by S W Vaughn
I grab Brad’s shirt and wrench him forward. “Where is she?” I shout. “Tell me, or I’ll blow a hole in your other leg, and then your third one!”
My outburst gets Ollie’s attention. He comes over fast, his gun out and ready. “You can’t find her?” he says quietly, with an edge of malice in his voice that’s directed at Brad.
“No. She’s not upstairs or in the attic, and I already searched the … first floor.” Suddenly I remember the second kitchen, and the feature that would’ve been another selling point for the house if it actually worked. The dumbwaiter.
I let go of Brad and race toward the back of the house.
“Celine, wait!” Ollie shouts after me. “Would you stop doing that?”
“Be right back!” I call over my shoulder without stopping.
When I get to the second kitchen, I throw the light switch on and run to the dumbwaiter panel next to the cabinets. The Quintaines had it painted over, since it didn’t work, but now the paint is scored away at the edges and scraped off the little knob that opens it. Hope surges in my heart as I twist the knob and throw the panel open.
She’s there. My baby. Tied and gagged, tears streaking her dirty face. But alive.
“Alyssa!” I cry, working the gag from her mouth. She shivers and coughs, and I pick her up and carry her over to the kitchen counter. “Don’t try to talk, baby. Mommy’s here. I’m going to get these off you.”
There’s another tied and gagged little body in the dumbwaiter with her — Izzy. It looks like she’s just unconscious, but I have to free Alyssa first.
“Ollie, come back here!” I shout as I hear more sirens arriving at the house. “Hurry. We might need an ambulance.”
I yank three drawers open before I find a sharp knife, and quickly but gently cut through the ropes around my daughter’s wrists and ankles. Her little body trembles, and when she’s free, she wraps herself around me and buries her face in my neck.
“It’s okay, munchkin. It’s going to be okay,” I soothe as I carry her back toward the dumbwaiter.
I’m trying to get Izzy out with one arm while I hold Alyssa with the other, when Ollie rushes in. He spots me, pushes me gently aside, and reaches in to scoop up the unconscious child.
Unconscious, but not dead. I can see the rise and fall of her chest.
“You don’t have two daughters, do you?” Ollie says as he eases the gag out of the girl’s mouth and carries her over to the counter, where the knife still lays.
I shake my head. “She’s Hannah’s daughter,” I say. “Izzy.”
“My best friend,” Alyssa murmurs weakly on a shivering sob. “She’s okay, isn’t she?”
“Yes. She’s going to be fine,” I tell her as I rub her back and breathe in her scent. I’m not going to put her down for a long, long time. I may never let her out of my sight again.
I know that’s not possible, but for now, it seems like the sanest plan in the world.
Ollie makes quick work of Izzy’s bonds and holds her in his arms, easing her head up so she can breathe easier. “Come on,” he says as he starts out of the kitchen. “I’m going to call an ambulance for her, but all three of you are getting in it.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need to go to the hospital.”
“Really.” He stops and nods at my arm. “You’re bleeding, and there’s a huge lump on the back of your head. You’re going to the hospital.”
I open my mouth to protest, but he gives me a look.
“Fine. I’m going,” I say, my lips curving up slightly. “You’re impossible, Detective Chambers. Do you know that?”
“Me? Which one of us snuck away from a police guard and confronted three people with guns, all by herself?”
“Jill didn’t have a gun,” I mutter. “She had a knife.”
“My point still stands.”
I guess I’ll let him have this one. I’m too tired to argue, now that I don’t have to fight anymore.
And I’ve got the whole world, right here in my arms.
Chapter 34
“Happy birthday, Alyssa!”
My daughter’s excited squeal echoes through the house when Izzy shouts from the front door, and she slides off her chair and runs from the dining room. I laugh and follow her out, leaving the streamers I’d been trying to hang dangling from the chandelier.
