In the Image of Grace

by Charlotte Ann Schlobohm

  I finally calmed myself. Jeremy wiped some tears off my face with his thumb and we continued digging. I uncovered a patella, a tibia and eventually found a pelvis. Then Jeremy pulled something out of the dirt and he gently held it in his hand. My mouth dropped to the ground when I saw my mother’s skull.

  “We’re going to have to get her out of the house. Especially if Reginald finds out we were down here,” I said in a whisper.

  “Should we call the police?” Jeremy asked still holding my mother’s skull.

  “I don’t trust Reginald. I’m sure he already has some sort of prepared statement to explain this. We have to bring her to the police ourselves.”

  Jeremy nodded and put the skull down. He got up and went over to the storage container that we used to step down on. “We could use this,” he said lifting off the lid.”

  “Only problem is it won’t fit out the window,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, hey, we could see if there’s something in the garage and then we could remove her piece by piece through the window.” Jeremy stopped talking and shook his head. “There is something so wrong with that statement.” He looked over at me. Then at my mom’s remains still shaking his head.

  “Is this too much for you?” I asked.

  “No, I knew what we were coming here to do,” Jeremy said somberly putting the lid back on the plastic tub. “You wait here with her and I’ll go look in the garage.”

  “Can you get back out?” I asked. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  “I should,” Jeremy reassured me stepping up onto the storage bin. He stood on the outside edges of it, so it wouldn’t cave in at the middle. Then he turned his back towards the wall and leant back. He was easily able to fit his body up to his shoulders out the window. He put his good arm up and out the window and pulled the rest of his body through the shallow opening. “Owe, crap,” I heard him say as I saw his feet disappear.

  “What,” I gasped rushing to the window.

  “I just cut my hand on some of the glass,” he said down to me as he squatted next to the window.

  “You okay?”

  Jeremy smiled at me. “I’ll be right back.” He was probably getting tired of me asking him the, are you okay question. I knew I was tired of people asking me.

  I went back to under the stairs and continued gently digging away the dirt. Almost my mother’s entire skeleton laid exposed in the dirt for me to see. I took in a deep breath and almost couldn’t let it out. My mother was no longer a missing person. I sat in silence with her, trying to get to know her before we had to take her away.

  It had been quite a few minutes since Jeremy climbed out the window to go look in the garage. I got up and walked across the basement towards the window. As I approached it I saw something fall past outside. It took me a second to realize it was Jeremy. I could just see the upper part of his body. He was crumpled on the ground with his face turned towards me. His eyes were closed and blood was flowing down from his forehead coating the rest of his face a bright red. I didn’t want to scream because then whoever did that to Jeremy would know that I was down there, but I did anyways. I let out a loud blood curdling scream, was it ever going to end? My legs took control of my body with my heart wildly thumping, trying to get out of my chest. My legs ran me across the basement, up the wooden steps two by two and I flung open the basement door. As soon as I stepped into the house there was a hand around my neck pulling me in. I didn’t get a chance to scream again.

  Reginald held me up in the air and looked up at me. I kicked my legs like mad and pried at his hand around my neck. With his free hand Reginald closed the basement door standing in the hall that led into the back of the house choking the life out of me. He looked at me with eyes wide open and a huge grin on his face showing me all his big fake white teeth. I continued to struggle. I could feel my air supply dwindling. My lungs screamed for assistance. I kept kicking and with all my might I threw a kick that landed right in his parts. He doubled over, dropping me to the floor. I scrambled to get to my feet, but quite couldn’t make it because it felt like the earth was about to flip over on me, so I started to crawl towards the back of the house. Getting to the back door and out to Jeremy was my plan. I didn’t get too far before Reginald reached out and grabbed the back of my sweater, lifting me to my feet.

  I stood unsteady on my feet as Reginald gripped my sweater pulling me in towards his body. In my ear he said, “It will just look like the two of you ran away together.”

  Chills went down my spine. My stomach dropped as I was told my fate.

  I attempted to run, but since Reginald had such a grip on me I didn’t get anywhere. He wrapped his arm around my upper body and dragged me into the kitchen. My legs stopped working. They didn’t want to lead me to my death. Reginald dragged me to the corner of the kitchen where there was a wooden block holding the steak knives. He pulled out the largest one. As he was doing so I was reaching towards the spoon rest on the stove, the only thing slightly in my reach. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him grip his hand around the handle of a knife. That was when I grabbed the porcelain spoon rest, bent my arm at the elbow and smacked Reginald as hard as I could with it.

  My assault caught him off guard. He made a grunting noise as I heard the spoon rest crack against jaw. He loosened his grip around my upper body some and I dropped myself to the linoleum kitchen floor, crawled a few feet and got up to run.

  I then felt a horrific pain rip itself all the way from my shoulder to my lower back. I immediately dropped to my knees. I tried to stand back up, but fell forward onto my hands. My head was than violently whipped back by Reginald grabbing a fistful of my hair.

