Inevitable Sentences

DEDICATION:

To all women seeking a safe place
to live and a life free of abuse.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

It takes the help of many people to bring about a finished novel. I am especially grateful to Jeff Gamble and his partners, Linda Gamble and John Gale, for giving their permission to me to use the Big Bay Point Lighthouse as a major focus in this story. Unlike the lighthouse in the novel, the actual Big Bay Point Lighthouse is a fully functioning lighthouse and a wonderful bed-and-breakfast,
www.bigbaylighthouse.com
, nestled on the cliffs of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Thank you also to Dana DeMay, the owner of the historic Thunder Bay Inn,
www.thunderbayinn.com
, which is a Big Bay bed-and-breakfast located in the small village of Big Bay.

My gratitude also goes to Elizabeth Testa, Joyce Alexander and Joan Green. I could do little without their continued support, humor, and guidance. And of course I thank my husband, Chet, for his encouragement and for standing by me in both good times and bad.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Epilogue

C
HAD
W
ILBANKS PACED HIS
cell. He’d long since measured the distance from the rear wall to the door, and as he placed one booted foot in front of the other, he followed his usual routine: he ticked off the names of one of his victims. One name per step. Very satisfying. Eight was Susan. Nine was Pilar. In the past it had irked him to take the last, unnamed step before arriving at the turning point. Today, though, he hesitated only a fraction of a moment, then stepped down squarely, with all his weight.

“Ten,” he said, and pivoted, just like squashing a cockroach. A wicked smile played across his face. It was time.

His heartbeat picked up the pace at the thought of the journey ahead. The time for his next adventure was nearing. The plan, which he had painstakingly put together over the past six months, was in place. Nothing would stop him. He would not fail.

A surge of voices filled the cell block. The other prisoners were returning from chow. He despised their intrusion into the only peaceful time in the day he had.

He faced the stainless steel desk bolted to the wall at the opposite end of the cell. Several letters were stacked perfectly square to the edge of the desk, each letter written to a desperate woman he’d found on
PrisonPal.com
. They all wanted to be his lover, his savior, his wife. They all had gladly sent money to his prison account, as a guarantee for what they foolishly believed would be a future with him. Of course each woman thought there was no other besides her. Each one trusted his carefully written pleas for a partner. Some had forgiven his crimes, but most simply believed him—that he had been wrongfully convicted of serial murder.

Stupid, stupid women. They all qualified to be his next victim.

Chad wasn’t about to waste his time on the easy ones like his pen pals, however. He had a mission. A score to settle. He’d waited four years and now it was time for him to take the next step—the tenth one.

He picked up the letters and fanned them, admiring the addresses from around the country, laughing at the needy women who dared think they could ever be good enough for him.

He checked the calendar hanging on the wall. “I only have to hold on for a few more days. Then”—he tapped the date—“your turn.”

S
LEET BEAT AGAINST THE
windows with such force it sounded like hundreds of stones assaulting the pane. Celeste believed the glass would surely break. For nearly a year she’d lived in the Big Bay Point Light-house—a solid, two-story brick structure topped by a sixty-foot tower and carrying the credibility of a century of uninterrupted duty. Yet she questioned whether she would ever get used to the sudden and often fierce storms that occurred over Lake Superior—storms that churned the water into such monstrous seething gray waves they could take down mighty freighters like the
Edmund Fitzgerald
in a November gale like the one howling outside. Fortunately, no ships had been lost in the nearby waters since 1985.

Today, Big Bay Point Lighthouse served as a “harbor” of another sort: a refuge for victims of domestic violence. Celeste sighed. If that was the only way Celeste Brookstone’s name would be known to posterity, so be it. It was an honorable way.

Still, Celeste gazed at the wild whitecaps with trepidation. The lighthouse sat thirty feet above the water. Could those waves ever rise over the rocky cliff? It was only the second week in November—too early for such a storm. She wrapped her arms around her chest to ward off a sudden chill. Celeste sensed something worse lay ahead and it had nothing to do with the weather. Silly.

A child’s cry interrupted Celeste’s thoughts. She turned away from the enraged lake and focused on the three women, mostly in their mid-to late-twenties, and their children. Adrian sat in the rocker huddled close to the formidable, natural brick fireplace. Although the living room had plenty of space, the others crowded onto one of two arts-and-crafts-style sofas. The women and children only found comfort from each other. Even the two wingback chairs on either side of the fireplace, Celeste’s own personal favorites, stood like a pair of lonely sentries. Although the women should have been consoled by the flames that seemed to dance to the fire’s crackling, their eyes held the fear Celeste could only assume they had also revealed when their partners had assaulted them.

