Residue

2. Panic

It was not a nightmare.

It all happened.

She was at the police station after they arrested her on suspicion of murder at 4:30am. She was detained in a room, awaiting the officer who wanted to "ask her some questions". They were taking their time. From the corner of her eye, she saw a CCTV camera with a red dot, knowing she was being watched.

She watched a lot of shows. They were perhaps going to observe her behaviour. She tried to look as casual as possible.

A tall, broad shouldered, relatively young officer without uniform shut the door quietly behind him. She looked at him as he sat down in the chair across from her.

"Good morning, I am Special Agent Emmett. I will be asking you questions, all you have to do is answer while I am taping it," he said it as a statement.

He pressed 'record'.

"What's your name?"

"Ephedra. Ephedra Alastor."

"You killed her, did you not?"

Her eyes went wide with shock and disgust. "Of course not! She's my mother, why would I?!"

"No need to get defensive. We had a warrant to search your home. We found this," he slowly slid her diary in to her range of vision.

"This has interesting thoughts about your mother. Open the thirteenth page, Miss. Alastor."

She swallowed a quickly-forming lump in her throat. It was not easy finding your mother murdered, finding out it was true, being arrested before she got out of shock and being forced to voice her deepest, darkest thoughts.

Her throat as dry as sand, eyes drenched with tears, she started reciting with a trembling voice. "Thursday, fifteenth of October. Dear diary, twenty-nine times my mother beat me before she passed out from whatever she was taking. She's getting worse as the days go by, and frankly I do not believe I can cope.

"Sometimes, I look at other teenage girls I see at school or at the mall. I always wondered how it would feel like just to have a normal family. Just once I want to feel like I could tolerate the people God chose as my parents.

"Just for five more minutes, I just want my father to be here. Just to feel his loving embrace, his smiling face. But I have been damned to this fate. I just have to take it for a little while. Then, I could find my salvation, at l-last..."

She knew those words sounded incriminating. She meant a little while until she left for university, but she knew it could be interpreted differently.

His brown eyes pierced her soul. "What was going through your mind, Miss. Alastor, as you wrote those last few lines?"

Ephedra looked down. She felt violated but she needed to clear her name so she could grieve properly and find out who actually killed her mother. "My thoughts were that I had been hit with a metal rod my mother found in the streets while she was high on drugs twenty-nine times before she vomited and passed out. I wrote it in a diary because I have no one to speak to." Maybe honesty was the best policy.

His young face seemed to age as this information was explored deeper by him. "I'm very sorry to hear that. If you don't mind me asking, can you tell me about your father and the relationship you have with your mother?"

"My dad was murdered when I was younger. His head was delivered to our doorstep. It messed my mother up, and she turned to drugs and alcohol to cope. She used me as a punching bag." She felt odd voicing this for the first time in her life.

"I'm sorr-"

"Don't be."

Clearing his throat, he moved on. "Right, could you have perhaps killed your mother for the beatings to stop?"

Ephedra needed to remain calm regardless of how much she wanted to scream at him for asking such an impertinent question.

"No, sir."

He yawned. She remembered that sometimes people used a yawn to see if that person is capable of empathy. So she imitated him a couple of seconds afterwards.

"Thank you for your time, Miss. Ephedra Alastor. End of interview." His finger snapped on the pause.

She was free to go, for now.

Panic over.

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