Sweet Vengeance

by Fern Michaels

  Books by Fern Michaels:

  Sweet Vengeance

  Holly and Ivy

  Fancy Dancer

  No Safe Secret

  Wishes for Christmas

  About Face

  Perfect Match

  A Family Affair

  Forget Me Not

  The Blossom Sisters

  Balancing Act

  Tuesday’s Child

  Betrayal

  Southern Comfort

  To Taste the Wine

  Sins of the Flesh

  Sins of Omission

  Return to Sender

  Mr. and Miss Anonymous

  Up Close and Personal

  Fool Me Once

  Picture Perfect

  The Future Scrolls

  Kentucky Sunrise

  Kentucky Heat

  Kentucky Rich

  Plain Jane

  Charming Lily

  What You Wish For

  The Guest List

  Listen to Your Heart

  Celebration

  Yesterday

  Finders Keepers

  Annie’s Rainbow

  Sara’s Song

  Vegas Sunrise

  Vegas Heat

  Vegas Rich

  Whitefire

  Wish List

  Dear Emily

  Christmas at Timberwoods

  The Sisterhood Novels:

  Need to Know

  Crash and Burn

  Point Blank

  In Plain Sight

  Eyes Only

  Kiss and Tell

  Blindsided

  Gotcha!

  Home Free

  Déjà Vu

  Cross Roads

  Game Over

  Deadly Deals

  Vanishing Act

  Razor Sharp

  Under the Radar

  Final Justice

  Collateral Damage

  Fast Track

  Hokus Pokus

  Hide and Seek

  Free Fall

  Lethal Justice

  Sweet Revenge

  The Jury

  Vendetta

  Payback

  Weekend Warriors

  The Men of the

  Sisterhood Novels:

  High Stakes

  Fast and Loose

  Double Down

  The Godmothers Series:

  Getaway (E-Novella Exclusive)

  Spirited Away (E-Novella

  Exclusive)

  Hideaway (E-Novella Exclusive)

  Classified

  Breaking News

  Deadline

  Late Edition

  Exclusive

  The Scoop

  E-Book Exclusives:

  Desperate Measures

  Seasons of Her Life

  To Have and To Hold

  Serendipity

  Captive Innocence

  Captive Embraces

  Captive Passions

  Captive Secrets

  Captive Splendors

  Cinders to Satin

  For All Their Lives

  Texas Heat

  Texas Rich

  Texas Fury

  Texas Sunrise

  Anthologies:

  Mistletoe Magic

  Winter Wishes

  The Most Wonderful Time

  When the Snow Falls

  Secret Santa

  A Winter Wonderland

  I’ll Be Home for Christmas

  Making Spirits Bright

  Holiday Magic

  Snow Angels

  Silver Bells

  Comfort and Joy

  Sugar and Spice

  Let it Snow

  A Gift of Joy

  Five Golden Rings

  Deck the Halls

  Jingle All the Way

  FERN MICHAELS

  SWEET VENGEANCE

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Fern Michaels.

  Fern Michaels is a registered trademark of KAP 5, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955103

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-0319-4

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-0319-7

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: April 2018

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-0321-7

  eISBN-10: 1-4967-0321-9

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: April 2018

  No More Tears Now; I will think about revenge

  —Mary, Queen of Scots

  Prologue

  Tessa Jamison counted the time so that she might arrive at a restful place when Death’s hand reached out for her own. Each second, minute, and hour, excluding those during which she slept, admittedly few, brought her closer to her inevitable meeting with Death. Surely, she would find peace, or possibly sheer nothingness, in death. If not peace, or a white noise of sorts, if the tenets of her Christian faith were as pure and true as she’d been brought up to believe, she would be reunited with the family she had slaughtered so callously.

  Since her conviction ten years ago, the quote from the San Maribel News Press had haunted every single minute of her essentially lifeless existence in Florida’s Correctional Center for Women.

  Slaughtered so callously. A mantra of sorts. Slaughtered so callously. The words drummed in her head like a rapid heartbeat. Images of Joel’s mangled body, the carnage, the horror of seeing her family.

  Dead.

  Joel’s body was unidentifiable by visual means, the coroner had stated.

  Gone in the blink of an eye.

