The restless spirits came to him, their screams and moans filling his ears. Their needs so long denied, their ignored cries, beat at him like the ocean waves that pounded on the beach he kneeled on now. No one heard them and no one cared, not then and not now.
In his mind’s eye he saw them as they had been. Forgotten and unloved, and hidden away as if they were something to be ashamed of. The tragedy of it filled him with pain and despair that tore at his heart. Tears brimmed in his dark eyes. For far too long they had wandered through eternity lost and hopeless, searching for the one that never came. It was to be no longer, for they had found their champion at last, and they would not release their grip until justice was theirs.
He raised his head, and the cool, damp air kissed his skin. His faith in her was rewarded once more, for she had heard the call and taken the higher path. When she could have turned her back on the one who needed her, she did not. She embraced the gift God had given her and now walked the path of righteousness. The faith he had assigned to her the moment he first saw her was not misplaced. She was special. She would once again bring the lost home, and this time she would also bring light into darkness.
Pushing his tall frame up from the sandy beach, he stood, his cloak billowing in the gusting wind that ripped across the ocean. In the distance, the sun had slipped below the horizon, and total darkness had fallen.
He put his hands together and bowed his head. “Go with God,” he whispered. “Go with God.”
Chapter Five
Lorna wanted to take the high road, she really did. But that was easier said than done. A wide range of emotions rose to the surface the second she saw Anna. Only a few hours ago it would have taken a whole lot of coercion and most likely a fair amount of alcohol to get her to even talk to the betrayer, and now here she was face-to-face with the woman who had broken her heart. Not much in the way of coercion and no alcohol at all. The weirdest part of all was that she wasn’t filled with blinding anger or even a tinge of resentment. Not exactly what she was expecting.
All the way over here, her body had buzzed, and she’d been so jumpy she’d had to force herself to stay seated in the car. She’d been anticipating the fury that seeing Anna again would ignite. Yet the moment she stepped out of the car and took one look at Anna’s face, all she could think of was helping her. It hit her in that moment that none of this was about her or Anna. This was all about Sadie. She was here to help someone in trouble, just as she’d done back at the house for Catherine and Tiana. Just as she’d done for her old friend Alida. A failed relationship, lies, and betrayal were all ancient history, and they simply didn’t matter.
The secret to her newfound freedom wasn’t much of a secret at all. She gave Renee one hundred percent of the credit for it. How she’d changed Lorna’s life over the months since she’d first glimpsed her having coffee in her kitchen was huge. If someone had told her on that morning that Renee would rock her world like this, she’d have called them nuts. Funny how things had a way of turning out. Her life since leaving this place had changed so much, and all of it was good.
Quite a relief to realize she could concentrate on trying to find Sadie and not have to worry about managing lingering emotions directed at her ex. That wasn’t the only eye-opener either. As much as her feelings toward Anna, or lack thereof, surprised her, she was equally amazed at how much she wanted her psychic abilities to kick in. When had she shifted from wanting them to go away to wanting them to appear on demand? Her trepidation on the way over here aside, now that they were here, she wanted to get rolling. She wanted to be able to part that veil and see what the universe could show her. Wow, what a mind-blowing revelation.
Her desire to get rolling was as much personal as it was to be the savior riding in on her white horse. Whatever was going on with Anna’s wife, Lorna wanted to find her quickly, as much to restore Anna’s life to normal as her own. She found that she truly wanted to help, and then she wanted to go home. Why? Her mind was whirling and one thing kept coming back around: she wanted to marry Renee.
“All right, let’s figure this out,” she said once they’d all taken seats in the living room. Just as Anna had shed her relationship with Lorna, she’d done the same with the house they’d shared. This was a new place, in a new neighborhood, and miles apart in location and in style from the one Lorna had run away from.
Inside, the surprises kept coming. When she’d pulled up in front of the big house she figured she’d be very uncomfortable in this place where Anna had built a life with a new woman, but she wasn’t. In fact, she was shocked to realize that nothing about it bothered her. Not being here with Anna, not the unfamiliar rooms that nonetheless held some familiar objects, or the changes that so clearly demonstrated how Anna had moved on without her. It was like visiting the home of an old friend. Friend…now wasn’t that a fine twist? It wasn’t a term she’d ever expected to use in conjunction with Anna. The last few hours were turning out to be brimming with the most surprising self-realizations.
She turned her attention away from her internal thoughts and back to Anna, who perched on the arm of the sofa and chewed on a fingernail. She recognized the familiar habit for what it was: nerves. Hindsight being twenty-twenty, it struck suddenly that Anna had been doing the same thing for weeks before their relationship blew apart. Funny how she hadn’t seen it at the time. Then again, thinking back, she had been pretty much in denial about everything that had happened back then. She’d told herself for months that Anna had blindsided her, and now she realized that wasn’t exactly true. The signs had been there, but she’d chosen not to see them.
Now it was a different relationship in that Anna’s lover was in peril, and Lorna’s heart unexpectedly, surprisingly, ached for her. She couldn’t wrap her head around how she would feel if it was Renee who was missing. Not something she even wanted to imagine.
