by Keary Taylor
“I already tried,” Alex said. “It just went straight to her voicemail.”
He was right; that was all I got.
“Why?” I stammered. “I don’t… Why would she go after Cole? She knows what he’s capable of. He branded her too, hundreds of times. Why would she go to him?”
I looked up at Alex and was surprised to see that he looked… almost angry. His jaw was clenched tightly and his fists were balled up. It took me a moment to understand his reaction. Alex had been pulled back into the afterlife and tortured for Cole’s location. He hadn’t known but apparently Emily did or had found it out.
“How’d she find him?” I said softly. “Where is he?”
Alex didn’t say anything, just shook his head, his lips pursed in a thin line.
Neither of us said much else the rest of the night. I could tell Alex was furious, and while I couldn’t blame him for feeling angry in general, I didn’t exactly think it should be directed at Emily. Maybe that was because I too had known where Cole was for a while.
My last conversation with Emily haunted me as I recalled it. Emily was jealous of what Alex and I had. She wanted someone to love her the way she thought only an angel could love someone. And so she had gone and found the only other angel she knew of.
I sent Alex out that night, claiming to want some ice cream. As soon as he was out of the house I went into my closet and unburied the last letter Cole had left for me.
I took a deep breath as I sat on my bed with it in my hands. How many days had it been that I’d been too afraid to open it?
My hands wanted to shake as I tore the envelope open and pulled the single sheet of paper out. It took every ounce of strength I had to unfold the page.
Good-bye, Jessica. Eventually we all have to face our demons. I’ve gone to face mine. Perhaps someday I can help you face yours.
X
I had never felt so emotionally exhausted as I climbed into bed that night. My emotions had been pulled in too many directions. First with being angry with Alex, being terrified of what Alex might not be telling me, and the revelation of Cole and Emily was just too much. And what was Cole’s letter supposed to mean?
I should have known better than to think that sleep might bring some sort of relief for me.
I had another nightmare of Cole that night. This one however was distinctly different from the others. This time everything was modern, the clothing, the music that played in the background, the way people talked. The biggest, most horrifying difference however was that this time I knew the woman Cole strangled in the end. It was Emily.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JESSICA
Cole’s house looked exactly the same as it did when I had been there last. The glass was still broken in the back door where Alex had punched it out in order to get in. There was evidence of water damage from the rain getting in but other than that, the front area looked the same. I wondered if Cole had even come in it when he had come back to stalk me.
There were no good memories attached to this house. I had been held a dying captive here for over a week. I had nearly killed myself within these walls, twice.
This house was about the last place on earth I wanted to go back to, but I had to do this. I knew I had to find Cole, now, and I didn’t know where else to start looking for clues as to where he might have gone. Emily obviously wasn’t going to answer her phone, unaware of what might possibly be looming in her future. I had to find something to point me in the right direction. I didn’t know how much time I had, if any. If the nightmares I had been having were real, Emily could already be dead.
I wandered down the hall to my left. The first door I tried was a bathroom, completely empty of anything, no soap, shampoo, or even toilet paper. The second door revealed a bedroom, also empty of absolutely anything other than a double sized bed, made up with stark white sheets, pillowcases, and comforter. I knew what was going to be behind door number three before I even opened it. I had seen into it once before, all part of a terrifying chain of events.
I knew what was going to be in the room but I wasn’t prepared for the state it was going to be in. Books had been pulled off their shelves, files emptied and dumped on the floor, CD cases lying open and cracked. The place had been ransacked. Someone else had been here before I had and I knew it wasn’t Cole who had done this.
It seemed that if there was going to be any clue as to where Cole might have ran to, it would be in this room. Apparently someone else had thought that as well. There was only one other person who would have tried to find Cole. Emily.
Not knowing exactly what I was looking for, I started sifting through the mess. I started by picking up the CD cases. I didn’t see anything that might give me any clues. I didn’t recognize any of the band names, I wasn’t into screamer rock. I next started into the books, quickly flipping through them, looking for anything that might help me. Cole had quite a collection of classics, written from the time period he had lived in. He also possessed volumes of poetry from people I had never heard of. I wondered why he had bothered getting them. He had only been back in the world of the living for a few months.
I couldn’t make any sense of most of the documents I sorted through. Some looked legal like they were possibly closing documents on this house, his shiny black sports car, a house full of furniture. Nothing looked helpful as I cleared page after page from the floor.
A small feeling of hope surged in my veins when I saw the ancient looking leather bound book half buried on the desk. I had seen it before, just briefly. Cole had been pouring over it the day I had seen his brand and realized his true identity. My hands shook and my insides quivered as I ran my hand over its worn and cracked surface.
Some sort of crest had been tooled into its cover and I could barely make out the word at the top. Emerson.
I opened the cover and began thumbing through its pages. It was an extensive family tree, filled with names, dates, and places. I finally found Cole’s name, written below Marcus Emerson and Annabell Florence’s. Cole had apparently been an only child. I felt mixed emotions that the line ended there, knowing that Cole’s blood had in fact been carried on.
