PART 3 — THE GIRL IN THE RED COAT
“That isn’t my daughter.”
Chloe’s warning came through the phone in a broken whisper.
Behind me, the girl who called herself Lily quietly slid the final bolt across the cellar door.
The metal scraped into place.
My entire body went cold.
I stared at the child’s pale face.
She was still wearing Chloe’s silver angel necklace. Her brown hair fell across the shoulders of the oversized red coat, and her eyes looked so much like my daughter’s that it hurt to meet them.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
The girl didn’t answer.
From inside the hidden tunnel, Mayor Whitmore began striking the wooden panel with something heavy.
Bang.
Dust drifted from the cellar ceiling.
Bang.
The wooden beam trembled in its brackets.
“Martha!” he shouted. “Open this door!”
The girl grabbed my wrist.
“We have to move.”
I pulled away from her.
“Not until you tell me the truth.”
Another blow shook the wall.
The girl looked toward the tunnel, then back at my phone.
“Is that really her?”
I pressed the receiver against my ear.
“Chloe?”
Static hissed across the line.
Then my daughter spoke again.
“Ask her about the blue room.”
The call ended.
The screen went black.
I looked at the girl.
“What is the blue room?”
Her expression collapsed.
For the first time, she no longer looked mysterious or dangerous.
She looked terrified.
“Who told you about that?”
“My daughter.”
“That’s impossible.”
“The same daughter whose necklace you’re wearing.”
She grabbed the silver angel and squeezed it inside her fist.
“I didn’t steal it.”
“Then where did you get it?”
“A woman gave it to me.”
“What woman?”
“I don’t know her real name. We called her Nurse Miriam.”
The wall behind us cracked.
Mayor Whitmore struck it again.
“Martha, she is lying to you!” he yelled. “That child is extremely disturbed!”
The girl flinched at his voice.
“He always says that.”
“You know him?”
“He used to visit the blue room.”
My stomach tightened.
“What did he do there?”
She looked down at her dirty shoes.
“He asked us questions.”
“Us?”
“There were seven of us.”
A chill moved through me.
“Seven children?”
“Seven girls.”
“All your age?”
She nodded.
“And he called every one of us Lily.”
For a moment, I could hear nothing but the violent pounding from the tunnel and the faint scratching of tree branches against the farmhouse above us.
I lowered myself until my face was level with hers.
“What is your real name?”
The girl swallowed.
“Rose.”
“Rose what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know your last name?”
“I don’t know if Rose is even my first name.”
Her voice cracked.
“It was written on the inside of my shoe when I was little. Nurse Miriam said it belonged to me, so I kept it.”
I stared at her.
She couldn’t have been older than ten.
The same age Chloe’s daughter would be now.
“What happened in the blue room?”
Rose looked toward the far end of the cellar.
A narrow wooden staircase led upward into the abandoned farmhouse.
She pulled me toward it.
“I’ll show you.”
We hurried through the cellar.
Behind us, a section of the hidden panel splintered inward.
Mayor Whitmore’s flashlight beam cut through the opening.
Rose and I reached the staircase.
She climbed first, moving quickly despite the heavy red coat. I followed with one hand gripping the railing and the other pressed against my nightgown, where I had hidden Chloe’s cassette tape and the birth certificate.
At the top, Rose pushed open a trapdoor.
We emerged inside what had once been the farmhouse pantry.
The air smelled of mildew, burned wood and old smoke.
Most of the house had been destroyed by fire years ago, but the rear section still stood. Moonlight poured through holes in the ceiling. Blackened beams rose above us like the ribs of a dead animal.
Rose led me through the kitchen.
Small footprints covered the dust.
Some were fresh.
Others had been there for years.
We entered a long hallway.
Seven doors stood along the walls.
Each one was painted a different color.
Red.
Yellow.
Green.
White.
Gray.
Black.
And at the very end—
Blue.
Rose stopped in front of it.
“This is where he questioned us.”
She pushed the door open.
The room was small and windowless.
A child-sized chair had been bolted to the floor beneath a bright ceiling lamp. A video camera stood in one corner, aimed directly at the chair.
The walls were covered in photographs of Chloe.
Chloe as a baby.
Chloe on her first day of school.
Chloe wearing her yellow sundress.
Chloe standing beside me at the county fair.
Some of those photographs had come from albums inside my home.
My hands began to shake.
“How did they get these?”
Rose stepped into the room.
“We had to study them.”
“Why?”
“They taught us everything about her.”
I looked at her.
“What do you mean?”
“We had to learn what food she liked. What songs she sang. What she called you. Where she had a scar on her knee. What she was afraid of.”
My stomach turned.
“What did Chloe call me when she was scared?”
