To the neighborhood, little Emily was just an imaginative 7 year old with a quirky hobby. Her mother, Helen, frequently laughed off the girl's habit of spending hours in the backyard with a plastic trowel.
"She’s just burying sick birds and giving them proper funerals,"
Helen told the neighbors over coffee, proud of her daughter's apparent empathy and deep respect for nature. She chose to ignore the collection of tiny, rusted scissors and sharp wire her daughter kept hidden beneath her mattress, attributing it to a child's natural curiosity about the world.
The illusion shattered into pieces when the neighborhood's 15 year old babysitter, Fern, went missing on a Tuesday afternoon. The community mobilized, launching massive search parties through the nearby woods, but found absolutely nothing.
Three days into the search, Helen noticed Emily out in the garden under the midday sun. The little girl wasn't planting seeds; she was struggling to drag a heavy, bulging tarp toward a newly dug trench beneath the hydrangeas. Emily was humming a cheerful nursery rhyme, her white sundress covered in dark, wet clay.
A cold dread settled deep in Helen’s stomach. Waiting until Emily took a nap, Helen grabbed a heavy metal shovel and walked out to the garden. She began digging furiously into the soft earth where her daughter had been working. Just two feet down, her shovel struck something soft.
Helen dropped to her knees and cleared the dirt away with her bare hands. A small, pale teenage hand emerged from the soil, the fingers frozen in a desperate clawing motion. Wrapped tightly around the wrist was a silver locket. Helen opened it with trembling fingers, gasping as she read the inscription inside: her own maiden name. It was the necklace she had lost weeks ago, gifted by Emily to her very first human prize.
Caught between exposing her and covering up her deeds, she decided to call the police on her only child. Fearing if this was covered up, Emily will be continue to go after others.