Chapter 5 - The Freezer Had Been Used to Make Lucy Doubt Herself
The estate security footage did not show inside the freezer.
It showed enough.
Tuesday afternoon, 3:18 p.m.
Lucy entered the service corridor carrying her stuffed rabbit.
Logan came from the opposite direction with a gray shipping case.
Lucy stopped him.
Three minutes later Cassandra appeared.
She took Lucy by the shoulder.
Walked her toward the freezer.
Then the camera lost them behind a service column.
At 3:23, Cassandra reappeared alone.
Lucy did not.
At 3:29, a catering employee entered the corridor.
He paused.
Looked toward the freezer.
Opened it.
Then immediately crouched down.
Lucy came out crying.
Six minutes.
Six minutes inside a commercial service freezer was six minutes too many.
The unit had fortunately been running at a reduced holding temperature during event preparation rather than full deep-freeze settings, and Lucy suffered no lasting physical injury.
That did not make it remotely acceptable.
The catering employee remembered Cassandra arriving moments later.
She laughed.
Said:
“There you are. I told you not to play hide-and-seek in here.”
Lucy insisted:
“She locked me.”
Cassandra corrected her in front of the employee.
“No, sweetheart. You hid because you were angry.”
Then she knelt beside Lucy and whispered something the camera could not capture.
Lucy later told me what it was.
“If you tell your dad stories, he’ll think you’re becoming confused because you miss Mommy.”
That was why Lucy wrote the note.
She wanted proof of her own memory.
At six years old.
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Because an adult had already started teaching her that truth could be renamed imagination.
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