The little girls collide in an explosion of giggles, jumping up and down a few times. Alyssa takes Izzy’s hand and pulls her across the room, away from her foster parents who are standing just behind her. “Come on, Izzy, I have a brand new yellow pony!” Alyssa gushes, still tugging her friend in the direction of her bedroom. “You can brush her, if you want to.”
“Yes!” Izzy says enthusiastically.
I smile and shake my head as the girls vanish, and then turn to hug Missy Wilson — soon to be Missy Voltaire. “Thanks for coming early,” I say. “Alyssa really wanted some alone time with Izzy before the rest of the guests get here.”
“Oh boy. If we didn’t come early, we’d never hear the end of it,” Missy says with a laugh. “Right, Dan?”
Her fiancé nods behind the huge, wrapped present he’s carrying. He’s still a little shy, but get a drink or two in him and he loosens right up. Occasionally, if he has more than two drinks, he loosens way up.
Missy surprised me, and herself, by deciding to become a foster mother after she heard what happened with Hannah and Jill. We’ve talked almost daily since then. She had no idea how to be a mother, and Izzy is difficult to manage — not that it’s her fault. She’s already had enough trauma in her almost-five years to last a lifetime. But Missy rose to the challenge.
She and Dan are planning to officially adopt Izzy once they’re married.
“Are you actually going to bring them in, or are we all going to stand around in the living room staring at each other?”
I turn to Ollie and swat him playfully. He’s the one who answered the door, but he’d backed away from the flurry of little girl glee when it started. Now he slips an arm around my shoulders and grins at Missy and Dan. “If she won’t say it, I will,” he says. “Come on in and have a seat, guys.”
“Thank you,” Missy says with a smile. “We’ll do that.”
The four of us head to the dining room. Dan places the present in the pile at the end of the table, and I step out to the kitchen, grabbing the pitcher of lemonade I’d made a few minutes ago and a stack of glasses. “So, how’s the wedding prep coming?” I say.
“Fabulous. We’re having Bel Votre cater the reception,” Missy says, giving Dan’s arm a light squeeze. “Oh, Celine, I almost forgot. Can you come with me sometime next week for a fitting? I can’t wait until you see your bridesmaid’s dress,” she gushes.
“Sure. Just let me know when,” I say with a smile that doesn’t rise quite as high as it should. Bel Votre. The place Jill lied about going to when she went to see Brad, while they planned their horrific schemes.
Too much still reminds me of her, or Hannah, or Brad. I try not to let it bother me, but it’s hard. I feel so betrayed — especially by Jill.
And she’d hurt Alyssa too. Badly. My bright, outgoing little girl is sometimes shy and quiet now, nervous around strangers. She was too afraid to go to school for weeks after it was all over. She’s easing back into it now, but it’s still devastating to watch her struggle.
If Jill wasn’t already dead, I’d have happily killed her. But both she and Hannah are in the ground, and Brad is locked away at the Seton-Frischer Clinic, the place where Hannah spent all those years. Unlike her, though, if he ever gets out of there, he’ll go straight to jail for kidnapping, aiding and abetting, and attempted murder.
Ollie keeps close tabs on him. And I know that if Brad somehow escapes, he’ll be dead before he ever gets near me.
“So, speaking of weddings,” Missy says, leaning forward with a smile. “When are the two of you going to tie the knot?”
I laugh and glance at Ollie, who’s wearing a funny crooked smile. �
�It’s been less than a month,” I tell her. “Give us a little more time before you try to ring the wedding bells. I don’t even know what kind of toothpaste he uses yet.”
“The kind that’s on sale,” he says with a grin. “I’m a cop. They don’t pay us very much.”
“Hey, what a coincidence,” I say. “That’s the kind I use, too.”
“Well, then. I guess we’re perfect for each other.” He looks into my eyes, and a deep, pleasant shiver tugs at my gut. “We should get married.”
I’m already thinking that someday soon, we will.
