Rachel Vincent - Menagerie

The sheriff’s flustered flush was so bright that one of the deputies stepped forward to see if he was okay. Pennington waved the unspoken question off and glared at the woman seated across the table.

“What we know, Mrs. Marlow, is that your daughter got worked up during a tour of the menagerie this evening and turned into the kind of creature that should have been lookin’ outta one of those cages, instead of looking into ’em. She grabbed a carny by the head and sank her fingers into his skull, and when she finally released him, he turned his livestock prod up as far as it would go and rammed it into his own leg.”

Charity’s bold spirit—a thing of wide repute in Franklin County—faded like a blossom gone dry in the sun. She closed her eyes to hide her thoughts from the sheriff, and the face that flashed behind her eyelids belonged to a woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, but would never in her life forget.

“Lilah actually hurt someone?” More than two decades of secrets, lies, and guilt swelled within her as she examined every fear and doubt she’d ever had about the daughter she loved more than anything else in the world. More, even, than the husband whose heart had given out at the age of fifty-seven, beneath the burden of their secret. “I didn’t think she was even capable of violence.”

“Why don’t you tell us what you know?”

Charity crossed her arms over her favorite blue summer sweater and when she leaned back in her chair, a gray-streaked strand of straight brown hair fell over her ear.

“Keeping your secret can’t help her anymore, Mrs. Marlow,” Wayne Atherton said. “We can’t help her either, if we don’t know what she is.”

Unlike Pennington, Atherton truly seemed to want to help, so Charity cleared her throat and took a long sip of her coffee. “Almost twenty-five years ago, my six-week-old daughter disappeared from her crib.”

“You’re telling us that Delilah was kidnapped?” Pennington prompted after a moment of silence, but Charity only shook her head.

“I’m telling you that my daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped. Her middle name was Delilah, so that’s what I called the changeling left in her place.”

For one long moment, neither the sheriff nor his deputy spoke. Charity couldn’t even be sure they were breathing.

“Changeling.” Pennington seemed to be tasting the word, as if he might want to spit it back out. “So, you’re saying the fae took your baby and left a surrogate in its place? There hasn’t been a confirmed surrogate exchange since the reaping.” The sheriff laid both thick hands flat on the table between them. “Mrs. Marlow, are you telling us that your daughter is part of a second wave of attack?”

Atherton slipped quietly out of the room.

“No.” Charity set her coffee down and looked straight into the sheriff’s eyes, so that he couldn’t possibly mistake any part of her bearing or intent. “This is different. I don’t know what those little monsters were, but Delilah isn’t one of them.”

The sheriff crossed his arms above his belly. “How can you be sure? Does she look like Elizabeth?”

“I haven’t seen Elizabeth in twenty-five years, Sheriff, but as infants, they were identical.”

Pennington’s scraggly gray brows rose. “Sounds like a surrogate to me.”

“You’re wrong.” Charity lifted her cup in one unsteady hand and took a sip of the cooling coffee. Then she set the cup down and took a long, deep breath. “Delilah was sent to deliver pain, but not by instilling terror on a national scale like the surrogates. She was left in Elizabeth’s place to punish me . And I got exactly what I asked for.”

“What—”

Charity held up one hand and spoke over the sheriff. “Elizabeth was a beautiful child, but she had an ugly temper. She cried for days and nights on end. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I couldn’t think straight. One day, when she was six weeks old, I prayed that the Lord would take my brand-new baby girl—the center of my existence—and send me a quieter, happier child in her place.”

She pulled a tissue from the purse in her lap and dabbed at first one eye, then the other. “Now, it may be that a lot of women in my position do the same thing, and nothing comes of it. But I...” She leaned forward, and fresh tears fell from her eyes. “Well, Sheriff, I said my prayer out loud. And it wasn’t the Lord who heard me.”

“Who heard you?” the remaining deputy whispered.

Charity twisted in her chair to give him a censuring glance. “Believe it or not, Deputy, no one claimed credit for replacing my daughter with a more pleasant doppelgänger.” She turned back to the sheriff. “So I did some research and learned that I could get in touch with whoever took my daughter if I were to nurse the child for a week, then smear a bit of her blood on a mirror and state my own child’s name.” More inclined toward logic than superstition, Charity had thought the whole thing sounded gruesome and crazy, but the truth was that since the reaping, anything seemed possible. The sheriff eyed her doubtfully, but she continued. “It worked! A woman appeared to me in my bathroom mirror, holding Elizabeth from some room I’ve never seen before.”

“What did she say?” the deputy asked, and the sheriff scowled, but let the question stand.

“She said that in a year, if I had taken proper care of the changeling and still wanted my daughter back, Elizabeth would be returned to me.”

“This woman in the mirror?” The sheriff’s skepticism was fading beneath undeniable curiosity. “Did you get her name? Her species?”

“She wouldn’t tell me any of that. But she looked and sounded as human as Delilah did.”

“So what did you do?” Pennington said, and from across the table, Charity could see that though he held a pen, the notebook page in front of him was completely blank.

“We cared for Lilah as if she were our own. She was a delightful child. Happy and affectionate. We came to love her—I felt guilty for how much I loved her, when my own daughter was missing.” Charity folded her hands on the table and took a deep breath. “Then the one-year mark came and went, and Elizabeth never reappeared.”

“Did you try the blood-on-the-mirror trick again?” the sheriff asked.

Charity nodded. “Several times, but my summons went unanswered.”

“And you never got her back?” the deputy guessed, clearly transfixed by the story.

Pennington waved one hand to silence the deputy, and when he turned back to Charity, she met his gaze with tear-filled eyes. “No, I never got Elizabeth back,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and gave voice to a fear that had lived in her soul for twenty-five years, but had never before been spoken aloud.

“Sheriff, I think my Elizabeth was never returned because I loved Delilah more.”

Delilah

The weight of my mother’s confession steadily pressed the air from my lungs until psychological suffocation felt like a very real threat. I tried to lean forward, staring intently through the one-way glass into the room where she sat, but again chains and cuffs held me painfully short of where I wanted to be.

However, the real trauma went much, much deeper. Brandon had been wrong—there really was a Delilah Marlow. But I wasn’t her.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to take it all in. Trying to understand.

I wasn’t my mother’s daughter.

That devastating revelation triggered a landslide of loss, leaving me crushed by the debris of my own life. I had no real name or family. No birthplace or birth date. No true identity. Added to the confiscation of everything I’d ever owned, that left me with nothing but a body I could no longer trust. Though according to Pennington, that was now owned by the state of Oklahoma.