Chapter 3 - What Hunter Was Supposed to Say
Hunter’s forensic interview lasted twenty-seven minutes.
I did not watch it live.
Morales advised against it.
“You’re his mother. Let him answer without worrying about your face.”
So I sat in a courthouse-style waiting room with terrible coffee and stared at an aquarium full of plastic plants.
When the interviewer finished, Morales gave me only the information appropriate for the ongoing case.
Hunter said Grandma called the shed the “practice room.”
At first, practice meant repeating sentences.
“Mommy forgot me.”
“Mommy is too busy.”
“Mommy gets angry.”
Whenever Hunter refused, Evelyn made him sit facing the wall.
Bertha filmed.
Later, the punishments became physical.
No grotesque detail was necessary.
The hospital already told that part.
The worst injuries came the night I was in Seattle.
Hunter had found something under the cot.
A metal box.
Inside were old papers with my name written on them.
“He recognized your picture,” Morales told me.
“My picture?”
She nodded.
Hunter had asked Evelyn why Mommy was sitting in the same little chair in one of the photographs.
I stopped breathing.
“What?”
Morales slid a sealed evidence photograph across the table.
It showed the open metal box.
Inside were decades-old Polaroids.
The first showed a little girl with blond pigtails sitting on what looked like the same folding chair.
I knew the dress.
Yellow collar.
White socks.
My second-grade school picture dress.
The girl was me.
I stared at it until the edges of the photograph disappeared.
“I don’t remember this.”
Morales did not tell me I should.
“There were tapes in the box too.”
“What kind?”
“Old microcassettes.”
A second photograph showed handwritten labels.
ABBY — DAD ANGRY
ABBY — WANT MOM
COURT
My father.
Thomas Hale.
The man Evelyn told me abandoned us when I was nine.
The man I had spent twenty-five years believing simply stopped wanting his daughters.
Morales watched me carefully.
“When did you last speak to him?”
“I was a child.”
“Did you ever see the court records from your parents’ divorce?”
“No.”
“Then we need them.”
May you like
That afternoon, the investigation stopped being only about what my mother had done to Hunter.
It began asking what she had done to me.
