Before She Was Found(94)

It’s no surprise that Max is doing just fine in our new town, making plenty of friends and girlfriends, though I still catch him texting Nikki now and then. He watches Violet just as closely as I do. He worries and it makes me sad and proud all at the same time.

Violet is taking a while to settle in to our new life but she seems okay. She doesn’t seem to have any close friends yet but she did join an after-school art club and they meet twice a week. I asked her if she ever misses Jordyn and Cora and she just shook her head and said not really. I check her phone and scan the bills to see if she calls or texts one of them, but she hasn’t. I sneak into her room when she’s at school and flip through her sketchbook, looking for drawings of Joseph Wither or tall grass or railroad tracks, but only find pictures of Boomer and attempts at anime. I’m relieved and hopeful and grateful. It’s time for us to make new memories, good memories.



Dr. Madeline Gideon


September 14, 2018


When we found Cora sitting in a pool of blood pulling out her stitches I was truly stunned. The nurses rushed in and whisked Cora away with Mara Landry right behind her. Cora was taken into surgery and the surgeons once more had the task of putting her back together again.

I remember standing in the middle of Cora’s hospital room, my hands and knees covered with her blood and Jim Landry standing in front of me, his face red with rage. “This is your fault!” he spat. “You were supposed to help her! You were supposed to help my family!”

Kendall was sitting on Cora’s hospital bed, crying anguished tears. I tried to step past Mr. Landry to go to Kendall, to comfort her, something her father should have been doing.

“No way,” he said, blocking my way. “You stay the fuck away from her. You stay away from my family.”

“She’s upset,” I told him the obvious. “You should go to her. She needs you.”

“No!” He stepped toward me, forcing me to move backward until my back was against the wall. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. Get out.”

After Cora, I reviewed her case file over and over. I read and reread until the pages were dog-eared and smudged. I thought I would be able to pinpoint the mistakes I made, learn from them and hopefully never make them again.

And for a while I did just fine. I moved on. That’s what we do as doctors. We assess and diagnose and treat and then move on to the next patient. The problem was, I didn’t move on. I kept doubting myself. I’d make a diagnosis, then hesitate and change my mind. It got to be that I couldn’t make a move without consulting with a colleague. I was losing sleep. I wasn’t eating. And I wasn’t good at my job anymore.

So I resigned. I quit because a little girl named Cora Landry and a fictional entity named Joseph Wither got into my head.

I don’t tell people that, of course. I simply said I needed a professional change, a new challenge. So I moved three hundred miles away and began a second career as the head of the psychology department and a professor at a small liberal arts college east of the Mississippi.

Jim Landry’s final words still echo in my head. The words he shouted after me as I left Cora’s hospital room the last time I saw her. “You’re going to pay for this.”

And I have. In too many ways to count.



Sept 14, 2018


Today is a good day. I get to use a pen to write in my journal and that is so much better than a crayon. It’s hard to stab yourself with a crayon. But like I said, today is a good day, so I get to use a pen.

My doctor here, Dr. Kim, tells me it’s a good idea to get my thoughts down on paper, that it will help me process everything that happened last April. I don’t know about that, but I like to write, so I do.

Dr. Kim also likes to talk about what I wrote in my old journal, the one I dropped at the train station. He walks in with his file folders, the ones labeled Case #92-10945, and he’ll say, “Good morning, Cora, how are you?” And I’ll say, “Don’t you mean Good morning, Number Ninety-Two Dash One, Zero, Nine, Four, Five?”

Dr. Kim laughs and says, “I like Cora.” We do this before each of our sessions. Every. Single. Time.

I don’t especially like talking about what I wrote in my journal. Imagine having to talk about every single secret thought you had. It sucks.

My arm is better and I didn’t lose my eye. My face has healed but there are scars. When Kendall came to visit me last week, she told me not to worry about it, that the scars make me look interesting, that when I’m older I can tell people whatever I want about what caused them. So now whenever I meet a new kid in the psych ward I say that I was in a car accident or mauled by a grizzly bear or injured in a skydiving accident. But if I really want to mess with them, I tell them the truth.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember exactly what happened that night. It was cold, but I barely felt it. It was the dark that scared me. But I was kind of excited, too. I thought Joseph was going to come and take me away from Pitch and we’d never come back.

I remember my arm hurt. Bad. Jordyn pushed me down after I grabbed her backpack. I was so tired of her bullying and teasing and tricks. She made me so mad saying that Joseph wasn’t real. That it was all one big joke. We heard something then. Footsteps or maybe just the wind.

I hoped it was Joseph coming for me like he promised. I looked around but I couldn’t see him. Jordyn and Violet had run away and I saw the knife on the ground at my feet. Jordyn must have dropped it. For a second I wanted to find Jordyn and use the knife on her, I hated her so much.