by Laurel Dewey
“Yeah…looks like he was a lot of fun,” Jane added, still patently aware of the strangeness to this ghostly exchange.
“Oh, that he was,” Anne replied, picking a speck of tobacco out of her front tooth. She looked around the room. “But he also had those moments where depression would just knock him over. You know what I’m talking about. Your first love had the same damn problem, didn’t he? Lots of fun until it wasn’t fun anymore.” She took a hard drag. “Aw, hell, I don’t want to talk about that! This room really is divine!”
“This was your room, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. But it sure didn’t look like this back then. There were three single beds along that wall. I shared the room with two other girls to save money.”
“What were you doing here?”
Anne sauntered to the desk and leaned against the chair. “Living my life. Feeling my oats. I wasn’t easy to contain. I didn’t care where I lived as long as there were interesting people and a good place to dance.” She smiled. “You never knew that you got your dancing chops from me, did you?” Anne chuckled. “I dug my heels into the floor of The Hayloft many a night.”
“It’s called The Rabbit Hole now.”
“Is that right? Down the rabbit hole we go…where we stop, nobody knows.”
“Why do you always show up at 3:11?” Jane’s tone was probing.
“Three eleven,” Anne mused, her demeanor suddenly less lighthearted. “My goodness, I had no idea.” She took another hard drag, seemingly desperate to numb her long-departed senses. “Three eleven…”
Jane stared at her mother. “Are you all right?”
Anne’s eyes darted back and forth. “You never answered me the last time. Are you prepared to see things for how they truly were?”
“I found the picture of you and Harry.” Jane’s tone was agitated.
“Right. Baby steps, I guess.” She forced an uneasy smile. “I never told anybody, Jane.”
Jane looked down at the photo. When you lose your mom at ten years old, the chances of hearing about her first lover during those prepubescent years isn’t high. “I understand.” She looked back up at her mother. Tears fell down her youthful face.
“I couldn’t tell a soul,” Anne said, her words choked with emotion. “Not a soul.” Anne let the ash of the cigarette fall but it vanished into the darkness. “And when he killed himself, it was all my fault!”
“Killed himself?” Jane asked, stunned. “Why’d he kill himself?”
Anne shook her head, tears flowing freely. “You shouldn’t carry it, Jane, if it doesn’t belong to you…”
Jane moved closer to her mother. “Carry what?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Feeling?” Jane regarded her mother with a questionable gaze. “I’m feeling fine.”
“Is that right?” Her tenor was eerie.
“Yeah. I’m…” Suddenly, that horrific pain bored into Jane’s gut. Her pelvic bone felt as if it was being crushed. Jane looked up at her mother with pleading eyes. “Make it stop, please!”
“I wish I could,” Anne said, detached from the emotion. “But it’s to be expected.”
Jane fell back on the bed, beads of sweat prickling across her forehead. The room spun as she held out her hand to her mother. “Make it stop!”
Anne looked at Jane with eyes suddenly lifeless. “I wish I’d been stronger.”
The pain was too much. Jane closed her eyes and screamed into the darkness.
“Jane?!”
She opened her eyes. Morning light streamed into the room. The pain was gone.
“Jane?!” It was Weyler’s voice.
She wobbled off the bed, still half asleep and opened the door. “What is it?”
He stood there in a blue dress shirt, sans tie and slacks. “I heard you scream.”
“I…was having a nightmare.”
Weyler looked uncertain. “You need to get dressed and come downstairs immediately. It looks like our kidnapper left something else just for you to scream about on your car.”
CHAPTER 28
By the time Jane threw on a pair of jeans and donned her jacket over the nightshirt, a small group of onlookers was already staring at the back of her Mustang. Jane’s gut seized as she maneuvered around the vehicle and came to rest next to Weyler at the rear of the car. Scrawled across the hood of the ice blue finish in dried blood were three words: FUCK YOU, JANE!
“What in the hell’s going on?” Jane demanded.
“Aaron found it when he came out to get the paper.”
“This doesn’t make sense!”