Rose hesitated.
Then she answered softly.
“Mama Bear.”
Tears filled my eyes.
Only Chloe had called me that.
Not even Samuel knew.
Rose pointed toward an old tape recorder on a metal table.
“They played her voice while we slept.”
I approached it.
Several cassette tapes were stacked beside the machine.
Each was labeled with a number.
LILY 1
LILY 2
LILY 3
All the way to LILY 7.
One tape was already inside the recorder.
Rose pressed the play button.
Static filled the room.
Then I heard a child’s voice.
“Her name is Martha Henderson. She lives in the white house past Miller Creek. She keeps chickens. She lights a candle every Monday.”
The recording stopped.
Another voice followed.
Another little girl.
“Chloe’s favorite flower was lavender. Her mother keeps her clothes in a blue box.”
The tape clicked again.
Then Rose’s voice came through the speaker.
“If Martha asks who I am, I must say my name is Lily. I must show her the angel necklace. I must make her trust me.”
I turned to Rose.
“You were sent to find me.”
She shook her head quickly.
“No.”
“I heard your own voice.”
“They made me say it.”
“But you knew my name. You knew who I was.”
“I escaped two weeks ago.”
“From where?”
“A house outside town. There were locks on every window. Nurse Miriam helped me get out.”
“Why did she give you Chloe’s necklace?”
“She said it would protect me.”
“From Mayor Whitmore?”
Rose’s lips trembled.
“From the other girls.”
A loud crack echoed through the house.
Mayor Whitmore had broken through the cellar wall.
Rose hurried to the door and turned off the ceiling lamp.
The blue room fell into darkness.
Below us, floorboards creaked.
He was inside the farmhouse.
“Martha!” the mayor called.
His voice traveled through the hall.
“I know you can hear me.”
Rose pressed one finger to her lips.
I slipped my hand beneath my nightgown and pulled out Chloe’s cassette.
It was smaller than the other tapes and covered in dried mud.
I moved toward the recorder.
Rose grabbed my arm.
“What are you doing?”
“My daughter left this beside her body.”
“He’ll hear it.”
“I need to know the truth.”
Mayor Whitmore’s footsteps entered the hallway.
Slow.
Deliberate.
He began opening the colored doors one by one.
I inserted Chloe’s cassette and pressed play.
For several seconds, nothing happened.
Then Chloe began to speak.
Her voice was weak and breathless.
“If you’re listening to this, I probably didn’t make it home.”
My knees nearly buckled.
I covered my mouth.
Rose stood beside me, perfectly still.
Chloe continued.
“Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the baby. I wanted to. I tried so many times, but Dad said you would blame yourself.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“I met Elias Whitmore when I started helping at the mayor’s office after school. Everyone trusted him. I trusted him too.”
Her voice broke.
“He told me I was special. He told me he could help me become a singer. Then one night, after a town fundraiser, he locked his office door.”
My chest burned with rage.
I had welcomed that man into my home.
I had served him coffee.
I had thanked him for comforting me at my daughter’s funeral.
On the tape, Chloe took a trembling breath.
“When I became pregnant, Elias told me to make it disappear. I refused. That’s when he brought Mr. Sterling and Sheriff Parker to the farmhouse.”
A floorboard creaked outside the blue room.
Mayor Whitmore was close.
“They said a scandal would destroy the town. But it wasn’t just about Elias. I found files in the farmhouse basement. Birth certificates. Adoption records. Photographs of babies whose mothers were told they had died.”
Rose stared at the recorder.
Her face had turned white.
Chloe continued.
“They’ve been selling children for years.”
A cold wave passed through me.
The seven girls.
The hidden rooms.
The false names.
“My baby isn’t the only one,” Chloe said. “Nurse Miriam tried to help me. She switched the bracelets after I gave birth so Elias wouldn’t know which child was mine.”
Rose’s breathing became shallow.
“She told me there were seven baby girls born that week. She removed their names, moved them separately and promised Elias would never know which one belonged to him.”
The tape crackled.
Then Chloe’s voice became softer.
“But he found them.”
Rose backed away from the recorder.
“No.”
“He has spent years bringing them back to this farmhouse. He tests them. He teaches them my memories. He wants to discover which girl is Lily.”
Rose shook her head again and again.
“No, no, no…”
I grabbed her shoulders.
“What is it?”
“There aren’t seven girls anymore.”
“How many are there?”
“Two.”
The doorknob moved.
Rose and I froze.
Mayor Whitmore stood directly outside.
His voice came through the wood.
“Turn off the tape, Martha.”
I pressed my hand against the door.
“You destroyed my daughter.”
“Chloe destroyed herself.”
“You raped her.”
Silence.
