Chapter 2 - The View from Room 104
We arrived across the border in Zapopan, Jalisco, thirty-six hours later.
I had chosen Zapopan not because I had family there, but because my late maternal aunt, Elena, had left me a three-room concrete house near the edge of the historic quarter—a property that had sat vacant for five years, its tax assessment paid annually through my private credit union account. It was two thousand miles away from Ohio, outside the jurisdiction of the Columbus municipal police, and completely invisible to Elmer’s family.
I checked us into a modest, three-story motel called El Parador near the central plaza for the first night, intending to clean the house on the following morning.
Room 104 was small, smelling of pine cleaner, damp tile, and line-dried cotton sheets. A small window faced an interior courtyard filled with potted ferns and hanging bougainvillea.
I sat on the edge of the queen-sized bed, holding a warm, wet washcloth against Louisa’s scalp.
The swelling on her head had begun to subside, but the dark red razor tracks left by Lydia’s beard trimmer were still visible under the dim yellow light of the bed lamp. Every time the damp cloth touched her skin, Louisa’s small shoulders would flinch, her fingers clutching my thumb so hard her nails turned white.
"Does it burn, baby?" I whispered, my voice thick with tears I had refused to shed while we were on the bus.
"It feels like fire, Mommy," she murmured, her eyes half-closed, her voice tiny and exhausted. She reached up with her free hand, gently touching the fleece cap I had set beside her pillow. "Why did Grandma cut my hair? Was I a bad girl?"
I pulled her into my lap, burying my face in the side of her neck, smelling the faint scent of baby soap mixed with the dusty smell of the long bus ride.
"You are the best girl in the world, Louisa," I told her, my teeth grinding together so hard my jaw ached. "You did nothing wrong. Not one single thing. Grandma is a sick, cruel woman, and she will never, ever be allowed to look at you again."
"And Grandpa?" she asked softly. "Grandpa made you bleed."
"Grandpa is going to pay for every drop of blood, baby," I whispered. "I promise you."
Louisa fell asleep twenty minutes later, clutching her stuffed yellow bunny against her chest, her breathing finally turning long, deep, and rhythmic.
I sat beside her on the bed, staring at the blank white wall of the motel room.
My jaw throbbed with a dull, heavy ache. The inside of my mouth was raw where my lip had split against my canine tooth, and my left eye had swollen into a dark, purplish bruise that made it difficult to blink.
I opened my bag, pulled out my small laptop—an eight-year-old plastic unit I used for my accounting work—and set it on the nightstand.
As I watched the screen flicker to life, a sudden, forgotten memory flashed through my mind.
Two years ago, when Louisa was fourteen months old, Elmer and I had discussed hiring a local college girl to watch her for three hours on Tuesday afternoons so I could take an online medical coding class. Elmer had been paranoid about bringing a stranger into the house—not because he cared about Louisa's safety, but because he was terrified a nanny might steal his father's vintage watch collection from the hallway closet.
To appease him, I had bought a cheap, self-contained Wi-Fi security camera from an online liquidation site for eighteen dollars.
It was a tiny black cylinder, no larger than a spool of thread, disguised inside the hollow faux-leather spine of a decorative dictionary that sat on the third shelf of the living room bookcase—directly opposite the sofa, the kitchen archway, and the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
When we gave up on the nanny idea three weeks later, I had simply forgotten the camera was there.
It had remained plugged into a hidden USB power strip behind the row of encyclopedias, connected to the apartment’s continuous Wi-Fi network, recording automatically on a seventy-two-hour rolling loop to a cloud account I had set up using an old Gmail address.
My hand began to shake as I opened a web browser, typed in the URL for the camera software, and entered my old login credentials.
CONNECTING TO NODE 04—COLUMBUS_WEST...
The screen flickered. A green status icon illuminated in the top right corner of the dashboard: ONLINE / LIVE FEED AVAILABLE.
Because I had paid for the thirty-day cloud storage plan during the initial setup and forgotten to cancel the three-dollar monthly subscription, the entire video archive for the past three weeks was fully intact, indexed by date and minute-by-minute timestamps.
I set the timeline back to Saturday, January twenty-fourth—the morning Lydia’s gold bracelet had allegedly disappeared.
I dragged the digital slider to 08:30 AM.
The video feed opened in crystal-clear seven-hundred-and-twenty-pixel resolution.
May you like
The camera's wide-angle lens captured ninety percent of the Thorne living room: the front door, the dining table, the kitchen archway, the entrance to Lydia’s bedroom corridor, and the sofa where Heather spent her days.
I pressed PLAY.