  It wasn’t until three years after her imprisonment for the murders that the memory of the aftermath of their savage deaths emerged from her safe place—the dark confines hidden deep inside the protective corner of her subconscious. For years, Tessa’s mind refused to retrieve the image of their slain bodies. Lily pads. She recalled thinking of lily pads floating in the aqua-blue pool on the fateful day when she’d discovered their bodies. Like a fine French claret, sinewy ribbons spread throughout the aquamarine water, the tomb that held the last whisper of their lives. Their last thoughts. Their last heartbeats. Their last cries. Their understanding t
hat this was indeed the end, that the finality of life was now death.

  Tessa hated this part the most. She could not bear to think of their last moments as the dark shroud of Death engulfed them. Had they struggled? Had they cried? Or had they simply taken their final breaths, accepting what was to come as their fate?

  These thoughts tormented her. Day and night, images of their bodies taunted her. Broken marionettes. Their limbs and arms askew, bloated, as decomposition began to set in. Later, she would recall the coroner testifying at her trial. Joel had died defending his daughters. His fingers and arms were covered in defensive wounds, and again, the fact that Joel was visually unidentifiable.

  “It’s as if the victim didn’t even have a face,” the coroner had testified.

  The testimony still had the power to cause her heart to race.

  Tessa struggled to keep the bitter prison coffee down as the images assaulted her. Catching her reflection in the small, steel-like mirror hanging above the built-in desk, Tessa no longer recognized the woman she’d become. Her blond hair was now streaked with thick stripes of silver, her once-bright blue eyes were now as dull as the mop-water-colored prison walls that stared back at her. Ten years living, if you could even call it that, in a seven-foot-by-ten-foot cell could do that to a person. She stared at the steel hinges that held her single bunk to the wall. Her bed was a thin, blue-and-white-striped dingy mattress atop rusted springs that creaked with every twist and turn. And the worn gray wool blanket on the bed, which she’d learned to make with military precision, was nothing more than a nighttime battleground. Underneath that blanket she fought the demons that haunted her dreams at night and tormented her days. She’d adjusted to life in prison as well as anyone could under the circumstances, but the anger that grew deep inside her with each day spent behind bars was now barely containable. Ten years of incarceration for a crime she had not committed, of complete and utter hell, had infested and darkened her soul.

  The clank of metal against metal, a shrill cry, a moan from someone in the depths of prison passion, were so common now that she hardly noticed them. Each day was the same as the thousand next and the one before it.

  In the beginning, she’d simply curled up at the corner of her bunk at night, fearful of what might happen if she fell asleep. Given the nature of her supposed crime, she was immediately ostracized by the other inmates. Other than former cops, baby killers received the worst treatment inside prison.

  Dinnertime was the worst. The other inmates’ chanting the words baby killer, baby killer greeted her as soon as she entered the utilitarian cafeteria each day. It wasn’t unusual for a spoonful of food to fly across the cafeteria, smacking her in the face, or to have a glob of instant mashed potatoes smashed in her hair as though she were nothing but a thing to torment. As hard as it was, Tessa refused to fight back. After a few years, she blended in, just like the others. She was a number, an inmate, a convicted murderer. She would die here in Florida’s Correctional Center for Women. No one would care; there would be no memorial service to honor the person she’d been. Nothing. She would be carted out in a pine box, and from there, she would most likely be buried in the state’s cemetery, where all the other inmates who had died were laid to rest.

  Stop, she told herself. Stop! It was these thoughts that would kill her. Not the other murderers and drug addicts. Not the child molesters and rapists housed in the men’s prison across the road. No, she would not die at their hand, but her own, if she continued to allow her thoughts to return to that day, now almost eleven years ago.

  She had died that day because since the moment she discovered the dead bodies of her husband and twin daughters floating in their pool, bobbing, up and down, like the red-and-white bobbers used by fishermen, she’d had no life.

  Nothing would change the devastation of what her family had suffered. There was no going back. To this very second, she was as traumatized as she’d been the day the words guilty of murder in the first degree filled the courtroom. Nothing would ever bring her a moment of happiness.

  Nor did she deserve it. If only she’d stayed home that weekend instead of racing to the mainland to prepare for an indefinite stay with the girls.

  The memory of that last day was all too clear to her now, very clear, having emerged in bits and pieces during her ten years in prison. If only she could turn back the hands of time.

  Chapter 1

  October 2021

  Tessa rolled over, facing the same wall she’d viewed for more than ten years. Thirty-seven cracks, 192 tiny holes punched in the shape of a small handgun, courtesy of the prison cell’s previous “guest.” She had often wondered what instrument had been used to make such tiny holes, as any objects that could remotely cause injuries were forbidden. Some days she spent hours thinking about it. It was usually at this point that her circumstances served up a harsh dose of reality. Tears pooled, and she wiped them away with the edge of the wool blanket that covered the thin, worn mattress.

