Tension is rolling off of me in waves as frustration and dread settles heavy around me, so much so when Andrew knocks on the door I’m in his face before his foot can cross the threshold, “What the fuck do you want?”
“Sit down.” Andrew’s hands clamp like vices around my wrists and he jerks the lapels of his suit jacket from my fists. “Once you calm down, stop seeing red, and stop breathing like you’re having an asthma attack, I’ll tell you what I’ve interrupted your brooding and pacing for.”
I’m going to kill him. I know I promised Heather that Sebastian would be the only person I had left to kill, but Andrew is quickly making a liar out of me. “Andrew. Do. Not. Fuck. With. Me.”
“Breathe. Stop talking through your clenched teeth. Let me know when the red has cleared.”
“ANDREW!”
He slides a file across the desk, knocks twice, and pins my eyes with his. “One of my men, Jase, found Dolores. She’s in his warehouse right outside Tucson, a little place called Catalina right off highway 79. He said his kid brother ran into her at Denny’s in Flagstaff, remembered hearing his brother talking about a missing kid and the picture of the old lady she was last seen with. The kid, Stevie, he’d been a busboy at the restaurant for less than two weeks, and he made quite a scene when he questioned her before dragging her out of the restaurant. Cops showed up, but they were already thirty miles away headed south to Jase’s place.”
Andrew flips the file open and raps his knuckle twice on the picture, drawing my eyes downward.
It takes me a minute to recognize the woman who practically raised me. She looks so frail, her face has aged a decade, and the circles around her eyes make her thin face look harsh and gaunt.
“Jesus H Christ.” My eyes scan every detail of the picture, memorizing every angle, looking at every item in the room captured inside the pictures frame. “How long has Jase been working for you? Do you trust him?”
He sinks into the oxford leather chair across from my desk and sighs, “I trust him, he’s been with us a little over five years.”
I nod before my thoughts begin falling from my mouth, “I want Dolores brought back home. Have one of the maids open up her room, notify me as soon as she’s here. I want her questioned and I want it taped. I don’t care if she is interrogated for twenty-four hours, I want answers. All I’ve been given so far are more questions, and now it’s time to get the answers I fucking deserve.”
Andrew leans over, pushing the heel of his hands against his eyes, “Man, Jase has questioned her for thirteen hours straight, she isn’t saying shit. She won’t say who took Ivy, she won’t say where the last place she saw Ivy was, hell, Jase said she hasn’t even uttered a single word.”
Grabbing up the file, I stalk towards the door, “Oh she’ll talk. Get her home and tell her I asked her to talk, and she’ll talk, mark my words.”
After stalking through the house my feet abruptly stop in the hallway outside our bedroom when my eyes land on my wife’s small frame huddled on an overstuffed chair looking out the window. There is no emotion to be seen, no tears, no sadness, just a blank stare on her expressionless face.
I want to ask her what she’s thinking, how she feels, but I never ask because I don’t want the answer I already know I don’t want to hear. After padding my way across the hardwood floor, I lean over my mouse’s still frame and brush my lips on the top of her head, whispering, “Why are you sitting in the dark, mouse? Are you okay?”
I count to a hundred before conceding my defeat, “I love you. I’m going to shower, I’ll be right out.”
The door to the bathroom almost closes behind me when I hear my wife’s doppelganger speak, “Roman, you know just as much as I that Dolores Chaisson is behind your daughter’s disappearance. Heather, or mouse, whatever the hell you call her, may prefer to keep her blinders on and ignore the shit I saw, the similarities between the main players on the other guy’s team I clocked five seconds into this twisted game we’re all playing. I just pray to whatever God listening you won’t let your ignorance blind you like your weak wife.”
I stalk to where she sits, grab her by the throat and her head is cracking against the stone hearth wall surrounding the fireplace before I can even make sense of my movements. Growling between clenched teeth, “Don’t you ever, ever speak of my wife like that again or so help me God…”
Mace’s signature snicker reverberates through her chest making her sound maniacal.
“What, Romie? So help you, God you’ll what? Kill me? Beat me? Put me back in the hospital? Your inability to own how badly you want to walk on the edge of darkness and taste what naughty tastes like on your wife is something I find utterly astounding, yet sadly pathetic.”
Before I am able to choke the words from her or shake the answers out, her body sags against mine as she conveniently loses consciousness.
I’m laying on my side with my head resting on my hand, my eyes haven’t moved from the spot in our bed my wife has occupied over the last several hours, scanning every curve and line of her face, her profile is illuminated by the moonlight shimmering through our bedroom window. When Heather’s eyelids flutter before opening, my anxiety becomes almost unbearable, but it’s when her dark brown eyes lock with mine and all I see is nothing, that I feel the last few frail shreds of hope break and fall away.
Who is this woman, I wonder. What have I done to her? And will I ever, in this life, get her back?
My voice sounds like a croak, “You fainted, mouse, or rather Mace fainted, are you alright?”
She shakes her head before turning her face away from me as a tear spills from the corner of her eye until it’s hidden in her hairline.
“Mace, she…when she spoke to me before fainting she said something and I’m having trouble piecing together her riddle. She said something about similarities, it was almost as if the people who held you prisoner are familiar to either her, you, or both. Does any of this make sense or ring any bells?”
