The Widow's Watcher

by Eliza Maxwell

  26

  1977

  “Told you she was great, didn’t I?” the half-drunk groom said.

  Lars grinned. “Never shut up about it.”

  The men turned together and leaned their backs against the bar while Steve’s eyes searched out his blushing bride. When she saw him watching, Maggie gave a sweet smile that showed off her overbite.

  “When you find the one, you just know,” Steve said at Lars’s side.

  “I’m happy for you. Really.”

  Maggie Shipman might not have been the great beauty Steve had described during their deployment, but there was no denying the look in their eyes when the couple smiled at each other.

  Lars didn’t regret coming to the wedding, exactly, but he wondered if it was too soon to make his excuses and head home. He’d socialized with enough strangers to last him a good long while.

  He opened his mouth to tell his friend congratulations again and good night, but his attention was pulled across the room.

  It was her laugh that caught him first. He searched out the sound, following the full-throated music back to its source. The woman’s smile was wide, unencumbered by modesty or restraint, her head thrown back in a pure embrace of the moment.

  Lars lost track of his thoughts, and his plans to call it an early night became scrambled with other, more basic ideas as the woman threw her hands in the air and twirled with an abandonment he’d rarely witnessed.

  She stopped suddenly, halting her impromptu pirouette midspin. Strands of long dark hair, still moving, wrapped around the bottom half of her face and clung like a veil. For a moment, only her eyes were visible. A frisson of excitement coursed through Lars. From across the crowded room, the woman’s gaze was leveled on him.

  A cheer went up from the crowd around her, and Lars felt he’d lost something when her eyes broke away from his. She turned back to the people nearest her and dropped into a bow with a quick flourish.

  “Who is that?”

  “Who?” Steve asked.

  Who else was in the room?

  “The woman in the dress,” Lars said.

  He missed the odd look his friend sent his way. Lars watched her as she laughed again and shook her head at a man standing nearby.

  Steve must have followed his line of sight.

  “The brunette?” he asked, and Lars could only nod, struck by the plain sound of the word. Brunette. There was nothing plain about this woman.

  “Came with Bob, Maggie’s brother.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Something with an A, I think. Amanda? Angela? Only met her tonight.”

  “Are they serious?” Lars asked.

  “Serious?” Steve laughed. “Shouldn’t think so. Never seen Bob serious about anything, much less a girl.”

  Lars’s pulse quickened.

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself? Looks like she’s headed this way.”

  When his friend spoke again, Lars barely heard him.

  “Think I’ll go check on my new wife,” Steve said, then clapped Lars on the shoulder and faded into the crowd.

  Lars couldn’t take his eyes off the woman.

  The way she moved, with a confident intensity that drew a man’s attention. His weren’t the only set of eyes that followed her.

  But it was toward him she came.

  He watched, transfixed, as she stopped. There were at least ten feet still between them. She tilted her head a bit to one side and smiled, studying him. He fought the urge to stand up straighter, to run a hand through his hair, which was only just beginning to grow out from his military cut.

  Those seconds were heavy with anticipation, fraught with meaning he didn’t fully comprehend. All he knew was he wanted, more than he’d ever wanted anything, for this woman to draw closer. To come to him. To choose him.

  The music of the band and the murmur of the crowd grew faint in his ears. Everything else fell away from that moment, those seconds that would define the rest of his life.

  With a grin of acceptance, she turned sideways to him and began a soft shoe shuffle that closed the final distance between them.

  Lars laughed, her irreverence contagious. When she stopped just in front of him, he studied her face, unable to keep the smile off his own.

  It wasn’t her features that held him. It was the light that shone through, brightening her smile, making her eyes sparkle like the stars over the ocean he’d stared up at so many nights on the open sea.

  “Want to dance, sailor?” She held out her hand.

  Her date was left passed out and forgotten in a chair along the edge of the room.

  They danced, and one day Lars would share with their children the story of how their mother had tap-danced her way into his life.

