She would stand on the roof looking down at me every morning, telling me ‘don’t trust anyone in that house'”
Every morning when Clara went to school, she would see a woman standing on the roof of an old apartment building nearby, looking down and shouting:
“Clara, you’re not safe! Get out of that house!”
Clara’s family thought she was paranoid.
One day, she jumped in front of Clara, but luckily survived. Before being taken to the ambulance, she whispered:
“I saw… that night… you have to leave them…”
Portland’s November drizzle shrouded suburban Beaverton in a cold, gray mist. I tightened my backpack strap and stepped out the front door of my family’s deceptively perfect cream-colored two-story house.
And like every other morning for the past six months, there she was.
On the flat roof of the abandoned old apartment building across the street, the woman the neighborhood called “Crazy Maggie” stood precariously on the edge of the wall. Her messy silver hair blew in the wind, her oversized coat flapping like an old crow’s wing.
“Clara!”
Her scream tore through the morning silence, startling me.
“Don’t go back in there! They’re not human! Run, you idiot! Blood… I smell blood in the kitchen!”
I ducked my head and quickened my pace toward the bus stop. My heart pounded. Not because I was afraid of her, but because of some other invisible fear that crept into my gut every time I heard that hoarse voice.
The garage door behind me opened. My father, Richard, drove slowly toward me in his new sedan. He rolled down the window, his handsome, intellectual face always tinged with tension.
“Get in the car, Clara. I’ll take you to school. Don’t listen to her,” he said, his voice low, trying to sound calm, but his hands on the wheel were bulging with veins. “I’ve called the police for the tenth time. This time they promised to take her to the state mental institution.”
“She knows my name, Dad,” I whispered, getting into the car. “How does she know my name?”
“She went through the trash, Clara,” my mother, Sarah, called from the passenger seat. She turned to look at me, her blue eyes wide, her reassuring smile stiff as a painted one. “Psychopaths are obsessed with random people. You’re just unlucky. Don’t worry about it.”
The car rolled away. I looked out the window. Maggie was still standing there, in the rain, pointing straight at our car, screaming words that the soundproof glass muffled. But I could read her lips: Thief. Thief.
Everything changed the following Tuesday afternoon.
I got home from school early because my teacher was sick. As I got off the bus, I saw a crowd gathered in front of the old apartment complex. Police cars and fire trucks flashing their lights.
A chill ran down my spine. I dropped my backpack and dashed through the tape.
“Hey, girl, no way in!” a police officer yelled.
But I saw. Maggie.
She wasn’t on the roof anymore. She was lying on the sidewalk, her body twisted in an unnatural position. Blood was pouring from her head, mixing with the dark rainwater. But she was still breathing. Her chest was heaving violently.
I don’t know why I did it, but I knelt beside her. Blood stained the knee of my jeans.
“Maggie…”
Her eyes opened. One was cloudy with cataracts, the other was strangely bright. She looked at me, not with her usual madness, but with a painful clarity.
Her cold, thin hand gripped my wrist. Her nails dug into my skin.
“I… I saw…” she whispered, blood foaming at the corner of her mouth.
“What did you see?” I leaned down to listen.
“That night… seventeen years ago… St. Jude’s Hospital…” Her voice hissed like the wind through the crack in the door. “They… the parking lot… I tried to scream… but he hit me in the head…”
I was stunned. “Him? Who?”
Maggie tugged at my arm harder, pulling me closer to her bloody face.
“The man in my house… He had a hammer… He took me from my dying mother… I’m not theirs… Run… I have to…”
The sentence was cut off by a violent convulsion. The paramedics rushed in, pushing me away.
“Little girl, get out of the way! We need to get this person away!”
I stood back, trembling, watching them load Maggie onto a gurney. In the crowd, I saw a familiar car pull up.
Richard and Sarah. My parents.
They stood across the street, under a black umbrella. They weren’t looking at the accident. They were looking at me. Their eyes weren’t worried for the victim, nor were they desperate.
They looked at me with the eyes of predators calculating how much their prey knew.
That evening, the air in the house was as thick as lead.
“You’re covered in blood, Clara,” my mother said when I entered the kitchen. She was slicing carrots. The knife hit the wooden cutting board with a creepy, clack, clack rhythm. “Go take a shower. Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.”
“She’s talking to you,” I said, standing rooted to the kitchen door.
The knife stopped. My father, who was reading the newspaper in the living room, also lowered his paper.
“Crazy people say a lot of things,” my father called in, his voice calm but cold. “What did she say?”
I swallowed. I remembered Maggie’s warning. Don’t trust anyone in that house.
“She said… she saw a ghost,” I lied. “She said this house is haunted.”
There was a three-second pause. My mother smiled and continued slicing carrots. “See? I told you she was delusional. Now, go take a shower, honey.”
I ran upstairs and locked the door. My hands were shaking as I pulled out my laptop.
St. Jude Hospital. Baby Abduction. 2007
.
The search results came back in droves. St. Jude in Seattle (a three-hour drive away) had closed 10 years ago after a scandal. I scrolled down, looking for the 2007 cases.
And then I saw it. An old article from the Seattle Times.
“MYSTERIOUS MISSING: NEWBORN GIRL ABDUCTED AFTER MULTIPLE ACCIDENTS.”