He turned to her. “You’re becoming the focus and that’s not what we need.”
“You think this is part of the clues?”
“How many times in your life have you had these three words written in blood on your car?” Jane turned away. “My point exactly. When the Van Gordens hear about this, all hell’s going to break loose. I think you should probably get out of here before Bo arrives. I’ll do what I can to smooth it over with him. This is a crime scene now so see if you can take Hank’s truck…” He moved closer. “Talk to Jordan but be careful. We need to ramp this up and fast.” Jane pulled her cell phone from her jacket pocket and quickly captured the graffiti with a quick snapshot.
Racing upstairs, she changed into one of Mollie’s T-shirts with the word Groovy across the chest. She donned her shoulder holster and Glock, leather jacket and grabbed her satchel. Downstairs, she slugged down a cup of java and grabbed a piece of toast and a few sausages that Sara offered her. After making sure that Bo was still AWOL on the scene, Jane slipped out the side door of the B&B and jogged across the street toward The Rabbit Hole. Without questioning Jane, Hank happily tossed her the keys to his truck and she sped out of town.
Jane peeled onto Jordan’s property, leaving a trail of dust in her wake. She brought the truck to an uneasy halt behind the cabin and raced to the front door where she found a tacked handwritten note. It read, MEET ME NEAR THE BRIDGE, JANE.
She ripped the note from the tack, stuffed it into her jacket pocket and headed across his property, through the thicket of bushes and spruce trees, toward the bridge. Jane yelled his name, only to hear it echoed back to her. A kaleidoscope of green shoots burst through the spongy soil where patches of snow lay in frozen heaps only days ago. Jane ventured deeper into the stand of spruce, pointed toward the bridge and the fenced area where she trespassed onto Jordan’s property the first time she met him face-to-face. She started to call his name again when she stumbled over the same bright red metal rod sticking out of the ground that she’d avoided during her first venture onto Jordan’s property. Hitting the dirt hard, Jane released a barrage of four-letter expletives before springing to her feet and screaming into the air, “Goddamnit, Jordan! Where are you?!”
“Here,” he said quietly. Jane spun around. Jordan stood twenty feet in front of her, toward the bridge. He looked sedate and exceptionally pensive. She waited, not knowing what to expect. He turned his back to her, gazing at the bridge. “A man has recently escaped from prison and is making his way home on foot. He is walking along a straight rural county highway in bright daylight. He’s walked about two miles from the prison, when he sees a police car coming toward him. Despite knowing that all squads were on the lookout for him, he runs towards the car for a short while, and only when he was ten feet away, did he turn and run into the woods to hide.” Jordan turned to Jane. “Why did he run towards the police car, Jane?”
Not knowing what was coming, Jane contemplated the riddle. She looked at the bridge. “He was on a bridge when he spots the police car. He’s more than halfway across it, so the quickest way off the bridge is to run forward and into the woods.”
Jordan smiled and nodded. “Yes.” He looked at the bridge. “Two people look at a bridge. One sees a place to jump and the other sees a place to cross over. But when it’s all said and done, it’s still just a bridge. It’s our perception that gives it power.” Jordan turned to
face her. “People need to have someone to hate. They need their monsters. They create their dragons because it gives them something to slay. That’s how they procure their power. And when they’re slaying other dragons, they don’t have to ponder the beasts that lurk under their own bed, do they? They don’t have to face the very real possibility that the monster they need to vanquish is really within them! I slay the monster inside me every day, Jane. I face him and I conquer him and each time, I fear him less. But it seems that I’ve been made the face of evil again. I’m the dragon up for slaughter, aren’t I?”
“If you’re involved with Jake Van Gorden’s disappearance,” Jane replied coolly, “then, yes.”
“Because I was convicted for killing Daniel Marshall?”
“Of course.”
He nodded calmly. “So, it’s Monday. Time to tell you my big secret.” He paused, the weight of what he was about to say lying heavy on his battered body. “I didn’t kill Daniel Marshall.”
Jane studied Jordan’s face. Against the shade of the conifers, she detected no deception. “Who killed him?”
