Authors: Carla Cassidy
S
he was back in the dream with Jack. They were having a picnic on a blanket spread out beneath a majestic oak tree. Tiny ran in circles, barking with excitement at every squirrel that jumped from limb to limb, rustling the bright green foliage overhead
.
Sunshine filtered through the leaves and shone on Jack’s face, emphasizing the lines and angles she loved to see. He reached out a hand and caressed her face, the warmth and love in his touch swelling her heart
.
“
You have to go,” he said, and there was a wealth of sadness in his green eyes
.
“
No, I want to stay,” she replied. “I want to stay here with you.”
“
You must go.” He dropped his hand from her face and wind began to buffet the branches of the trees overhead. “There’s a storm coming.” He got to his feet as the skies turned dark, boiling with black, angry clouds. “There’s a terrible storm coming.”
A flash of lightning nearly blinded her. Thunder roared and Tiny’s yips intensified, no longer happy but instead frantic and afraid. Mariah suddenly realized where she
was, in the grove of trees outside her house. Where he’d once found her and hurt her
.
She scrambled to her feet, suddenly afraid. She reached out for Jack’s hand, but he backed away from her. “You have to go.” He yelled to be heard above the din of the storm
.
“
Please. I’m afraid. Don’t make me go,” she cried. Again lightning rent the skies, followed by a tremendous boom. Tiny barked and ran in circles
.
“
You have to go,” Jack repeated as he was swallowed up by the storm. “You have to find Kelsey.”
Kelsey.
Consciousness came in bits and pieces. The first conscious thought was pain. The back of her head felt as if it had been split open like an overripe plum. To make matters worse, Tiny barked and barked, the incessant noise only making her head ache more.
“Tiny, enough,” she murmured.
She twisted her head and frowned as she realized she wasn’t in bed. In that instant, total recall smashed into her brain.
Kelsey!
She shot up and nearly stumbled over Tiny. She ran to Kelsey’s room and flipped on the light. She fell to her knees and screamed at the sight of Kelsey’s empty bed. The covers were strewn on the floor and the lamp on the nightstand was overturned.
He had Kelsey! Oh God. Oh God. She dry-heaved as she got to her feet. How long had she been unconscious, how long? Minutes? Hours?
As she stumbled backward out of the room, she stepped on the gun, the gun that hadn’t fired when she’d tried to pull the trigger.
Urgency screamed through her. Do something.
Call somebody. She picked up the gun and realized she’d never taken off the safety. That’s why it hadn’t fired. She did so now as Tiny clumped down the stairs, barking all the way.
Mariah followed, feet flying as she ran downstairs and to the front door. Maybe she’d see him. Maybe she had been unconscious for only a few seconds and he was now loading Kelsey into the back of a car or the bed of a pickup.
She gripped the gun firmly and opened the door, nearly sobbing in despair as she saw nothing … nobody. Where was her baby? Where was Kelsey?
Tiny barked once again and she looked down at the little dog who Kelsey loved, the dog who loved Kelsey. He followed her everywhere.
“Tiny, where’s Kelsey?” she said. “Where’s Kelsey?” To her surprise Tiny danced off the front porch and took off running.
Toward Finn’s place.
Mariah froze.
All she could hear was the thunder of her heart in her head. All she felt was the cold grip of memory. And she smelled the fires of sudden, burning knowledge.
Hands pressing into her upper arms. Fingers biting into her skin. Fingers. Nine fingers, not ten. No thumb. No thumb!
Finn!
She took off running after Tiny, the gun held tightly in her hand. Her brain shut down. She didn’t feel the rough ground beneath her bare feet, or the cool night air that blew over her half-naked body.
The full moon illuminated her way as she raced toward her neighbor’s house. Finn. He’d been her
best friend. Finn. She couldn’t think about it or she’d go mad.
She couldn’t think about Kelsey and what might have already happened. If she did, she’d fall to the ground, too incapacitated with grief, with despair, to do anything.
Just run, her brain commanded. Legs pumped and lungs burned as she raced, afraid she was too late. Not too late. Please, God, don’t make it be too late.
Kelsey. Kelsey. The name screamed inside her head and ripped apart her heart. What if she was wrong? What if it wasn’t Finn at all? What if Tiny was just chasing a rabbit through the woods?
She should have called Clay. The minute she’d regained consciousness, she should have called for help instead of following a dog who might be leading her farther away from Kelsey rather than closer.
