The Widow's Watcher

by Eliza Maxwell

  34

  Jenna had finally dropped into a deep and haunted darkness where her dreams were nothing but unformed sensations. A creeping sense of cold, of time stretching infinitely outward.

  A touch of chill snaked its way across her cheek and she shivered in her sleep, struggling to find warmth in the desolate landscape of her mind.

  “Francie,” came a whisper, floating through the black.

  Jenna shook her head, denying the sound and the emotions that came with it.

  “No,” she mumbled. “No.”

  More whispers, unintelligible, yet pressing their need on her.

  “Francie.”

  “No!” Jenna broke through the surface of her dreams with a strangled start, gasping for breath, for safety, for sanity.

  Her eyes and her mind struggled to adjust, to hold on to anything real, but the fingers of cold continued to stroke her cheek.

  “Francie.” A whisper in the night. Close. So close.

  The face, pale and desperate, that leaned over her was no dream.

  Jenna’s scream ripped through the silence as she scrambled up and away from the ghostly mirage hovering over her.

  “Shh, sweetheart,” the figure said, moving toward her in a failed attempt to soothe Jenna’s panic. “Shh, it’s Mommy. Mommy’s here, honey.”

  Jenna could only scream again, until feet pounded down the hallway and out of the bedrooms, feet that brought help, that brought reality back with a crash and a bang of slamming doors.

  “Audrey?” came Lars’s sleep-addled voice. “My God, Jenna, are you all right?”

  He made his way to her as Beverly skidded to a halt at the scene that greeted her in the living room.

  “Audrey,” she said when she saw her daughter standing like a lost specter in the middle of the room. “Oh, Audrey.”

  Lars wrapped a blanket around Jenna’s shoulders and looked her in the eye.

  “Did she hurt you?” he asked slowly. “Are you hurt?”

  Jenna shook her head, words still impossible to form. Her heart slammed an erratic rhythm in her chest, and she tried to drink in deep, calming breaths.

  Looking around, Lars saw the front door had been left swinging wide, and the warmth had leached out of the room as winter made itself an uninvited visitor.

  “Christ,” he muttered, moving to shut the door, his face pale and shaken.

  He shut the cold and the falling snow outside where it belonged. He turned, opened his mouth to speak, but the warbling ring of the telephone cut him off. Jenna gave another strangled scream, though she managed to shut it down with a hand to her mouth before it ran wild.

  Each of them stared at the phone with anxious expectation, as if God himself were calling.

  Visibly shaking off his disquiet, Lars reached for the phone before it could intrude with another persistent ring.

  “Hello?” His voice was rough with the dregs of sleep and an edge of shock.

  His eyes flitted up to lock onto his wife, who was standing mute and forlorn next to her mother.

  Audrey may have been flesh and bone rather than the ghost of Jenna’s nightmares, but with the woman’s gray hair flowing madly around her face and a deep, searching confusion in her eyes, Jenna could forgive herself the temporary lapse. Beverly rubbed one hand up and down her daughter’s back. She’d laced her fingers through Audrey’s with the other, her knuckles white.

  The skin on the back of Jenna’s neck prickled at Audrey’s eyes watching her.

  “I’m just going to stop you there,” Lars said into the phone, pulling Jenna’s attention back in his direction. “I’m fully aware my wife is not in your facility, Dr. Taylor, because I’m looking at her.”

  There was a pause.

  “No, there’s no situation. Everyone is safe, and Audrey is calm,” he said with brisk efficiency.

  “Yes, that’ll be fine. Of course.”

  He hung up the phone and ran a hand through his thick, sleep-tousled hair.

  “We’re about to have company,” he told the trio of women. “Audrey, love,” he said with a shake of his head. “You still know how to cause a stir, don’t you?”

  He walked toward his wife and placed a hand upon her cheek. Her eyes met his, this man who’d stood by her side through it all. A stable port in a storm of her own making.

  He pulled her to him in a reverent hug. The melancholy air that had settled upon the cabin was full of regret, of loss, and, undeniably, of love.

  “I’ll put the coffee on,” Beverly said with a sigh.

  35

  Instead of the sun breaking over the horizon, the red and blue flashing lights of police cruisers marked the coming of the day.

  There was a myriad of questions, each group looking to fill in the gaps of what had happened and who was responsible.

  “Mr. Jorgensen, did you have any hand in helping your wife escape from the psychiatric facility? Were you aware of her intentions in advance?” This from the police lieutenant who had led an unresisting Audrey to the back of his official vehicle to transport her where the courts had deemed she belonged.

  There were representatives of the hospital who had their own questions to ask and answer. Dr. Taylor, the director, arrived with hospital security as well as a nurse who was familiar with Audrey and would ride with her on her return trip.

  “We’re reviewing events of the night, and obviously, our priority is to keep both the members of the community and the patients in our charge safe,” he said. “That directive broke down somewhere tonight, and we’ll be vigilant in searching out exactly when and where that breakdown took place. I want to assure you, Mr. Jorgensen . . .”

  On and on it went.

  Lars answered their questions, to the extent he was able, with a resigned directness Jenna couldn’t help but admire, given the circumstances.

