Out of the Ashes

by Emilie Richards

  "Do you remember her real name, Harry? Not her pseudonym?"

  Harry wrinkled his brow. "Can't say I do. But I think it was Dana something. That's what the D was for. Dana Cahill. That was it. Her husband was Charles Cahill. Cahil's a big name in America. Ever heard of him?"

  Chapter 7

  MATTHEW TOOK THREE nights to finish Before I Sleep. During the days in between, he brooded as he worked. He no longer had any doubts that Alexis had written the book. Everything fit. He could have satisfied any questions by driving to Kingscote to look through back issues of the news magazines for a picture of D. A. Meredith, but since he was already certain, he didn't bother.

  Alexis had written the book. More important, as he read each chapter, delving deeper into the twisted psyche of the heroine's husband, he knew she had lived it.

  She had lived with Charles Cahill, a man much like Terrence Garrick of Before I Sleep, and she was running from him now.

  Running because she didn't want her own final chapter to mirror the novel's.

  On the third night, when the last page had been read, he hurled the book at his bedroom wall. He'd had questions, and now he had answers. He wished, fervently, that the answers had been different.

  The clock in his hallway chimed once, then was silent. He'd been up late for three nights, but there was no question whether he'd get to sleep that night. He wouldn't. His mind was churning with thoughts of Cynthia Garrick of Before I Sleep, and of Alexis Whitham.

  He had an urgent need to check her safety. He had been patrolling her property more frequently since beginning the book, but he hadn't seen her. He had seen the light in her study, seen that her automobile was parked at slightly different angles each day, seen that Jody had left a plate of scraps for the wallabies she was training to come up on the porch. He knew Alexis and Jody were all right—so far. He wasn't sure they would remain so.

  He rose from bed and pulled on his trousers and an old rugby shirt. In his haste to leave he slipped on loafers without any socks as he searched for the keys to his ute. At the door he almost tripped over the book. It was lying open, its white pages reflecting the light from his bedside lamp. He had the sudden vision of a childhood religious crusade he had once been forced to attend with his grandparents. The preacher, a powerful man with a lion's mane and eyes that shot fire, had stood at the front of the wool-shed-turned-church and held the Bible aloft. It had fallen open, and its pages, too, had reflected the light.

  "Judgment," the man had screamed. "Judgment!"

  Matthew kicked the book to one side and ran out the door.

  * * *

  ALEXIS PULLED RON Bartow's letter from its envelope. She had memorized the contents, but she wanted to read it again anyway, hoping it would help her sleep.

  She was still too keyed up to turn off the light and close her eyes. "Let it be true," she whispered into the silent bedroom. "Please God, let it be true!"

  If it were true, then she could begin to hope again. If it were true, she could begin to live again.

  "’Charles is seeing a woman, Sandra Oliver, of the Ann Arbor Olivers. There are rumors of an engagement announcement in the not too distant future. There are also rumors that he may be in line for a job at the very top of the corporation.' "She read the words out loud like an ancient chant to ward off evil. "'And if everything our investigator tells us is true, it looks like he's stopped searching for you, Dana. He can't chance anything now. He has too much to lose.'"

  Too much to lose! She was the one who had lost everything. Yet the words still thrilled her, even as the use of her real name, which now seemed to belong to a stranger, brought her past back too vividly.

  She thought about the turn of events in Charles's life. She felt deepest regret for Sandra Oliver, but Sandra had been warned. Before I Sleep had warned the world. Now Alexis had her own life to struggle with.

  She thought of what a dear, faithful friend Ron had been through the nightmare of the last years. From the beginning he had believed her stories of Charles's abuse when no one else had or had wanted to.

  Ron had been rising through the ranks of one of Detroit's most prestigious law firms when Alexis had been introduced to him at a cocktail party. She had liked him right away, liked the warmth in his eyes, the quiet way he listened, the loving way he treated his wife.