The following pages contained maps, drawings of property boundaries, leases of real estate and a lot of other information I had to hope would lead me to where I was now sure Cole would be.
It seemed so clear and simple where Cole had gone. Home. He’d gone to face his demons.
I just couldn’t understand where any of these places were supposed to be. The entire Emerson legacy was bound on paper before me but I had no idea where any of it was.
I was about to close the book when I noticed that there was still more. In the final few pages there was yet another family tree, written in ink that looked much newer and fresher than the rest of it all. The name at the very beginning took me a moment to process and understand who it must have been.
William Anthony.
Cole’s illegitimate son.
I still didn’t know Cole’s lover’s first name but I now knew her last.
There were no places written with these names, but dates spread down through seven generations. I didn’t recognize any of the names but at the bottom, when the dates reached years the final people could have still been alive, Cole had penned in
No connection.
I didn’t understand what it meant but it didn’t matter. I closed the book and put it under my arm. I would take it home and Alex would help me figure out where the Emerson estate was. He had traveled around the world; perhaps he would see something that would otherwise never mean anything to me.
I don’t know why I did it. I had no reason to and I regretted it the second after my feet met flat ground.
I walked with shaking knees down the stairs, descending into the shadowy second floor. As I did, dark memories surfaced, feelings I didn’t want to remember flooded my mind.
The bottom floor was smaller than the rest of the house. To my left at the bottom of the stairs was a small th
eater room, to my right was a bathroom. Straight in front of me was a windowless bedroom.
I flipped the light on in the bedroom and froze in the doorway.
It looked exactly the same as when I had run out of the room six or so months before. The sheetrock was buckled in all over the room. I winced as I recalled the way Cole had thrown Alex’s body against the walls. The sound of all the breaks echoed in my brain. Spatters of blood stained the light colored carpet everywhere. There was a pool of it where it had drained out of Alex’s nose after he hadn’t been able to move.
One break in the sheetrock held my eyes locked. It was the smallest one but the most significant. Alex told Cole that he had made a deal, his life for mine. As Cole realized he could never have me, he had slammed Alex’s head against the wall.
I recalled seeing how Cole’s knuckles turned white as he squeezed Alex’s neck.
And then the snap as he broke Alex’s neck. And killed him.
I squeezed my eyes closed, holding my hands over my stomach. Why had I come here?
When I opened my eyes again, something else caught my eye. Lying on the ground, among the spatters and smears of blood was the gleaming gun I had tried to turn on myself.
That was all it took to send me running back up the steps.
I took a dozen gasping breaths as I stood back in the living room. My head wouldn’t stop spinning for a few minutes.
It seemed unnecessary, but I decided to check the other rooms on the main floor. I tried to keep myself from throwing up as I walked down the other hall. The first door was just a storage closet containing only towels. The second door opened to what was supposed to be the master bedroom.
It shouldn’t have creeped me out as much as it did, to be in Cole’s bedroom. Angels don’t sleep so the fact that there was a perfectly made bed in the room should have looked like anything else in Cole’s home. It was probably one of the most unused pieces of furniture in the house. It still sent a slight shiver down my back to look at it.
There wasn’t much in the room. The bed, a dresser, most of the contents piled on the floor in front of it, a nightstand Emily seemed to have gone through as well. There was a large walk-in closet off the room, though it was mostly empty. The bathroom that was attached was mostly empty as well.
I was about to leave when a painting on the wall caught my eye. It was a simple seascape scene but it seemed oddly out of place for the frame it was in. The painting seemed like a cheap, mass reproduction, something anyone could buy for twenty dollars or less. The frame it was in, however, looked ancient and carved in intricate detail. It was obvious it had been done by hand and there were no repeat patterns. Every surface of it was different on all sides, yet blending perfectly with itself. It looked expensive as well, a tarnished gold look. As I touched a tentative finger to it I was pretty sure it was gold leafed.
My fingers accidently brushed the paper of the painting, surprisingly ruffling it. I then realized that the picture wasn’t mounted to the frame right, it appeared to only be attached at the top.
With curiosity, I lifted the paper to see what was hidden underneath. Half a second later, I wished I hadn’t.
My mind couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing at first. I was sure I would find another painting behind the false one, but at first glance I thought it must have been a mirror. Except the elegant twist wasn’t the way I had done my hair this morning, the intricate and detailed dress exposing my shoulders wasn’t the gray t-shirt I had put on earlier.
The woman in the mirror could have been my sister, no, my twin, if not a painting of myself in different clothes and a fancy hairdo. My skin crawled and the scar on the back of my neck prickled.
I searched the woman’s face and wasn’t sure if I was relieved or not when I found the subtle differences. Her eyes were much more green than my hazel, her bottom lip fuller than my own, her nose slightly more narrow. The woman in the painting wasn’t me, but like I said, she could have been my twin.
