Chapter 4 - The Cellar of Whispers
Detective Vance stood near the foot of the hospital bed, his pen moving silently across a yellow legal pad, his jaw clenched so tightly the muscles bulged beneath his skin. Ethan sat frozen, his hand gripping Grace’s, feeling the ice in his own veins turning into volcanic rage.
"She locked the kitchen," Grace continued, her voice trembling, hitching with fresh sobs. "She put a padlock on the refrigerator and the pantry. Ethan... she wouldn't let me have water. Every time I tried to turn on the faucet, she would shut off the main valve from the basement."
"Why?" Ethan choked out, tears finally breaking past his defenses. "Why would she do that? Leo needed formula if she dumped your milk!"
"She didn't give him formula," Grace wept, the memory tearing at her soul. "She gave him tap water mixed with flour. She said babies in her day didn't need modern chemical junk. Leo wouldn't stop screaming. His stomach was swollen, Ethan! He was starving! Every time he cried, she would pick him up, lock herself in the guest bedroom, and leave me outside the door."
Grace tried to sit up, but the sharp agony in her ribs forced her back down with a gasp. Ethan gently placed his hand on her shoulder, his heart breaking into dust.
"On the second night," Grace whispered, her voice dropping into a horrified register, "I couldn't take it anymore. Leo’s cries were getting weaker. He was barely moving. I went downstairs at two in the morning. I found a butter knife. I tried to pry open the pantry door just to get a single bottle of water, a single scoop of formula."
She paused, closing her eyes as if trying to block out a demon.
"Eleanor was standing in the dark at the top of the stairs. She didn't say a word. She just walked down, step by step. When I begged her—when I fell to my knees and kissed her feet, begging her to just give my baby milk—she kicked me."
Ethan let out a strangled, agonizing sound. "She kicked you?!"
"Right in the ribs," Grace sobbed. "I heard the bone snap. The pain was so intense I couldn't breathe. I curled into a ball on the kitchen floor. And then... then she grabbed me by my hair."
Eleanor had dragged Grace, injured and gasping for air, across the hardwood hallway toward the basement door. She threw Grace down the wooden steps into the damp, unheated cellar.
"Sleep down there with the rats," Eleanor had spat before slamming the heavy wooden door. "When Ethan gets back, he will find an unfit, violent woman who abandoned her child in the middle of the night. The courts will give me full custody. Ethan will be free of you, and I will raise my grandson the way a Campbell should be raised!"
The bolt had clicked shut.
For fourteen hours, Grace had lain in the pitch darkness of the concrete basement, shivering in the forty-degree chill, clutching her fractured ribs, listening through the floorboards above to the fading, dying cries of her newborn son.
Down in that black void, Grace realized something that chilled her to the marrow: Eleanor hadn't just lost her temper.
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She had planned this. She had engineered Ethan’s business trip. She had isolated Grace on purpose. Eleanor didn't just want control; she wanted Grace dead, or locked away in an asylum, so she could replace Grace entirely and claim Leo as her own.
***