As she reached Finn’s property, she came to a stop behind a tree. The house was directly in front of her. Dark and silent. Finn’s truck was parked in the driveway and nothing appeared amiss.
Had she just wasted precious minutes? Had this just been a wild-goose chase that led to nothing? Kelsey! Where was her baby? Once again the urge to vomit welled up inside her.
Tiny growled from someplace nearby and Mariah heard a low mutter. A man’s voice. Finn’s voice. She followed the sound and saw him coming out of the old smokehouse.
As he turned to secure the door, she ran toward him. “Finn!”
He whirled around to face her as she held the gun leveled at his chest. “Mariah! What in the hell are you doing out here in the middle of the night in your
nightgown?” He shoved a key ring in his pocket and smiled, that beautiful open grin that had always imbued her with warmth. “And I don’t even want to ask about the gun.”
With a whine Tiny scratched at the smokehouse door. “Open it,” Mariah said with steely determination. “Open the door, Finn.”
“What’s wrong with you, Mariah?” He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “It’s the middle of the night. I can’t believe you’re out here pointing a gun at me.” He took a step toward her. “I heard what happened to you. Honey, I’m so sorry. But I think you’re having some sort of a breakdown.”
“I am,” she agreed, and tightened her grip on the gun. “I am having a breakdown and if you don’t open that door, I’m going to shoot. This time I won’t make the mistake of pulling the trigger with the safety on. And when I shoot, the noise will wake up your wife and your children. You don’t want that, Finn.”
“Hannah and the kids are gone for a couple of days.” He took another step toward her. “Mariah, put the gun down and let’s talk. Remember how we used to talk?” His voice was soft. The moonlight bathed his face and for just a moment it was the face of the boy she’d known, the boy she’d loved like a brother.
Emotion rose up inside her and brought tears to her eyes. “How could you, Finn?” Emotion made her voice tremble. “How could you hurt me like that?”
For a moment he stood perfectly still, like a moon-bathed statue. Then his features transformed into something unrecognizable, something dark and ugly. “Hurt you? Hurt you?” He screamed the words as
his hands tightened into fists at his sides. “What about me? What about my pain?”
“Just open the damn door,” she exclaimed.
“No. Not until you listen to me.” Once again his features softened. “You have to understand, Mariah. I need to make you understand. The pain. Oh God, the pain.” He brought his hands up to either side of his head and squeezed so hard his hands whitened in the bleach of the moon.
“That night … I didn’t want to hurt you. But the pain was so bad I couldn’t stand it anymore.” He dropped his hands to his sides once again. “I had to hold it together. I had to do it all. I was nothing but a kid, but I had to take care of them, do everything for them. My old man was useless. He cut off my thumb, for Christ’s sake.” Once again he was screaming with such venom even Tiny was silent and huddled against the door of the smokehouse as if waiting for a kick.
“I love my sisters. I do. But I was trapped. I didn’t get to hang out—I couldn’t go to college. I had to be a man and take care of things. I didn’t do anything but take care of everyone else and if I had a moment to rest, my old man took that moment to beat the hell out of me.”
His body vibrated with the force of the storm inside him. “The night before, he came back, like he did every once in a while. He took what money I had put away, and went out and got stinking drunk. Stumbled back home and puked in the hallway, pissed on the sofa and just made a mess, such a mess. The next morning he was gone and I had to clean it up. I had to clean up everything. That night I got the
girls into bed, then left the house, and I had such a pain inside me. And I saw you and you were so good and I thought if I could just get a piece of you, a piece of your goodness, then maybe my pain would go away. And it did for a while.”
Mariah hadn’t noticed the coolness of the night until that moment. Staring into the eyes of the man who had held her when her father had beaten her, the man who had lain in the sweet-smelling grass beside her and made clover chains, she saw his madness.
“And there were others besides me,” she whispered as an arctic wind blew through her.
He seemed to calm then as he nodded. “Pieces. Pieces of good. They took away the pain and the rage for a little while, but it always came back.” He pointed to the smokehouse. “They’re in there. All my pieces, but you were my first.” He smiled, an almost dreamy expression on his face. “She looks just like you did that night, Mariah.”
He rushed her then and before she could pull the trigger, his hand was on the gun. She struggled to hang on to it, but he was bigger, stronger. As he gained possession, he stood over her.
Sobs ripped through her. It was over. In an instant, thoughts flew through her head. Kelsey would never get her cell phone. Mariah would never see her daughter graduate, go to culinary school and get her own television show.
