PART 2 — THE BONES BENEATH THE WELL
“Mom, run!”
Chloe’s scream exploded through the receiver just as the deadbolt completed its slow turn.
Click.
The front door opened three inches.
A blade of freezing night air sliced through the house, causing the white candle beside Chloe’s shattered photograph to flicker violently.
For a second, all I could see through the opening was darkness.
Then a black leather glove curled around the edge of the door.
“Martha,” the man said softly. “You’re making a terrible mistake.”
I dropped the telephone.
The receiver struck the floor and swung from its cord as Chloe’s voice continued screaming from it.
“Go to the well! Take the notebook!”
I shoved the sonogram between the pages of Chloe’s spiral notebook, pressed it against my chest, and ran toward the kitchen.
Behind me, the front door groaned open.
Heavy boots stepped onto my living-room floor.
The man didn’t rush.
He knew I was an old woman living alone.
He believed there was nowhere for me to go.
“There’s no reason for anyone else to get hurt,” he called. “Give me the notebook, and I’ll leave.”
Anyone else.
Those words terrified me more than the sound of his footsteps.
I grabbed my husband’s old flashlight from the kitchen drawer and pulled open the back door.
The winter wind struck my face like a slap.
I ran barefoot across the frozen grass.
Sharp stones cut into my heels, but I barely felt them. All I could hear was my own ragged breathing and the pounding of blood inside my ears.
The old well stood beneath the dead apple tree at the far edge of the yard.
Moonlight reflected off the rusted sheet metal covering it.
My husband, Samuel, had placed that metal there shortly after Chloe’s funeral.
For ten years, I had never questioned him.
Now every memory of my husband felt poisoned.
Why had he been so desperate to seal the well?
Why had he warned me never to go near it?
And why had Chloe hidden a sonogram behind her photograph instead of telling me she was pregnant?
I reached the well and dropped to my knees.
The two river rocks holding down the metal cover were far heavier than I remembered. I pushed against the first one with both hands.
It didn’t move.
Behind me, the kitchen door opened.
The hinges squealed.
“Martha!”
The man was outside.
His voice no longer sounded like Mr. Sterling’s.
It sounded deeper.
Older.
Familiar.
I pushed again, screaming through clenched teeth.
The rock shifted several inches.
Then another sound came from inside the well.
Not water.
Not an animal.
A baby crying.
I froze.
The faint wail rose from somewhere beneath the metal cover.
It lasted only a few seconds before abruptly stopping.
“No,” I whispered.
The notebook slipped from beneath my arm and landed open in the grass.
The wind flipped several pages before stopping on a sheet covered in Chloe’s handwriting.
I aimed the flashlight at it.
There were names written across the page.
Mayor Elias Whitmore.
Sheriff Dean Parker.
Arthur Sterling.
And beneath all three names, circled repeatedly in red ink, was the name of my late husband.
Samuel Henderson.
My stomach twisted.
At the bottom of the page, Chloe had written:
They all know what happened at the farmhouse. Dad says he is protecting me, but I don’t know who he is protecting anymore.
“Martha, step away from the well.”
The man was closer now.
I recognized his voice.
Mayor Elias Whitmore had spoken at Chloe’s memorial service.
He had stood beside her closed casket and told the entire town that she had been like a daughter to him.
I slowly turned.
He stood twenty feet away, holding a pistol at his side.
He was no longer wearing the glove on his right hand.
The thick gold ring with the square black stone gleamed beneath the moonlight.
“You,” I breathed.
His face looked older than it had at the funeral, but his cold gray eyes had not changed.
“You lied to me.”
Mayor Whitmore sighed.
“We all did what was necessary.”
“What did you do to my daughter?”
His gaze moved toward the notebook lying in the grass.
“Give me that.”
“Chloe said you forced her into the car.”
Something changed in his expression.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
“You spoke to Chloe?”
“My telephone rang.”
“Impossible.”
“She warned me you were coming.”
For the first time, fear entered his eyes.
He raised the pistol.
“Move away from the well.”