  And she had liked the fact that his firm was prestigious, because she believed that only someone well-established and respected could help her get what she most desired: a divorce from Charles.

  Looking back years later, she and Ron had pondered how they could have been so naive. The firm had terminated Ron without warning when he'd agreed to represent Alexis in her divorce attempt. The following night he had been stabbed and left for dead in his suburban garage. His wallet with less than four dollars had been taken, but his expensive gold pocket watch and a diamond studded wedding ring had been passed over.

  Alexis had withdrawn her suit, not only because of the harm done to Ron, but because that same night Charles showed her evidence that he'd had fabricated. The evidence suggested that she had both cheated on her husband and abused her infant daughter. He would use the evidence, he informed her, to get custody of Jody.

  There had been no one to go to for advice. Ron had almost died because he had befriended her. She had no other close friends, humiliated that they might discover the truth about the abuse she suffered. Her family more than approved of her marriage; they engineered it. Charles Cahill was the perfect match for dear Dana. His feet were firmly on the ground, while her head was somewhere in the clouds. His bloodlines were impeccable, his education properly Ivy League, and his family's wealth rivaled their own.

  Any stories Alexis tried to tell her family were branded flights of fantasy. She had always been the odd duck, the child who was more at home in her imagination than the real world. When Alexis tried to confront her mother with the truth, her mother had told her to stop complaining and start giving dear Charles what he needed.

  If her mother had listened, she would have known that Alexis had been giving Charles what he needed since the first day of her marriage: a target for a soul so warped that he believed any of his impulses deserved to be acted upon.

  Ron had recovered, slowly, painfully. As he recovered, he lay in bed developing strategies to help Alexis. He started his own law firm, accepting cases sent his way by attorney friends who knew he'd been victimized. He built the firm steadily until it was successful enough to shield him. Then he contacted Alexis through friends to tell her that he would help if she wanted to try again.

  Jody was four by then, a chubby cherub who had seen little of her father and little of his wrath. But Alexis had watched Charles on the few occasions that he had been in Jody's company. She had seen signs that terrified her. The vein throbbing in his neck if Jody dared to interrupt him, the icy gleam in his eyes if she dared to reach out to him. On the day of her fourth birthday party, Alexis had found bruises on Jody's arms after Charles had carried her to her room for spilling cake crumbs. Alexis had known then that she had to try again. Somehow she had to try.

  Ron's plan of action was uncomplicated and effective. He hired detectives and paid handsomely for the testimony of servants who refused to testify for any other reason. His most inventive strategy was to take statements from the so-called witnesses that Charles had threatened to use against Alexis the first time around. He got two of the witnesses to admit that their statements were made under duress and that the information in them wasn't true. In every way he bested Charles at his own game.

  The day Ron was ready to spring the trap, Alexis left the Cahill estate to take Jody for a walk. She never returned. By Ron's arrangement, she was secreted in a hotel in the city with a twenty-four-hour-a-day bodyguard, psychological twin to the one who was escorting Ron himself. Negotiations took one week. In the end Charles gave Alexis what she wanted: a divorce and total custody of Jody. In return she gave her word that she would never reveal the circumstances of the divorce to anyon
e. There was little reason for Charles to doubt that she would honor her promise. Alexis knew that all the Ron Bartows in the world couldn't stop Charles's wrath if she didn't.

  The divorce and all the evidence that had secured it cost Alexis most of the small fortune she had inherited from her Grandmother Whitham. But her escape had been worth any price. She asked for no money for herself or Jody in the divorce settlement. She left her marriage with only the possessions and cash she had brought to it. She decided to stay in the Detroit area because Ron and the information he had secured offered her protection there. Anywhere else she would be friendless and alone if Charles set out to get revenge. She settled in a small house in Oak Park, miles from exclusive Grosse Pointe, where she had lived with Charles, and began to pull together the shattered fragments of her life.

