Chapter 3: What the Audio Holds
No one spoke for several seconds after Dean’s voice disappeared.
Then Officer Ruiz set the tablet down on the small table beside my bed.
“We can stop here,” he said. “You’ve already given us a lot.”
“I want you to hear the rest.”
My voice sounded steadier than I felt. Ms. Cole shifted her chair closer, still leaving space between us.
Ruiz nodded. “We’ll go at your pace. And I want to be clear: a recording can give us something to investigate. It doesn’t answer every question by itself.”
“I know.”
I didn’t, not completely. Until that night, I’d thought of the audio as a door out of a locked room. I hadn’t imagined how many people might need to examine the hinges before anyone believed it could open.
Officer Bell stood near the curtain, watching the hallway. My mother was somewhere beyond it, and Dean was somewhere beyond her. I tried not to picture them talking. I tried not to wonder what story they were making now.
Ruiz asked me to show him the list of recordings again.
I scrolled slowly, stopping at dates I recognized. Some files were only a few seconds long. Others ran for several minutes. Seeing them together made the past look neat and numbered, which it had never felt while I was living it.
“Can you tell me which ones you remember?” Ruiz asked.
“Some of them.”
“Do you know what we’ll hear?”
“Not always.”
He didn’t rush me. Neither did Ms. Cole. I picked a file from a month earlier and confirmed I wanted it played.
The room filled with an ordinary sound: a cupboard shutting, the tick of a clock, my mother’s voice asking Dean whether he wanted more coffee.
Then Dean answered.
“You know why I hit her. She keeps giving me reasons.”
The file continued for another few seconds. A chair scraped. My mother said something I couldn’t make out. Then the recording ended.
The silence afterward felt different from the one after the first clip. That one had been a question nobody could answer. This one seemed to have answered something, though I wasn’t sure what.
Ruiz wrote down the file name and date.
“Is that what you mean when you say he admitted it?” Bell asked.
“Sometimes he said it more directly,” I answered. “Other times he said things like that.”
“Did your mother know what he meant?”
I looked toward the curtain. “She knew what was happening.”
That sounded like an accusation. It was also the smallest true sentence I could manage.
Ms. Cole rested her hand on the blanket again, palm up. I didn’t take it, but I didn’t pull away either.
Ruiz asked whether there were more files from that week. I found one with a date I remembered because it was the night Dean had kept me from going upstairs. The audio caught him speaking in the low voice that always came first.
“You think anyone’s going to believe you over me?”
A pause.
“Try it. See what happens.”
The clip stopped.
Bell lowered his eyes to his notebook. Ruiz made another careful note.
“You told us the abuse has been happening for years,” he said. “We’ll compare dates and details where we can. We won’t assume every recording says the same thing.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
I did expect them to believe the sound. I wanted that so badly that I was afraid to say it out loud.
Dr. Grant came in a little later to check on me. He asked the officers to give him room while he examined the bruising he had already documented. When he finished, he pulled his stool close enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice.
“The injuries we’ve seen need careful documentation,” he told me. “Some are newer. Some have been healing longer. I can describe what I observed and what I can’t determine.”
“Can the recordings match the injuries?” I asked.
“They may help establish a timeline if the dates and circumstances can be checked. But sound alone can’t tell me how an injury happened.”
He didn’t make a promise. Somehow, that made me trust him more.
Ruiz explained that they would preserve copies of the files I could access and record how I had opened the account. He didn’t name a service or pretend to know how my phone had sent anything. He said a specialist might have to examine the material later.
“And the phone?” I asked.
“We’ll do what we can to locate it,” Bell said. “But first we preserve what’s already there.”
The secondhand phone had been my secret for six months. I had bought it with tutoring money after Dean smashed my first one, then hidden it inside the broken speaker on my bookshelf. The uploads were the part I had counted on. The little phone itself was only supposed to stay out of sight.
“What if it isn’t there anymore?”
“Then we document that,” Ruiz said. “We won’t guess about what happened to it.”
An officer outside the room spoke to Bell. He stepped into the hall, answered in a low voice, then returned.
“We may be able to check your room while you stay here,” he said. “You don’t have to go back to the house. We’ll explain what we can do before anyone enters.”
My stomach tightened.
“Will Dean be there?”
“We’ll handle access,” Bell said. He didn’t offer a guarantee that I would never have to see Dean again. He only made it clear I wouldn’t be sent back to face him tonight.
The officers spoke with someone at the house. I didn’t hear every word. I watched Ruiz’s face as he listened, and tried to tell whether the search was happening or had fallen apart.
Finally, he covered the phone and looked at me.
“Your mother has agreed to let officers check your room. You don’t need to speak with her right now.”
I didn’t ask why she had agreed. I couldn’t make myself imagine it as kindness.
The search took place without me. I stayed in the hospital bed while the officers checked the room I had left that morning, the shelf, the broken speaker, and the spaces around it. They did not call to tell me every step. I was grateful for that. I was also terrified whenever the phone rang.
Dr. Grant came back once more. Ms. Cole brought me water. I watched its surface tremble in the paper cup as I drank.
Then Bell returned with Ruiz.
“We found the speaker,” Bell said. “It was on the bookshelf where you described it.”
“And the phone?”
“It wasn’t inside.”
I looked down at my bandaged hand.
“Could it have fallen out?”
“It could have,” Ruiz said. “We checked the nearby area. We didn’t find it.”
“Could somebody have taken it?”
“That’s possible. We don’t know.”
There it was: the answer I had feared, offered without a comforting lie. The empty speaker might mean Dean had found the phone. It might mean it had fallen somewhere they hadn’t seen. It might mean something else I hadn’t thought of. None of those possibilities was proof.
“Did you take the speaker?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Bell said. “We documented where it was and what we observed. We’re preserving the files you can access first. The missing phone is a separate question.”
The room felt larger with that empty space on the shelf inside my mind. I had imagined the phone waiting there, harmless and ready, like a key hidden under a mat. Now even its absence seemed to have a voice, and I didn’t know what it was saying.
Ruiz returned to the tablet.
“There are a lot of files,” he said. “Would you like to keep reviewing them, or stop for now?”
I almost said stop. My head hurt, and my body felt too heavy to move. Then I remembered how many times I’d heard my mother explain away a bruise before anyone had asked her to.
“I want to know what’s there.”
He asked me to choose another date. I scrolled through the list, past files I recognized and those I didn’t, until one from a few weeks earlier caught my attention.
“Maybe that one,” I whispered.
Ruiz asked whether I wanted it played aloud. I nodded.
He made sure everyone was ready, then tapped the file.
A soft scrape came first, followed by the faint buzz of the refrigerator. A chair shifted across the floor.
Then came my mother’s voice, close to the microphone.
“No, Dean,” she said. “You can’t say she fell down the stairs. They’ll ask why she has those other bruises.”
A pause.
I stopped breathing.
May you like
My mother spoke again, slow and careful, as if practicing a line for an audience.
“She slipped while bathing. She’s always clumsy. That’s what we tell them.”