And now it seemed so foolish that she’d intended to run from Jack and the love that he held out to her like a shining trophy. It hadn’t been fear of a monster that had been going to chase her out of town. It had
been her own fear of not living up to his fantasy, her fear that he would discover that she was just a woman who couldn’t cook and had bad dreams.
She raised her head to look at Finn. In the moonlight and with the shimmer of her tears, he didn’t look quite real, but the gun he pointed at her was very real. Nobody would hear the shot that ended it all. Nobody would hear her screams.
One last plea. If Kelsey was still alive, then she had to do something, try one final time to save her daughter’s life. “For God’s sake, Finn. She’s your daughter.”
The gun boomed.
“I
’ve got to get going,” Clay said, and rose slowly from the table. “I want to take a drive by the Sayers place before I call it a night.”
“Why? You expect trouble there?” Jack asked.
Clay shrugged. “Not really, but I can’t stop thinking about how she called me out there because she thought she saw somebody lurking around her property. The whole town knows she came to me about what happened to her. I’m just trying to be safe rather than sorry. I had one of my deputies drive by earlier this evening and everything looked fine, but I just want to take a final run by before heading home.”
“Mind if I ride along?”
Clay stifled a yawn with the back of his hand. “I suppose not. You can talk to me on the way and keep me awake. I’ll bring you back here for your car.”
“Thanks.” Minutes later Jack was in the passenger seat of Clay’s patrol car and heading toward Mariah’s. “You don’t think he’d go after her again, do you?”
Apparently Clay knew exactly whom Jack was asking
about, “Who knows? I can’t begin to get into the head of somebody like this guy.”
“I’m in love with her.” Jack winced. He hadn’t intended to speak the words out loud. They just spurted out of him like he was some kind of damned fool.
Clay shot him a glance and grinned. “Yeah, I know. She was a nice girl as a teenager and she’s still a nice lady. And you’re a stand-up kind of guy.”
“She plans on leaving town as soon as Janice is well enough to travel.”
“You gonna let her go?”
Jack smiled ruefully. “She strikes me as the kind of woman who makes her own decisions.” He gazed out the window, where the moonlight bathed the landscape in pale light. “Plains Point is a nice place to live in, but I imagine there are sick dogs and cats in Chicago.”
“Every single woman in town will mourn your leaving,” Clay said with a touch of humor. “Although it would be nice if you could talk her into staying here.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve always been a one-woman kind of man and I’ve found the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. I don’t care if it’s here or in the city.” He straightened in his seat as they came to the turn that led to Mariah’s house.
He wasn’t sure when he’d made the decision that he’d go to Chicago if that was what it took to have Mariah in his life. But the decision was made. He was not going to lose her again.
Clay’s car crept up the driveway, and in the splash of his headlights on the front of the house, Jack saw
that the front door was ajar. Why would it be standing open at this time of night?
“Shit,” Clay muttered as he jammed on the brakes, threw the gear into park and opened his car door. Jack was already out of the car and racing toward the house.
He burst into the entry, heart pounding in frantic rhythm. “Mariah!” There were no lights on in the lower level, but a light spilled down the stairway and he raced up the stairs.
Mariah’s room was empty, as was Kelsey’s, but Kelsey’s bedcovers were half on the floor and the lamp next to her bed was on its side. “Mariah! Kelsey?” he cried. He looked in the bathroom and the other bedroom, then raced back down the stairs and crashed into Clay on his way up.
“They aren’t up there,” he said.
“I’ll check the kitchen,” Clay said, leading with his gun. Jack followed right behind him, terror crawling up the back of his throat, making him feel half-sick.
It was the middle of the night. Why weren’t Mariah and Kelsey in bed where they belonged? And where was Tiny? Why wasn’t he barking?
Clay flipped on the kitchen light and both men expelled sighs of relief. At least there weren’t any bodies on the floor. “It looked like there might have been a struggle in Kelsey’s room,” Jack said, surprised by the tremble in his voice. “Jesus, Clay, where can they be?” With hollow eyes he stared at the lawman.
“Let’s take a look outside,” Clay replied.
They had just stepped out on the front porch when they heard it. The unmistakable sound of a gun report.
“That sounded like it came from Finn’s place,” Clay exclaimed.
Jack took off running. He didn’t wait to see whether Clay was following. His heart thundered in his chest. He had no idea if the gunshot was related to Mariah and Kelsey’s disappearance, but terror chased him across the ground.
