INSIDE

CHAPTER 14

Jason. Jason

The voice echoed at a distance; he was far lost in thought. Thinking back about her words, he felt more restless. He woke up to find her bed empty and tried his best not to worry about her disappearance. She didn’t look like she had anything in her life in control, but he had to speak to officer Dan.

A cold hand touched him, and he jerked back to the present. He noticed the worried look of the sister beside him and the judgmental eyes of the officer beside him. He scratched the back of his neck sheepishly, wondering just how far he had left the conversation behind.

“Is everything okay”??

“Yes Sister, I was just caught up in my thoughts for a moment.”

“You still look uncertain” the gruff man sitting across from him finally spoke to his hearing,

“Pardon??”

“The very young lad who always looked around with a distant and confused expression”. He said with a sure look in his eyes. “I remember you.”

“I can imagine what I looked like, sir”.

“Dan, the girl I spoke to you about”. Sister Martha’s voice rang impatiently.

“Lisa was it”. He didn’t sound too sure. “I heard you married her”. Jason could hear his judgmental tone.

“It was a conscious relationship, sir”. He just felt the urge to clear that up.

“Marriage is always a conscious decision; I mean there wasn’t a gun to your head”. His eyebrows slightly raised, he asked.

“I need your help with my wife”. Ignoring his very obvious taunt, he went straight to his request.

“What can I possibly do to help”.

“I spoke to Sister Martha before, and she mentioned that you had an encounter with her, before her acceptance to the orphanage. I was wondering if you could help me with some information about her.”

“You could ask her about it, coming to me makes it seem like a criminal investigation”.

“I tried talking to her, but I couldn’t get anything out of her”.

“What do you want to know about her? Our investigation was close knitted and futile, but I can let go of a few details and nothing more”.

“Her father, she doesn’t talk about him.”

“There was nothing much about him, aside from that he was a well-known drunk and her mother hardly made an appearance. There was no description of her. They had a daughter, which was a fact, and that was because of the persistent cries of 2 females. From what we gathered, it was a stormy night on the day of the incident. Nothing much was heard. No CCTV camera to look out for a possible conclusion. The child was gone, the father was still wasted but sober enough to alert everyone and run off. Her mother was burnt beyond recognition”. He said on a note of finality.

“You didn’t believe the conclusion, you smelled foul play. Was it intuition??”. He looked over to sister Martha to be sure he had asked the right question. The man seemed like he had a huge ego.

“You could say that. It was proven that the child was a sociopath, so there was nothing to prove otherwise. I didn’t want to be known as an officer who didn’t believe in the silence and innocence of a little child”. He had a bad expression on his face as he reminisced about the incident.

“I would understand if she didn’t speak of her father”. Leaning close to the eager face in front of him, he continued in all eagerness. It was evident he sought someone to listen to his thinking on this particular case. “In most cases, the victims relate to each other, they were abused in that house, but she never shed a tear for her mother, she never said anything about her father despite the questions. The neighbors helped, but it wasn’t enough. She never bothered about the fact that her abuser was out there”.

“She was a child, maybe she didn’t understand those things”. Jason said those words in a hurry. He could see where the man’s suspicions were coming from.

“Children feel fear, they also feel the need to survive and, above all, they mostly have trauma that sends them to the psychiatric ward, they always said things in fear. But that girl was far too composed for her age. I would like to remind you again that her mother burned to death, no one knows how she escaped, and she never clarified it”.

“What if she was being threatened”. It was the only rational thought he could come up with for that.

“We all thought the same thing, so we monitored her every move till she left this orphanage. For close to 12 years, she had no contact with anyone”.

“She came to me with a request to let her stay till she was old enough to leave here. She didn’t want to be put up for adoption, she never even wanted to leave the walls of this place, and she never did. I spoke to the sister in charge on her behalf, and we agreed to it because of her story”. Sister Martha finally spoke, she didn’t say anything else.