by Lee Alan
“I will,” she replied, with all her heart.
“Corey and Anna, I now invite you to join hands and make your vows in the presence of God and his people.”
She took his hand once again. It felt cold, though, and the tremble seemed far more pronounced than a second before.
“Are you okay?” she mouthed. His nod barely registered.
After the priest read out the vows, Corey followed haltingly:
“I, Corey Young, take you, Anna Price…” he hesitated, “to be my wife; to have and to hold from this day forward; for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health; to love and to cherish til death,” he paused again, swaying on his feet “do us part.” A murmur went up from the crowd as his discomfort became visible to all.
“Would you like to take a break, Mr. Young?” the clergyman asked, clearly concerned.
“No.”
The kind–faced man turned to Anna in a gesture seeming to ask her agreement. Anna nodded hesitantly, unsure. Upon the sight of her groom’s pasty–white complexion, she repeated her vows with as much meaning as her growing alarm would allow. They were so close—so very close.
“Corey and Anna will now exchange rings as a symbol of their love for each other,” prompted the priest.
With all the slow care of a man moving a mountain, Corey reached into his pocket. Anna retrieved her own band of gold—the one she’d kept since the death of her father. It lay in a specially–made concealed pocket in her dress.
On his first attempt, Corey clutched at her fingers before seeming to steady himself. With huge effort, he slid the ring previously belonging to his mother onto her slender digit. “Anna, I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage. With my body, I honor you. All that I am, I give to you, and all that I have, I share with you within the love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” he repeated after the priest, his words a whisper.
As Anna reached down, lifted his arm, and then placed her own ring on his finger, a smudge of red on the underside of his shirt cuff caught her eye. She repeated her own vows, transfixed by the ominous stain. Her mind swam, torn between growing dread and the need to complete the act that meant so much to them both.
“In the presence of God, and before this congregation, Corey and Anna have given their consent and made their marriage vows to each other.”
She looked across at Corey’s right hand and her heart stopped. A single line of blood ran down the length of his wedding finger, pooled around the newly–placed band, and dripped off the end and onto the bright, white marble below. Anna put a hand over her mouth in shock. Even now, she didn’t dare break the final moment of the ceremony—something about his determination forbade it.
“They have declared their marriage by the joining of hands and by the giving and receiving of rings. I, therefore, proclaim that they are husband and wife.”
He fell with an audible thud against the hard floor, even as the priest spoke the last word. Gasps rang out amongst the guests, and it took Anna a second to register the dark red stain revealed when the flap on his jacket opened. She’d only seen such a sight twice before in her life.
“Corey!” she screamed, falling beside him.
Dimly, Anna became aware of thudding footsteps reaching their side. She looked up to see two paramedics racing to reach them with Matt beside them. “Let us help him, sweetheart,” said a pony–tailed medic kneeling beside Anna. She opened his jacket further to reveal the extent of his injury.
“She attacked him before the ceremony,” Matt said, laying a restraining hand on Anna’s shoulder.
“What?”
“He insisted we go through with it, Anna. I’m so sorry—I should have made him…”
Anna didn’t hear, though. She stared down into a faltering gaze, willing the return of the bright, keen look that she’d come to love. “I’m not going to lose you, do you hear me?” she wept. Corey’s gaze dimmed. “No! Don’t you dare!” she yelled with a passion welling from her soul. She laid his head on the marble floor before reaching under her dress to retrieve the wedding gift she’d been saving under her garter. “Do you see, Corey Young? Do you see that I need you?” She lifted the pregnancy kit toward him, the blue line challenging his growing stillness.
Anna thought she saw a flicker of recognition.
Epilogue
Detective Raymond let out an explosive breath and then replaced the receiver after hearing the update from the Clear Water estate security manager. It seemed the British doctors were still fighting to save the life of Corey Young.
Raymond couldn’t help but feel a sliver of sympathy for the security manager. The guy on the other end of the line had sounded hoarse with exhaustion and concern. To lose your job was one thing, but losing the life of the person you’d been sworn to protect must be a bitter prospect to face. He pinched the bridge of his nose with thumb and fore finger, while sending up a silent prayer that he’d at least given the fella a fighting chance. Something bugged him though: why Corey and not Anna? Surely, Eckerman would have used his accomplice to murder Anna Price rather than her fiancé?
Maybe the sicko still thinks they can get back together? He speculated. But that wouldn’t explain why Claire would target Corey Young rather than the person she must surely see as her love rival.