Then the mayor said calmly:
“Open the door, and I’ll explain everything.”
I looked at Rose.
She pointed toward the air vent near the floor.
It was small, but the metal grate had already been removed.
“You go first,” I whispered.
Rose dropped to her knees.
The door shook as Whitmore rammed his shoulder against it.
The tape continued playing.
“Mom,” Chloe said, “Dad didn’t kill me.”
I stopped.
Rose had already crawled halfway into the vent.
“What did she say?” I whispered.
On the tape, Chloe began to cry.
“Dad came to the farmhouse to save me. Elias told him I had disgraced our family, but Dad tried to take me home.”
The mayor struck the door again.
The lock began to split.
“They shot him,” Chloe continued. “Not that night. Later. They made it look like his heart failed.”
My mind flashed back to Samuel’s death three years after Chloe’s funeral.
He had collapsed in his workshop.
Sheriff Parker had arrived before the ambulance.
The county doctor had signed the death certificate without an autopsy.
I had buried my husband beside an empty coffin.
Another lie.
“Dad hid my body in the well because I asked him to,” Chloe said.
I stared at the recorder.
“Why?” I whispered.
“He promised that one day you would find me and uncover everything. He hid the cassette with me. He placed the sonogram behind my picture. But Elias discovered what he had done before Dad could tell you.”
Tears streamed down my face.
Samuel had not betrayed our daughter.
He had died trying to protect her secret.
The doorframe cracked.
Whitmore’s hand reached through the opening.
I grabbed the recorder and hurled it against his fingers.
He screamed.
The pistol fired.
The bullet tore through the wall above my head.
Rose seized my hand from inside the vent.
“Come on!”
I crawled after her.
The metal shaft was tight and filled with dust. Behind us, the blue-room door burst open.
Mayor Whitmore fired again.
The bullet struck the vent, sending a deafening clang through the metal.
Rose crawled faster.
The shaft turned sharply upward and opened behind a loose wall panel in another room.
We pushed through it and fell onto the floor.
This room had once been a nursery.
Seven rusted metal beds stood in two rows.
Names had been carved into the headboards.
ANNA
GRACE
RUTH
ROSE
EVA
LILY
The seventh name had been scratched away.
Above each bed hung a photograph of a girl.
Four photographs had large black X marks drawn across their faces.
One frame was empty.
Rose’s photograph hung above the fourth bed.
The image showed her wearing the same red coat.
I moved toward the bed labeled LILY.
A photograph hung above it.
It showed a little girl with light brown hair, green eyes and a small crescent-shaped birthmark behind her left ear.
She was standing in front of my house.
My breath stopped.
I recognized her.
Her name was Emily Parker.
Sheriff Parker’s granddaughter.
She had come to my property three months earlier with a school group to buy eggs. While the other children chased chickens, Emily had stood silently in my living room, staring at Chloe’s photograph.
Then she had asked me something strange.
“Does the lady in the picture sing when it rains?”
I had laughed and told her that Chloe used to stand on the porch during storms and sing as loudly as she could.
Emily had smiled.
“I do that too.”
At the time, I thought it was a coincidence.
Now I saw the silver angel necklace around her neck in the photograph.
The same necklace Rose was wearing.
I turned.
“Where did you really get that necklace?”
Rose touched it.
“Nurse Miriam took it from the girl in this picture.”
“Emily?”
“She wasn’t called Emily when she lived here.”
“What was she called?”
“Lily.”
My heart began pounding.
“Where is she now?”
Rose looked toward the nursery door.
“Sheriff Parker took her.”
“Why would he raise Chloe’s daughter?”
“He isn’t raising her.”
Footsteps entered the room next door.
Mayor Whitmore was searching for us.
Rose moved to the empty seventh bed.
She reached beneath its mattress and pulled out a thin folder.
Inside were newspaper clippings, medical records and photographs.
She handed me the top page.
It was a police report dated three days earlier.
MISSING CHILD: EMILY PARKER, AGE TEN
I looked at Rose.
“She’s missing?”
Rose shook her head.
“No. He took her back to the house.”
“What house?”
“The one where we were kept.”
“Where is it?”
“I can show you.”
The nursery door slowly opened.
Mayor Whitmore stood in the doorway.
Blood covered the fingers of his right hand, but the pistol remained steady in his left.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he said.
Rose stepped behind me.
I held the folder against my chest.
“You don’t know which child is yours,” I said.
His expression hardened.
“I know now.”
He aimed the weapon at Rose.
“She failed the final test.”
Rose whimpered.
“What test?” I demanded.
“The dead always recognize their own blood.”
I stared at him.
He smiled without warmth.
“Chloe’s voice never called Rose her daughter.”
My skin prickled.
