by Dale Mayer
He pointed to his cruiser hidden on the other side of several vehicles. “We’re going this way.”
She walked along happily at his side, apparently just delighted to be out of the hospital. She hadn’t fought being in there, but being free was a whole different story.
“What else did you learn from his books?”
“Way more than I wanted to about sex,” she said with a snicker. “He had several books on positions and esoteric beliefs of sexual energy. I was pretty young for that, but, if I had stayed much longer, I’m not sure I would have been innocent for very long.”
“Were you ever raped?” He hated to ask, but that question that had been deep in his thoughts ever since he realized the extent to which she had been tortured.
“No,” she said. “I think he was waiting for my menstruation to start. Of course that didn’t save me from being forced to take care of his needs in other ways.”
“Bastard,” he said under his breath.
“Well, he could have waited for a hell of a long time for that,” she said. “I think all my injuries pushed my puberty way back. My cycle didn’t start until I was almost seventeen.”
“That is pretty late, isn’t it?”
“It’s on the late end of the spectrum,” she said. “Which was probably a good thing for me.”
“Were other girls raped?”
“I don’t think they thought it was rape,” she replied, joining him in his vehicle. “When you are programmed to believe this will happen and that it will be beautiful, fun and all the women before you do this on a regular basis, it just becomes one more stage of your growth. One they were quite eager to achieve because the other women were all much higher in the food chain. I wasn’t having my menses, no matter how much my father really wanted me to. It was one more thing for them to hold over me.”
Something odd was in her voice. He studied her for a long moment and turned on the engine, reversed out of his parking spot and took the next couple corners. “Did you do anything to stop your menses?”
An odd silence followed.
He looked over to see her looking at him under her hooded gaze. “Interesting that you would ask that,” she said. “I wondered if it was a natural side effect of the torture or of the healing energy I used to try to stay alive. But I was only eleven so how would I know to do that? It’s not like I read anything on that topic.”
“While your body would require a certain amount of energy to get through puberty,” he said, “maybe you needed all of that energy to heal?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I know that mentally I was telling my body to not take that next step because I knew what was coming.”
“You saw the other girls go through it and saw they were happy and had that same programming. Why is it you didn’t think it would happen the same way for you?”
“Because nothing was ever the same for me,” she said. “I figured it was another way for him to humiliate me, another way for him to hurt me.”
“He would have,” Rowan said, his voice low and deep. “He was already a sick bastard. That would have been just one more avenue for him.”
“I don’t know that it would have made any difference to me,” she said. “I was terrified of getting pregnant though.”
“So, you knew all about biology?”
“I’d helped several women have babies,” she said. “I saw the pain and torment they went through. Sometimes they were a little too free with their words because they were in such pain. I certainly understood it was a result of the sex act. I wouldn’t do anything that would put myself in a position to have a child. That would give him yet another way to hurt me.” She turned to stare out the window.
He watched her profile, wondering yet again how she had ever survived what she had been through, both physically and emotionally.
“You’re trying to figure out if I’m normal, aren’t you?” she asked suddenly.
He shook his head as he kept his gaze on the road, then turned to look into her eyes for a second.
“I doubt I am,” she admitted. “I don’t know what normal is.”
“Your life since leaving the compound seems as close to normal as anything,” he said, then added, “At least, I think. I can’t imagine what your recovery was like.”
“It was as normal as I could make it,” she said. “I don’t know …” Then her voice broke off.
“You don’t know what?” He headed down the long street that would take them the last couple turns to his house. He lived at the end of a road and had four acres to himself, and it was all fenced in. He had several dogs he kept around as pets, but they were also great guard dogs and kept a lot of the wildlife away.
When she stayed quiet, he said, “I’ve been seeing energy since puberty. That’s why I was curious about the puberty thing.”
“Oh.” She looked at him in surprise. “So, you started seeing auras and colors and energy around you then, not before?”
“Not that I know of. I don’t remember seeing it, but then, around eleven or twelve, I started to see all kinds of things. Some of it was pretty confusing. Sometimes the world would just be Technicolor, and I wouldn’t understand why, and then I could blink several times, and it would go back to normal. But then sometimes I turned my head, looked again, and it would be all bright.”
“Interesting,” she murmured. “For me, I was working at energy stuff since about eight, when I was into reading his books. I was already pretty broken by then though, so maybe that started earlier, just not as focused as I was after the books.”
“At eight, it’s amazing you understood.”
“I don’t think I did,” she said. “There were lots of pictures. The text was about pulling energy from your feet down, from your hand, circulating it through your body, through the seven centers—asking for guidance, asking for help, asking for healing, asking for love and trying to offer life. My mother was big on love.”
He once again turned to look at her. Her voice was so devoid of emotion he had to wonder what she meant. “Meaning, she had no love?”