On November 14, 2007, in the chaos of a bus crash right in front of St. Jude’s emergency room, a newborn girl named Jane Doe (who had yet to be named) disappeared from the waiting room while her mother was being treated for hemorrhage.
The only witness, Margaret “Maggie” Sullivan, a nurse who had just finished her shift, was found unconscious in the parking lot with a severe traumatic brain injury caused by a blunt object. The police suspected that the kidnapper had attacked the witness to escape. When she regained consciousness two years later, Mrs. Sullivan had temporary amnesia and permanent mental confusion due to damage to her frontal lobe.
I covered my mouth to keep from screaming.
Margaret Sullivan. Maggie.
She was not a random neighbor. She was the nurse who witnessed the incident. She had been hit in the head with a severe brain injury, but her subconscious still remembered the faces of the perpetrators. And by some ironic twist of fate—or the persistent obsession of a victim—she had wandered for the past 15 years, traveling across states, and accidentally found those familiar “eyes” on me. Or maybe my parents had just moved to the same town where she was living.
I looked at the sketch of the suspect in the article. Although it was blurry, the man in sunglasses had the exact same cleft chin as Richard.
Click.
The sound of a key being inserted into the lock of my bedroom door.
I slammed my laptop shut, my heart leaping into my throat. Hadn’t I locked the door?
The door opened. Richard and Sarah were standing there. They were no longer smiling. Richard had a glass of warm milk in his hand. Sarah had… a roll of duct tape in her hand.
“We heard your call to the police, Clara,” Richard said, stepping into the room. “I installed surveillance software on your phone when you were 12.”
I backed away from the window. “Don’t come near me! Who are you?”
“We saved you!” Sarah hissed, tears streaming down her face but her face contorted with anger. “Your real mother is a drug addict! She’s dying on a gurney. She doesn’t deserve you! We gave you the perfect life! Private school, nice clothes, a bright future!”
“And you smashed an innocent nurse’s skull to get me?” I screamed.
“It was an accident!” Richard yelled, slamming the glass of milk down on the table so hard it splattered. “She was screaming! She was going to call security! Dad just wanted her to shut up and take you away!”
They moved closer. Two long shadows fell across the floor, looming over me.
“Drink this milk, Clara,” Sarah said, her voice eerily sweet. “We’re moving out tonight. To Mexico. We’ll be a happy family there. No one will find us.”
“Is Maggie dead?” I asked, glancing out the window.
“She’ll die,” Richard said coldly. “That fall didn’t kill her, but a heart attack in the hospital might. Dad has friends at the county hospital.”
The viciousness in his voice was the last straw. I was no longer their good daughter.
I grabbed the heavy brass table lamp and slammed it into Richard’s face. He screamed, clutched his bloody nose, and fell back.
“You’re crazy!” Sarah lunged at me, her sharp nails digging into my face.
I kicked her away and ran for the window. My room was on the second floor, just below the garage porch.
“Get her!” Richard roared.
I climbed through the window and jumped onto the porch, slippery from the rain. My feet slipped, and I fell, hitting my shoulder on the roof tiles, but I managed to get up and jump onto the lawn.
I ran.
I ran like I’d never run before. Crossing the wet street, toward the lights of the only open convenience store at the end of the street.
Behind me, I heard the roar of an engine. Richard’s sedan pulled out of the garage, headlights tearing through the night, shining straight at my back.
They weren’t going to catch me. They were going to stab me. If they couldn’t have me, they would destroy me. That was how their sick love worked.
I dashed into the narrow alley between two buildings, where cars couldn’t get in. The screeching of burning brakes echoed loudly behind me.
I ran, my lungs pounding, until I saw the red and blue lights of the county police station.
Two months later.
I was sitting in the waiting room of the rehabilitation hospital. In my hand was a bouquet of white chrysanthemums.
“You can come in,” the nurse said softly. “But she can’t say much yet. The old brain damage combined with the new trauma makes it very difficult for her to communicate.”
I walked into the room. Maggie was sitting in a wheelchair, looking out the window. Her head was wrapped in a white bandage.
“Maggie?”
She turned. Her eyes were still blank, but when she saw me, a flash of recognition flashed. She moved her lips, her hand trembling as she raised it.
I walked over, knelt down to her eye level, and let her touch my face.
The police found A
My DN matches my biological mother, who died in 2007. Richard and Sarah are facing life in prison for kidnapping and attempted murder. They claim they have been stalking Maggie and me for years, and when they learned Maggie moved to this neighborhood (a coincidence of fate or victim instinct?), they planned to kill her long ago but didn’t dare to do it.
“You saved me,” I whispered, holding her thin hand. “You’re not crazy. You’re the sanest person I’ve ever met.”
Maggie looked at me, tears welling up in her wrinkled eyes. She struggled to speak, each word, difficult but clear:
“I’m… safe… now.”
I buried my head in her lap and sobbed. Seventeen years of sweet lies were over. I lost my parents, my name, Clara, my warm home. But in return, I found the truth.
And most importantly, I know that in this world, there is a stranger who is willing to stand on the roof in the rain and wind for six months, endure humiliation and beatings, just to protect a child who is not related by blood.
That is what family really is.
THE END