I looked at the weapon and realized he had never intended to leave me alive.
The story would be simple.
A grieving widow, still emotionally unstable after her daughter’s death, wandered outside in the darkness and fell into an abandoned well.
The entire town would mourn me.
Mayor Whitmore would probably speak at my funeral too.
I bent down slowly and grabbed the notebook.
His finger tightened around the trigger.
“Martha, don’t.”
Instead of handing it to him, I hurled it over the well.
The notebook landed on the rusted cover and slid beneath the remaining river rock.
Mayor Whitmore rushed forward.
That was exactly what I needed.
I grabbed the loose rock with both hands and rolled it toward him.
It struck his shin.
He screamed and fell, firing the gun into the air.
The sound echoed across the fields.
I seized the edge of the metal cover and pulled with all my strength.
It scraped across the stone rim.
A circular opening appeared beneath it, releasing a gust of air that smelled of wet earth, rust, and something sweetly rotten.
An old rope ladder hung inside.
It had not been there when Samuel first sealed the well.
Someone had returned.
Recently.
The flashlight revealed fresh footprints in the mud around the stones.
Mayor Whitmore reached for my ankle.
I kicked him in the face and lowered myself into the opening.
“Martha!”
I descended into the darkness.
The rope ladder swayed beneath my weight.
Above me, Mayor Whitmore dragged himself toward the well, cursing through the pain.
The crying began again.
This time, I realized it wasn’t a baby.
It was a rusty piece of metal groaning whenever the wind moved through a crack in the stones.
For ten years, that sound had been trapped beneath my backyard.
Waiting for someone to hear it.
The bottom of the well was approximately thirty feet down.
There was no water.
Instead, I found a circular floor of black mud and a narrow opening carved into the stone wall.
My flashlight swept across the ground.
At first, I saw only rocks.
Then I saw a human hand.
I stopped breathing.
It rested palm-up in the mud, the fingers reduced to bones.
A thin silver bracelet still circled the wrist.
Tiny metal letters hung from it.
C-H-L-O-E.
A sound escaped me that I did not recognize as my own.
I dropped beside the remains.
“My baby…”
Chloe had worn that bracelet every day after her sixteenth birthday.
I had fastened it around her wrist myself.
They told me her body had burned inside the car.
They told me there had been nothing left for me to see.
But her bones had been beneath my backyard the entire time.
I touched the bracelet.
The moment my fingers made contact with it, every flashlight in my house went out above me.
The yard fell completely dark.
Then Chloe whispered beside my ear.
“Mom.”
I spun around.
Nobody was there.
“I found you,” I sobbed.
“You have to leave.”
“I’m not leaving you again.”
“He’s coming down.”
The rope creaked.
Mayor Whitmore was descending.
I grabbed the bracelet from Chloe’s wrist and crawled toward the narrow opening in the stone wall.
Inside was a small chamber.
Someone had placed a rusted metal box beside Chloe’s remains.
A faded baby blanket lay folded on top.
One corner had been embroidered with a single name.
LILY.
My hands trembled as I opened the box.
Inside were several photographs, a small cassette tape, a hospital bracelet and a birth certificate wrapped in plastic.
The hospital bracelet read:
BABY GIRL HENDERSON
The date printed beneath it was three days after Chloe’s supposed car accident.
My daughter had not died on the highway.
She had lived long enough to give birth.
I unfolded the birth certificate.
The mother’s name was Chloe Marie Henderson.
The father’s name had been blacked out with permanent ink.
However, the original letters remained faintly visible beneath it.
I held the flashlight closer.
The first name began with an E.
The last name began with a W.
Elias Whitmore.
My knees nearly collapsed.
The mayor had been fifty-two when Chloe disappeared.
She had been nineteen.
The rope creaked again.
He was almost at the bottom.
I shoved the birth certificate and cassette tape beneath my nightgown. Then I crawled deeper into the narrow chamber.
“Where are you, Martha?” Mayor Whitmore called.
His voice echoed through the well.
“You don’t understand what she did.”
I pressed myself against the cold stone.