  The nightmares of Charles's abuse still haunted her, however. She tried talking to a counselor, but found herself unable to verbalize the terrors she had endured. She tried making new friends, taking a part-time job during Jody's hours at preschool, redecorating the little house. Despite everything, she knew she was fast sinking into a deep depression.

  Ron had come to the rescue once more. He had suggested that Alexis begin a journal. If she couldn't talk about what had happened, then she could write about it. She was the only one who ever had to know what was in those pages. She was free to reveal everything.

  The idea tugged at her until one day she took out her college typewriter and began. She discovered right away that putting down what had happened to her was as impossible as talking about it. But she also discovered that if she wrote her story as if it had happened to someone else, the words poured out. She changed names and facts. She became Cynthia Garrick; Charles became Terrence. The automobile industry became the shipping industry; Michigan became New York. She embroidered on some of Ron's information. During Ron's investigation Charles had been seen with a well-known Detroit crime boss. Ron had also turned up rumors of a corporate upheaval masterminded by Charles himself. She remembered bits and pieces of Charles's conversations, unexplained phone calls, the gossip of others. She wrote the story as if Terrence Garrick had Mafia connections; she used her imagination and intuition to weave together a picture of a man so evil that he seemed driven by the devil. And to balance the horror, the pathos, she invented a lover for Cynthia, a man who was the antithesis of Terrence, a man who was everything kind and courageous.

  The novel took her a year to write. Once begun, it motivated every waking hour. Before I Sleep brought her back to life, and she found that life was truly where she wanted to be.

  The novel would have remained no more than her personal therapy if she hadn't mentioned it to a friend. Nancy Carter had been a roommate during Alexis's years at Sarah Lawrence. The friendship had waned, as all her friendships had, during the years of her marriage. But it had been renewed one day when Alexis took Jody to New York for a short holiday after the book was completed. On a whim she had called Nancy, and they had met for lunch while Jody stayed at the hotel with a babysitter.

  Nancy had recently been made an editor at a prestigious publishing house, Abercrombie Press, and the two women talked about her job until they sipped their after lunch coffee. "You should write a novel," Nancy had told Alexis then. "You were always better with words than anyone I knew. You'd be a pleasure to edit."

  Alexis had smiled and asked Nancy if she could keep a secret. Then she had told her about the manuscript locked in a Detroit safe-deposit box. "Someday, maybe I'll write something you can print," she said, her mind already busy searching for a new idea, one that could be published.

  But Nancy hadn't been willing to let her get away so easily. "Let me read the one you've written," she'd said. "Maybe I can save you any mistakes on your next one. I'll be honest with you. We're friends."

  Back in Detroit, Alexis thought about Nancy's offer. The book could never be published, but it was, after all, not really her life story. She wasn't breaking the promise that had secured her divorce. Nancy was the soul of discretion. She understood why the book could never be printed. And somehow the idea of just one other person reading it, one other person understanding what she had gone through, was too much of a lure to refuse.

  Alexis copied the manuscript and sent it to New York. Then she forced herself to forget about it, knowing just how busy an editor's life is. She was on Nancy's personal slush pile, and she knew it would be months before the manuscript was returned.

  Nancy called in five days. She was sending tickets to New York by courier for Alexis and Jody. She already had a nanny lined up for the three days Alexis would be there, and lunch with her senior editor for the first day Alexis arrived. She begged for permission to show him the book and promised that he would respect Alexis's wish for silence, if she still wanted it after they'd had a chance to talk.

  Alexis had lived for years in terror and humiliation. Only the book had helped lift her from the morass her life had become. Now the respect and admiration in Nancy's voice were another lure she couldn't refuse.

  She and Jody made the trip. The events that followed were like a snowball picking up momentum until it became an avalanche. Abercrombie Press offered her an unheard of advance on the hardcover rights to her story. Paperback rights and possible movie or miniseries options were almost guaranteed to bring it up above the million dollar mark. More important, they promised that her real name would never be disclosed. No one would be able to trace the book to her. She would be safe and financially secure for life.

