by having spent seven years as the child of serial killers, Trina Pierce possessed intimate knowledge of how such predators concealed themselves.
It was a lie.
She’d had no idea that Abigail and Daniel Banning weren’t her real parents, not until a SWAT team exploded from the woods one day, the result of a deliveryman recognizing Trina from an age-progression photo he’d seen on a true crime show.
Her father had built a story for her that didn’t exist.
Worse, that narrative didn’t even fit with his own suspicions about his daughter.
He sometimes worried aloud about the effect Trina’s experience might have had on her young mind. Once, as a teenager, when she’d complained about yet another series of speaking events, he’d snapped and said, “We keep doing this so you’ll never forget who they really were.”
And what would have been so bad about forgetting the Bannings and what they had done?
In that moment, she didn’t have the courage to ask. Later, she’d come to suspect that her father believed if he didn’t drag his daughter constantly through the mud of her past, she might turn into a literal heir to the Bannings’ evil ways. Did he actually think he was competing with those monsters for the care and feeding of his daughter’s soul?
The search results reveal details about her mother’s final hours she’s never heard before—first reported by the Washington Post right after her rescue and the arrest of the Bannings, then repeated in countless other articles. She realizes that her mother’s death is something she’s never truly experienced or grieved.
Now she experiences it as a body blow.
Her ears are ringing; her cheeks hot.
The exhumation of her mother’s body from where the Bannings had crudely buried her revealed that she’d broken four fingers on her right hand during her captivity. The manner of the breaks suggested she’d done it trying to claw open the doors to the root cellar in which Abigail and Daniel Banning confined her. Abigail confirmed it in interviews. Four fingers, all but her pinky on her right hand. Worse, the pathologist believed she broke one after the other, which meant she kept up her efforts even after the first bone snapped. Maybe it was pure panic. Or maybe it was something else.
The root cellar was dug out of the side of a gently sloping hill. Charley can remember the mound it made between the trees. Many of the victims scratched messages into the stones in the walls with their fingernails or tiny rocks. They weren’t messages for other victims; they were messages for the Bannings, and the most famous one read U CAN’T RAPE MY HATE AWAY.
Several families of the victims believed their loved one had written it, but there was no telling, really. There was another message, though, that had most certainly been left by her mother; Abigail confirmed it.
LET ME HOLD HER PLEASE.
Impossible not to believe that Joyce Pierce had broken her fingers not just to escape the root cellar but to get to her baby girl, who she wanted to believe was somewhere alive on that farm. Did she find out she was right before she died? Abigail says no. It was not Abigail’s job to visit the victims during her confinement; that was the time her husband spent alone with them. On the third day, Abigail would cut their throats, but not before whispering in their ears, “You are now nothing.”
No interviewer had ever mentioned this message to Charley. When she was first rescued, she was a little girl, appearing only briefly on camera, seated mostly on her father’s lap and answering basic, insipid questions about whether she was OK. Those interviews were like proof of life for television watchers everywhere.
Then, once her father was able to put the money-making machine in place, he did the interviews, and she appeared onstage to read the agreed-upon script. Maybe she should be grateful now that the horror movie fans who flooded their events had enough restraint not to ask about her mother’s last, anguished request.
But now, sitting in her brand-new bedroom, free to Google and free to roam the countryside surrounding her new hometown, she is also free to experience the leveling pain of her mother’s loss for the first time. It’s their first goodbye, really, and it’s composed of broken bones and a desperate plea scratched in stone.
LET ME HOLD HER PLEASE.
She can’t remember falling off the bed. She must have, though, because the next thing she remembers is being on all fours, staring at the