  27

  Lars drove on.

  Jenna knew there was more to this story than Lars had shared. An iceberg, massive in scope and lurking beneath still waters, that he and Owen had run against, shipwrecked with only each other to cling to.

  The deserted roads Jenna had grown used to since wandering off the interstate, lined with snow-covered fields and dotted with barns and silos in the distance, contributed to a sense of isolation that fit her state of mind.

  Yet without her noticing, the roads had begun to widen. Other vehicles passed, reminding her there was a town up ahead, somewhere in the distance. A town where she could get an overpriced cup of coffee. Where she would rent a car to take her away from this place.

  Forever.

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?” Cassie asked.

  Jenna frowned. Her daughter was far more troublesome in death than she’d ever been in her lifetime.

  As if reading her thoughts, Lars slowed the truck without a word and pulled along the shoulder of the road.

  He put the vehicle in park and looked across the cab, meeting her questioning glance.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “At least, not yet,” he hastened to add at her look of confusion.

  Jenna shook her head. “I don’t . . . But why?” she asked.

  If she didn’t know better, she could have sworn there was a look of embarrassment about him. Embarrassment, tinged with something else. Was it hope?

  “Come with me.”

  “Come with you where?” Jenna asked. He wasn’t making any sense. “If you’re hoping to run off to the Bahamas together and sip mai tais, my schedule’s pretty full for the foreseeable future.”

  “Liar,” Cassie said.

  The old man didn’t bat an eyelash at her lame humor. He just stared at her with an intensity Jenna didn’t care to acknowledge.

  “It’s your decision,” he said. “But the rental cars aren’t going anywhere.”

  Actually, she thought, they are. By design, in fact, rental cars are going lots of places. Lots of places that aren’t here.

  “What harm will it do, Mom?” Cassie nudged.

  “I’m asking you to do this for me,” he said.

  Jenna shook her head, not meeting his eyes.

  “I’d hazard a guess this man hasn’t asked anyone for anything in a long, long time. Are you really going to sit there and tell him no?” her daughter prodded. “Don’t you owe him more than that?”

  “I don’t owe you anything,” Jenna told him.

  “That’s debatable,” Cassie said. “Not to mention rude.”

  “No, you don’t,” Lars agreed. “I’m asking all the same. I’ll bring you back tomorrow, if that’s what you want.”

  Jenna opened her mouth, but the words she had every intention of putting out there died on her lips. She sighed.

  “One more day is all I’m asking.”

  “One day, Mom. If you’re so determined, one day isn’t going to change anything.”

  No, it’s not, Cassie. And I can see through your attempts to manipulate me. Stop it.

  “Then it shouldn’t matter,” Cassie replied.

  “Okay, fine,” Jenna said, capitulating with no attempt at grace. “One day,” she added. />
  Lars didn’t gloat. He simply put the truck into drive and steered them back onto the road without a word.

  But Jenna couldn’t shake the sensation she was being pulled into a whirlpool, down and down, and her chances for escape were getting slimmer by the second.

  28

  The warren of squat brick buildings sat apart from the rest of the world, separated by chain fencing topped with rolls of barbed wire.

  The Minnesota State Secure Psychiatric Hospital. The word hospital was there, but there was no mistaking the security portion of the program.

  This was a prison.

  The guard at the gatehouse allowed them entry only after examining their identification and recording the information in his log.

  Jenna looked around as Lars maneuvered the truck through the campus and found a parking spot in the visitor’s lot. If she’d expected menacing Gothic architecture and patients wandering the grounds in bathrobes mumbling to themselves, she’d have been disappointed.

  “You have no room to be judgmental about people hearing voices,” Cassie reminded her.

  The buildings were old, built for function rather than atmosphere. The impression left was cold institutionalism. Impersonal and efficient. In its way, just as chilling.

  Lars obviously knew the routine by heart.

  “Leave your things. Everything but your ID. You can’t bring anything into the unit anyway.” He emptied his pockets of everything except his keys and wallet.