Celeste lifted Matthew, the crying two-year-old boy, whose left arm was in a cast, and rocked him gently in her arms. “Quiet, little one. The nasty wind and rain won’t come inside.” She wondered if those sounds awakened horrible memories even for one so young.

She faced the women. “You don’t have to be afraid of this storm.”

The women hunched over further as the wind increased and whistled and roared around the house and through the woods behind. The bare tree branches twisting in the gale sounded like wild beasts scratching the sky. The women didn’t speak. Each time a gust growled outside, they held their collective breath and stared at the window facing the lake. Clearly the women expected to be swept away by the storm’s energy and violence.

“This lighthouse,” Celeste continued, “has withstood far more dreadful weather than this for over a hundred years. You have to admit, you can hardly hear a creak even though the building is being lashed by the wind. Such strength has to tell us something. Right?”

No one responded. No one moved. The women’s eyes stayed focused on the windows. Although the toasty fire warmed the cozy living room, the women and children shivered as though they had been tossed out into the freezing storm.

“The worse that can happen is”—Celeste still tried to ease their fears—“we’ll lose both the electrical power and telephone service. But we have flashlights, kerosene lamps, and my cell phone for such occasions.” She handed the quieted boy to his mother.

The closest the women had been to any wilderness was a city park. “The lighthouse,” she reassured them, “has proven to be a formidable shelter over the years and I doubt it will let us down tonight.”

Celeste understood why such rational thinking wouldn’t calm these women—they had to erase years of horror from their memories before they ignored Mother Nature’s every creak and snap. Surely Celeste would react the same way if she were in their shoes.

Celeste allowed herself to think about the first time she saw the lighthouse. Max Whitefeather, the warden then at nearby Hawk Haven Prison outside Marquette, brought her to Big Bay Point after they enjoyed a brunch at the Thunder Bay Inn, a few miles away. On that first visit to the lighthouse, it reminded her of a medieval castle, stalwart and impregnable.

“It’s on the National Historic Record,” Max boasted as though he owned the place.

Max had wanted to give Celeste a break from a quest that was all but consuming her: answers to her daughter’s murder. Pilar had been a doctor at Hawk Haven when she became entangled in a crazy escape scheme devised by a serial killer, Chad Wilbanks. Celeste had blamed herself at the time for her daughter’s tragic destiny, and even now, four years later, she couldn’t let go of the guilt she’d harbored since the day of Pilar’s death—July 17, 2003. If she had left Marcus, her prominent, wealthy, and abusive husband, when Pilar was a child, Celeste believed her daughter would still be alive.

Celeste surveyed the families in her care. Had she pushed her own luck and perhaps theirs by relocating close to the prison where Chad was still locked away? Nonsense. He couldn’t be a threat to her. Chad was safely secured—Hawk Haven was a maximum-security prison. He couldn’t possibly harm her or anyone else, at least not outside the institution.

Besides, Chad couldn’t hurt Celeste any more than he had already. The pain still stabbed her heart when she thought about Pilar’s love for him. Pilar had to have been terribly lonely to have given in to his manipulation. Celeste had been so caught up in her own unhappy situation then, she was blind to Pilar’s need for a father’s love. In fact, Celeste had been in no better shape at that time than the women who now shared her life.

Still the guilt lingered. Yet Celeste had realized the only way to survive the loss of her daughter—her only child—was to face her guilt and her grief head-on. Buying the lighthouse was part of the plan she’d prayed would eventually free her. One day, when she had the strength, she also planned to confront Chad Wilbanks again.

The image of Pilar—half her face blown away—lying on a table in the morgue flashed into Celeste’s mind, as it often did. Pilar would have been thirty- two now. Perhaps she would have been a mother and Celeste a grandmother. A lump as big as a fist filled Celeste’s throat and she forced the image from her thoughts. She knew she’d have to settle for caring for other women’s children, like the ones clustered on the couch. She knew she also shared their pain.

Celeste studied her adopted family huddled around the fireplace. The lighthouse had become a safe house for abused women and their children. It was a small shelter. Yet it was the right size for Celeste to handle with mostly volunteers and a few employees, and without asking for too much outside funding. She couldn’t even comprehend that there were about fifteen thousand women in shelters in Michigan alone. What kind of cultural statement did those numbers make in a country that boasted about the progress women had made? After that discovery she believed the one positive thing Marcus had done for her was to leave her with enough money to be financially independent and, ironically, help women who were much like she herself had been years ago.