I’m a police detective assigned to a rather strange case. We just got a warrant to search a house owned by a man and woman named Jim and Kay Boyd. I’ve been searching through their things and haven’t found much of anything. Until I got to their daughter’s room. I found a journal there, and I read most of it. Things just aren’t adding up for me. I’m typing it all up here in hopes someone can make some sense of it. I’m breaking some major confidentiality laws, but I just can’t keep this to myself anymore.
Here’s what’s written:
On her tenth birthday, Edie Boyd decided to go for a walk.
It was four o’clock in the evening and no one even remembered it was her birthday. Not her dad. Not her mom. Not her friends. Not even Mrs. Penny wished her the obligatory “happy birthday” on the whiteboard at school just like she did for every other student. Edie was invisible. No matter how much her feelings were hurt, though, she didn’t say a word to anyone.
When she got home after school, her mom and dad were arguing again. Something about bills and money, but Edie didn’t care enough to listen too closely. Her parents would almost always argue everyday, and it was beginning to wear her down. Money this, money that. Her parents never had any or they never had enough.
The reason for that was simple: her father could never hold down a job long enough to keep a steady paycheck. Her mom, on the other hand, could never get a job at all. She was always too busy smoking something in the morning to knock her out for the rest of the day or taking pill after pill in the evening to keep her up all night.
Edie would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to find her mom rummaging through her bedroom, looking for who knows what in her chest of drawers. The only things in there were the few pairs of underwear Edie had and some socks that had holes in the toes. If her mom was looking for money or drugs, Edie sure wasn’t harboring any in her room. Her mom had been too crazy to talk some sense into, though. She searched anyway.
For as long as she could remember, Edie’s life had been this way. Her parents were always neglectful, and even when they did notice her, it was always to yell at her or blame her for something she didn’t do. There were many times she’d gone to school wearing tattered clothes and clothes that were too cold for the weather. She didn’t own a coat, only long-sleeved t-shirts and small cardigans that didn’t keep her warm in the winter.
Sometimes winters in the south could get balmy and freezing. They’d had cases of ice storms that knocked the power out once or twice and Edie almost froze to death during those. Her parents had been too preoccupied with themselves to even throw her a blanket.
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