Page 15 of The Chain House

Yellow wiped her eyes and cheeks and looked at her wet fingers like she didn’t know she was crying. “What did the boy look like? Jennifer? What did the boy look like?”

“He was kind of tall. He had a red shirt on.”

Yellow bit her lip, closed her eyes, opened them, like maybe He was kind of tall and had a red shirt on wasn’t the answer she was looking for. Or maybe it was, and that’s why she now looked extra stressed, and her jaw was clenched so tight she could have chewed nails. She said, “Are you sure he waved to you?”

Jennifer nodded, but she was getting scared of the conversation and now wished she hadn’t started it. Now she only wanted to eat breakfast.

Yellow then let go of her hand and placed both of hers on Jennifer’s shoulders. “Jennifer, look at me. Was it a wave? Or did the boy place his hand on the window. On the glass.” She splayed her right hand out like a starfish. “Like this. On the glass. Jennifer? It’s important.”

Jennifer swallowed hard. “Like that. His hand was on the glass, just like that.”

“Son of a bitch,” Yellow said under her breath. She wiped her left cheek with her right hand, a hand that shook as violently as her mother’s hand had on the night she’d run into the woods. “Go on into the Kitchen House, Jennifer.”

“What’s happening?” Jennifer asked, teary-eyed now. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Why are you mad? We’re not supposed to show anger on the ranch.”

“Just go inside, Jennifer. And tell The Raven I said to come out here. Now.”

CHAPTER6

SAM AND CARL’S dining room table was a ping-pong table.

When they had parties, they’d take the net off and use it as a buffet table. He’d removed the net an hour ago to spread out the years of research he’d collected on Sal Batise.

The full names of the four children found in that closet were Jennifer Hamilton, Mark “Markie” Staphanski, Iris Erickson, and Peter Moore. After none of the parents—assumed cult members—showed up to claim their children, they all went into the system and were eventually adopted. When they’d been discovered, a dead flashlight was found inside the closet with them, and no one knew at which point during their twenty-four to thirty-six hours inside the closet things had gone completely dark for them. But the bigger story was what had been drawn on the closet wall.

“And that was you?” Sam asked Jennifer as they sorted through his research. It was a stupid question, he knew, but he had to officially confirm; it was well-known that Jennifer Hamilton, now Daley, had been the artist inside that closet, which had made her the key target for the questioning authorities.

“Yes,” she said without giving him glance. “That was me. And no, I don’t remember drawing it. I barely even remember being inside that closet. It was a long time ago, Sam.”

They worked in silence for the next few minutes, but Sam couldn’t stop thinking about that collage, or mural of sorts, authorities had found on the interior closet wall, sketches ranging from the Freedom Ranch’s wooded landscape and barracks to Sal Batise’s main house, and interspersed throughout were depictions of who authorities assumed were various cult members. Photographs of the lone closet wall had been in every true crime book ever written on Batise and the ranch and The Collective, and it had been analyzed to death by writers and art therapists and psychologists ever since. One aspect of the wall drawing that had always stood out to Sam were the four children drawn as stick figures inside what was assumed to be the ranch’s main house. The four stick figures were the only part of the wall art that appeared to have been drawn by a child; the rest of the mural had been expertly done. That had initially caused investigators to believe one of the children maybe had drawn most of the wall while another had drawn the stick figures. But the kids had all been so shell-shocked upon being freed that they barely had any recollection of their time inside the closet, and when asked which child, if any of them, had drawn the mural on the wall, the other three all pointed to Jennifer, like they all knew they weren’t supposed to draw on walls. But the real interrogation resulted from the detectives’ disbelief that any of the children could have drawn something so sophisticated and intelligent, something that would later give credibility to Bethany Hawthorne’s mysterious, masked attacker during the night of the massacre, who everyone now believed was a man named Justice Minks.

Sam wanted so badly to ask Jennifer about Minks, but feared her reaction, when suddenly she looked at him and said, “What’s your question? I know you have one.”

Sam froze like a deer in headlights.

“Sam, if we’re going to work together, you can’t be afraid of me.”

Afraid wasn’t what he felt; it was more like awe, but he couldn’t admit that. They’d called her a prodigy back then, and here she was, inside his apartment. “How did you do it?” Sam asked. “I mean, the vision. The skill. You were six years old.”

Jennifer said, “I don’t remember much from my mom, but she liked to tell people I was born with a pencil in my hand. Although now it’s a brush. I paint, mostly.”

She returned to the files she’d been digging through.

Sam lifted a file that held a photocopied picture of the closet’s mural and held it so Jennifer couldn’t see what he was looking at. It was one of those things that once you saw it, you couldn’t unsee it. He’d first looked at it as an eighth grader and hadn’t initially seen the image of the Guy Fawkes mask staring up at him from the photograph. He hadn’t even known who Guy Fawkes was, or what he looked like, and later googled the historic figure when he got home. It was only after staring at the photocopied mural inside the confines of his bedroom with the door closed that he’d finally noticed it, and he’d been mesmerized how all those smaller, individual sketches of various things could all come together to form one larger picture.

While Bethany Hawthorne had been the only survivor from the massacre to recall seeing the man in the Guy Fawkes mask that evening, no one, inside or outside The Collective, would speak to his existence at all. But the mural—and this was what had started the talk of the girl’s artistic genius—held much more in store for the detectives than initially thought. At first it wasn’t noticed because the closet was small, and they couldn’t stand far enough away to see it, but once clear pictures were taken and studied, the mural itself, when viewed from afar, had indeed shown a creepily accurate image of the Guy Fawkes mask itself.

The detectives had been blown away at how a six-year-old could have the foresight and vision to draw that inside a dark closet with only the aid of a flashlight that eventually lost power. The pencil found on the closet floor had been used all the way down to within an inch of the eraser. Jennifer’s fingers showed no blisters, and in fact were calloused, which told them she was no novice. She’d soon admitted to drawing the mural, but they’d gotten very little else from her after that, and as time went on, she seemed to remember and understand less of her time in that closet. But in the coming days, after searching the Freedom Ranch barracks, they’d found dozens of sketches under Jennifer’s bed, many of them later used at trial, a handful ending up as vital in the defense’s case on the three women known as Sal’s Angels.

Sam would eventually ask about those sketches, but right now he couldn’t step away from the mural in the closet. “Did you know when you started drawing on that wall, what it would look like in the end?”

“I don’t remember, Sam.”

“But you must have seen the man Beth Hawthorne saw the night of the massacre,” he said, with caution. “I mean, you must have seen him at some point on the Freedom Ranch, to have drawn what you did. To disguise that face in those sketches.”