Renee sat next to her with her hand on Lorna’s thigh. The gesture was both comforting and possessive, and it gave her a sense of security she’d never experienced with Anna. In the back of her mind she’d always worried she wasn’t good enough for Anna. It had been a recurring thought that beat against her confidence day in and day out. Looking around this room in the home Anna had made with Sadie, she realized this wasn’t a place she’d have been comfortable with or that she’d have wanted to live in. Yet it seemed to envelop Anna in a way that obviously fit. That fearful whisper of inadequacy and insecurity had never so much as flickered when it came to Renee.
“I don’t even know where to start.” Anna’s eyes filled with tears.
Looking at Anna’s pale face, Lorna thought again of how devastated she’d be if Renee suddenly went missing. It would crush the life out of her. She placed her hand over Renee’s and squeezed gently. “Just start at the beginning,” Lorna said with kindness. “Tell us everything one more time and we’ll sort it all out.”
Taking a deep breath, Anna related the events of the last few days for the second time. When she finished, silence fell over the room, and Lorna had the sense that, just as she was, everyone was thinking through the odd situation. It wasn’t like what had happened with the ghosts of the two women inhabiting their house back on the shores of the Pacific Ocean or anything even close to what had happened when her dear friend Alida was abducted and murdered. With Sadie, it was as if she had vanished into clear air. No abandoned car, no obvious signs of abduction, no nothing. Lorna didn’t even know where to begin with this one.
Lorna decided to go for what was becoming her preferred starting point because she couldn’t come up with a better place to begin. “Do you have something personal I can hold?”
Anna looked at her quizzically. “Something personal? Like what?” Her hands fluttered as if she was trying to grab something imaginary.
Honestly, she still didn’t have a good handle on what would trigger her visions. It had been dumb luck so far. Still, it made sense that if Sadie had touched an item or worn a piece of clothing, she should be able to pick up someth
ing. A vision would surely come to her if she could hold an item of Sadie’s, and it could potentially give them clues as to where she was.
“Like a brush or a jacket she might have worn recently. Even better would be something she’d been wearing or holding the day she went missing.” Yeah, that sounded good, and hopefully it would work. Not hopefully. It would work because it had to.
Anna paused to think for a moment and then got up and disappeared down the hallway. Her footsteps were a muted thump, thump, thump against the hardwood floor. A few minutes later, she reappeared holding a necklace. It was a delicate gold heart with a hefty sparkling diamond in the center. Impressive piece and nothing Lorna would ever wear. She wasn’t the sparkly diamond kind of woman. She was more the type who got excited over a shiny new wetsuit or a carbon-fiber road bike. Another reminder of how far apart they were in their separate lives.
“She was wearing this the morning she disappeared, and then before she left, she changed her mind and took it off. I hope it helps.” Anna’s eyes filled with tears again as she hesitated before dropping the necklace into the palm of Lorna’s hand.
Lorna jumped as the metal touched her palm. Yeah, her plan was going to bear fruit. The bolt of energy that roared through her was immediate, and darkness charged across her vision.
*
The woman standing in the open door was backlit by soft glowing light coming from the hallway. A black apron covered the ankle-length white skirt, and a sharp-white nurse’s cap covered her dark hair. Her expression was one of deep disapproval, her eyes narrowed and her thin lips pressed together in a hard line. The whole effect was to give her a menacing bigger-than-life appearance that sent chills down Sadie’s spine.
Involuntarily, Sadie shrank back against the wall as her pulse surged. In that flash of a moment when she’d closed her eyes and willed herself to relax, everything had changed. She’d opened her eyes to a sight that couldn’t be, and yet it was. The empty room was no longer empty. The bed frames were no longer rusted shells.
Against the long wall, the beds were evenly spaced, crisply made with snow-white linens, and on every one a single pillow rested against each headboard. At the foot of the beds stood a black locker, held secure with a brass latch. All except one. A woman with disheveled long red hair and her blue-striped blouse untucked from her full navy skirt sat on the floor frantically throwing items from the opened chest. One shoe lay in the middle of the floor, one on the foot not tucked under her body. Her stockings were smudged and had fallen in waves at her ankles.
“Who took it?” she cried. “Who took it?” Despair colored her words, and tears traced down her shadowed cheeks. Her face was as colorless as the linens on her bed.
“Stop, Rose,” whispered another woman, small and pale as she put a restraining hand on her arm. She too wore a blue-striped blouse tucked into an identical long navy skirt. Unlike Rose’s, her stockings were tidy and intact. “You do not want to go into the brass.”
The woman called Rose immediately stopped her frantic searching and peered up at the other woman with tear-filled eyes. “It’s gone,” she said in a voice filled with such anguish it tore at Sadie’s heart. “Gone. Where could it go?”
“Enough,” bellowed the nurse, who still stood, imposing, in the open doorway. “Rose, clean up that mess, right this moment. I will not tolerate this type of disorder in my ward.”
Every woman in the room except Rose scuttled to her bed, each of them sitting with her clasped hands in her lap, eyes downcast. Rose stared with sadness at the clothing, books, and scarves littering the floor. She picked up one of the scarves, stared at it, and then let it flutter back to the floor.
