Chapter 3
“This is sixteen years prior to this year. I was just thirteen years old, a child playing around in the yard with my friends. I’m going to tell you the story just as it unfolded.
” Sidney said he was there for her. “You are now, but you might not be after I tell you what unfolded that summer. Along with the months and years that followed it as well.”
She loved playing outdoors in the summer. She didn’t need anyone to translate for her while she was with her friends. They just had fun in whoever’s yard they were in and would play outside until it was dark out.
Most of the kids that she played with knew enough sign language to get them by with her.
She had taught them the basics last year, and they knew enough about her that they didn’t give her a hard time when she messed up because she couldn’t hear.
She couldn’t speak either, but they were fine with that.
They were good friends, and that’s all that mattered.
At dinnertime, she had to go home to eat.
She thought that her mom just wanted to make sure she was getting enough to eat, which is why she didn’t eat at the other kids’ homes.
But they could come to her house, and that was fine by her mom.
Today they were having grilled peanut butter sammiches along with chips and a glass of milk.
Toby Lea was the youngest of her friends at eight, and she was the oldest at thirteen.
After lunch, they ended back in the yard playing with dolls and having a good time.
She noticed that there was a white van that kept going by her home, but like the rest of the kids, she thought he was looking for a street address.
As soon as he drove away, she went about playing with her doll that she’d gotten last Christmas.
The others, the same kind of doll, were having a tea party, and she wasn’t able to join as they only had four seats.
Not that she cared. Olivia could and did create her own little world about her dolls. Today was no different.
When the van pulled up in front of her house, she watched as a man got out with a present in his hands.
She knew better than to go into someone’s car that she didn’t know, but watched the others get closer and closer to him.
It was then that he grabbed Toby Lea and pulled her towards the van.
Sensing danger, she beat on the man until he let her go.
That was when he pulled her into the van and drove off.
Hitting her head on something hard in the van, she was out before she could figure out if the kids were going to tell her momma that she’d been kidnapped.
Olivia’s teacher had told them about stranger danger. Her mom had told her too that you never took a gift from someone you didn’t know. There was a little girl down the street from them all who had been caught by a stranger and killed. She didn’t want that to happen to her.
The man who was driving the van had tied her up, and she was rolling around in the back.
Each time she hit her head, she was out again.
This went on for what seemed like hours.
When the van stopped, she tried getting away from him, but he wasn’t having it.
He carried her, wrapped in a smelly blanket, into a barn that she could see and tied her up again.
That first night, he violated her innocence and shattered the world she had known.
Broken and terrified, she cried herself to sleep when he finally left her alone.
She prayed it would be the only time, prayed he would let her go so she could find her way home.
But Olivia was trapped in a silence deeper than most could imagine.
She could not call out for help, nor hear what the man tried to tell her.
A bandana covered his mouth, denying her even the chance to read his lips.
When he came for her again, Olivia fought back, managing to bite his arm hard enough to draw blood.
Her defiance earned her a brutal blow, and when she regained consciousness, she found herself restrained and utterly at his mercy.
She pleaded with him as best she could, but her resistance only brought more cruelty.
By the next day, after enduring repeated abuse, she was weak, in pain, and certain she might not survive what was being done to her.
She had no idea whether anyone was searching for her as the days and nights blurred into one endless nightmare.
He brought her meager food at first—things she could barely force herself to swallow—followed by more abuse.
In time, even that small mercy faded, and cruelty became the rhythm of her captivity, sometimes more than once in a day.
It wasn’t until she finally saw his face clearly that a deeper terror took hold.
She knew she would never forget him. She had seen that face before—on billboards along the highway, smiling down in polished confidence.
He was one of the wealthy men who had visited her school, speaking of tearing it down and rebuilding it on the same grounds.
His name was Richard Winchester, of the Winchester family.
Weak and barely holding on, Olivia was sometimes untied while he tended to her or left briefly to his own business.
But she had never dared try to escape again.
She had attempted it once before, and the punishment had been so violent she feared it had nearly killed her.
The pain from it lingered, a constant reminder of what defiance could cost. But one night, when he left her unbound, something in her shifted.
Summoning what little strength she had left, she managed to run.
It was late when Olivia realized he had left her alone again. She watched for the familiar signs—the vibrations fading, the movement outside gone still—and after crying herself into a fitful sleep, she knew this night had to be different. Tonight, she would escape.
When he did not return, she forced herself up and staggered toward the stairs.
Though she had no clothing, she found a shirt and pulled it over her battered frame before making her way up and out of the basement.
The door stood unlocked, and she feared it could only mean he would be back soon.
With no time to lose, she slipped out of the barn and followed the road leading away from it, toward a place she had never seen before.
Seeing headlights in the distance, she was nearly caught when she realized it was him returning.
Slipping off the road, she hid among the trees until she was certain he had not seen her.
Watching the car turn toward the barn, she froze, terrified he might step out at any moment.
But when he remained inside, she felt a fragile surge of relief.
Moving toward the end of the road, she never took her eyes off the man in the car.
The sun was coming up when she realized that she’d been walking for a long time.
The newspaper might have said her name and how she was missing.
She was hoping that someone would see her and remember that she’d been taken.
Moving along the road that had come off the little road she was on, she didn’t have any idea where she was or where she was going.
She just wanted as much distance between him and herself as she could get.
She was so sore when she realized that she was lost. She might well have known that before, but as her body began to hurt more, she realized that she was going to be spending the rest of her life right out here in the woods, and no one would find her.
Getting herself going, her body aching to the point of her being sick with the pain, she made herself walk until she couldn’t anymore.
She had fallen so many times she was sure she was nothing but a bloody mess.
Getting up, making herself get going, all she could think about was her mom and dad.
And that she had to get back to them. Seeing cars coming and going on the road, she was careful not to be seen.
The shirt she had on was bloodied as badly as she was, and she wasn’t sure if she could take another step when one of the cars on the road did a sudden stop.
She didn’t move. Knowing it was him, she made sure that she didn’t so much as blink when the light that he had shown over where she was hiding.
Watching the car, she was nearly ready to bolt again when the car suddenly had police lights turned on.
Taking her time getting to the car, she was cautious of her surroundings, knowing that at any moment, Winchester was going to come out of nowhere and get her again.
Crying when the officer came toward her, she simply fell to the ground when he wrapped her in his coat.
She didn’t know what to do when he spoke to her.
She could read his lips, but getting him to understand what she was saying to him was difficult.
He put her in the back of his cruiser and watched over her.
She didn’t know what they were waiting on, but knew that on a very special level, she was safe. As safe as she’d been in the last week.
An ambulance arrived about the time she was really feeling the pain.
He kept asking her questions, some she could answer, most she couldn’t.
He asked her if she was Olivia James, and she was able to tell him that she was.
Then he asked her if she knew the person who had taken her.
Getting him to understand that was impossible, so she waited for someone to come and translate for her.
As soon as she was in the ambulance, she was given something for pain, and it knocked her out.