Chapter 27 – Leah

Lizzie entered Snape's office above the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom on Tuesday for the scheduled detention.

Snape looked up at her as she walked in quietly and sat down slowly, she was expecting harsh reprimand for the doe situation. He noticeably didn't say anything to her at all except for instructions on what assignments to complete due to her absence. He didn't mention the doe and he didn't berate her. She left two hours later feeling confused, but grateful for what was probably the first detention with him that wasn't hostile. His demeanor toward her had shifted dramatically.

Lizzie started to have a series of bizarre dreams that neither felt trauma induced, invasive, nor especially terrifying to her. They were, however, incredibly disturbing and she wasn't sure if it was her mind playing off the memories she'd been seeing with Dumbledore, or if she was accessing Voldemort's mind. If she was, she felt she was not doing so directly, they came like memories of her own, but she was still displaced from them.

Lizzie pulled out the dream journal she kept the prior term for Trelawney, and started getting the dreams down on paper, certain they were based primarily in memory, just not her own.

Tom peered through the yellowing glass window in his closet-sized bedroom at Wool's Orphanage, as a car pulled up in front. A small red headed girl about his age reluctantly got out of the car. It was raining and her clothing soaked through. Her eyes were noticeably swollen, and Ms. Wool escorted inside, rushing her into the bedroom adjacent to him.

He heard muffled talking between Ms. Wool and the officer that brought her. "Her and her mother lived in the apartment above the meat shop. Last night someone broke in looking for something and killed the mother. Leah was found hiding under the bed sometime this morning by the shop owner. Her father died on the eastern front years ago. Her papers are here, she's a doll, certainly you'll find someone," the officer explained apologetically to Ms. Wool, who nodded and thanked him. The girl showed up at Tom's doorway later that day.

"Hi, I'm Leah," she said meekly, with a hoarse voice, rubbing a pair of very swollen green eyes.

"Your mother died, didn't she? Did you see it happen?" he asked bluntly with a stone-cold demeanor. She nodded and cried through a wave of grief, but he stared back at her vacantly.

"What's your name?" She asked.

"Tom," he said.

"Is it safe here?" She asked.

"No," he said coldly, and she looked back at him nervously.

At breakfast he felt oddly drawn to sit with her. "Is this all we get?" She asked, referring to small amount of oatmeal in front of her after they finished a prayer. He nodded and noticed that as she ate that the food didn't deplete in the slightest. He stared at her confused and she smiled back weakly.

They sat on a ledge with legs dangling off a low bearing wall in the small playground in the back of the orphanage. He looked annoyed by her, she talked sweetly and was uncommonly nice to everyone, she never got rapped or hit, Ms. Wool had finally shown there was a kind bone in her body around Leah. There was also a charm about her that seemed to protect against bruised knuckles and mean remarks. Tom, on the other hand, was suspected immediately whenever something went wrong.

"Billy!" Ms. Wool shouted at a boy who was seemingly launched off the swing he was enjoying, landing directly onto his face on the hard concrete. His face bled and nose was broken from the force of the fall. Ms. Wool immediately looked at Tom from across the yard. She pulled him harshly by the arm and Leah protested.

"You did this! How?" Wool demanded, with a streak of paranoia and rage. Tom simply smirked back at her.

"He couldn't have, we were over there!" Leah shouted, but Wool ignored her, and Tom was told to remove his belt for a beating. He took it silently, but Wool stopped when she started to feel the sting on her own backside, after which she dragged him back to the room and shut the door.

November 13, 1997 – Journal Entry

The little girl named Leah arrives at the orphanage. She's clingy and sweet toward Tom, who is cold toward her. Revealed that her mum was murdered when their loft was broken into and her father died in the war, but she didn't remember him. She misses her mum. Orphanage is abusive. Tom causes trouble, but she seems to be immune, and it bothers him.

An exceedingly handsome, dark-haired teenager peered menacingly through the edge a windowpane of the Riddle House in Little Hangleton. He spent several moments watching the equally handsome, older, though not quite middle-aged, dark-haired man dance near the hearth to a rolling record with his daughter. She was about nine or ten with auburn hair and a wide, contagious smile. There was a woman in the kitchen who opened the door when he knocked, she was presumably the man's wife. She looked back on the younger Tom in awe, immediately noticing the resemblance.