The only sound he heard was his own breathing. Who had shot a gun? Where were Mariah and Kelsey? As he got closer to Finn’s place, he heard a dog bark. Tiny. Rather than fill him with relief, the sound of Tiny’s barking amplified the terror that roared through him. If Tiny was someplace out here in the night, then that meant Kelsey and Mariah had to be out here, too.
He broke out of the woods and into the clearing in front of Finn’s house and saw nothing. Then Tiny barked and he whirled toward the pasture and saw the smokehouse.
Relief crashed through him as he saw Mariah standing at the door. He called her name and she turned to look at him and in the moonlight he saw her eyes widened with horror. He also realized somebody was lying prone on the ground near her.
“Jack! I can’t get it open. We have to get it open.” She began to babble as he ran toward her. “It can’t be too late. It can’t. She has to be all right.”
He realized she had a key ring and she was attempting to unfasten the padlock on the door, but her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t get the key into the slot.
The scent of death hung in the air along with the acrid smell of gunfire. As he took the key ring from her trembling hands, he shot a glance to the figure
on the ground. Finn. He was obviously dead. Half his head appeared to be missing.
“Jack, for God’s sake, hurry. Kelsey’s inside and I don’t know if she’s dead or alive.” Mariah’s voice held all the despair of a mother on the edge. Her fingernails bit into his arm as she urged him to unlock the door.
Clay came huffing up, gun still drawn. At that moment Jack managed to get the key into the padlock and remove it. He said a silent prayer for Kelsey, for Mariah, then opened the smokehouse door.
The stench that wafted out the door forced Jack back a step, but not Mariah. She ran into the dark building and cried Kelsey’s name.
Clay pulled a high-powered flashlight from his belt and shone it through the door. A graveyard. That’s what was inside. There was no floor, only earth that had been overturned. The first body the flashlight beam caught was Missy Temple’s.
Mariah screamed at the sight and that scream cut Jack to his core. She sagged against him even as she whispered Kelsey’s name.
The beam of light moved to a pile of purses and items in the corner, and in the other corner it shone on Kelsey’s unmoving form. Jack’s heart plummeted to his feet.
Mariah shot straight up and ran for her daughter. “Kelsey!” As she fell to her knees next to Kelsey, a deep moan came from the very depths of her, a moan filled with such despair it brought a raw anguish to Jack.
“She’s alive!” Mariah grabbed her daughter into her arms. “She’s breathing.”
The next few minutes were a blur to Jack. In those
heart-stopping seconds immediately following the sound of the gunshot, both men had taken off running, leaving the patrol car back at Mariah’s.
Clay threw him the keys to the car and Jack ran as he’d never run before, cursing himself and Clay for not having the forethought to drive to Finn’s, and praying that the extra time didn’t make the difference between life and death.
He had no idea what condition Kelsey was in, had no idea what Finn might have done to her. All he knew was that seconds counted and so he ran like his life was at stake, and it was, for he knew if Kelsey died, all would be lost.
By the time he got the car back to the smokehouse, Kelsey’s condition hadn’t changed. She remained unconscious, but breathing.
They loaded her into the backseat with Mariah, and Jack held Tiny on his lap; then Clay drove like a madman to the hospital, where she was immediately taken into the emergency room. A nurse stopped Mariah from following and Jack led her to the chairs, where she collapsed.
Somebody from the hospital took Tiny from Jack, promising to see that he got food and water. Clay was on his phone, calling in men and directing them to get lights and get over to Finn’s smokehouse. It was going to be a long night for everyone.
Somebody gave Mariah a hospital gown and she pulled it on over her silky nightgown. She had never been so cold in her life. Her body trembled with it, and her heart shivered inside her as she prayed for her daughter.
Thankfully Jack asked no questions. He simply sat beside her, his hand tightly enfolded around hers.
She felt his strength through his warm skin, knew he prayed with her.
She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to use the energy it would take. She needed all her energy, all her thoughts, on Kelsey. Be okay. Please, be okay, she cried inside.
Time passed, but it had no meaning. She had no idea if they sat there for two hours or two minutes. Clay disappeared and still she and Jack sat waiting.
What had Finn done to her? Thankfully Kelsey hadn’t been beaten like Janice. Her face had been unmarked, her body without bruises. So why wouldn’t she wake up?
“Mariah?” She looked up at Clay. “Can I ask you a few questions?”
