Page 16 of The Chain House

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the assumption.”

“But you don’t remember him?”

“Do you remember much of anything from when you were six, Sam?” She waited, then said, “I didn’t think so. As time goes on, it’s like those memories don’t count. Whatever happened didn’t happen. They aren’t me anymore.”

Sam could tell by the sorrow in her eyes that she didn’t believe her own words, because those memories, for her, did count. Or you wouldn’t be here, he wanted to say. But whoever it was in that mask—and most thought it was the mystery man Justice Minks—he’d had such a profound effect on her that she drew what she did in such a secretive way that few people, if any, had noticed it initially.

She’d feared that man back then and she still feared him now, and Sam couldn’t let it go. “On the wall,” he said, “you wrote … ‘The Raven was here’?”

“Yes,” she said. “Evidently so. And no, I don’t remember who The Raven was. Or why I then must have written, ‘The Raven is a liar.’ Except I spelled it wrong.”

“L-Y-E-R,” Sam said, glancing down at the open file in his hand.

“Thanks for the reminder,” she said, with a nod toward the concealed file folder in his hand. “And I know what you’re looking at, dork. You don’t have to hide it.”

He lowered the file now that he’d been outed. “What about the stick figures?”

“What about them?”

“Why did you draw them like a normal kid would?”

“So I’m abnormal?”

“Not what I meant.”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking away. “Maybe because we were kids and we were scared, so that’s how I drew them.”

“Why don’t you admit you’re a badass?” Sam said, unable to contain his smile.

“Same reason you don’t admit you’re a dork.”

“But I am.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Is that all?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “Go ahead and ask it, Sam. The fifth child?”

“Now that you bring it up.”

“Same as the rest of it,” she said, in reference to what was generally thought of as an erased fifth stick figure on the wall. “I couldn’t answer it then, and I can’t answer that now.”

It had drawn the obvious question back then over whether there had actually been five children in the closet and not just four. Or maybe it had meant there were five children on the ranch at one time, but only four remained. Regardless, it was universally agreed that there had been five stick figures on the wall and one of them at some point had been erased. “Or maybe I just lost count,” Jennifer added. “Or maybe it was full dark by then.”

Jennifer was right, memories from that young of an age were fleeting. Or maybe they’d been in full flight mode. But what most therapists agreed on was fear. The children were afraid to talk about anything pertaining to the ranch or Sal Batise. The fear of the repercussions. The fear of someone coming back to punish them. The fear of what Iris, during one interview let slip, of someone she called the bad man finding them and cutting out their tongues. When asked who the bad man was, she clammed up and never spoke of him again, and the same went for the other three children. Markie was on record in the days after their discovery saying, We’re not supposed to talk about The Collective.

Sam asked her, “Did you really believe there were demons in the woods?”

“Look at the mural,” she said in a way that made him feel stupid.

He looked down at the photocopy, although it had long ago been engraved in his mind, and the six-year-old Jennifer had drawn what appeared to be ghosts or demons throughout the wooded areas of the mural.

She said, “Of course I believed it.”

“And now?

She looked at him incredulously. “No, Sam. I don’t. Although something must have stolen my mother,” she snapped. And they went quiet again. They both knew that no cult members or other family members ever came back to claim the four children. “But that’s when I became Jennifer Daley. I was adopted into a loving family. I have two stepbrothers, and my parents are as vanilla as it gets. I’m not complaining,” she said. “Could have been a lot worse.”