"Who are you?" The man asked apprehensively, hiding the little girl behind his back and exchanging a wary look with his wife.

"My name is Tom Riddle, my mother was Merope," Tom said evenly, looking around the house in fascination. The man shook his head and clenched his jaw.

"Merope. That's not possible," he whispered, and with two bright flashes of light, they were both gone.

The little girl stared back at him with a look of both fear and fascination in a pair of bright green familiar eyes.

"What's your name?" Tom asked the sister he just orphaned.

"Renee," she said, and looked around in horror at her parent's vacant faces, but he looked back at her intently with a great surge of anger. Then there was another flash of light, and she was sprawled on the floor behind her father, the light from the flames dancing over her frozen face. Tom picked up a picture of the family from the mantel and stared at the girl. He removed a torn picture of the children from the orphanage with Leah smiling at the end and compared them. They looked like they could be sisters or cousins, and he pocketed both photos.

November 15, 1997 - Journal Entry

Returns to the house in Little Hangleton. Tom Riddle Sr. was there with a wife and young daughter. The daughter looked semi-familiar to the girl from the orphanage, but younger. His father apparently remarried and had a family. Tom killed them all but hesitated at the girl. Her name was Renee.

He stared down a picture he kept of the kids at the orphanage, focused on Leah at the end of the line, and compared it to one of Renee on the mantel.

Tom was older now, he wore a smart looking jacket, his hair fell in graying wavy black locks, and he walked briskly to the gates of Wool Orphanage. He knocked on the familiar door and was startled to see a small boy answer instead of Ms. Wool. The boy showed him to the study she still used after all these years, and he interrupted a caning punishment of a little girl who was crying.

"Girls do not have mouths like yours, do you understand?" She asked. "Next time I will do this at dinner," she hissed, and the little girl nodded.

Wool looked up at Tom who stared back coldly and recognized him immediately. She quickly fixed the girl's knickers and shooed her off, but Tom stopped the child with his hand. Her eyes were red and swollen, and he set a pillow down on a chair for her to sit down. The look she gave him was equal parts frightened and abrasive, as though sizing him up.

"Pleasure to see you, Ms. Wool, I'm here because I was hoping I could adopt today," he said evenly. Ms. Wool let out a nervous laugh.

"Never thought I would see the likes of you again, Tom. Are you married?" She asked.

"No... no I'm not," he said with a slight chuckle.

"I'm afraid you will not qualify then, I'm sorry, we have strict rules now," she said with blatantly fake remorse. Tom pulled his wand, and her face went blank and compliant under his imperius as she drew up the papers.

Tom looked down at the girl, who stared up with green, swollen familiar eyes, "That one," he said, fondling a locket hanging from his jacket pocket, and pointing to the girl. "I want that one," and he grinned innocently. Once the papers were complete, he left with the scared little girl in his hand. Ms. Wool suddenly let out a harsh squeal and fell onto her knees before she keeled onto the floor.

"Pity, old age takes the best of us," he said coldly, collecting the papers and tossing them into the hearth. He pulled the little girl along through the double doors and street, and into a vacant alleyway. The locket Merope wore was clasped tightly in his hand.

"Please sir, can I go back? My brother is still there..." The girl asked timidly.

"Don't you remember me?" He growled. She shook her head and stared back. She had strawberry blonde, curly hair, was no more than nine, and had a charming complexion.

"What did you do to get punished like that?" He asked, rubbing her chin.

"I - I - I called William Rutters a dirtbag," she admitted. Tom smirked.

"That's not like you," he mumbled to himself.

"Sorry... but do you know me?" she asked meekly. He shoved her up against the wall and knelt down to stare back into her eyes. He was looking for something, like a confirmation.

"What's your name, darling?" He asked quietly, he hadn't paid the slightest bit of attention to the adoption papers. "Emily," she whispered, trembling. His face went feral, and with a flash of light, she fell limp to the floor of the alley.

