Chapter 5 - Elena’s secret
Police traced Elena’s call.
Prepaid phone.
Signal bounced through a highway corridor.
No precise location.
She called again three hours later.
This time through my attorney.
She wanted protection before coming forward.
“From whom?” I asked.
She wouldn’t say.
That infuriated me.
“Our daughter was in a cage.”
“I know.”
“You knew?”
“I knew Julian locked her outside once.”
“Once?”
“I didn’t know about the cage.”
“How could you not know?”
Silence.
Then Elena said:
“Because I wasn’t living there anymore.”
I stopped.
“What?”
For nearly two months, Elena had been staying at the house only intermittently.
She and Julian had separated secretly.
Maya didn’t know the full extent.
Julian told her Elena was “working nights.”
Why keep it secret?
Because Elena had discovered money moving through accounts tied to Julian.
At first, she thought he was hiding assets from her.
Then she found names.
Missing-person names.
Samuel Harris among them.
One woman named Natalie Pierce.
Another named Rebecca Lowe.
All connected somehow to the property.
Elena hired a private investigator.
That investigator disappeared.
Then she panicked.
She moved into a hotel under another name.
But she left Maya?
That was the question I could not forgive.
“You left our daughter there.”
“I thought Julian would never hurt her.”
“You thought wrong.”
“I know.”
Her voice broke.
“I know.”
I wanted to scream.
Instead, I asked:
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was ashamed.”
“Of what?”
“Of admitting you were right about him.”
There it was.
Pride.
Fear.
Divorce resentment.
All the stupid adult things children end up paying for.
Then Elena told me about the girl from the pool.
Her name was Sophie Grant.
Seventeen.
Daughter of the private investigator Elena hired.
Sophie had been searching for her father.
Julian discovered her near the property.
He claimed she broke in.
Elena believed him at first.
Then Sophie disappeared too.
The girl recovered in intensive care.
When police later showed her Julian’s photograph, she cried.
But she did not say he put her in the bag.
She said:
“He tried to get me out.”
That changed everything.
Julian had locked Maya in a cage.
He had abused and terrorized her.
Nothing erased that.
But Sophie claimed Julian was not the person who trapped her beneath the pool.
Someone else was using the chamber.
Someone Julian feared enough to keep secrets for.
Then Sophie wrote one name on a hospital pad.
May you like
Victor.
Julian’s supposedly dead father.