“I think her version of love was very conflicted,” she said. “Maybe confused. I was her daughter, and she professed to love me, but she was also very much in love with my father, who was abusing me. So I don’t know how that makes sense to anybody.”
“Hence the conflict in her,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“Did she ever give you anything to keep as a child?”
“Sure. The letter,” she said. “When my father found out, he was very, very angry. It’s the only time I ever saw him lash out at her.”
“Well, that’s one reason why she didn’t fight him much,” he said. “Fear is a great intimidator.” Rowan pulled into his driveway and shut off the engine. But he didn’t open the door and get out; instead he twisted in the seat and said, “I thought your father gave it to you.”
“Yeah, well, he took it from me,” she explained. “And gave it back to me years later.”
“Do you know why?”
“Because he said I was the only one who could own it.” She shrugged and laughed. “I figured there had to be some trick to it. It would burn me or something.”
“Interesting.” He opened the door and said, “Do you need help getting out?”
She shook her head and hopped out.
He was surprised at her agility. The nimbleness of her movements. If that had been him, he’d have been feeling like he’d been hit by a truck. Instead she was already walking toward his front door. “I saw one thing in the police file. A suspicion there might have been a second adult male on the place.”
She froze at the bottom step, her hand on the railing, and turned to look at him. “What?”
He nodded. “The cops found two razors in two different bathrooms and two different shaving creams. Clothing in one bedroom and no clothing in the other.”
She racked her brain. “I only remember seeing my father there.” She stared at a point over his head. “I do
n’t know if it’s safe to trust my memories though.”
He waited calmly, watching to see if anything would shake loose from her brain. A second male would be huge. “It’s possible he had visitors or family. Maybe other people in the cult he looked up to?”
Her gaze shuttered.
And he realized she had remembered something else. He waited, hoping she’d share. And then she sighed and said, “There’s a tendril of a memory, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. It’s just out of reach.” She gazed at him in frustration. “But it has something to do with another male.”
“I hope you can find it,” he said. “The police worry somebody got away scot-free.”
“Even if they find out, what difference will it make?” she asked curiously. “I’m sure there’s a statute of limitations, and he’s well past that point.”
“I’m not sure about that. Not if he’s the one who shot you just this week. But it would be nice to have closure on this issue. All those children, whose hand did they die by? Because an awful lot of dead bodies were there. If this second male had a hand in it, he could be tried—if not criminally, then in a civil suit—as part of the machine that drove those women to do whatever they did.”
“I didn’t remember anything about that until you said something now.” She laughed. “My father was nothing but crazy.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“I used to think maybe I was crazy too,” she said in that same conversational tone. She went up the last few steps to the large veranda across the front of his log house. She stopped, looked around and smiled. “This is such a perfect home.”
“In what way?” he asked, unlocking the front door. The dogs wagged their tails, jumping about, then bolted around him, and when they caught sight of her, they stopped. Not a sound came out of them, and their butts hit the floor. They just stared up at her. Both were rescues, and neither one showed aggression, but neither were they friendly. Strange that they no longer jumped and barked for joy at having seen him, as if in shock at seeing her.
“What the hell?” he murmured. He turned to look at her and asked, “Do you always have this effect on animals?”
Chapter 18
She dropped her gaze to the dogs and, in an even slower movement, dropped into a crouch beside them. She held out her hand, but neither dog moved—not a tail, not a nostril. When she brushed her hand closer toward them, they both leaned in, and then both gave heavy sighs, lay down on their backs and gave her their bellies.
She heard Rowan whisper, “What the …” above her.
She gently scratched one dog, then the other, wishing her other arm was back in operation so she could handle both at once. When they gave another round of deep, heavy sighs and seemed to relax even further, she scratched their ears, whispering the whole time about what beautiful animals they were.
She glanced up at Rowan and said, “I’ve never really had much to do with animals.”
But his gaze went deep as he stared at her. She wasn’t sure he believed her or not.
She shrugged. “Maybe it’s my energy?”
He stepped over the dogs and went into the house. She realized she’d upset him but didn’t know what she was supposed to do about it. She straightened back up and called the dogs in. They came in, reverting to the happy puppies they’d been when they first arrived.
She whispered to them, “Go say hi to Rowan.” She shut the door and turned to watch as the dogs bolted to Rowan, jumping up and around him to say hi again.
She leaned against the front door, wondering. She hadn’t been around many dogs, but she did know birds often sat on her shoulder or beside her. She could hold out her hand, and a squirrel, in time, would crawl up. She never bothered taking any pictures of it because she didn’t know what other people could do or not do. As far as she understood, this was normal. She talked to them as if they were the same as she was. She’d always communicated with animals that way.
Only Rowan’s reaction showed her that, for his dogs, obviously part of his family, this wasn’t normal behavior. Not a great start to staying at his house. She knew she would have to apologize, she just didn’t know what for. And that made the apology seem awfully empty.