“Mommy!” Alyssa’s small but enthusiastic shout precedes her as she races out of the bedroom, the yellow plastic pony she got last weekend clutched in one hand. Izzy is right behind her. “Mommy, can I give Izzy this one?” she says. “She doesn’t have any yellow ones yet, only pink and blue, and I have two yellows.”
I’m proud of my daughter for being so generous, and at the same time a little uneasy that she’s so quick to give her brand new toys away. There’s being kind, and then there’s being generous to a fault. It’s been so hard for me to stop doing the latter. I don’t want my daughter to grow up a pushover like me, and stay spineless until something horrible forces her to change.
But she’s so earnest, and still so young. It probably won’t hurt for now.
“Okay, munchkin. That’s very sweet of you to share,” I say.
Izzy cheers and nearly snatches the pony from my daughter’s hand. “Thank you,” she says quickly. It’s almost an afterthought.
There’s a gleam in the little girl’s vivid blue eyes, so much like her mother’s. She stares at Alyssa for just a moment too long and cocks her head — with the exact cold, calculating expression I saw on Hannah’s face, seconds before she ordered Brad to kill me.
“Come on, ’Lyssa. Let’s play some more ponies,” Izzy says, and the moment vanishes as the girls giggle and tumble their way back to the bedroom.
But I wonder just how much of her mother is in Alice Isabel Byers … and how much of her father. Because now I know who that is: Brad Dowling.
The girls are sisters.
They don’t know, and Missy and I have agreed not to tell them yet. The trauma of what happened at Hannah’s house is still too fresh, and neither of them will really be able to understand what it means, that Brad is their father.
Maybe Izzy will turn out to have some of the same mental afflictions as her parents, or maybe not. A stable upbringing might help her overcome a lot of what had affected both Hannah and Brad — her a spoiled princess, him an idolized man-baby who was protected from everything. Maybe she’ll be just fine, and the girls will stay best friends forever.
But I’m watching. Just in case.
And I’ll always choose my daughter first.
Thanks for reading!
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About the Author
S.W. Vaughn cut her reading teeth on Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and James Patterson, and has been hooked on thrillers and horror since. She lives in fabulous Central New York, where there are only two seasons (Winter and Road Construction) with her husband and son. An award-winning author, copywriter, and blogger, she’s been writing professionally for the past 15 years.
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More books by S.W. Vaughn
WHAT SHE FORGOT – a standalone psychological thriller
** Read on for an exclusive preview of What She Forgot * * *
KILL SWITCH – a psychological thriller
P.I. Jude Wyland books: crime thrillers
DEADLY MEASURES – a prequel novella
THE BLACK DIRECTIVE
House Phoenix series: crime thrillers (written under Sonya Bateman)
BREAKING ANGEL | Book 1
DEVIL RISING | Book 2
TEMPTING JENNER | Book 3
SHADOWS FALLING | Book 4
WICKED ORIGINS | Stories & Novellas
Preview: WHAT SHE FORGOT
I didn’t mean to kill her. Not like that. She just wouldn’t stop screaming, no matter how much I begged her to. She wouldn’t stop.
Killing her was messy. But it’s done now, and I can’t take it back.
This new one, she doesn’t scream. She’s eager, maybe a little too eager. She promises she’s never going to tell anyone what we do, what she saw me doing. She says I excite her.
She says a lot of things. I’m not sure I believe any of them.
I tell her that she’s special, that she’s my only love. It keeps her under control. I need to control her, even though we’re out here so far away from anyone and anything. She has to keep my secrets. I don’t want to kill another one. All she has to do is stay, and be mine when I want her, and things will work out.
But I’m starting to think she’s crazy. Maybe crazier than me.
Now I don’t know what to do anymore. She’s still mine — so young, so beautiful, so eager to please. She swears she’ll never leave, that she’ll always be here waiting for me. And I want to believe her. I really do.