Jordan took a long breath. “He killed himself. It was an accident. He was always far too interested in my father’s gun case that stood in our entry hall. My father had a nasty habit of failing to secure the cabinet, and I had a habit of double-checking that lock every day and making sure it was secured, especially after Daniel became obsessed with the guns.” Jordan’s demeanor remained calm but edged with sadness. “I was born from a dirty little secret and, thus, I was an outcast from my first breath. I was shunned and ignored and never able to make a connection with anyone except my true mother. When my father took her away from me, my world became so utterly lonely. I was alone whether I was by myself or standing in a crowded room. But I could feel things they couldn’t even begin to understand and I had no one but the walls or my dead mother to talk to.” Tears welled in his eyes. “Jane, can you even begin to understand what that does to one’s heart? To feel nothing from anyone, except the knowledge that you’re an unaccustomed burden? To be treated like a maid who doesn’t know her place? You can fire that maid but you can’t fire your blood son. You can only pray that the stars align in such a way that he’s forced to go far away and be forgotten. So, was it fate or destiny that I was doomed to create a situation where I was forced to leave?”
“Why in God’s name would you cop to a murder you didn’t commit? You could have explained what happened, why you got scared and hid his body…”
“Nobody would have listened to me, Jane, because no one ever listened to me. And even if they did, I would have been asked to leave for good. But I could hardly navigate my own home let alone have the social skills to figure out how to live in the world with nothing but my shattered wits. No one made me feel as if I was worth knowing. How in the hell was I supposed to strike out on my own with no money, no connections and no sense of self ?”
“Tell me what happened on the day Daniel killed himself.”
Jordan’s eyes traced the ground. “The natural desire to want to belong and not be a pariah is a powerful opiate. Here I was, my only friend being a thirteen-year-old retarded boy. That was who would lower himself to be my companion. I hung around with Daniel, but I was always embarrassed by his presence. As much as I hated it, my youthful ego still wanted to belong to something or someone who was normal. And Daniel wasn’t helping in my flagging pursuit of normalcy. One day, it all caught up with me. My ego overrode my integrity and I purposely didn’t double-check the lock on my father’s gun cabinet.”
Jordan disappeared into the past. “It was pouring rain—that kind of late afternoon summer rain where the air is thick and foreboding. My parents were gone. Daniel had visited and was babbling about being a cowboy and riding a horse. I was sick of it. I told him to leave and I went back up to my room. About ten minutes later, I hear this ridiculous hooting out in the backyard by the far gate. I looked out the window and there was Daniel standing in the pouring rain with my father’s hunting rifle between his legs and he was riding it like a fucking bronco. I could have opened that window and yelled down to him and told him to put down the gun, but I didn’t. I could have raced down the stairs and out into the rain and grabbed the gun from him. But I didn’t. I just stood there watching that poor son-of-a-bitch ride that fucking gun and wave his hand in the air like he was a rodeo cowboy. He was looking right up at me when he accidentally pulled the trigger. I watched his face disintegrate in an instant. He fell back onto the wet grass and I just stood there, motionless, as the rain beat down on his flesh and washed the blood away. I must have stood in that damn window for half an hour before I came back into myself and went downstairs. I picked him up, brought him to my room, wrapped him in a sheet and rolled him under my bed. I put the rifle back in the cabinet and locked it. But then the world just started to close in around me. I couldn’t stand my weakness and I was ashamed that I allowed the one person who had given me his friendship to die. I was no better than the bourgeois couple I lived with who looked down on me and treated me like yesterday’s trash.” Jordan’s face etched with profound misery. “I don’t remember much after that. I was in shock. The next memory I have is hearing Mrs. Copeland scream and being pelted with her bony fists after she found his body under my bed. She kept screaming, ‘You bastard! Look what you’ve done to us! We’re ruined now, you little freak!’ After that, it’s just a blur of jail cells, courtrooms and my final sentencing. I didn’t really wake up and become aware of my own breath until about four years later. Up to that point, I was as good as dead. But when I woke up, all I felt was anger toward the conventions that gave me no choice but to hide my family secret…to bury that which was evident. I was taught to hide mistakes because I was a mistake. Hide a family secret, hide a person…the point is hide it. Bury it. If you can’t see it, maybe it will disappear. They hid my mother away in an asylum until she conveniently disappeared by dying.