“I hate this fucking job,” he muttered, suspecting that his brush with the big C had more to do with the stress caused by this kind of shit, rather than the cigs.
He pushed his wheeled office chair across the length of his work desk, which often doubled as a place to lay his head during all nighters, such as this.
After glancing around to check that he was alone, Raymond reached into the third drawer down, and felt toward the back, until his hand settled on the familiar shape of the whiskey bottle. He kept the secret treat there for occasions just like this, when life demanded liquor. Realizing that he didn’t have a shot glass to hand, he instead finished off the last dregs of stone cold coffee in his stained white mug, before pouring the amber liquid into it. He took a long swig of the concoction, still tinged by the taste of its former contents, and then saluted the security camera at the end of the office. “I’m on my time now you sons of bitches. If I want a god damn drink, I will.” He said to the blind mechanical eye that he knew to be broken. Like most things round here, it’d stopped working some time ago.
He logged onto his PC, then completed a web search for the same reports that had triggered his recognition of Claire in the wedding picture. After a few moments he’d found the unsettling story and accompanying image once again.
The last time he’d seen the article was on the cover of the Hays tribune, while spending several days in Kansas at the home of his mother. She’d become frail of late and had taken a nasty fall in the kitchen, while cooking breakfast pancakes for his even frailer father. The precinct captain had allowed him a whole two days compassionate leave.
Raymond felt surprised by the same feelings of pity that came to him, on seeing Claire and the kid again. Just as he remembered, she looked wide eyed and terrified by the full force of the state gathered to rescue them, the kid even more so.
The paps had snapped them emerging from a white washed farm house, dressed like they were attending church circa 1840, between two uniformed officers. It struck him that the home looked like the safe kind you saw on a T.V series like the Waltons. An old time place, owned by the kind of folks who’d leave the door unlocked at night and where kids spoke respectfully to their elders. In reality, it’d been a house of horrors.
Tom Pike, Claire’s father, had decided that he alone was the mouth piece of the almighty after being shown the light by a talking tree, no less. What followed had been a tale of one mans descent into madness, while dragging his own family with him.
Over a six month period, he seemed to have converted a handful of locals. If the neighbor statements had been anything to go by, his new disciples’ mental health issues were almost as serious as his own. After whipping
them all in to a holy frenzy, both metaphorically and literally, he’d declared that the lord in his infinite wisdom had decided that the women in the group should become his wives. Including his own biological daughters.
The Pike farm was a remote place, where people ‘kept themselves to themselves,’ abusive puke or no. The sorry affair had gone on for three years before one of Claire’s sisters had run away and blew the whistle. In addition to the news clippings, Raymond had checked the police report into the raid on the house.
After receiving a tip from a local, like any good, all seeing messiah would, the father hung himself in the barn, before the cops had a chance to get him. The mother had slit her own throat under his swinging corpse. It was telling that some of the group had stayed at the property, after the deaths, for almost two days before the law arrived on scene. Clearly, not all of them had appreciated their liberation.
He’d found the interview tapes with Claire and the boy. It was clear the kid knew nothing of just how fucked up his family had become, and was mercifully oblivious to the full wickedness of his grandfather. Claire though, had refused to co–operate for the most part. But he’d found one telling response to the question: “How do you feel about your sister?” The chilling transcript of her answer gave him the closest he would get to a motive: “We are of eve—of the rib. Adam guides us. Adam—who begot Cain and begot Able. My sister will come back to the fold. She will reject Satan and embrace the lord and his seed once more.”
Maybe she saw Eckerman as a replacement for her father?
Raymond finished off the glass, feeling the burning liquid run down his throat. The article, dated a year ago, concluded that the escaped sister had been admitted into a private clinic. This left him curious to know who funded the treatment. The fate of Claire and the boy since the incident, however, was uncertain.
The paper skirted around the subject of incest, seeming to err on the side of caution, by saying that the parentage of the boy in the photo was ‘unclear.’ But the inference was clear.
Raymond could only imagine the kind of confusion experienced by the vulnerable duo after being thrust back into the world. To go from a freakish vision of Victorian life, to the land of 24/7 porn and all you can eat pizza, must have been a huge shock. And he’d seen first–hand what passed for social care these days: food stamps and a bag of sugar put in your kids School milk allowance.
No, despite the wicked nature of her actions, his pity remained. Pity for a woman who’d never been taught to respect herself, and let down by a society that valued butt cheek implants over the wellbeing of each other. It all amounted to a perfect breeding ground for predators like Eckerman to find a damaged, deluded, fool to exploit.
Raymond poured himself another.
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