The light and movement we had seen beneath the door is from flickering candles surrounding the bed and the body on it.
Heat from the half-burned candles wafts out of the room through the door, over us, and into the kitchen.
There’s a disconnect between what I’m seeing and any thoughts my mind can form from it, a visual cognitive dissonance that is surreal and unsettling.
In the glow of the candlelight the room looks like a sanctuary, the bed an altar, the little girl in the white gown on it perhaps part of a pagan rite or funereal ritual.
The body of the beautiful little girl laid out on the bed is clearly lifeless, unmoving, inanimate, the castoff remnants of a mortal coil.
Flashes of Taylor streak the night sky of my mind like heat lightning on a hot summer night.
But the body on the bed is not Taylor, but the little girl who the bed belongs to.
Magdalene, as if frozen in time somehow, is back in her bed looking much as she did the night she vanished, only instead of sweet, cutesy Toy Story pajamas, she’s sheathed in an elegant white gown.
Suddenly, jarringly, I become aware of Keith and Christopher screaming and yelling and trying to press past us as and Roderick and I block the doorway into the room that is a crime scene for a second time.
“Oh, God,” Christopher screams. “Oh, God.”
Roderick holsters his weapon, snatches the radio off his belt and calls for backup.
“Let us in to check on her,” Keith is saying.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “We can’t.”
“She’s gone, Keith,” Roderick says. “It’s obvious. I’m sorry. We’ve got to preserve the scene now so we can find out who did this to her.”
“She’s just sleeping,” Christopher says.
“You’ve got to let us check,” Keith says.
“Keith,” I say, my voice calm but firm, “she wouldn’t still look like she did nearly a year ago.”
“How . . .” he says, looking up at her again. “How . . . is that . . . possible?”
“We’re gonna find out,” Roderick says.
“Who would do this?” Keith says. “Who could do something like this? Wasn’t enough to take her from us, they have to . . . to . . . to bring her back to . . . to torture and taunt us like this.”
“Oh God,” Christopher keeps saying between sobs and screams and yells. “Oh, God.”
A deputy opens the hallway door and asks Roderick how he can help.
Before Roderick can respond, Derinda, who is behind the deputy with a few other people, sees how upset Keith and Christopher are.
“WHAT IS IT?” she yells. “WHAT’S WRONG?”
“It’s her, Mama,” Keith says. “It’s our little Magdalene.”
“What?” she says. “What do you mean? It’s her what?”
Derinda rushes past the deputy over to Keith, who is nearest the hallway.
“What is it?” she asks.
But before he can respond, she turns and looks through the open door into the room where we’re all looking and begins to scream. If possible her cries seem even more inconsolable than Keith’s and Christopher’s, and I wonder if it’s because she’s grieving for both her child and her grandchild.
“Help them into the front room,” Roderick says to the deputy, “and stay with them. No one else comes in here. Tell everyone to keep looking for Taylor. Everybody keep doing what they’re doing. I’m calling FDLE and the medical examiner’s office. Bring them right back to us when they get here.”