I just can’t be sure. After all, can I really trust a crazy person? It doesn’t seem like a good plan, with everything she knows about me. I may have to kill her too.
I’m thinking maybe that’ll be okay. Maybe killing won’t be so hard this time.
And I can always get another one to replace her.
MADELINE
I was the one who got away.
His name was Stewart Brooks. They called him the Singing Woods Killer, and for five long, horrifying months, he made the quiet suburban town of Dayfield, New York, his hunting ground. His reign of terror cast a shadow that hangs over this place, even today, as one by one he claimed four mothers’ daughters.
I should’ve been the fifth.
Like his other victims, I was sixteen when he dragged me into the woods. They said he kept me for a week, but I don’t remember any of that. I don’t remember the abuse, the pain, the starvation they told me I’d suffered. I remember nothing. They filled in those stories for me, the doctors and the shrinks and the police with their cold, invasive examinations and their droning, exhaustive interviews. I never read any of the news articles, not even the ones they wrote about me. I couldn’t stand to risk seeing photos of his dumping grounds, of glimpsing those endless trees again.
There’s only one thing I know must have happened. For that, I carried the painful, heart-wrenching proof, and I still bear those scars. But even there, my memory is a black hole, a complete and terrible blank spot where nothing lives.
I remember the terror of being taken. I remember knowing I was going to die. I can still feel that awful hollow sensation, the idea that I would cease to exist, become nothing. And my memories would die with me. I would never remember my friends or my family or that camping trip with Carson and Tricia the summer after freshman year, or my tenth birthday when Mom got me a guitar and I obsessed over it fiercely for two weeks and then put it in my closet and never touched it again, or how much I love pistachio ice cream and walking barefoot on warm sand.
That feeling — the terrible, shuddering black nothing of death — always comes back to me when it’s too quiet, and I have to watch television, turn on music, make up awful stories in my head. Anything to distract myself before the feeling can consume me.
I remember running through the woods. Running from death.
I remember that I killed death itself.
I can still see my escape, if I close my eyes. The dark, thick silence of the woods, the trees looming out of the blackness from nowhere to slow me, scratch at me, as if they were on his side. His harsh breathing and heavy footsteps catching me, his weight falling on me. The broken branch I jammed into his throat to get him off, because all I could feel was death, the awful rotting empty spot deep in my stomach t
hat I never wanted to experience again. I pretended all that blood was a warm shower, washing away the shivery ache of death.
Twenty years ago on the evening of June 4, somewhere deep in the Singing Woods, I killed Stewart Brooks.
He’s dead, long gone, reduced to dust and bones in a numbered pauper’s grave at the Woodlawn Cemetery. My psychiatrist keeps telling me it’s okay that he’s dead. It’s okay that I killed him. I can forgive myself for murder. Because now, he can never hurt anyone again.
But this morning, I saw him again. Watching me. Taunting me.
I’m crazy. Everyone knows it. I know it, but that doesn’t matter.
He’s come back for me, and the vast, yawning empty is still waiting to claim me after all these years.
The hunt is on.
MADELINE — NOW
The morning starts out like any other Monday, with Renata dragging and groaning her way through school preparations and finally hauling herself into the car five minutes late. It’s my week for the morning carpool, and like any other teenager, my daughter is mortified at being driven around by her mother.
“Ugh,” she says as she flops into the passenger seat and hauls her backpack in behind her, as if it’s full of bricks instead of books. School is such a chore for the young. “How long until I can get my license, again?”
I watch until she puts her seatbelt on, and then put the car in reverse and start backing out of the driveway. “Six months,” I say, as if I haven’t told her that a hundred times since she passed her permit test last week.
She heaves a dramatic sigh. “Why do I have to wait so long?”
“Because the state of New York hates teenagers.” I’m hoping to prod a smile from her. It almost works, but she actively fights the tug at her lips. Sixteen-year-olds aren’t supposed to laugh at lame mom jokes.