  She did as he asked, and they exited the truck together and walked toward the glass doors leading inside.

  They were met by more guards, more questions, and more places to sign their names and state their business. Jenna followed Lars’s lead.

  After what seemed an eternity, they were directed to an empty waiting room that could have graced any other hospital in the country, except for a few subtle differences.

  The chairs and tables were bolted to the floor. There were windows spilling light into the room, but they were narrow and high on the walls, leaving no view to the grounds outside. The room was stifled and still, and Jenna felt sure it was by design.

  “This unit is an improvement over the last,” Lars said by her side. “When Audrey first got here she was in B unit, where most of the inmates are taken. More guards, more locks, more dangerous patients. I had to speak to her through glass.”

  “And now?”

  He shrugged. “Audrey’s not a danger to anyone. Not even herself anymore. And we got old, didn’t we? Me, out there. Her, in here, behind walls.” He glanced up to a security camera mounted near the ceiling. “She’s spent more of her life in this place than out.”

  Jenna considered him. “She’s never . . . ?” She trailed off. The enormity of everything Audrey Jorgensen had never said was hard to wrap her mind around.

  Lars met her gaze. He knew what she was getting at.

  “Nearly twenty years I asked her. Nothing. Then one day, she looked at me and said, ‘Where are my babies, Lars?’” He sighed, a sound full of regret and despair. “She got so wound up, they had to sedate her. I never asked again. There was no point. She doesn’t have any answers to give.”

  Jenna looked down at her hands, picked at the cuticle on her thumb, and wondered if that could possibly be true.

  The rattle of locks being turned drew her attention to a doorway leading into a white tile-lined hallway. Jenna sat up straighter, suddenly nervous.

  Lars rose as a guard entered the room, and Jenna followed suit. The guard was joined by an orderly in scrubs. The orderly was leading a woman in loose gray sweatpants and a matching shirt.

  Audrey Jorgensen shuffled into the room on feet encased in scuffed canvas shoes. Her hands hung limply by her sides. A shock of silver hair fell down her back. Jenna did a quick mental calculation. She couldn’t be more than sixty years old.

  This woman would have passed for eighty.

  It wasn’t just age to blame for her slow and painful gait.

  There was a blankness in Audrey as she stared at the ground, her body moving automatically, if slowly, where she was told to go.

  “Mr. Jorgensen.” The orderly led his charge to a chair across from Jenna and Lars. “Good to see you today, sir.”

  “You too, James. How is she?”

  “Oh, not too bad. Finally kicked the cold that had her feeling so poorly.”

  Lars sat and took his wife’s thin, pale hands into his own.

  James took a seat across the room on a bench, giving them some space and a modicum of privacy. The guard stood armed by the door they’d entered, reminding Jenna that even if the patient had no shackles or handcuffs on her wrists, this was a correctional facility.

  “Audrey, love,” Lars said. “Can you look at me?”

  It was a request, not a demand. For a moment, Jenna thought Audrey hadn’t heard his question.

  But after a pause, she raised her eyes and looked in her husband’s direction. Jenna had doubts she was focused on him, but Audrey spoke.

  “Lars?” Her voice was a high, birdlike whisper.

  “Yes.” He gave her a small smile. His gentleness shouldn’t have been a shock to Jenna. She glanced at him all the same, trying to untangle her thoughts about him treating his wife with such care, as if she were a fine piece of china.

  Frailty and age aside, and regardless of how charmed Lars had been by Audrey as a young woman, this was still the person responsible for his lost children.

  How could he look at her with such love? How could he look at her at all?

  “Audrey,” Lars said, unaware of the uneasy turn of Jenna’s thoughts. “I brought someone to see you. Her name is Jenna.”

  A bit late, it occurred to Jenna to wonder why Lars had brought her here.

  Audrey turned slowly in Jenna’s direction. Despite her discomfort, Jenna raised her eyes to meet those of the older woman.

