Chapter 2 - I Had Known Lenora When She Was Eighteen
Police arrived within minutes.
So did paramedics.
Vanessa was checked first.
No injury from the dragging.
No contact from the bat.
Physically, she was safe.
That fact was the only reason I could breathe.
Lenora was taken for evaluation and then into custody while officers documented the shattered coffee table, the bat, and the marks on the floor.
I remained with Vanessa.
She refused to let go of my shirt.
But my mind kept circling one sentence.
What you did to my mother and me.
Later that night, after Vanessa finally fell asleep beside me, I searched for a photograph I had not looked at in more than twenty years.
It was in an old family album.
Summer.
My parents’ former estate outside Boston.
I was fifteen.
Standing awkwardly beside a swimming pool.
Behind me were two people.
A woman in a housekeeping uniform.
And an eighteen-year-old girl with long blond hair tied back.
The girl’s name had been Lenora.
Her mother was Elaine Parker.
Elaine had worked for my family for nearly seven years.
They lived in a small staff cottage at the edge of our property.
Lenora was three years older than me.
We weren’t friends exactly.
But we knew each other.
She borrowed books from our library.
Sometimes she helped me with algebra because she was annoyingly good at it.
Then one night something happened inside my father’s study.
By the following morning, Elaine had been arrested.
Within a week, Lenora and her mother were gone.
I had never seen either of them again.
Until Lenora walked into my house twenty-four years later and applied to become my daughter’s housekeeper.
May you like
And somehow, I had failed to recognize her.
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