The Shattered Silence

This story is by Bonnie Bowden and won an honorable mention in our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Michigan-based writer Bonnie E. Bowden blends her unwavering Christian faith with a passion for mental health advocacy to craft soul-stirring poetry and inspirational short stories, especially thrillers. When she isn’t writing, Bonnie finds joy in the pages of a good book or cuddling with her beloved Cavapoo, Dexter. 

The silence was tense, a layer of thin ice stretched over a dark, restless feeling. A hawk’s screech pierced the air, its cacophonous sound cutting through the quiet like a knife. My muscles tensed before I even had a chance to process it, and a chill of memory rushed back.

I looked through a kitchen window at the frozen lake and the bare trees that reflected the hollow ache in my chest. The hawk’s cry hadn’t just broken the silence; it had torn open the past, merging a child’s scream with the hawk’s shriek into a single, unbearable sound.

“Make it stop!” I whispered, pressing my palms so hard against my ears that white static danced behind my eyes.

“Addie?” Liam’s voice came from the doorway. My husband was here for business, a property inspection. Still, I had followed him north because I couldn’t face my sister’s death anniversary alone.

“Just enjoying the view,” I said, forcing a tight, unnatural calm into my voice.

“You’re shaking,” he murmured, stepping closer, his shadow falling over the snow outside the window. “Did you hear something?”

“The hawk,” I whispered, the word catching in my throat. “That cry—it’s the exact sound from that day.”

“You must be mistaken, Addie. It was a loon.”

His lies were tearing us apart. Why did he need to make me doubt myself so much? What happened to the man who used to hold me all night and wipe away my tears?

I wandered through the cottage, my little sister Emma’s presence lingering in every room. Around each corner, I felt her, until I ended up in the storage closet where Mom had kept her things.

Desperate to integrate my fragmenting memories, I began searching. I knocked over a stack of boxes, spilling photographs in a silent cascade across the floor.

Then I saw it: a blurred shot of the lake’s edge, dated two days before Emma drowned. A blurry photo showed a man in a plaid shirt by the water, back turned, holding a shovel. Though the quality was poor, his stance unnerved me.

Beneath the photos, I found my mother’s leather journal. Getting misty-eyed as I read her scrawled cursive writing.

• November 23rd: The house is too quiet. I keep seeing that man Emma drew, the one digging by the shore where the current keeps the ice thin. The police closed Samuels’s file—a “missing person.” But Emma’s body was found there. Liam is so kind, always bringing me soup and checking on me. I rely on him.
• November 30th: I asked Liam about the old plaid coat he wears for chores. He told me it belonged to his father. I remember Emma describing the man’s coat. I found the receipt for that exact coat in a box of Liam’s old receipts. He bought it several weeks before Emma died. He lied to me.
• December 5th: The lake is locked now. But the hole in the ice where they found Emma… Liam insisted on marking that spot. I realize now he needed to know exactly where the current was weakest.”
• January 12th: I cannot shake the truth. Liam helped me mourn so he could control the narrative. The last thing Emma told me was that the hawk saw the man bury a secret. I pray that God sees the secrets hidden under the ice and that Addie, when she is ready, will understand the witness Emma left behind.

Everything was starting to fall into place—the plaid shirt, his height, the hawk’s cry, and now, Liam’s lie about the loon. All of it pointed in one direction. He couldn’t risk my making the connection that Mom had tried so hard to uncover but never could reveal.

Feeling a surge of determination, I tucked the photograph and journal into my coat pocket. It was time to confront him. Fifteen years of silence was far too long.

I found Liam by the woodshed, hacking away at some wood. It seemed like he was putting on a show for my benefit.

“The ice is thin down by the current. Always has been.” I said, not as a question.

He stopped, the axe frozen mid-swing. “Don’t go down there, Addie. It’s dangerous.”

“It was dangerous for Emma,” I countered. “I found Mom’s journal, Liam. She knew you had something to do with Samuels.”

He dropped the axe. It landed in the snow with a dull thud. “You need to stop your digging. It’s old history.”

“It’s murder,” I corrected, my voice unwavering.  “Emma saw you burying Mr. Samuels. She told Mom the hawk was watching. She was seven, and she had a witness.”

His face flushed dark red. “You have no proof. That’s an old photograph, Addie.”

I pulled out the picture and held it up. “It shows you. In your shirt. Digging where the ice is thinnest. And you lied to me about the hawk today. You acted as if I couldn’t trust my own mind.”

“Samuels was going to ruin me!” The words were a raw, desperate howl. “I was skimming the realty accounts. He figured it out. He was going to take everything.”

“So, you killed him. And when Emma wouldn’t stop talking about the ‘man digging’—when she told my mother about the hawk—you killed her too.”

“She wouldn’t keep quiet!” He stepped toward me, his face contorted. “She was going to tell! I didn’t push her, not exactly, but I brought her out to that spot. I told her to step on it, dared her. She slipped, Addie. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t let her tell.”

The air went dead. Liam hadn’t just done it; he’d engineered it—a cruel dare to a child.

“You’re a monster, Liam.” I took three quick steps backward, instinctively moving toward the house and the phone.

“Addie, wait! You don’t understand the pressure!” He moved to intercept me, his heavy boot hitting the snow-covered lakeshore.

The ice fractured with a sickening, splintering crack that made my stomach lurch. Beneath his boots, the riverbank disintegrated into frozen shrapnel, and the water’s edge gave way. I didn’t look back at the gaping black hole that had swallowed my husband whole, sealing the rest of his secrets beneath the frozen surface forever.

I kept running until I reached the cottage, Liam’s frantic, muffled screams echoing off the distant pines until they simply stopped.

The police recovered his body three days later, pulled from the same dark current that had claimed Emma. The photograph and Mom’s journal entries provided the motive and the location.

Mr. Samuels’s remains were found exactly where Emma’s childish drawing had suggested.

I left the cottage on a clear, cold morning, the silence now feeling less like a trap and more like peace.

As I got into the car, the cry returned: sharp and keening.

The hawk circled overhead, a dark silhouette, completing its long watch.

I raised my hand in acknowledgment—to the bird, to Mom, and to Emma. The truth, witnessed by my sister and guarded by my mother’s faith, had finally surfaced from beneath the ice.

Some witnesses never forget. Truth is a shadow that grows with the sun; it might hide for a time, but its presence is inevitable.