sidneyprescottkinkaid​:
Sidney didn’t hear either the knock or Gale calling to her. She was totally focused in on what she had just seen, her own blood roaring in her ears.
For several moments Sidney held her phone with badly shaking hands, tears streaming; although the video had ended, she could still see her husband’s face contorted in the final moments of his death, almost unrecognizable in their sheer anguish. She started to pull up the keypad of her phone to dial 911, with the intention of directing them to dispatch officers to her address in Monterey, but then she froze, stricken with new and intense fear.
The killer had spoken to Mark about their children. The killer had said to him, just before murdering Mark, that his children would die too. And there were other texts, other video messages, that Sidney had yet to watch.
No part of her wanted to hear anything else that the killer could have had to say, to witness any further the terrible actions that he had committed or was in the process of committing hundreds of miles away, too far away for Sidney to be able to stop him. But Sidney could not opt out. She could not refuse to bear witness to what had happened, what could still be happening, to her daughters.
Her breathing painfully loud even to her own ears, shallow and constricted, Sidney slowly reached to play the first video message.
The video panned out, showing the all too familiar interior of her older two daughters’ bedroom. The cheerful green walls, decorated with pictures of pop stars and cluttered with preteen pretend cosmetics and fluffy pillows on Tatum’s side, posters of horses and kittens and littered with stuffed animals on Riley’s side. Her daughters’ bedroom, where her little girls lay in their beds, small faces relaxed and peaceful in sleep. Her daughters, young and innocent and so very vulnerable- and the video was time stamped to hours ago. Hours ago, when Sidney herself slept, her little girls had been in danger, and she hadn’t known, she had done nothing to help them.
Tears continued to stream down her face unchecked as Sidney watched, not wanting to see, but unable to bring herself to stop. The killer set the camera on a surface that Sidney distantly assumed was the girls’ bookshelf before moving into its view, standing in between the space of her daughters’ beds. It tilted its head, first towards Riley, than towards Tatum, seeming to be sizing them up. Barely aware of what she was saying, Sidney cursed him fiercely, her voice cracking as she begged for her girls to wake up, to run, get away, save themselves, for the killer to give her babies mercy.
None of her pleas were answered. Instead, she was forced to watch as the killer’s knife rose high over her seven year old daughter’s sleeping body, burying deep in her narrow chest. Riley’s eyes came open, huge with her pain and terror, but she had little time to react before the killer was snatching the knife from her chest, bringing it down next into the chest of her nine year old sister.
Sidney’s mouth opened in a scream without words, without even sound, as she watched her little girls choking, weeping, trying to speak with blood gargling their words. She knew her babies enough to be able to tell nevertheless, no matter how unclearly they spoke, that they were calling for her. They were suffering, in unbearable pain, and they were calling out for their mommy to help them. They were calling for her, and she had not been there.
She remembered with sudden vividness how only a few months earlier, Tatum had come to her hesitantly, asking to speak to her in private. Sidney had assumed that she wanted to talk about crushes or puberty, dating or even an embarrassing moment in school. She had been taken aback when instead, Tatum told her that some of her friends had teased her about her mom being “the lady all the killers go after in the movies.” Far earlier than she had expected, Sidney had had to sit down with her fourth grader and explain to her a condensed version of not only her history of trauma, but that of their father, their aunt Gale, and their late Uncle Dewey as well. That had brought up questions never before asked about Tatum’s namesake, and Tatum had been visibly troubled to learn that she had been named after not just her mother’s friend who had “died young,” but her mother’s friend who had been murdered.
“Am I going to die too, Mommy?” she had asked- the first time in months that she had reverted to using the name she had decided too “babyish” to use any longer when referring to her mother. “They all said I’m going to die just like the other Tatum. What if they’re right?”
Sidney had taken care to reassure her daughter, without actually making a promise that she couldn’t keep, that she would do everything in her power to protect her and her sisters, that it was the job she and Mark took more seriously than any in the world. She had taken pains to remind her of everything they did to keep the girls and themselves safe. Still, Tatum had spent the next three nights sleeping with Sidney and Mark, too frightened and unsettled to be comfortable in her room with Riley.
Now Sidney was watching her daughter die, after she had failed to keep her safe. Her daughter was dying just like the first Tatum, and 27 years later, she still could not be there to intervene.
The girls’ lives were ended faster than Mark’s; the killer lingered over them just long enough for the video to get twenty-three torturous seconds of them suffering before cutting their throats, first Riley, then Tatum. Just like Mark, Sidney watched her babies’ eyes go blank as they bled out and became nothing more than the bodies her children used to inhabit.
There was one video left, and Sidney knew after the first two what it must hold. She was crying so hard she could barely see, her hands shaking so the phone was unsteady in her hand to the point it almost didn’t remain there. But she couldn’t ignore the final video of her final child. She had to bear witness to Hallie’s death, just as she had the others of her family. And so through tears so strong she almost gagged on them, Sidney clicked the video and watched it play.
The video was, as she had expected, set up to film the inside of her youngest daughter’s bedroom, where three year old Hallie lay in her small toddler bed. Only last year had Hallie graduated from her crib to the toddler bed with Frozen sheets and blanket; only in the last few months had she graduated out of pull ups overnight. She was not just Sidney’s baby, she was still a baby, period, her hair in messy ringlets on her snowflake patterned pillow. And she too was awakened with a brutal stab to her chest, her wailing cries silenced far too much time after by the cutting of her throat.
Gale could hear what sounded like screaming and crying coming from the room. Apparently Sidney was watching a video. At least, that was what Gale had gathered. She pressed her ear against the door so she could hear a little more. Those screams and cries sounded all too familiar. Especially the crying. Gale had stayed at Mark and Sidney’s place last year after she lost Dewey. She had heard the girls crying at least once.Â
Upon recognizing the cries, Gale let herself into the guest bedroom. She sat down on the bed beside Sidney and watched the brutalities beside her. Gale felt sick to her stomach and immediately guilty. Even if Sidney was there, she could have been killed. But either way, now she had no family and that was horrible. Gale felt responsible for the deaths of Sid’s husband and beautiful little girls. Fuck... She thought to herself, unable to speak in that moment.Â
Chewing on the inside of her lower lip, Gale continued watching the contents on Sidney’s screen and could feel her own tears forming behind her eyes. She needed to be stronger this time. She needed to be someone Sidney could lean on. “Sid...” Was all she could manage. “I... I’m so sorry...” She whispered wrapping her arm around her friend.Â
