Chapter 6 - What Lily Hid
Lily would not sleep at Rachel's house. Every time a car went past, she sat up and asked whether Vanessa had come.
Rachel called Daniel at midnight. "Come over. She has something to tell you, but she keeps saying she'll get in trouble."
Daniel arrived with Maya, who agreed to talk to Lily only after explaining that the child could stop at any time. Rachel stayed beside her.
"I didn't see everything," Lily began. "I was scared."
"It's okay not to know," Maya said.
The recording lasted only twenty-seven seconds. Daniel later listened to it once more with the detective's permission, alone in a conference room. What shook him most wasn't the splash. It was the sound Lily made just before it: one quick, uncertain breath, like a child deciding whether speaking would make everything worse. He could hear birds in the hedge and the distant whir of the pool pump. Life had continued normally in the background. He wanted to go back to that morning and open the gate himself. But there was no going back. There was only the little girl asleep at his sister's house and the choice to believe her now, completely, without demanding she perform her fear for him again.
Lily brought out a little stuffed fox. Inside its zipper pocket was a small phone, an old model Daniel had given her to play games on.
"Vanessa said I couldn't use it in the garden," Lily whispered. "I recorded because she was being mean."
The video shook wildly. Sunlight flashed between leaves. Vanessa's voice came first.
"You should've stayed out of this, Nora."
Another voice, a man's: "We don't have time."
"I didn't ask you to hurt her," Vanessa snapped.
There was a scrape, a cry, a heavy splash. The image swung toward the water but captured only a red hem, a blue sleeve and a man's black shoes stepping backward.
"Turn it off," Lily whispered. "I don't want to hear it again."
Maya stopped the recording and placed the phone in an evidence bag.
Daniel held Lily until she fell asleep against him.
Before leaving, Maya said, "There's an argument here, and evidence of a possible assault. But we still need to identify that man."
Her own phone buzzed. She checked it, then looked up sharply.
"Daniel, the name on Vanessa's caller ID wasn't Colin. It was Colin Ward."
May you like
"Ward?"
"Ben's father."