“You heard the telephone call?”
“I arranged it.”
“No.”
“Sterling installed equipment in your phone line years ago. Every word you heard came from recordings we made before Chloe died.”
He had an explanation for everything.
The calls.
The voice.
The timing.
But I remembered what Chloe had told me.
The blue box.
The missing notebook page.
The well.
Things Mayor Whitmore should not have known.
“You didn’t make that call,” I said.
His smile disappeared.
“I said give me the folder.”
Behind him, the hallway light began to flicker.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then a girl’s voice came from the blue room.
“Elias.”
The mayor went rigid.
It was Chloe.
Not through a telephone.
Not through a recorder.
Her voice echoed through the farmhouse itself.
Mayor Whitmore slowly turned toward the hallway.
A shadow moved across the wall.
The shape of a young woman in a yellow sundress.
The pistol slipped slightly in his hand.
“That’s impossible,” he whispered.
Rose grabbed a rusted lamp from beside the bed and swung it.
The metal base struck the mayor’s wrist.
The gun flew across the floor.
I kicked it beneath one of the beds.
Mayor Whitmore lunged at Rose.
I threw myself against him.
The three of us crashed into the nearest bed, sending the old frame scraping across the floorboards.
The burned wood beneath us cracked.
Rose rolled away.
Mayor Whitmore grabbed my throat.
His thumbs pressed into my windpipe.
“You should have stayed inside your house,” he hissed.
I clawed at his hands.
Behind him, the girl in the yellow sundress appeared in the nursery doorway.
Chloe looked exactly as she had the last morning I saw her alive.
Nineteen years old.
Barefoot.
Her hair damp from the rain.
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Mom,” she said.
Mayor Whitmore turned.
The broken floor gave way beneath him.
He fell through the boards, screaming as he disappeared into the dark cellar below.
The sound of his body striking the ground echoed through the farmhouse.
Then everything became silent.
Chloe was gone.
Rose helped me stand.
“We have to leave before he gets back up.”
I retrieved the pistol and the folder.
Together, we hurried down the hallway and climbed through a broken window into the yard.
The eastern sky was beginning to lighten.
Morning was coming.
But the night was not finished with us.
As we crossed the field toward my house, the landline began ringing inside.
I could hear it from the porch.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Rose stopped at the edge of the yard.
“I’m not going inside.”
“It might be Chloe.”
“It might be them.”
I opened the back door and entered alone.
The kitchen lights were still off.
The shattered mug lay across the floor.
Chloe’s photograph remained beside the broken glass in the living room.
The telephone rang again.
I lifted the receiver.
“Hello?”
A child was crying on the other end.
Not Chloe.
A little girl.
“Mrs. Henderson?”
My fingers tightened around the phone.
“Who is this?”
“My name is Emily.”
My heart stopped.
“Emily Parker?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know.”
Her voice trembled.
“The windows are covered. There are other children here.”
“Is Sheriff Parker with you?”
“He left a few minutes ago.”
“Emily, listen to me. Can you see anything that tells you where you are?”
She began breathing rapidly.
“There’s a sign outside the basement door.”
“What does it say?”
“Saint Agnes.”
I knew that name.
Saint Agnes Maternity Home had closed nearly forty years earlier.
It stood deep in the forest north of town.
The same road Chloe had supposedly taken on the night of her accident.
“Emily, I’m coming to find you.”
“Please hurry.”
Then she whispered something so quietly that I almost didn’t hear it.
“There’s a woman locked in the room beside mine.”
“What woman?”
“She says her name is Nurse Miriam.”
The line crackled.
Someone began unlocking Emily’s door.
“Hide the phone,” I whispered.
Emily started crying harder.
“Mrs. Henderson, she told me to ask you something.”
“What?”
“She wants to know whether you remember the baby you lost before Chloe was born.”
The air left my lungs.
I had never told anyone about that baby.
Not even Chloe.
Before I could answer, a man entered Emily’s room.
Sheriff Parker’s voice came through the receiver.
“Martha, bring Rose and the evidence to Saint Agnes.”
A gun clicked.
“Or this time, we’ll make sure your granddaughter stays dead.”
The call ended.
I slowly lowered the receiver.
From the doorway behind me, Rose spoke.
“What did he say?”
I turned toward her.
But Rose was no longer alone.
Attorney Arthur Sterling stood behind her with one hand gripping her shoulder.
In his other hand, he held a syringe.
He plunged the needle into Rose’s neck.
Her eyes widened.
Then her body went limp.
Sterling caught her before she hit the floor.
He looked at me and smiled.
“Good morning, Mrs. Henderson.”
Outside, the first church bell began to ring.
“You and I are going to Saint Agnes.”…………….
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 4…
