Murder, She Lived. (Paranormal)

Two

Two.

It had been two months since the incident. Two months since Caroline's parents had been murdered, and her younger brother taken from their home. The police had kept quiet about Caroline's survival, informing the public that all three of them had died that night. A triple Homicide, that's what the killer needed to think it was, but Caroline had survived. A miracle. The killer had accidentally pressed the emergency button on her phone when he stabbed her, unintentionally saving her life. A miracle.

"Caroline, would you like to share your feelings about going home today?" Doctor Peter's asked. He was a young man who wore a lab coat to group therapy like he was searching for the cure for cancer.

Caroline looked down at her hands, at her bruised knuckles. Her blonde hair was dyed a dark brown now, cut down to her shoulders. She needed to hide from whoever did this to her. "I feel... I feel afraid. What if I go home and the blood stains are still on the carpet? What if I go inside and see the photos on the wall and just... and I..." she stopped speaking. She felt tears welling up in her eyes and shut down, what she had been doing everyday for two months.

Doctor Peter's sent her a sad smile. In his ten years of working with teen victims of trauma he had never quite dealt with a case so bad. One more minute the doctors said, and Caroline would have been dead. Just the fact alone that she was supposed to die that night would be cause for anyone to be eternally screwed up, but she had lost her mother and father that night. Her brother, she hadn't spoken of him since it happened. She convinced herself that Little Teddy had never existed at all.

"You know you don't have to go back to that house if you don't think you can handle it, Caroline. Your aunt said she was more than happy to take you back home to Arizona with her." In fact, the doctors, the police, even her aunt practically begged her to leave to Arizona. The second she moved back into that house she would be the girl everyone thought was dead, and was suddenly alive. If everybody knew, then the killer surely would too. As much as everybody urged her to leave the police could not make her, the doctors could not convince her, and aunt Claire couldn't stand to hurt the poor girl in any other way. The house was left in Claire's name until Caroline's eighteenth birthday when it would then become hers. She would own the house that killed her parents.

"Everyone wants me to leave," Caroline whispered. The kids in her therapy group were listening attentively, "They all want me to run away. I can't run away because what if..." What if Teddy comes home and I'm not there? She shoved the thought away quickly. Teddy wasn't real, he never was, she tells herself. "I don't care if everybody knows that I lied about being dead."

"Nobody will blame you for that. It was for your protection."

Caroline nodded, "The police think the killer fled the country, it won't matter if he knows."

"You'll have a patrol officer watching your house for the first month until they know for sure that it is safe, they won't hurt you again," Doctor Peter's assured her. Part of him was assuring himself, he was terrified for the young girl. They entire town was terrified. What was even more terrifying was that nobody knew why; there was no obvious motive, no reason, and no other crimes. Why were three meant to die and one meant to be taken?

The Maryland Inquirer

It has been announced today, two months to the date of the brutal murder that shook our town, that the daughter of Rachel and Owen Wilk's survived the once believed Triple Homicide and kidnapping. Police have released a statement saying that to protect Caroline Wilks, 17, the public was made to believe she had died until Police believed she would be safe enough to return home.