  For the briefest of moments, Audrey’s gaze remained vague and unfocused, just as Jenna had suspected it would.

  “Mrs. Jorgensen, I’m pleased to meet you,” Jenna said woodenly, the words ringing false in her ears. Politeness alone pried the sentiment from her lips. She needn’t have bothered. Audrey wasn’t interested in her words, polite or otherwise.

  Yet seconds later, Jenna’s senses went on alert when the skin around Audrey’s face tightened, the muscles constricting and pulling her eyes wide. A spark ignited within the depth of the older woman’s gaze, and she pulled back suddenly.

  Instinctively, Jenna did the same.

  Audrey’s mouth opened and shut, and she struggled to form words. Her head swiveled to her husband.

  “Who . . . Lars . . . ?” She sounded strained, higher pitched than even before.

  She was frightened, Jenna realized with a start.

  “Audrey, it’s okay, she’s a friend,” Lars said, trying to soothe his wife, even as confusion showed on his features. “Her name is Jenna.”

  Audrey leaned farther away from them. Her head was turned downward, facing the table, her chin on her chest, but her eyes flicked up to look at Jenna again, then skittered away. She was unable to meet the younger woman’s gaze for more than a few seconds.

  “Audrey, honey. It’s okay,” Lars tried again.

  His wife shook her head back and forth and began to mumble. Jenna couldn’t make out the words, but it was clear her presence had upset Audrey. Jenna simply didn’t understand why.

  “Audrey, what is it? What’s wrong?” Lars started to rise from the table. He glanced toward the orderly, whose attention was on a magazine. He seated himself again.

  “I can’t hear you, love.” He reached across the table that separated them.

  The jumble of sounds tumbling from Audrey’s lips made no sense, partly because the woman’s head was hung low and she seemed to be speaking to the hands she was wringing in her lap, but also because Jenna had begun to back even farther away.

  A new comprehension washed over her. This wasn’t research, from a safe and impersonal distan
ce. This was real.

  Audrey Jorgensen was an inmate at a mental hospital, and she was there for a reason.

  The walls were too close, the air too warm, and suddenly Jenna wanted nothing more than to be far away from this room, with its armed guard and its bolted chairs, and especially this stranger who looked at her with such irrational fear.

  “What? No, Audrey, no,” Lars was saying, having apparently made some sense of his wife’s mad ramblings.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Jenna, an unspoken apology in his face.

  “No,” he said, more firmly. “Look at her again, Audrey. Look closer.”

  The woman shrank away from him, but slowly she lifted her head, and the sheets of silver hair parted to reveal fearful, hopeful eyes that locked on Jenna.

  Her jaw worked, silently at first. Jenna couldn’t turn away.

  “Francie?” Audrey whispered. “My Francie?”

  Horror dawned. Jenna shook her head, desperate to disabuse this woman with the needful eyes of her mistake.

  “No,” Jenna said, more forcefully than she intended. “No,” she said again, quieter, with a glance at the orderly, who’d looked up from his magazine.

  She leaned closer to Audrey, speaking distinctly.

  “My name is Jenna Shaw. I am not your daughter.”

  Audrey’s entire countenance stayed trained on Jenna. Her words had no perceivable effect.

  “Jenna, I’m sorry. I didn’t expect this,” Lars said.

  “Francie,” Audrey pleaded. “Francie, do you hate me?”

  Jenna shook her head again, powerless to stop this delusion that had taken hold like a fever.

  “I’m sorry, Francie, I’m so sorry,” she cried.

  “I’m not Francie!” Jenna hissed.

  “Francie, can you forgive me? It was all my fault, Francie, all my fault.” Audrey was reaching for Jenna across the table, though she wasn’t, not really. She was reaching for the daughter she’d lost.

  Jenna hugged her arms tightly across her middle and backed away from the woman.

  Lars was losing control of the situation, if he’d had any to begin with. He tried to reach his wife while Jenna stood silently and watched from a safer distance.