Work Text:
The extended Brewer family was celebrating a wedding. Watson Brewer hired the BSC to watch all of the kids who attended the event in his enormous mansion while the adults enjoyed the reception on the patio. After the ceremony, as the parents toasted the couple and ate passed hors d'oeuvres, the babysitters divided the kids among themselves: Dawn’s group would make crafts in the rec room, Mary Anne would lead a storytime in a quiet room, and Mallory would organize an epic game of hide and seek on the third floor.
After a while, Mallory’s charges insisted she hide for the next round. Mallory got into it; she was not much older than the kids herself and was grateful to have a little fun. She decided to hide in a big trunk up in the attic, one that Karen showed her a few months before. "They'll never find me here," she thought, laughing.
As she was climbing into the trunk, the lid came down and cracked her in the head. She fell unconscious inside. The lid slammed shut and locked.
No one will ever know how long she called for help or how hard she struggled to free herself from that tomb. All of the kids searched for her, and then the BSC, and then their families. They looked almost everywhere. But no one thought of looking in the trunk in the old Brewer mansion. After two weeks, the town gave her up for lost.
Years later, a teen-aged Karen went up into the attic looking for a box of her old Victorian dolls. "Maybe they’re in the trunk," she thought. She opened it - and screamed. There lay Mallory in her hand-me-down horse-print dress and oversized plastic glasses. But by then, she was only a skeleton.