Only after the mix of horror and bewilderment started to ebb somewhat did I notice the words that had been painted in the corner.
My Dearest
It landed on me like a pile of bricks. This was the woman from the letters. The woman he had had an affair with, created a child with, and the woman he could never have.
And she looked almost exactly like me.
X
We were both getting frustrated in trying to figure out where Cole’s hometown was supposed to be. The documents were difficult to decipher and we had nearly exhausted all our resources except for having to pay a professional to take a look at it. We weren’t against that, we just didn’t know where to start.
The names that were attached to land parcels weren’t town’s as far as we could tell. They were names of family’s who had owned them, or other names that had no meaning to us. And we couldn’t decipher a location from the hand drawn maps.
I had stayed up all night with Alex, poring over the book. I felt mentally exhausted and I could tell it was getting to Alex that we hadn’t figured it out yet. I understood his drive to solve the mystery. He had been tortured for Cole’s location. In some way, I think we were both afraid he might get sucked back into the afterlife and be terrorized again.
I was almost glad when Amber hauled me into her bedroom to work on wedding plans. I needed a break.
“You know you have to call and tell mom and dad sometime,” I said as I flipped through the third bridal magazine.
“Ugh,” Amber groaned. “I know. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“No you won’t,” I half teased, yet knowing it was true.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
We sat on Amber’s bed, flipping through magazines that were scattered across it. I was being forced into the quest of finding the perfect wedding dress.
“Well you’re going to have to call dad if you expect him to pay for a wedding,” I said as I tossed the magazine aside and rolled onto my stomach. I may have been giving Amber a hard time about this, but I understood why she hadn’t called. I had run away from my parents myself.
Amber didn’t say anything as she looked intently at something on the page.
“So have you picked a date yet?” I asked as I grabbed Amber’s left hand, again inspecting the ring on her finger. Rod must have come from some money like Alex had; the ring was stunning with a wide band and probably a dozen diamonds on it. I wouldn’t say it out loud but I was jealous, even if that jealousy wasn’t driving me crazy anymore. Sal’s reasoning had fixed that. Who would have guessed it would be Sal who would finally talk reason into me?
“November fifth,” she said as she turned the page.
“Wow, that’s kind of fast,” I said in surprise. “Only two and a half months away.”
“Neither of us sees any reason to wait,” she said as she set it down and looked me in the eye as I released her hand. “Even November seems forever away,” she said wistfully.
“Are you sure you’re ready to be Mrs. Amber Gepper?” I asked in a teasing tone.
“Yes!” Amber practically squealed as she scrunched up her nose, a gigantic smile plastered across her face.
I could only smile in return.
Amber gave a sigh before checking her phone for the fifth time in the last five minutes, looking for a text from Rod who was supposed to be getting off any minute. “So what about you and Alex? You two already live together. And don’t try and tell me that you don’t sleep in the same bed, I know you do.”
“Yes we do, but it’s not like that,” I sighed as I shifted my position on the bed. “And actually, Alex doesn’t sleep. Things are…” I hesitated, not knowing how to answer. “Complicated I guess. You know what Alex is. We just don’t know what is going to happen. I told him I don’t care but he’s not willing to risk that something might happen to him.”
Amber didn’t say anything for a minute as she just looked in my face and took my hand. For some reason, I suspected she had al
ready known the answer to her question before she had even asked it. “Everything will work out. It has to. You and Alex are perfect for each other. I keep telling you that. And just look at what you two have been through together. You have to finish the fairy tale.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at this and Amber joined me. I didn’t think that fairy tale was the right term. It all seemed like a nightmare with a few blissful chapters inserted into it.
Even though I wanted to be helping Alex figure out where Cole had gone to, I knew I needed to spend some time with my sister. Getting married was a big deal. And the fact that Amber had asked me to be her maid of honor made it an even bigger one. We had a lot of lost years to make up for.
Within an hour or two of being hauled into her room, Amber and I had chosen her colors and had a pretty good idea of the type of venue she wanted to have the wedding at and the reception at. She still didn’t have any idea what kind of a dress she wanted though. Maybe the fact that Alex and I had no wedding in the foreseeable future wasn’t such a bad thing. This was going to be a lot of work and even more money.
It was well past three before I got out of Amber’s room and back out to find Alex. He was seated at the dining table, his laptop set in front of him, and had just set down his credit card and clicked on something.
“Sorry,” I said as I walked to his side, resting one hand on his shoulder. “Um… I, Amber,” I stumbled through my words.
“No, its fine,” he said as he placed a hand over mine, his eyes still on the screen as he continued working. “This is important. You should be helping her.”
“Any more luck?” I asked as I looked at what he had on the screen. It looked like a confirmation page for airline tickets.
Alex clicked over to another page which brought up a map. “I think I finally figured it out. I did some more research online and I’m about ninety-five percent positive that I’ve found it. It used to be called by something else but a lot can change over a few hundred years. This is it though,” he said as he indicated the map.