone again.”
I picked up one of Mom’s birthday cards.
A line had been written inside every card.
When the bluebirds return, follow them home.
I thought it was something poetic.
Then I remembered the mosaic.
Project Bluebird.
The blue box.
Mom had created more than one hiding place.
I searched her envelope.
A hand-drawn bluebird appeared beneath the stamp.
Its wing pointed toward three numbers.
32, 96, 14.
Rebecca recognized them as rural highway markers.
They led to land our family once owned near Lake Whitney.
An old cabin stood there.
Dad looked at Ruiz.
“That’s where Sarah and I spent our honeymoon.”
Ruiz called local deputies.
No one answered at the cabin.
May you like
Then Noah said something that chilled me.
“Melissa took me there last summer.”