“What did my daughter do?” I demanded.
“She tried to destroy my family.”
“She was a child!”
“She knew exactly what she was doing.”
He stepped off the ladder.
His pistol was still in his hand.
The flashlight beam swept across Chloe’s bones.
For one second, Mayor Whitmore looked down at them.
There was no regret on his face.
Only disgust.
“She should have stayed quiet,” he muttered.
Rage burned away my fear.
“You murdered her.”
“No. Your husband did.”
The words struck me harder than any fist could have.
“You’re lying.”
“Samuel discovered she was carrying my child. He said he would handle it before the town learned the truth.”
I remembered the final months before Chloe’s death.
The arguments behind closed doors.
Samuel’s sudden temper.
The bruises Chloe claimed came from falling down the basement stairs.
The night she disappeared, Samuel had told me she left the house alone.
Had I been living beside my daughter’s murderer all those years?
Mayor Whitmore stepped toward the chamber.
“Samuel planned to bury her in the forest. But he panicked and brought her home.”
“No…”
“He put her in this well while you were asleep.”
I covered my mouth to hold back a scream.
“And the baby?” I whispered.
Mayor Whitmore stopped.
His silence answered me.
“The baby survived,” I said.
He lifted the pistol.
“For a while.”
A small stone rolled across the floor behind me.
Mayor Whitmore turned his flashlight toward the sound.
I saw a narrow tunnel leading away from the chamber.
And standing inside it was a little girl.
She looked no older than ten.
Her long brown hair hung loosely around her shoulders. Her face was pale and dirty, and she wore a red coat several sizes too large for her.
But it was her eyes that made my heart stop.
They were Chloe’s eyes.
The girl lifted one finger to her lips.
Then she motioned for me to follow.
Mayor Whitmore took another step.
I grabbed a loose stone and threw it across the chamber.
It struck the opposite wall.
He spun toward the noise.
The girl reached out, caught my hand, and pulled me into the tunnel.
“Run,” she whispered.
We crawled on our hands and knees through the darkness.
Behind us, Mayor Whitmore realized what had happened.
“No!” he shouted. “You can’t take her!”
A bullet struck the stone wall beside my head.
Fragments cut my cheek.
The girl pulled me faster.
The tunnel climbed upward, narrowing until I could barely squeeze through it. At the end was a wooden panel.
The girl pushed against it.
We spilled into the root cellar of an abandoned farmhouse beyond my property.
I knew that farmhouse.
It had belonged to Mayor Whitmore’s family before it burned twenty years earlier.
The cellar was filled with blankets, canned food and children’s drawings.
Someone had been living there.
The girl closed the panel behind us and placed a wooden beam across it.
“You’re Martha,” she said.
I stared at her.
“How do you know my name?”
She reached beneath her red coat and pulled out a necklace.
A small silver angel hung from the chain.
It had belonged to Chloe.
I had given it to her for her eighteenth birthday.
“My mother gave me this,” the girl said.
My legs gave way.
I sank onto an overturned wooden crate.
“What is your name?”
She stepped closer.
“Lily.”
The name embroidered on the baby blanket.
Tears blurred my vision.
“You’re Chloe’s daughter.”
Lily looked toward the hidden tunnel as Mayor Whitmore’s muffled shouts echoed behind the wall.
Then she turned back to me.
“He’s been searching for me since I escaped.”
“Escaped from where?”
Before Lily could answer, my cell phone began ringing inside my nightgown.
I had forgotten it was there.
The screen illuminated the dark cellar.
The caller ID displayed Chloe’s number.
Lily stared at it.
Her face lost all color.
I answered with shaking hands.
“Chloe?”
For several seconds, there was only static.
Then my daughter whispered:
“Mom, you found my bones.”
“Yes.”
“And you found the girl.”
I looked at Lily.
She slowly backed away from me.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I found your daughter.”
The line became silent.
Then Chloe spoke four words that froze the blood inside my veins.
“That isn’t my daughter.”
Behind me, Lily quietly locked the cellar door…………………………
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 3…