  Alexis had discussed the proposal thoroughly with Ron before she'd said yes. In the end he'd been encouraging. The book was different enough from reality that even those who suspected that Terrence Garrick was Charles Cahill would never be sure. And if Charles came after her, threatening her life, Abercrombie Press would leak her identity. That was certainly a threat that would stop him. His hands would be tied, for if he made a move toward Alexis, the world would know he was really Terrence Garrick.

  The plan had been foolproof, but unfortunately, the reporter who had relentlessly tracked her down had been nobody's fool. No one could have predicted the public's obsession with learning the true identity of D.A. Meredith. The mere fact that her identity was hidden sparked the imagination of women everywhere. And when she was finally exposed and what was known of her personal story compared to incidents in the book, the public had what they wanted most.

  The name of the man on whom the character of Terrence Garrick had been based.

  The nightmare had begun again immediately afterwards. Alexis had refused to verify that Before I Sleep was based on her life story, but her refusals didn't matter to Charles. And her refusals didn't matter to the women who read the book, either. Every woman who had ever been threatened by a man saw herself in Cynthia Garrick and D.A. Meredith. Every woman who had ever been threatened by a man saw him in Terrence Garrick and Charles Cahill.

  Charles's prestige slipped as the book grew in popularity. Mail poured in against him. A boycott against his employer netted more bad publicity than loss of profit, but Charles's work began to suffer. He was a man not used to losing, or to criticism. Flashes of the instability that no one except Alexis had ever seen began to show at work, until finally he was forced to resign. Although officially he left to pursue the possibility of starting his own company, the upper echelon of Motor City knew that Charles Cahill was a man in disgrace.

  With nothing to lose and nothing else to distract him, Charles opened war on Alexis.

  The war was invisible, the emotional equivalent of nerve gas. There was nothing Alexis could prove. She had moved to a modern condominium complex with top-quality security, but she arrived home one day to find her plants turning brown in their pots and Jody's cocker spaniel in convulsions. The veterinarian had been baffled, because no test he administered could pinpoint a cause. And even after the dog died and tissue samples were tested, no conclusions were reached.

  She moved again, to another, safer condominium. This time her car
was tampered with. She was driving Jody home from school one afternoon and suddenly the steering wheel locked. She was hit from behind when she attempted to stop, and her car smashed a guard rail, just missing a plunge into a deep creek.

  Neither the police nor the mechanic who took the car apart and put it back together at Ron's insistence could find the cause of the problem.

  By then Charles had found an important new position with another auto manufacturer. Despite rumors and boycotts, Charles Cahill was too brilliant, too talented, to stay unemployed for long.

  The new job made no difference in his campaign of terror, however. The incidents grew, expanding in complexity and cunning. Never once did Charles incriminate himself. Alexis prayed he would slip up, leave just one piece of evidence so that she could charge him with harassment, but he was too clever for that. The same superior mind that had combined space-age technology and Yankee ingenuity to design some of the most innovative automobiles in the industry could also design new and foolproof ways to terrorize his ex-wife.

  Then one night Alexis awoke to find Charles standing beside her bed. "If I die," she had whispered, frantic to make him leave, "Ron Bartow will make public every piece of evidence we found against you. The world will know you are Terrence Garrick and that you murdered me."

  "When I murder you," he had said calmly, "the world won't care, because you and your life will be old news, and I will be in power again. And when I murder you, no one will know it's murder."

  She had lain there in terror, waiting for him to beat her, to force himself on her. But he had smiled, the same confident smile that had attracted her to him in the first place, and left the room. With trembling fingers she had punched out the number for security, then Ron's home phone.

  Security had listened to her story and searched the condo for clues. All the windows were locked; the back door was secure. Alexis had to admit that the chain and deadbolt had been in place before she had let them in. Both guards had thrown up their hands in defeat and left.