  Owen arrived. Whether Lars had found the time to call him or he’d been contacted in some other way, Jenna couldn’t know. He inclined his head in her direction and spoke quietly to his father while his mother was driven away.

  After the crowd dispersed, all with a low-key composure Jenna had come to associate with Midwesterners, she found herself at a loss, left with an antsy need to be doing something. Anything.

  She gathered coffee cups, their contents gone cold, and ran a sink of warm, soapy water. She could have placed them in the dishwasher and been done with it, but then what would she do with her hands?

  Beverly found a dish towel and took a clean cup from Jenna’s hands to dry. The older woman had a few questions of her own.

  “I spoke with the nurse. She told me Audrey was stirred up yesterday evening. I wasn’t aware Lars had taken you to meet her.”

  Jenna glanced over, but Beverly had a guarded look that was impossible to read.

  “I asked her to go,” Lars said from behind the pair. He was standing with his back against the counter, arms crossed, contemplating the cracked tile floor.

  “Dad, I don’t understand you,” Owen said from the opposite side of the counter, where he was leaning with his head in his hands.

  Jenna didn’t understand him either, but kept her opinions to herself. This wasn’t her family. Thoughts of the ashes packed away in the spare room were never far from her mind, if she needed a chilling reminder.

  Ignoring his son’s frustration, Lars went on.

  “It’s hard to imagine. They said she was uncooperative. Disruptive, even. There was some sort of upset in the dining hall. Several patients ended up in the infirmary.”

  “Mom hurt someone?” Owen raised his head and leaned back slightly.

  “No, no,” Lars said. “But she may have been the spark that set the others off. And in the chaos, they lost track of her.”

  “So how did she get out?” Owen asked, voicing the question they were all wondering.

  Lars shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, son. Apparently the orderlies and the guards on the unit thought she was in the infirmary with the others, and vice versa, so it w
as late before they realized she was gone.”

  “Sounds like someone is going to be begging to hold on to their job,” Beverly added.

  “She must have hitchhiked,” Lars went on. “There’s no way she could have made it all this way on her own. Not in this weather.”

  “It’s good she came here, then,” Jenna added mildly. “At least she’s safe now.”

  “What I still don’t understand is why,” Beverly said with surprising force. “Why now? After all these years of nothing?”

  A pit formed in the base of Jenna’s stomach, and she swallowed a heavy lump in her throat.

  “Jenna, I don’t know if you understand the significance of what’s happened,” Lars said.

  She was beginning to.

  “Mom’s never agitated,” Owen continued. “Never. The Thorazine used to make her jittery, but since her medications were changed years ago, she’s been as placid as the lake on a windless day.”

  “Looks like the winds have started blowing,” Beverly said, meeting Lars’s gaze over the cup she was drying in her hand.

  “They said she was talking. None of it makes any sense, but she’s saying things, Bev. Things she’s never said before.” There was a kind of wonder in his tone.

  “What was she saying?” Beverly asked.

  Lars shook his head. “I didn’t understand it. Something about, ‘He wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t he come?’ Or something like that. Nurse Bennington told me Audrey repeated it over and over, asking the nursing staff, the orderlies, the other patients. No one had an answer.”

  Owen went pale and dropped down on the edge of the couch.

  Lars moved to sit next to him.

  “It’s a shock,” he said. He looked toward Jenna and Beverly and said the words no one else could bring themselves to hope, much less say.

  “What if . . . Bev, what if she’s starting to remember?”

  Beverly put a hand to her throat and leaned her back against the counter for support.

  “Twenty-nine years,” she whispered. “She’s never spoken of those missing days. Not once.” She shook her head. When she finally looked up, her eyes bored into Jenna’s, the stranger in the room. “Until you, Mrs. Shaw.”

  Jenna squirmed under the scrutiny.

  “You visited her yesterday, and within hours she’s saying things she’s never said, not to her doctors, not to her family, not to the courts.”

  “I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Audrey’s confused Jenna with Francie,” Lars said. “You heard her.”

  Beverly was looking at Jenna when she spoke again. “I did, and I can see that, I suppose. The dark hair. But I showed Audrey pictures of Francie and Will every time I visited her for years. I never got any response at all.”

  Jenna looked to Lars for help. His face was troubled. All their faces were.

  “What are you trying to say, Beverly?” Lars asked.

  “I think a better question would be, what are you two not saying? Clearly, something happened yesterday to set Audrey off. Maybe that’s all for the good, and maybe not, but I think it’s time somebody tells us the truth.”

  Beverly crossed her arms and waited.

  “She was upset when we left,” Lars admitted. “That’s true.”

  “Upset how?” Owen asked. “Mom doesn’t get upset.”

  Lars blew out a breath. “I don’t know, just—”

  “It was me,” Jenna interrupted. “I did it.”

  They might as well know. Jenna had always tried to teach her children to fess up to what they’d done.

  All eyes turned toward her. There was compassion and empathy in Lars’s face. The others reserved judgment.

  Shame washed over Jenna as she remembered the aggressive, unrelenting words she’d hurled at a woman who was clearly mentally ill. A woman who had no defense, even in her own mind.

