Part 3: The Sleepwalker
Harper gently pulled me into a hug, awkwardly patting my back. She forced a strained, gentle smile.
“Elara, don’t worry,” Harper coaxed softly. “Do you remember the night it happened? Tell me exactly what you saw.”
I nodded, swallowing the lump in my throat, trying to hold back the tears.
“I remember,” I sniffled. “That night, my parents had a huge, terrible fight. My mother always told me that when they yelled, I had to hide in the closet, or else my father would kick me. So I hid. I didn’t dare look.”
I took a shaky breath.
“But my mother kept crying. She was screaming so loudly. It hurt my ears. I couldn’t bear it, so I secretly peeked through the slats of the closet door. I saw her lying on the living room floor. There was so much blood. She was asleep. My father wrapped her in a heavy canvas sack and dragged her outside.”
“The next day, my father poured new concrete for the western wall. I watched him put the sack inside the wooden forms before he poured the cement.”
Harper’s eyes widened, hanging onto every word.
“I was too afraid of my father to stop him,” I confessed, looking down at my dirty shoes. “I waited until it was pitch black outside. Then, I sneaked out to the wet concrete wall. I knocked on it and told my mother to come out.”
“And what happened?” Harper asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“My mother answered me,” I said earnestly. “She said, ‘I can’t come out anymore, Elara. I’m asleep. I won’t wake up again. You have to eat your vegetables and study hard, okay?’“
I remember being so confused. “I asked her, ‘Mom, how can you talk if you’re asleep?’“
“My mother said, ‘I’m talking in my sleep, baby. I can only talk to you.’“
I looked up at Harper, remembering the warning. “My mother also told me, ‘Don’t tell anyone I’m sleeping in the wall. If your father finds out, he’ll beat you so badly you won’t be able to get out of bed. And then you won’t be able to come out here to talk to me anymore.’“
“I was a good girl. I listened. I didn’t tell anyone. I never meant to tell the police, but it’s been three years since I was taken, and I missed her voice so much I couldn’t hold it in.”
I looked at the empty, broken concrete. “Is it because I broke my promise? Is that why she left? Because she doesn’t want me anymore?”
The thought of never hearing my mother’s voice again physically hurt. My chest tightened so violently I couldn’t breathe. I sobbed again, burying my face in my hands.
Through my tear-blurred vision, I saw Harper slowly let go of me and take a deliberate step backward.
Her face was pale. She looked at me with a deeply unsettling, terrified expression.
The other officers were staring at me as if I were a ghost.
“Captain Miller,” Harper said, her voice shaking. “Is the girl’s brain… really functioning correctly?”
“Yeah, Captain,” another officer chimed in, nervously backing away from the wall. “How the hell can a dead woman wrapped in concrete talk to a kid?”
Before Miller could respond, the woman impersonating my mother scrambled up from the dirt, wiping blood from her lip where Marcus had struck her.
“I already told you I am Sarah Caldwell!” she shrieked triumphantly. “I am not a fake! You destroyed my property based on the hallucinations of a traumatized, psychotic child! What more do you want?!”
Marcus gritted his teeth, spitting on the ground near Harper’s boots.
“Since you’ve already ruined my yard, let them keep digging!” Marcus challenged coldly. “If you find a single bone on my property, I’ll let you shoot me right here! But when you don’t find anything, you’re going to owe me a massive settlement for harassment and property damage!”
Just then, Harper’s radio crackled to life.
She unclipped it from her vest, holding it to her ear. Captain Miller’s booming voice rang out from the dispatch center back at the precinct.
“Harper, pull the men back immediately. We made a catastrophic mistake.”
Harper froze. “Sir? What do you mean?”
“The DNA test results just came back from the rapid-response lab,” Miller said, his voice heavy with resignation. “There is no mistake. The woman in your custody is a 99.9% match. She is Elara Caldwell’s biological mother.”
Harper stood absolutely still. Her face flushed with profound embarrassment and realization.
She clipped the radio back to her vest, letting out a long, heavy sigh.
“It’s over,” Harper announced to the tactical team. “Pack up the gear. We are withdrawing. We’ll handle the compensation paperwork at the station.”
She looked down at me. She was about to offer an apology, about to tell me that my mind had invented a ghost to cope with the abuse.
But I didn’t let her finish.
“I hear my mother’s voice!” I shouted, staring wildly at the tree line behind the house.
“She says she was moved! She misses me! She’s telling me to come find her!”
Part 4: The Anchor
No one believed me anymore.
The murmurs of the tactical team were loud and dismissive.
“Jesus, how sick is this poor kid? She’s having full-blown auditory hallucinations.”
“The shrink said she was fine, but clearly, the trauma fractured her grip on reality.”
“Do you think she made the whole thing up just to get her dad arrested because he beat her?”
