Chapter 2 The House of Whispers

My scream echoed through the house so violently that it seemed to bounce off the walls and come back to me. For a moment I could not move. I stood rooted to the spot, my eyes fixed on my father’s body hanging from the ceiling, swaying slightly as if the house itself had not yet realized he was dead.

I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. His face had gone pale, his features frozen in a way that did not look peaceful. There was something wrong about it, something my mind refused to accept. My father had been alive just a few hours ago, sitting in that very room, making one of his terrible jokes while Mother cooked in the kitchen.

The newspaper still lay on the floor. The chair had been overturned. A broken cup glittered near the leg of the table. Then my eyes dropped to the blood.

A dark trail stretched from the sitting room and disappeared into the kitchen. My heart clenched so painfully that I almost doubled over.

“Mother?” I called, though my voice came out as little more than a whisper.

No answer.

My feet moved before I could think. Every step toward the kitchen felt heavier than the last, as though something in me already knew what waited beyond that door and was trying to keep me from seeing it.

When I stepped inside, the world as I knew it ended.

My mother lay on the floor near the stove, one arm stretched out as if she had tried to crawl toward the door. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing. The pot she had been cooking in had fallen sideways, and the stew had spilled across the floor, mixing with the blood in a sight so horrifying that I felt bile rise in my throat. A few feet away from her was Daniel.

My little brother.

His small body lay curled on his side, his face turned toward the doorway, almost as though he had been trying to run out.

I dropped to my knees so hard that pain shot through them, but I barely felt it.

“Daniel!!” I screamed, reaching for him with trembling hands.

His skin was cold. Cold.

Just a few hours earlier, he had been laughing and begging to follow me.

“Next time”

The words came back so sharply that I felt as if someone had driven a knife into my chest. I told him next time. I had left him here. If I had taken him with me, he would still be alive.

The thought hit me with such force that I bent over, sobbing into my hands, unable to stop the sound that tore from my throat. It was grief, guilt, horror, and something else I could not yet name.

Footsteps thundered behind me and voices filled the house.

Someone from outside must have heard my scream and come in.

Strong hands pulled me away from the kitchen floor, away from my mother and brother, and no matter how much I struggled, I could not get back to them.

The days that followed were worse than the night itself.

At first, there was too much noise. Neighbors flooded the compound, police officers came and went, and people who had once smiled at my family now stood in corners whispering with lowered voices.

Then came the silence.

The house felt empty in a way that suffocated me.

Every room reminded me of them.

The kitchen still smelled faintly of my mother’s cooking.

My father’s chair remained in its place, though I could not bear to look at it for long. Daniel’s little wooden toy car sat beneath the table where he had left it.

I lived alone in that house after the burial, if it could even be called living. Sleep became impossible. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my mother’s smile, Daniel’s face, and my father hanging from the ceiling. But it was not only the grief that made it unbearable. It was the rumors.

At first they came quietly, like wind slipping beneath a door. Then they grew louder.

I heard them at the market. On the road. At the bookshop. Even outside my own gate.

“They said the man killed himself first.”

“No, the wife poisoned herself and the boy after finding him.”

“I heard they had been fighting for days.”

“Yes, people said the marriage was not as perfect as it seemed.”

“She must have lost her mind.”

“Poor child. Imagine surviving that.”

The worst part was how true they made it sound.

People did not merely gossip; they built an entire story around our deaths and repeated it until it sounded like fact.

According to them, my father had been under pressure from work and finally decided to hang himself. My mother, unable to bear the shock, had fed poison to herself and Daniel after discovering his body.

They spoke with such confidence that strangers who had never met my family nodded along as if they had been present in our home that night. No one wanted to hear anything else.

No one cared about the overturned chair in the sitting room. No one cared about the broken cup that clearly did not belong to my father. No one cared that my mother had bruises on her wrist, bruises I had noticed when they took her body away.

No one cared that there had been blood on the floor, far too much for a simple suicide story. They ignored every detail that did not fit the version they preferred. It was easier that way. Easier to call it a family tragedy than to admit something darker had happened. Soon, people began whispering when I walked past.

“That’s him.”

“The boy whose mother poisoned his brother.”

“They said madness runs in the family.”

“Poor thing. He must have known they were unstable.”

Each whisper struck harder than the last.

I had once been admired in our neighborhood. The same people who praised my intelligence now looked at me with pity, suspicion, or morbid curiosity.

I could feel the change. The smiles were gone. The warmth was gone. People who once greeted me now stepped aside and spoke only after I had passed.

That was when I began to think. Really think. Something about that night had never made sense.

The first thing that stayed with me was my father’s hand. I remembered seeing a deep cut across his knuckles.

My father was left-handed, and the injury had been on that hand. It looked fresh, as though he had struck someone. That was not the hand of a man who had calmly taken his own life. It was the hand of a man who had fought back.

Then there was the poison story.

People kept insisting Mother had poisoned herself and Daniel, but I knew that was impossible.

The next morning, before the police sealed the kitchen, I had absentmindedly eaten a piece of the fried plantain that had been left on the tray. Nothing happened.

If the food had been poisoned, I would not still be standing. That meant the story was false. Then there was the broken cup.

My father hated glass cups. He always drank from his ceramic mug, the dark blue one Mother had bought him years ago. The broken cup in the sitting room did not belong to him. It belonged to someone else.

That realization stayed with me. Someone had been there that night. Someone my father had likely known well enough to let into the house.

And then I remembered the men in black suits.

I had seen them outside our gate the day before everything happened. They had been speaking with my father in low voices, and the moment he saw me watching, he had sent me inside.

At the time I had ignored it. Now it haunts me. Who were they? Why had my father looked so afraid?

I went into his study the next morning and searched through every drawer, every file, every book.

At first I found nothing but work documents and old papers. Then, hidden inside one of the books on his shelf, I found a folded note. The handwriting was unmistakably his.

‘They know. Trust no one. Not even Victor.’

I stared at the words for so long that they began to blur.

Victor.

My father’s secretary. He was his closest friend. The man who had been with him for years. The man who had come to the house the morning after their deaths, far too quickly, as though he had already known.

The man who had stood beside me at the funeral, placing a hand on my shoulder and speaking softly about grief. A cold realization settled over me.

Victor had access to everything. My father’s schedule. His files. His secrets.

And if anyone could have brought those men in black suits to our door, it was him.

I read the note again. ‘Not

even Victor’

That was the moment I knew. My family had not died by suicide. They had been murdered. And Victor knew who did it.