Page 102 of The Hanging Dolls
Travis Hunter was sitting at his desk. Behind him it was pitch black outside, no sign of rain or thunder or wind. Like a still painting. His desk was clean—all the clutter cleared out. Only one thing remained—a glass of whiskey.
Zoe and Aiden moved forward to sit across from him. The air was soupy and viscous. She felt like this space existed in another plane. Travis didn’t look at them. As he stared into empty space, he picked up the glass and took a sip from it.
With bated breath, she waited for him to puncture the silence with words. But the silence stretched between them, filling it with a tension that could be cut with a knife. There was a peace to this moment, like the calm before the storm or those seconds before a vase comes crashing down. The truth hung between them; Zoe could feel it. But without acknowledging it, she could pretend for a few more seconds that it wasn’t there.
She waited for Aiden to say something. But he was too absorbed, observing Travis’s apparent calmness.
“Do you know your son was arrested after being found with Lucy in the basement of a greenhouse?” Zoe said.
He nodded, his expression unchanged. “One of my guys called me.”
“He refuses to cooperate without a lawyer. I confronted him but he didn’t deny anything,” she said.
Travis’s eyes flitted to Zoe, a zing of confusion. “He didn’t?”
“No. I thought it was him. He was wearing that hoodie from the video, which now I realize you could have easily borrowed. Lucy told me that she’d never met him before today and that he was trying to help her escape.”
She didn’t want to ask him if there was even a faint possibility that this was a mistake.
“He’s trying to protect someone he loves but doesn’t understand.” Aiden leaned forward, pinning him with a hard look.
“My mother had it.” Travis finally gave in, his hand swirling the glass in which the burgundy liquid sloshed. “Munchausen by proxy. She liked to keep us sick. Not my father. But he was a weak man. He just did what my mother told him to do. After a while, I think he… lied to himself and pretended that everything was fine. My mother was a vicious woman. Unhinged. Thought we were the devils but still loved us. Someone found out and reported them.” His gaze drifted into empty space, taking him somewhere else. “She panicked. I remember coming home after school one day to find her force-feeding my sisters milk. She ordered me to drink it too. I knew what it was, probably something that would give us an upset stomach or make us drowsy. It was easier to do as she said rather than resist. It made her worse if I argued. Except this time I was wrong.” A lone tear trickled down his cheek. He took a big gulp of whiskey. “My sisters passed out first. I was tired but still half-conscious. I watched my mother prepare three ropes, curling their ends intonooses and hanging them from the ceiling fan. My eyes were closing, my energy fading as she took my sisters and placed them in the nooses. I couldn’t move. And then it was my turn.”
Zoe recalled the story Dr. Parsons had told her at the hospital.
“She did the same with me. I didn’t resist; I guess I was too afraid, too shocked. She left the room. The door clicked shut. I remember that very well. That door clicking shut and somehow how I found my strength again. As soon as she left the room, I felt this last speckle of strength surge through me. And that’s when I escaped from my noose. Something that morning told me to grab a pocket knife and hide it up my sleeve. But it was too late for my sisters. I checked. They were younger than me and much smaller in size. My mother must not have accounted for that when she roofied us so it didn’t hit me as hard. I had enough strength to crawl out the window and never look back.” He finished his drink, his hand trembling as he wiped his lips. He finally gazed at Zoe. “I was thirteen. I took a bus to my aunt’s place. She never liked my mother but was fond of us kids. I never told her about the things Mother did to us. She raised me and gave me her name. It was so long ago. With time, it felt unreal. Has that ever happened to you? A part of your life so different and immensely confusing that it feels like a distant dream?”
Zoe didn’t respond but her face gave it away.
“You do know. It’s okay, that’s your story. I forgot about mine with time. Locked it away somewhere deep inside.” He pounded his chest and winced. “That is until I was at the hospital one time for my symptoms. You see they come and go. I hallucinate sometimes. I see my dead sisters and mother. I never really dealt with what happened so they still exist somewhere inside me and come out from time to time. I overheard Parsons talking about Lily to someone on the phone. He was crying, saying it reminded him of that case all those years ago.”
That was the pivot Travis’s life took. That one nudge that had sent him back down the path he had managed to avoid.
“That’s when I started seeing them again more often.” His eyes glazed past them. “My sisters and my mother. They’re standing behind you, Agent Storm and Dr. Wesley.”
Zoe went cold inside.
“But you won’t see them,” he said calmly. “Only I do. Thank God, Ryan doesn’t. I was worried about him, worried that he was like me, seeing things he shouldn’t. I even followed him once. Turned his room upside down. But I found pictures… pictures of me talking to Lily.” He laughed without humor. “He knew. He knew what I’d done and that’s why he hated me. But he didn’t say anything. And I said nothing too.”
“Ryan went to the greenhouse to save Lucy,” Aiden said.
A smile that made his eyes twinkle. “I’m proud of my boy. I’m so proud. He’s not like me. He’s like his mother. It’s a powerful bond. No matter how much we hate our parents, it’s hard to turn on them. He didn’t turn on me; the same way I couldn’t turn on my mother. But he tried to do the right thing. He must have figured out where I was keeping Lucy.”
“What was your endgame, Travis?” Zoe’s tone was caustic, her mind still ticking over his words.
He looked past her at the ghosts of his dead family. “Because I left them. I abandoned my sisters when I was supposed to die with them. I was their older brother; I should have protected them. Instead, I climbed out of that window and left them hanging.” The corner of his mouth curled into a sneer filled with self-loathing. “And when I found out about Lily, it all came flooding back. I needed to die with them. This time.”
“The three nooses. Lily and Lucy to represent your two sisters. The third noose… was for you,” Aiden stated.
He nodded. “I was always the third victim. But when Tara went missing, it threw me off. I had no idea that Connor would exploit this for his political gain. She wasn’t supposed to die.”
“But Lily and Lucy were?” Zoe argued hotly. “How could you do this to them?”
He played with the phantom ring on his ring finger. “Their mothers would have killed them either way. I just got there first. But I was very gentle. Isn’t it better to die at the hands of a stranger than your mother?”
Zoe didn’t know how to feel. She was drowning in everything. Travis’s confession settled over her but there was no clarity. It filled her with a sense of hopelessness. Were people really forever slaves to their trauma? She knew she was—it was why she hunted for pain in illegal, underground fights.
“You could have ended the cycle, Travis.” Aiden couldn’t hide the disappointment in his voice. “You were raising a good son, you were doing good for the community. Why didn’t you just open an investigation into Lily’s parents? You aren’t that little boy anymore?—”
