Chapter 2 - The Storage Room on Peters Road
Thirty-one miles north, the smell of damp concrete and mouse poison filled the dark twelve-by-twelve room beneath the administrative office of the New Dawn Hope House.
My name is Nora Vance.
I was twenty-seven years old, my husband had been buried six months earlier after a tractor-trailer crushed his pickup on Route 35, and every dollar we owned had disappeared into his funeral costs and two months of back rent on a trailer in Huber Heights.
I sat on a metal folding chair with my wrists cuffed behind me to the structural iron support pole in the center of the floor.
The door at the top of the wooden stairs opened with a heavy, dry groan.
Footsteps descended.
Marjorie Sterling walked into the cellar carrying a clipboard, a portable LED lantern, and an unsealed manila folder stamped with the gold seal of the Montgomery County Probate Court.
At fifty-four, Marjorie was the executive director of New Dawn. She wore an expensive camel-hair cardigan, a silver cross pendant at her throat, and had the warm, practiced smile of a woman who was photographed three times a year presenting oversized checks to local television reporters.
"Nora, dear," Marjorie said, setting the lantern on a stack of plastic storage totes. "It’s past midnight. The county transport van will be here at seven in the morning to transfer you to the state psychiatric evaluation facility in Cincinnati."
"Where are my children, Marjorie?" I asked, my voice hoarse from six hours of screaming into the concrete walls.
Marjorie clicked her gold ballpoint pen.
"Your children are in safe, Christian hands, Nora," she replied smoothly. "Maddie is currently being processed for private, closed adoption through our partner agency in Naples, Florida. A wonderful couple—he's an orthopedic surgeon, she's a philanthropist. They've contributed fifty thousand dollars to our building fund to ensure Maddie receives the life an unemployed widow could never provide."
"And Lily?" I choked out, pulling against the steel handcuffs until the metal bit through the skin of my wrists, warm blood trickling down into my palms.
Marjorie’s smile faded, replaced by a thin, cold disgust.
"Lily is a difficult, oppositional child," Marjorie said. "She bit one of our intake nurses when we separated them in the dormitory. She suffered a minor arm injury while being restrained. Our medical staff is managing her in the isolation cottage. Once you sign the voluntary relinquishment affidavits, we can discuss visitation terms for Lily when she reaches sixteen."
Marjorie held the clipboard before my face.
It was an Affidavit of Voluntary Parental Surrender and Complete Severance of Rights.
"Sign the document, Nora," Marjorie urged, her voice dropping into a low, menacing whisper. "If you refuse, the probate judge will receive our psychiatric evaluation in the morning documenting your chronic paranoia, your self-harm in this cellar, and your total inability to provide shelter. You will lose them anyway, and you will spend the next two years in a locked ward."
"Go to hell," I whispered.
Marjorie sighed, clicking her pen shut. "A pity. You had until sunrise."
May you like
She picked up her lantern, climbed the wooden stairs, and turned off the overhead light, leaving me in the black, freezing cellar with the sound of water dripping from the foundation walls.
She didn't know that three hours earlier, while the intake nurse was unlocking the laundry room door to take the evening linens, Lily had kicked the screen loose from the ground-floor window, pulled four-month-old Maddie from the nursery bassinet, and crawled through three miles of soybean fields to reach the Interstate.