  “What exactly did you do, Ms. Shaw?” Beverly prompted.

  “I . . . I told her . . .” Jenna took a deep breath and straightened her spine. “She thought I was her daughter, and instead of comforting her, I told her I couldn’t be Francie, could I? That her daughter was gone, and she had no one to blame but herself.”

  Jenna heard Beverly’s sharp intake of breath.

  “I told her that her kids were never coming back, and it was all her fault.”

  36

  An uneasy sense of foreboding had overtaken the cabin.

  Owen left to get Hannah to school and open the garage. Beverly was gathering her things, readying to make the drive back to her home, a condominium an hour west of Raven.

  “Ever shoveled snow?” Lars asked Jenna with a quirk of an eyebrow.

  “Can’t say I have, but I’m a fast learner.”

  She dressed quickly and pulled on the warm clothing needed to protect her from the elements, grateful for the mundane task.

  They labored side by side until Jenna’s arms burned. She shed one of her layers and went back to work.

  By the time they were done, the driveway along with the steps down to the lake were clear.

  “You do this every time it snows?” Jenna asked, leaning her weight against the dented snow shovel she’d buried in a drift.

  “Unless you want to climb through it to get to your car, you do.”

  She marveled at his matter-of-factness. Was it an innate part of him, or was this what years and the grinding sands of loss did to a person? Shaped them into something smooth and hard and polished.

  With enough time, would he be polished away to nothing? Thoughts of his heart and the conversation he’d shared last night, which included phrases like mini-stroke and matter of time, came back to her. She supposed, yes, he’d one day be polished away to nothing. Nothing but memories.

  They all would, wouldn’t they?

  Then even the memories would fade.

  “Lars, I can’t help you find out what happened to your family.”

  He glanced up and met her eyes, then went back to removing the last of the snow covering the walkway.

  “Because you don’t want to? Or because you don’t think it’ll make a difference?”

  She turned to stare out across the lake that had drawn her here in the first place. “Both, maybe.”

  There was a crunch as Lars pushed his shovel into the snow behind her, then he was by her side, staring at the same view that held her.

  Did he see what she saw? Or did the magnificence lessen with familiarity?

  “If you don’t want to, there’s not a lot I can say to that,” he said. “But don’t fool yourself into thinking it won’t make a difference.”

  She shook her head. “You said yourself, you don’t think I’ll find anything.”

  “There’s more than one way to make a difference, Jenna Shaw.”

  Like pieces to a puzzle she wasn’t aware she’d been searching for, his words clicked into place. Her breath caught at the image forming.

  “You didn’t ask me to do this for you, or your wife and son, or even your missing kids.” She jerked around to face him. “You asked me to do this so I’d have a reason to stay.”

  She didn’t mean stay in Minnesota, and he knew it.

  Lars shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat and continued to stare across the expanse of frozen water.

  He didn’t deny it.

  “It’s your decision, Jenna. But it would make a difference. It would make a difference to me.”

  He said nothing more before he walked away to gather the snow shovels and stow them in the garage.

  She watched him go, horrified at the swell of emotion that came over her.

  At least he wasn’t there to see the tears pooling in her eyes. Jenna didn’t know if she could handle that humiliation on top of everything else threatening to surface.

  She swiped at her eyes, hiding the evidence of how much the old man’s words had affected her.

  “I think he’s gone and fallen in love with you,” Cassie said.

  “Hush,” she m
umbled.

  Jenna could tell the difference between romantic love and a different sort of attachment. Lars’s heart belonged to Audrey, for better or worse, and it always would.

  “You can’t deny he’s come to care for you, Mom,” Cassie said.

  “God knows why,” Jenna murmured, avoiding the natural next step—an honest examination of whether she’d come to care about the old bastard in return.

  “Regardless of his reasons, there’s one question you can’t avoid.”

  Jenna didn’t have to wait long for her daughter to put into words what she didn’t want to face.

  “What’s it going to do to him when you decide to leave? For good?”

  Jenna’s forehead creased as she stared at the ice that had crept farther across the lake, meeting in the middle to form what looked to be an impenetrable barrier.

  “Don’t you think he’s been through enough?”

  Jenna had no answer for that.

  37

  The ride was just as bumpy as ever when Lars drove the two of them into Raven.

  They’d said goodbye to Beverly. Jenna had expected an icy farewell, given the woman’s reaction to what Jenna had done to her daughter, so the hug Beverly pulled her into had taken her off guard. Jenna’s arms hung stiffly at her sides until she managed to bring them up to pat the woman gingerly on the back.

  “Whatever the reason, Jenna,” Beverly said into her ear, “this might be a good thing.”

  There were calls to make and return to both the hospital and the police station. Audrey had made it safely back into the custody of the psychiatric facility, but Lars frowned at the news that she was still distressed and acting strange. The hospital staff had sedated her.

  “There are bound to be repercussions for this business,” he mused as he drove.

  “What can they do?” Jenna asked. “She’s already locked away.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But there are units like the one she’s in, and then there are others. I hope they don’t try and say she’s dangerous now.”

  He had plenty on his mind, and Jenna didn’t want to add to his burdens, but an idea was floating around she couldn’t put to rest.