Jack’s hand tightened around hers as she nodded. “Okay.”
“You want to tell me what happened tonight?”
She told him everything, about Finn sneaking into the house, about her being knocked unconscious and waking up to find Kelsey gone. She told him how Tiny had led her to Finn’s and about the final confrontation.
“He grabbed the gun from me. I thought he was going to kill me.” She leaned into Jack as he placed an arm around her shoulder. “I didn’t care about me, but if there was a chance he hadn’t hurt Kelsey yet, I wanted him to leave her alone. I yelled at him that Kelsey was his daughter.”
Mariah squeezed her eyes closed, her head filled with the look on Finn’s face. For just a moment she’d seen the raging beast, the agonizing pain that lived inside him shining from his eyes.
Then he’d smiled at her and in that single, heart-breaking
moment he’d been the boy of her childhood, her best friend and her confidant. He’d still been smiling when he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
She opened her eyes and gazed at Clay. “He shot himself. He could have killed both Kelsey and me out there. He could have buried our bodies in the smokehouse and nobody would have known, but there was still something good at the core of him. He knew he’d become a monster.”
At that moment the doctor came out and all other thoughts fled her mind. “She’s fine,” he said before she could ask. “We ran some blood tests and found that she’s been given a shot of a tranquilizer. She’s still asleep, but her vitals are good and we expect her to start coming around in the next couple of hours.”
“Thank God,” Jack murmured.
The relief that flooded through Mariah was indescribable. “Can I see her?”
“I’ve transferred her to room 106. Give it a few minutes and you can go on in.” With a reassuring smile the doctor turned on his heels and went back through the swinging doors and into the inner sanctum of the emergency room.
“Between Janice and Kelsey I think you’re going to be seeing a lot of this place in the next few days,” Jack said.
She nodded and leaned against the wall. “It’s over, isn’t it?”
Jack nodded. “It’s over.”
All the feelings that she’d been holding in since awakening to the sound of the stair creak cascaded through her and she began to weep.
The tears came from a place so deep inside her
they nearly crumpled her to the floor and would have if Jack hadn’t grabbed her and wrapped her up in his arms.
He didn’t try to stop her from crying. He simply held her while the emotion crashed through her. Fear slowly fell away. She grieved for a friend lost but found relief in the monster found and destroyed.
Finally there was nothing left except Jack’s embrace. The scent of his skin was sweetly familiar as she burrowed her face in the hollow of his neck. She raised her face to look at him and he smiled. “Come on, let’s go wait for Kelsey to wake up.”
She nodded and together they walked down the hall to the hospital room where Kelsey was already in the bed. Mariah sat in a chair and took her daughter’s hand in hers. Jack sat in a chair nearby.
“You don’t have to stay,” she said to him.
“I’ll stay.”
“It really isn’t necessary.” There was no point in both of them spending the rest of the night in the hospital.
He smiled. “I’ll stay.”
He did.
Eventually he fell asleep in the chair. Mariah didn’t sleep. She sat next to Kelsey and breathed her scent and thought of all the wonderful things her daughter would accomplish in her lifetime. She stared at her daughter’s beautiful face for much of the night.
She prayed that Kelsey hadn’t seen the carnage in the smokehouse, that Finn had knocked her out with the drug before he’d carried her there. She hoped her daughter remembered nothing of the night of terror.
She must have finally fallen asleep, for when she opened her eyes, dawn’s light was creeping into the
window. Kelsey looked peaceful in sleep, a faint snore rumbling from her with each breath.
“Good morning,” Jack said softly as Mariah stretched with her arms overhead. He walked to where she sat and handed her a foam cup of coffee.
“Oh, thank you. What would I do without you?”
“Actually, we need to talk about that.” He pulled his chair up next to hers. “I know this might not be the time or the place, but I’m afraid if I don’t say a few things now, I might never get the chance again.” He drew a deep breath. “I love you, Mariah Sayers. I love you like I’ve never loved a woman in my life. If I have to pack my bags and follow you to Chicago, then that’s what I’ll do. I lost you when we were kids and I don’t want to lose you again.”
“I’m not a fantasy, Jack. I can’t cook. I have nightmares. I’m a real grouch before my first cup of coffee in the morning,” she said.
“Jeez, Mom, you never tell a guy all the bad things about you,” Kelsey said groggily as she opened her eyes.
“Honey!” Mariah jumped up and grabbed Kelsey’s hand in hers. “How do you feel?”