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CHAPTER SEVEN the goodbye ciphers ᴏᴄᴛ. 17ᴛʜ, 6ᴀᴍ
WHAT THEY HAD NOW was in fact nothing at all. Broken pieces of a traumatic night that made no sense and no meaning. All of it was connected in a way that was so dysfunctional it was all practically useless. And besides, they were running out of time. Either they accused Bernadette Blanchard of her crime, or the girl walked free. It was only a matter of mere moments, and the justice for the five youngest Blanchard girls was becoming more and more like a fogged up wish.
Bernadette Blanchard would love nothing more than to get out of the orange jumpsuit she had been put in. She didn't care if she had to yank back the bloodied jumper the cops had taken in for evidence. She had prayed and prayed over and over again to God that he would prove her innocence, but she still felt the cold metal lining of the interrogation table, still felt the rub of handcuffs, and still caught the flash of orange cloth around her shaking limbs.
At precisely six in the early morning, the last day she was supposed to be in custody, Aaron Hotchner came through the door with a firm, deadly stare ready to split open the girl who had lost everything. He stared her at first, his still, collected movements. Each flicker of motion seemed to be thought out, each breath calculated as if following a schedule. Hotchner came in quietly, an eerie silence trailing in after him. The room felt cold with the echoes of Anne's cries, and Bernadette wanted to go home.
"Good morning," he told her. He had something in his hand.
It turned out that in the end, Anne Blanchard did write a suicide note, not just a slip up of past tense, and so did Primrose, more or less. As for the others, the BAU found nothing along the crime scene that Pippa and Constance, strewn along the bathroom floor tangled in each other's hands, or Agatha, who was found swinging slightly under the basement beam she knew would carry her weight, had left behind as a goodbye.
They had left Bernadette for the night after the discovery of her sister's love affair and had promptly interrogated Mrs Miller when the morning sung bedtime stories to the moon. The aureate necklace that hung from every Blanchard daughter's neck was not the only dead giveaway to having severe, and on that note, unaccepting, parents, there was a crippling multitude of painful factors that put towards the pile of a brutally cold mother. The morning of Monday, October 17th proved to be better than the day before on many accounts, no eleven year olds were found poisoned, nor eighteen year old girls stabbed, and Bernadette Blanchard had had the entire night to let her head spin with the thoughts of what had happened.
"How have you been sleeping?" Hotchner questioned, flicking through a stack of crisp sheets in front of him. He scarcely looked up, raised only an eyebrow to snatch her expression before returning back down to the haunted photographs preserving horror in eternal time.
