“You will retake your seat this instant, Counselor, or I will hold you in contempt, do you hear me?” Judge Lockhart said, sending Navarro back to his proper place while Isabella, unaffected by his outburst, continued with her testimony.
“Mommy was crying … she wanted him to stop. She couldn’t breathe with her head in the bucket. She said it burned her eyes and her throat. The rope hurt, but I couldn’t get it off to help.” Isabella’s breathing became rapid and shallow.
“Oh my … okay … what happened next?” Attorney Johnson sounded less like a lawyer questioning a witness and more like a concerned police officer trying to ascertain facts from a traumatized victim. She appeared stunned and shaky on her feet. Her questions were losing focus and intent. This testimony had to be as shocking to her as it was to everyone else in the courtroom, but nobody more so than Grace.
“Daddy said he’d send her to jail forever if she didn’t leave and take me with her.”
Mitch thought of what Ruby had shared.
He said he’d put her in jail …
Other phrases from those sessions jumped out at him.
I wasn’t alone.
Gone and gone for good.
I’d get the bucket too.
He was right. All of it, every dissociative state she’d experienced with him, brought up memories from her distant past. Which meant the state names she’d listed were from the past as well. But how? Everything Isabella shared appeared to belong to the same series of memories, a grouping of memories. Mitch had only asked her about each city and state individually, but didn’t think of them as a group, or a pattern.
He took out a yellow legal pad from his workbag, as well as the black marker he used to sign prescriptions. In big letters, he wrote on a page:
HAVE JACK SEARCH THE CITIES AND STATES AS GROUP. LOOK FOR A PATTERN.
He handed the note to Grace.
Grace gave the note to Jack and returned to her seat beside Mitch.
“Did you try to get help for your mommy?”
“I couldn’t help Mommy. I couldn’t!” Isabella cried. “He hit her all the time. He wanted her to go away. He wanted me to go away. So I ran upstairs when he had her head in the bucket. I ran upstairs and went to my hiding place under the bed, the place I went to when Mommy and Daddy fought. Not under it … I hid in it.”
“In it?” Attorney Johnson said. “Like you crawled under the covers?”
“It was a box. I crawled under the box. My hands were tied but I could move the boards to climb in. I laid down on the boards under the box and you couldn’t see me even if you checked under the bed.”
“You hid in the bed’s box spring?” Attorney Johnson asked.
“It’s a box. That’s where I hid.”
Grace’s eyes went wide. She whispered to Mitch: “Penny did the same thing when she came to live with us. We couldn’t find her. We thought she’d run away.”
“How long did you hide in there?” said Attorney Johnson.
“I heard him coming up the stairs. I heard him looking for me.” She stomped her feet on the floor of the witness stand.
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
“He was looking for me, but he couldn’t find me.”
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
Mitch had heard tap, tap, tap and figured it was a reference to the 911 phone call Rachel made, but that was wrong. It was Isabella remembering her father’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs … looking for her.
“I heard Mommy calling for me, too. But she couldn’t find me either. They thought I’d gone outside, because I tripped and my necklace got caught on my finger and it broke. It fell by the front door, but I didn’t stop to pick it up because I had to get upstairs to my hiding place.”
“What necklace?”
“A necklace Mommy bought for me and said it was from Daddy, but I knew that was a lie because I heard her tell Bonnie that. Bonnie is our neighbor. Mommy told Bonnie she bought it for my birthday because Daddy never gave me presents.”
“What was the necklace?”
“It was a necklace with an anchor.
“I heard Daddy come upstairs and he told Mommy that she better run. She better leave right now. Right now! Or he’d put her head back in the bucket and make her breathe that horrible stuff until she died. Mommy saw my necklace by the door and she thought I’d gone outside … she didn’t know I was under the bed. But I was too scared to come out.”
Jack got up from his seat, came to Grace, and handed her the piece of paper she’d passed to him.