Chapter 4 - Sarah’s Box
The box was beneath my bed.
Emily knew because children always know more about their parents’ hiding places than adults imagine.
Inside were newspaper clippings about Nathan Mercer.
Thirty years of them.
Missing Boy, 13.
Search Expands.
Family Offers Reward.
No Evidence of Drowning Found.
Then newer material.
Photographs of Daniel leaving the precinct.
His vehicle.
His childhood home.
Emily asked:
“Did Mommy know you?”
“I don’t know.”
Daniel hated the answer.
Then he found a photograph dated eleven years earlier.
Daniel standing outside a courthouse.
I was visible in the background.
Watching him.
So yes.
I knew him.
He simply didn’t know me.
Laura sat down.
“Sarah had been looking for you for years.”
“Why?”
“Because of Nathan.”
“What did Nathan have to do with Sarah?”
Laura looked at Emily.
Too much for a child.
Daniel understood.
He asked another officer to remain with the children while he spoke to Laura in the kitchen.
She finally explained.
Thirty years earlier, Nathan had not disappeared near the river.
He reached the Bennett house.
Terrified.
Injured only by scratches from running through woods.
Thomas Bennett let him inside.
Nathan said someone had been following him.
“Who?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
Thomas intended to call Daniel’s parents.
Nathan begged him not to.
Then a vehicle arrived.
Laura had been eight.
I was five.
We watched from upstairs.
A man entered.
Nathan saw him.
And immediately hid.
“Who was the man?”
Laura stared at Daniel.
“Your father.”
Daniel’s throat tightened.
“My father was searching for Nathan.”
“No.”
“He organized the search.”
“I know.”
“You’re saying Nathan was hiding from him?”
“I’m saying Nathan screamed when he saw him.”
Daniel shook his head.
His father, William Mercer, had died twelve years earlier.
A respected attorney.
A devastated parent.
The man who kept Nathan’s bedroom unchanged for years.
Laura continued.
Her father confronted William.
They argued.
Nathan escaped through the back.
That was the last night Laura saw him.
But I had seen something else.
“What?”
“Sarah followed Nathan.”
I was five years old.
Barefoot.
Carrying a stuffed rabbit.
Nobody noticed for nearly fifteen minutes.
When Thomas found me, I was standing beside an abandoned storm tunnel.
Nathan was gone.
But I kept repeating one sentence.
“He went through the little door.”
The police searched.
Nothing.
Years later, I started remembering more.
A second adult had been inside that tunnel.
A woman.
Daniel asked:
“Who?”
Laura shook her head.
“Sarah never remembered her face.”
Then Emily appeared in the kitchen doorway.
She had heard enough.
“Yes, she did.”
Everyone looked at her.
May you like
Emily whispered:
“Mom drew her.”
