Chapter 1 - The Disappearance
My five-year-old daughter disappeared in the middle of my father’s seventieth birthday party.
One minute Lily was beside the cake table. The next, her pink sweater was gone from the crowded living room.
I shouted her name while thirty relatives searched the house. My sister Megan kept insisting Lily had probably wandered outside.
“She always runs off when she wants attention,” Megan said.
Lily had never done that.
I found her twelve minutes later inside the narrow cabinet beneath the basement stairs. She was curled around her knees, one hand covering her mouth.
When she looked up, her eyes were swollen with fear.
“Daddy… do I have to say sorry?”
I pulled her into my arms. “For what?”
Her lower lip trembled. “Aunt Megan said I ruined everything.”
There were red finger marks around Lily’s wrist.
Before I could ask another question, she pushed something into my palm. It was a torn corner of a white envelope, dusted with powder.
“I saw her put it in Grandpa’s drink,” Lily whispered. “She said if I told you, the police would take you away and I’d never see you again.”
I ran upstairs carrying her.
The room had gone quiet. Dad stood at the head of the table, lifting a glass of bourbon while everyone sang.
I knocked it from his hand.
The glass shattered across the floor.
Megan screamed. “What is wrong with you?”
Dad tried to answer, but his knees buckled. He collapsed against the table, dragging the birthday cake down with him.
Paramedics rushed inside. A deputy pulled me away while Megan knelt beside Dad, sobbing loudly enough for everyone to hear.
Then she reached into the pocket of my jacket, which had been hanging near the front door, and produced an orange prescription bottle.
“I knew it,” she said. “Daniel has been controlling Dad’s medication for months.”
The deputy read the label, then looked at me.
It had my name on it.
Lily began screaming that Megan had put it there.
Megan only held out her hands and whispered, “She’s confused. He told her to say that.”
The deputy stepped behind me and reached for his cuffs.
May you like
“Daniel Carter,” he said, “turn around.”
Lily had seen more than Megan realized, and the small object hidden inside her sock was about to expose why my father had been drugged, why I had been framed, and why my daughter had become the most valuable person in the house.