I wasn’t lying. I really did hear my mother’s voice.
It was a faint, distressed, vibrating hum in my mind. It sounded terrified.
I tried to pinpoint the exact direction it was coming from, but the chaotic noise of the police packing up their heavy equipment, the idling engines of the cruisers, and the shouting of the officers made it impossible to focus.
I was dying of panic. I wanted to run to Harper and beg her to listen, but the woman impersonating my mother suddenly grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Elara, stop it!” the woman hissed, shaking me slightly. “Mom is right here! Can you just calm down?! It was so hard for me to find you. Don’t scare me like this! Listen to me, we are going to get in the car and go to a hospital to get your head checked…”
The police had already removed her handcuffs.
She tried to pull me into a tight hug, but Marcus violently yanked her backward by the collar of her shirt.
“Enough!” Marcus roared. “You wasted three years and our life savings looking for this broken brat, and you still want to throw money at a shrink?! I fed her! I raised her! That’s more than she deserves!”
The woman couldn’t hold back any longer. The subservient act vanished. She exploded, shoving Marcus away with surprising ferocity.
“She is my daughter!” the woman screamed, her eyes bulging. “No matter what it costs, I have to cure her! If you don’t give me the money for the doctors, I swear to God I’ll kill myself right here on this porch!”
She wildly grabbed a heavy, jagged rock from the demolished wall, raising it as if to bash her own skull in.
Marcus and the grandparents trembled with rage, cursing her for being a hysterical idiot.
The officers closest to the porch immediately rushed forward, wrestling the rock from her hands and pinning her against the railing to prevent her from harming herself.
The chaos escalated into a deafening crescendo. The shouting, the struggling, the sirens—it completely drowned out the faint, humming voice in my head. I lost the connection.
I dropped to my knees in the dirt, crawling toward Harper, desperately clinging to her dark blue uniform pants.
“I’m not lying!” I wept, my voice cracking. “I’m not sick! My mother was really taken away. I have to find her. Please, Detective! If I don’t find her, I can’t live anymore!”
Harper looked down at me, her eyes filled with an agonizing, conflicted sorrow.
She didn’t believe me. But she was a mother herself. In the squad car, she had told me she lost a daughter to leukemia years ago. Looking at my tear-streaked, desperate face, she couldn’t bear to simply walk away.
After a long, tense moment of internal struggle, Harper gritted her teeth.
“Jenkins,” Harper snapped at the forensics officer. “Bring the ground-penetrating radar and the luminol over here. Scan the entire foundation of that wall. If a rotting corpse was inside that concrete for years, it would have left chemical and biological traces in the porous material.”
The other officers groaned, looking at Harper as if she had lost her mind.
“Captain Harper, are you letting this psychotic kid dictate the investigation?” one officer complained.
Harper shook her head, her jaw set. “Consider it closure for the girl. If we prove scientifically that the wall is clean, maybe it will snap her out of this delusion.”
Harper knelt in the dirt, wrapping her arms around my trembling shoulders. She pointed to the woman struggling against the officers on the porch.
“Elara, listen to me,” Harper said softly, but firmly. “That woman over there is Sarah Caldwell. The DNA proves it. She suffered hell to find you. She loves you. If the radar and the chemicals prove there was never a body in that wall, you have to accept that your mind played a trick on you to cope with the abuse. You have to promise me you will listen to her, go to the hospital, and stop hurting her. Okay?”
I didn’t know how to respond. I knew, with absolute, terrifying certainty, that the screaming woman on the porch was a fake.
But to keep Harper from leaving, to keep the investigation open so I could find my real mother, I slowly nodded.
Thirty agonizing minutes later, the forensics team concluded their rigorous technical analysis of the concrete chunks and the soil beneath the wall.
“Nothing,” Jenkins reported, packing up the equipment. “No blood pooling, no biological decay markers, no cavities. The wall is clean. It’s always been clean.”
After that, no matter how hard I cried, no matter how desperately I begged, Harper refused to listen.
She had fulfilled her promise. The science had spoken. She signaled the team to withdraw.
I wanted to run after the squad cars, but the woman impersonating my mother grabbed my wrist in a vice grip, hauling me back toward the house.
I was terrified. A cold, suffocating dread seized my lungs.
If the police left, Marcus would drag me inside and beat me until I couldn’t move. I would be trapped in this nightmare forever. I would never see my mother again. I would never speak to her.
As despair threatened to completely swallow me, the chaotic noise in the yard finally died down.
And in that sudden silence, the humming vibration in my mind flared back to life.
I sensed her.
“I found her!” I screamed with every ounce of air in my lungs, ripping my arm out of the woman’s grip. “I know where my mother is!”
(Click ‘Next’ to continue)