“But after a few years of being awakened to my own psychological torture, I was determined to learn why a secret becomes flesh and has a heartbeat just like you and I. I read every book I could find on sociology, psychology and family systems of dysfunction. The more I read, the more fascinated I became and the more I was determined to understand the way a buried secret can infect a bloodline and cause generations of pain.”
Jane’s ears pricked. “Where did you read that a secret can infect a bloodline?”
“That’s my term for it.”
“Yours?”
“Yes. What’s your point, Jane?”
“Jake Van Gorden used that same word, both in conversation and in writing in regard to the sins of his family. It’s an odd word and even stranger when a missing boy you’re accused of taking also used it.”
Jordan’s back went up. “I won’t be a martyr for their cause, Jane! No one loves a martyr except the Church. To everyone else, they’re just dusty bores.”
“Why don’t you ever give me a straight answer?!” Jane yelled.
“Because I would hope that you’d trust me by now to know the answer!” His manner hardened. “There are two things people can’t handle—death and the truth. Ask yourself some questions, Jane.” Jordan took several steps toward her. “What are people willing to sacrifice to keep a secret? Who are they willing to sacrifice for that secret?! I was sacrificed to serve the secret of my father’s affair! People are sacrificed every fucking day, Jane, in the name of a secret. And the darker that secret, the more it must be kept at all costs!”
“The cost of a life?”
“Especially at the cost of a life! Wasn’t my life sacrificed? You can sacrifice someone without killing them physically. You take away their honor, their right to be heard, their right to exist. You can bury a man without putting him in a box.” He moved closer to her. “I exist, Jane. I exist in this town like I’ve existed in every other town. I exist under a modus vivendi—a practical arrangement that allows conflicting people to coexist until a final settlement is reached. The fina
l agreement is usually my removal from the town. Take away a man’s sense of safety and he never feels as if he can exhale. It’s psychological warfare at its finest. You never have to do anything else to him. Just keep him on the slenderest of edges so he feels a bit unsteady and you’ll own him because the tension within him will prevent him from fighting back.” He raised his hand. “But I’ll be damned if they’re going to lead me toward desperation because I don’t believe in desperation. It always leads to compliance!” Jordan stood within an uncomfortable foot of Jane. “I know how the game is played, honey. I may be half black, but I won’t be their nigger.”
Jane had enough. She turned and moved through the thicket of trees back toward the truck. Jordan followed closely on her heels. “You know what it feels like to be alone, don’t you, Jane?” he yelled. “Staring at the ceiling when you’re in bed and wondering if there will ever be another warm body next to you that won’t end up destroying you!”
She stopped and stared daggers at Jordan. “You’ve crossed the line one too many times with me. I can make your life a living hell if I choose to!”
“But you know the truth, Jane.” He held her arm, more in desperation. “Most women who leave a man to find themselves, end up finding themselves in the arms of another man because truly finding yourself is a lonely and terrifying proposition. You have an understanding of what abject loneliness feels like. You understand my life more than anyone!”
Jane shook him off. “Stop dragging me into your fucking nightmare!” She turned around and moved quickly toward the truck.
Jordan remained relentless, hugging her shadow as she walked. “We’re all magnets in this town, Jane! I’ve told you that before! We’re drawn to each other in the electric haze and with a synchronistic aim, we shoot into each other’s lives. Because the more we try to run from our secrets and hide our past, the more we encounter it and are forced to reconcile our sins.” Jordan grabbed Jane’s arm and turned her around. “How else could you explain you and I coming together? You, the one who holds the thing I so desperately need but don’t yet understand. You, the one who can bring me my life.” His left hand started to shake. “You see?! It’s confirmation!”