“Now, Rose. You are trying my patience. I have told you before that this type of behavior is not acceptable.”
Shoulders shaking once more, Rose began to retrieve her belongings from the floor, slowly placing them back in the chest with great care. When she finished, she closed the lid and engaged the brass latch. She pushed up from the floor and, like the other women, sat on the one empty bed in the room. She leaned down and put her missing shoe back on. She didn’t pull up her stockings. With her hands clasped in her lap, she lowered her eyes.
“Good,” the nurse said in a harsh, clipped voice, her hands in the pockets of her apron. “There will be no further outbursts of this nature. Need I remind you of what will happen if there is another?”
Every head in the room, except for Rose’s, shook from side to side. “Rose? Must I remind you of what will happen?”
Slowly Rose brought her head up, and her eyes met those of the nurse. She shook her head. “No, ma’am.” Defeat dropped her shoulders and clouded her eyes.
“Very good then, you all understand. You must obey the rules. You must behave. It is not for me that it must be so. It is for your own safety,” she said with a smile. “Now, you must all be ready for the evening meal in twenty minutes. Rose, do tidy your hair and fix your clothing. I will not have you in the dining room looking like riffraff. This is a fine institution, your families pay a great deal to provide you with the very best of care, and I will not allow you to show disrespect by looking as though you live in a gutter. One never knows when a family member might stop by for a visit. You must always be prepared.”
“Yes, Nurse Thompson,” Rose said without looking up, her voice flat and lifeless.
“Twenty minutes, not one minute longer.” Nurse Thompson turned from the door and took a step away, but not before Sadie saw the smirk that crossed the woman’s face and the glint of a gold and diamond locket she pulled from her pocket.
Sadie got chills again. Something about this was so very wrong. The way the nurse talked to the women, the look on her face as she chastised Rose, and the obvious perverse pleasure she gleaned from possessing the locket. Though she wasn’t certain, she believed the locket was the thing the red-haired woman was so frantically searching for. She wanted to run through that door and snatch the jewelry out of her hand.
It took a second for the importance of that thought to sink in, and when it did, Sadie jumped up and started to run toward the still-open door. She focused her gaze on one single element: the open door. As her feet pounded against the hardwood and the door drew closer, hope surged that her nightmare was over. As quickly as it rose, it crumbled because, in the space of an eye blink, everything that had given the room life dissolved. Her steps slowed and finally stopped. She reached up and put one hand on the door, closed and locked.
Her hand fell away. “What in the hell is going on here?” Sadie turned a full circle as tears began to slide down her cheeks. Once more she was staring at empty bed frames and mold-stained walls, and with her back against the locked door, she slid to the floor.
*
She was screaming and trying as hard as she could to tear herself free from the grip of the tall, frowning man who held so tightly to her arm that bruises were already beginning to appear on her pale flesh. “I will not go,” she cried. “You cannot force me to step inside. I am not sick. Let me go!”
He sighed loudly, and his grip grew stronger and more painful. “Stop! You are making a spectacle of yourself. Have some dignity, woman. Do what you know you must. Stop shaming us. Do you want our children to hear of this? They will be mortified.”
Her hair was coming loose from its pins, and her clean white blouse was pulling free from her skirt. Desperation poured from her like water from a fountain. The look in her eyes mirrored that desperation.
“It is you who lack dignity,” she snapped as she tried to wrench her arm free. “You who create a spectacle. How can you do this to me? You only want me gone so you can send our children away to boarding school while you live with that child.” She almost spat the last word.
He shook his head and continued to drag her toward the front door even as she stumbled and nearly fell. His step didn’t falter. “This does not concern me. I do this not for myself but for you. It is for your own safety. We have talked of this many, many times. You know
you must have help. You must be protected.”
“I am perfectly safe. I am sane. It is you who needs help. Not I. Let me go.”
“You are a danger to yourself. To our children. Do not fight this.”
“I am fine. You just want me out of the way.”
He stopped at the bottom of the entryway steps. She stumbled again, crashing into him and dropping to one knee. He yanked her back up to her feet. “Please,” he said with icy calm. “Do not fight this.” She continued to try to wrench herself free from his iron grip, tearing the shoulder of her blouse as she did.
Two large men in white pants and crisp white shirts came scurrying down the steps of the big brick building. At the sight of them, she screamed again, “NO!”
Lorna dropped the necklace to the floor, and relief flooded over her in a whoosh. While she appreciated the fact that her psychic powers had kicked in powerfully as she held the piece, she didn’t want to hold the thing one more second. The despair and agony transmitted through the diamond were in absolute contrast to its sparkling magnificence. How could something that beautiful hold such sorrow? The strength of emotion in that small piece was so powerful she felt as though it actually burned her palm.
She blew out a long breath as she rolled through her mind the meaning of what she’d seen. With her thumb, she massaged the palm of her hand, trying to rub away the lingering sensations. “Wow. That was weird.”
Anna didn’t even glance at the precious necklace lying discarded on the floor. Her eyes stayed on Lorna’s face. “What? Did you see her?” An edge of hysteria threaded through her voice, and all color had drained away, not that there had been much color in her face to begin with.
Twisted Screams Page 5