  When her thoughts took her back to her previous life, which they did on a daily basis, Tessa did the one thing that helped her to cope with her anxiety.

  She exercised.

  She lay down on the cold cement floor, hands folded behind her head, and began doing sit-ups. When she reached five hundred, she stopped, a thin sheet of sweat covering her, the hair at the nape of her neck slick with dampness. She stood and began doing jumping jacks, something she’d learned in her seventh-grade gym class. She remembered thinking how stupid some of the girls in her class had looked. A few had developed breasts, some quite large. Jumping up and down with their breasts practically smacking them in the face, she’d been glad to be a bit behind in the physical-development department. The memory brought a mimic of a smile, a rarity. The last time she’d smiled and felt true happiness was nothing more than a distant memory, as though it belonged to someone else.

  A lifetime ago.

  With the force of an indescribable power, her mind suddenly registered the blatant fact that she’d now been incarcerated longer than her girls had lived. Tears blurred her vision again, and she wiped away the mixture of sweat and tears with the back of her hand. For once, she felt blessed to have the small sink in her cell. She turned on the tap, cold water only—all they were allowed—and she was glad of this missing amenity. The sharp sting of the cold water brought back the harsh reality of what had become of her life.

  One day the same as the next, rarely a variation unless an inmate caused a disturbance. It could be over a stolen cigarette, one’s helping of dessert being more, or less, plentiful, or the startling whistle from a guard as they observed the crimes committed by the convicts. Tessa learned that nothing was off-limits where the inmates were concerned. Every item was made even more valuable, as the supply of what counted as contraband was limited and the demand so much greater. Contraband was mostly Marlboro cigarettes, which she never touched as the smell made her sick. Stamps were also a hot commodity, as was bottled water and the digital radios they were allowed. She kept her supply meager so as not to seem covetous. She knew this would set her apart from the other inmates even more. Flashing her wealth was totally out of bounds. And she wouldn’t do that under any circumstances. She’d experienced being poor as well as being wealthy. Little good either status did her.

  On each Saturday and Sunday, they were allowed visitors. For days afterward, the cellblocks were almost cheery; at least cellblock C-15 was. She’d been in the same cellblock since being sentenced to prison, despite the crime she’d been convicted of. This was the least violent of the murderers’ blocks, as the guards constantly reminded them when there was even the slightest threat to their safety. She did nothing to rattle their chains or that of the others. She spoke only when spoken to and did not participate in cellblock chatter. She had not made friends and did not want to. To what end? To plan a coffee date upon their release, then spend the day shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue? Not going to happen. No way.

  Other than her attorney, she rarely had
visitors since she had no close family except for her sister, Lara, who was two years younger. Lara had visited all of six times in ten years. Each visit she had asked for money, and Tessa always gave in and would see to it that Jamison Pharmaceuticals released the money her sister had requested. Lara used drugs, and Tessa suspected she worked as a prostitute when her supply of money and drugs was low. They had never been close when they were young since they were raised in separate foster homes after their alcoholic and drug-addicted mother died when they were just eight and ten years old. They’d never known their father, or even if whoever Tessa’s father was had also fathered her sister. They both resembled their mother, and neither had really cared enough to discuss the topic when they were old enough to understand that their mother’s lifestyle wasn’t considered normal.

  Tessa remembered feeling relief when she had learned of her mother’s death, and the brief flash of guilt she had felt at her own thoughts. She had been in Mr. Pittenger’s fourth-grade class, studying her spelling words for the week. Mr. Cleveland, their principal, had quietly entered the classroom, whispered into her teacher’s ear, then the two of them looked at her, and she had turned away, knowing that whatever Mr. Cleveland had told Mr. Pittenger wasn’t good because they focused on her.

  She had already turned her eyes back to the list of spelling words when she felt a tap on her shoulder. Bracing herself, she stood and followed the two men who’d had such a positive influence on her in the past year. Lara was waiting inside the principal’s office when she entered. Tessa stood next to her younger sister, and reached for her hand, gripping it tightly as they were told of their mother’s death. Both were stoic as they were given the news of their loss. Neither of them cried, accepting the fact that once again, their lives were about to change. Though they had not been told at the time, Tessa and Lara soon learned that the cause of their mother’s death had been a heroin overdose.