She glanced around at his beautiful home—a huge fireplace, a great big open living room, open dining room and an open kitchen.
She slipped out of her shoes and walked barefoot across the floor toward him. “I know I’m supposed to apologize,” she said. “It’s the thing to do. But I’m not sure why.”
He gave a half snort and turned to look at her.
She nodded. “I know that means that the apology doesn’t mean much but …” She looked down at the dogs and smiled. “I do sometimes see this reaction in other animals around me. I just haven’t been around dogs much.”
“What other animals?” he asked curiously.
“Well, sometimes, if I sit still long enough, a squirrel will run up my arm. Birds will sit on my shoulder. I’ve had deer walk up to me, and even a beaver lie down beside me,” she said. “But some things you just don’t know if it’s normal or not. I worked at a university with tons of noise and kids, and, although I’d hear the birds, and I could see them land on the window when I was there, I didn’t know others couldn’t see them.”
“Couldn’t see the birds?” he asked, jumping on her for emphasis.
She groaned. “Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t see. I don’t know,” she said. “For all I know, the birds weren’t real.”
“We’re just getting through layers and layers of stuff with you, aren’t we?” he said. He turned his back on her and pulled the coffeemaker across the counter.
“I’ve never tried to hide anything,” she said. “At least nothing important.”
“I guess that’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t really know what’s important until we bring it out in the open.”
“I’ve never had a long-term boyfriend,” she said. “Yet animals have always liked me. Sometimes I wondered if they were even real. Once I put my hand through one, and it just stayed there and stared at me.”
He slowly turned to her. “A ghost bird?”
“I don’t know. The next day, the same bird was back. When I went to do the same thing, it was real and hopped up on my fingers.”
He spun back, ground the coffee and finished making a pot. Then he pivoted, leaned against the counter, his hands braced there, and she joined him. “A premonition?”
“Maybe,” she said with a shake of her head. “I didn’t understand it at the time but maybe.”
“Have you seen any others?”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes.”
“When?”
“When I was a child. When I was still at the cult. I remember seeing the cops come into the house, and I went to my mother and told her that we had to leave. I told her what I’d seen. She looked terrified and disappeared. For the longest time after I was rescued, I figured I must have caused the death of everybody because, if I hadn’t told her what I’d seen, she wouldn’t have thought it would happen and wouldn’t have made preparations for it. The next day the police did come. By then the cult was prepared, and everyone died,” she said, tears slowly leaking from her eyes. “Do you know what it’s like to hold that memory—that guilt—for all these years?”
He gently folded her into his arms. “It was not your fault,” he said roughly. “Even if you did have a premonition of the cops coming, you were eleven.”
“If I hadn’t said anything …” she said, tilting her head back so she could look up at him. “If I hadn’t said anything, they’d probably be alive today.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “The police were on to him. Your father was shot several times. Chances are, without advanced notice, he would have used all the women and children as a defense and gotten them killed anyway. Several other instances of cults like that ended with multiple family members dying in mass suicide, whether by cop or by poison.”
She wiped he
r eyes. “I keep telling myself that I can’t go back and change anything. But it’s all tied to throwing that damn letter into the lava.”
“I saw you reach your arm back and throw it,” he said cautiously. “Are you telling me that you didn’t? I thought that was done with.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Oh.” She stared down at her hands. “I remember pulling my arm back, then the pain … Did I throw it?” She frowned. “Where’s my clothing?”
He motioned to the front door, the bag he’d brought in. She grabbed it and brought the bag to the kitchen table and opened it. Her T-shirt, leggings, socks and sweater were all there. She straightened it all out as best as she could with one hand. She checked the pockets. But it wasn’t there. She sighed with joy. “Maybe I did do it.”
“Your purse is here,” he said and pointed to it. “You want me to dump it?”
She nodded. “Let’s find out for sure.”
He upended the purse, using his arms to stop everything from rolling away.
As he removed the leather bag from the pile, she said, “I don’t see it.”
He separated the items a little more. Her passport was here. Her wallet was here. As was a pad of paper, various lipsticks, lip gloss. He wasn’t even sure what half of this stuff was, it just looked like makeup.
He picked up the pad of paper, and she gave an odd cry, plucked it from his hand and flipped through the pages. As she did so, another sheet of paper fell to the pile in front of them. She snatched it up, looked at it and held it up to him. “I guess not,” she whispered. “It’s still here.”
“We attached it to a rock,” he said. “Where’s the rock?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea. And did we do it, or did we just think we did it?”
“Like Irene. That would mean a shared premonition again,” he said. “And that’s not something I really like to think about.”
“I don’t believe it matters,” she said with a broken laugh. “Because look at us. That damn letter is still here.”
*
Rowan stared at the letter with loathing. “That thing is enchanted.”