November 20, 1997 – Journal Entry

Tom returns to the orphanage as a fairly young, not quite middle-aged adult, and a young girl who vaguely resembles Leah is being punished by the head mistress. Ms. Wool recognized him immediately. He offered to adopt a child from the school, and she questioned his intentions. She insisted he must be married and dismisses him. He used the imperius on her to sign adoption papers for the little girl she just caned. The woman fell to the ground and died as they left.

He burned the adoption papers and left the orphanage with the little girl. She followed willingly but grew scared. They stop in an alley, and he asks her if she remembers him. She says her name is Emily and killed her in an alley.

Lizzie was reading through her journal during an open period. She was trying to remember Melody and wrote out the memory she uncovered with Dumbledore with shaking hands below the dreams she'd had over the course of the last couple of weeks. Leah was surely a witch, and Lizzie remembered that Dumbledore had said years ago that Melody was on the Hogwarts list. It was no coincidence.

Lavender was pressed up next to Ron, Hermione was reading intently and scribbling out formulas for Alchemy, and Seamus was deep into one of McGonagall's essays.

Dean and Ginny were deep in conversation, and sudden dawning washed over Lizzie. "Ginny" she whispered to herself, remembering how young she was when Riddle targeted her to open the chamber.

A brown barn owl swooped in less than a moment later, cutting off her train of thought. It was another lesson invitation from Dumbledore.

Lizzie got up abruptly and tugged harshly on Hermione's sleeve. Hermione closed her book and gathered her bag as Lizzie walked quickly out of the Great Hall.

"What's going on?" Hermione asked when they rounded into an empty corridor.

"I'm accessing his mind and I don't think he knows," Lizzie whispered. "At night, through dreams, memories... old memories..." she explained, and handed Hermione her dream journal folded to the page they started at.

"Some of these piggyback off of memories from Dumbledore... he has a victim profile, Hermione, it started with this little girl, Leah," she explained.

"He killed the first?" Hermione asked, frowning. Lizzie nodded.

"Yes, she was supposed to be adopted and they were late to arrive. Tom convinced her to hang herself from... from the banister," Lizzie explained. Hermione looked up sharply.

"Didn't you have a friend in school who - ?" Hermione asked. Lizzie nodded and looked ashamed.

"Leah watched her mother die and her dad died in the war, WWII presumably, I think she was his first. I don't know if these are in order or if there are more in between. He tried to do the same to Ginny... and I think it's why he picked me to fulfill the prophecy... it's no coincidence all of these have eerily familiar aspects with my life..." Lizzie said.

"Maybe your brain is interpreting them that way because of your life," Hermione reasoned, but Lizzie shook her head.

"No, these girls are real. Something tells me there are more. I mean he has killed hundreds, but his most malicious killings are these girls who remind him of Leah," Lizzie explained.

"But why would he target that specifically?" Hermione asked.

"From what I gathered she was a polar opposite of him, but she was also the only one who was kind to him. Sweet, treated well in an abusive environment...she was about to be adopted... I'm confident she was a witch... I think he was jealous... I used to be insanely jealous of Dudley, thought all things awful with him. His sister, jealousy for the family he could have had, not because he wanted love, but because he could have avoided the abuse in that orphanage..." Lizzie reasoned.

Hermione wrote to a London newspaper to do some research in old archives, and her mother had sent her a package of newspaper articles that turned results. There was an article about Emily Teller, a ten-year-old girl found murdered in a London alleyway near Wool Orphanage in 1961, the cause of death was not formally identified, but she had strange marks on her body and her major organs were all missing from her corpse. Meredith Wool was found dead in the orphanage that same day, having died at 70-years-old from an apparent heart attack. Lizzie stopped at the name, but surely Teller was too common and just a coincidence, but Katie came to mind immediately.

There was also an article found in a 1937 paper about an eleven-year-old girl named Leah Wilson who had hung herself from a banister at Wool Orphanage the day she was formally adopted, launching an investigation into the care of the children there, it didn't give her name before the adoption. She was supposed to be buried with her recently deceased mother, but when they went to deposit her casket, her body was gone.

The article about what is probably her mother's death which was published on November 1, 1936. It just said she was murdered on Halloween night by a debt collector, didn't even give a name.

Then finally, an August 1, 1943 article about the murder of the Riddle family the night prior. The parents were found dead with no apparent trace of a cause. The daughter however, was burned in the back courtyard post mortem.