  He then let go and shoved me all the way to the ground by way of stepping on my back causing pain to surge through every ones of my limbs because he was standing on the wound he had just given me. I clawed at the ground and tried to get away, but I was very quickly losing the little bit of energy I had. Reginald then drove the knife into my shoulder blade, preventing me from at least using the one arm to crawl away. I screamed out of pain and for help, hoping maybe one of the few that milled around out front could hear. Reginald then had my hair again and started slamming my head into the floor. It was like he didn’t want to kill me right away. He wanted to torture me a bit before he actually did away with me. I started to see black spots and thought I was going pass out for a moment, but then I tried to focus all my energy. I had to live. I had to let the world know what he did to our mother.

  Despite the searing pain filling my body I somehow climbed to my feet, spun around to face Reginald while he still had a grip of my hair and kicked him in the gut, then kicked the hand he was holding the knife in. The knife went flying and the look of anger on his face went straight to hatred. He gritted his teeth and growled. He lunged on top of me, knocking me flat to my back, straddled my waist and started throttling me again. As I was about to slip into unconsciousness I heard a loud cracking sound. All of a sudden Reginald fell on top of me. I heard the cracking sound a couple more times, then a loud metallic plink. Reginald’s body was then rolled off of me. I started gasping for air trying to breathe again. I felt a warm hand on my cheek and looked up to see Jeremy’s face. It was dirty, streaked with blood and he was missing his glasses again. I rolled onto my stomach. It felt so much better than lying on my back.

  “Careful,” Jeremy said kneeling next to me. I could see his hands were trembling.

  I turned my head to the left and saw Reginald lying there. His eyes were open and looked at me, but it appeared that he wasn’t really there. Jeremy gently placed his hand on my cheek again. I laid there a while before I spoke. “I thought you were dead,” I mumbled to Jeremy in a raspy voice that hurt my throat.

  “So did he, he was going to kill you.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “I think so,” Jeremy said.

  “What did you hit him with?”

  “Stop talking, just lay there and rest, but I did hit him with the tire
iron he hit me with.” Jeremy stopped talking for a few seconds and then again said, “He was gonna kill you.”

  “You saved my life yet again,” I stammered out in a whisper.

  Jeremy bent over and kissed me on the check. He always seemed to know exactly what to say.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A large plate of strawberry pancakes was placed in front of me on the table. It was topped with a ginormous dollop of whipped cream and looked delicious. Everybody else’s food looked equally delicious. Jeremy had an omelet stuffed with an incredible amount of meat and Isabelle had French toast with peaches. The restaurant was warm and inviting. The clink of coffee cups and cutlery partnered with the smell of pancakes and fresh morning brew was comforting.

  Jeremy took a bite out of his food. “You’re right this is pretty good.” He raised his fork with some chunk of meat on it, his arm in a cast. The same arm he got shot in. When Reginald attacked him he put up his arm in defense and Reginald whacked it with the tire iron and broke it clear in half.

  It had been some weeks since everything happened. We were all still getting over our injuries, physical and emotional.

  Reginald died that night from blunt force trauma brought on by being clobbered in the head three times with a tire iron. His death saddened me in a way because he was the only person we knew as a father, but I knew we would be able to go on and fully live our lives. Our mother’s bones were properly removed and sent for DNA testing and as I already knew, it was Grace Fernando. She too died from blunt force trauma. I was happy we found our mother, but it was bittersweet. Clarissa recovered just fine. The doctors were surprised by her quick recovery. She was still getting some needed rest that morning as we sat there eating our scrumptious breakfast.

  We went to stay with Helen and Robert. Once they heard what had happened they graciously took us in. It was nice having people that actually cared about us. The only drawback was that I was hours away from Jeremy, but he came up on the weekend. If he couldn’t get his mom’s car he just took the train. Helen and Robert let him sleep on the couch, as long as there was no funny business. That was how Robert phrased it. It made me smile.

  Within the past couple of weeks I actually smiled a few times. Things were still rough going, but life seemed to be heading in the right direction. I no longer had the dreams. I heard what Grace was telling me and she and Elizabeth helped us discover the truth, they helped us find the answers through my dreams. We still had so many questions. I was hoping they’d be answered in time, but what I did know was somehow we were all connected, my sisters, mother and I. We were our mother, but yet we were ourselves. I figured I could live with that.

  I looked over at Isabelle. A smile was across her face and a cup of coffee in front of her on the table. She was comparing notes on the food with Jeremy, so I switched my gaze to out the window. I watched a group of high school kids leaving the restaurant. They looked around our age. As they walked past the window I noticed one girl in particular. She wore a navy coat, with some jeans and Buck Baylor’s. Long shiny hair fell down her back and played on the breeze. She laughed at what one of her friends was saying. I watched her light step as she glided across the parking lot. It seemed she felt my stare because she turned and looked at me through the window. We locked eyes. My stomach immediately dropped and checked itself out of my body. I was staring into my eyes, into the eyes of Grace.

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  About the author:

  Some say Charlotte Ann Schlobohm is just a fictional character, but that is not so. She is the author of this young adult novel which is about events in her life. When she is not writing, she enjoys hanging out with her sisters and seeing her boyfriend's band play.

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