With her eyes still gazing out of the window she slightly shakes her head and whispers, “No. I don’t know what she’s referring to. That’s all she does, mocks me and speaks in riddles, I began tuning her out years ago, Roman,” a soft sob leaves her words trailing off. After a few minutes she’s calm enough to continue, “She’s agitated, resentful, and jealous of your affections towards me as well as the loving bond I have, I had,” the last two words are sputtered out around another heartbreaking sob, “with Ivy.”
I gather Heather up in my arms and gently rock her back and forth, combing my fingers through her hair, when she winces as my fingertips brush over the swollen bump on her scalp, my muscles tense, “I ahh…Mace said some things about, well she said something and I reacted without thinking. I’ll go grab an icepack.”
“What did she say, Rome?” Her tone is flat and without emotion.
Bracing myself with a hand on each door frame, I hang my head and mutter, “You don’t want to know, mouse, and even if I told you, it wouldn’t help our situation.”
I shove my weight from the doorframe before heading downstairs to the kitchen when I hear Andrew shouting, angrily from somewhere in the house.
No, not just somewhere. His voice is coming from the basement where Heather’s rooms were in the beginning. When she was shackled from the ceiling that first night for all of seven hours.
After quickly making mouse an icepack, I jog up the stairs to check on her and find her still lying in bed with her eyes closed. I slide the icepack in her pillow case and position it so it cradles the back of her head before kissing her temple and leaving.
Descending down the stairs and into the basement, my Ferragamo dress shoes halt, ceasing their echoing through the corridor.
When my right hand grasps the door knob, I am forced to stop myself and count to thirteen…twice.
After taking a deep breath, knowing what I am about to encounter is something I won’t be able to witness, then make it go away, unsee, unhear, or undo.
Andrew’s
shouting abruptly stops when I step into the room and he immediately steps back until his back is against the wall.
He looks over at me and shrugs, “Just like Jase said, Rome, not a single word, no matter how much it could possibly help her or Ivy, she still refuses to speak.”
As I round the corner keeping me from Dolores’s sight from where she sits handcuffed and shackled to not only the particle board desk in front of her, but the floor as well, I freeze at the sight of her.
The woman before me is nothing more than a shell of her former self. The state of condition she’s currently in makes the pictures I saw of her this morning pale in comparison. And as much as I hate to admit it, I must say seeing her, the woman who practically raised me, the one clapping as I took my first steps, who taught me how to ride a bike, who spent tireless hours quizzing me and helping me prepare for every spelling bee I ever won, the woman who cried and beamed with pride as I graduated high school, and again when I graduated med school, almost causes me to become undone. At least until Andrew’s voice pulls me from my happy childhood memories of the woman who bandaged and cared for me the day I first saw the girl of my dreams with dark brown eyes and silky blond hair blowing in the summer wind. I stood up against the seven boys to protect her that day, all of who outweighed me by fifty pounds or more and were a good foot taller than me. I watched her face masked in horror get smaller and smaller staring at me through the back window of her dad’s maroon Datsun as they drove away. While I was getting pummeled, lying in the fetal position on the gravel path in the middle of the park, I promised myself one day I would find her again.
“Dolores, I’m only going to ask you one more time. If you refuse to comply, you are the one making the choice to do this the hard way,” Andrew’s head jerks, nodding in my direction, “When I leave, you’ll be in the hands of the father whose daughter YOU lost, and YOU refuse to help find. The choice is up to you, do you feel safe putting your life in the hands of not only a sadist, but also a known serial killer?” He pauses pacing back and forth. When he makes his way back in front of her, he leans over and growls, “I’m going to ask you two questions, after allowing you to replay my words in your mind, I expect an answer from you. Are those instructions explained clearly enough for your simple mind?”
After a few moments of silence he begins, “THE! FUCK! Were you doing in Flagstaff?! That’s a long goddamn way from where the fuck you were supposed to be, don’t you think?!”
It’s not only the smirk on her mouth, but the look of knowing defiance that seals my childhood nanny’s fate. I’m across the desk with Dolores’s throat in my grasp when her head, and only her head connects with the basement wall, her extremities stretched awkwardly still shackled to the floor and now broken desk. Spittle flies from my lips as I demand, “You fucking know! Say it! SAY IT! You fucking know, don’t you?!”
Though her lips are turning blue and her voice sounds like it’s raking through gravel before being spoken, her eyes never lose their defiance and her calm demeanor never falters, “Now, now, child, I taught you better than this. Or did I?” She gasps in another breath, “Sometimes I worry the sweet boy I loved and raised isn’t in there any more, what scares me most is knowing he’s been gone since long before even he can remember.”
My hand tightens as the thoughts of her betrayal batter through my mind. Every good memory I possessed of her and my childhood is sliced in two with a scythe forged in lies and deceit. As my hands feel the bones of her esophagus grate beneath my fingertips I ram her head over and over into the wall behind her, screaming, “Fucking say it! Say you know where my little girl is, or so help me God! Say it, D! Say it!”
Once Andrew pulls me back, her body’s weight slams into the floor and her blank eyes spark with fire before rolling back into her head, but not before her hoarse voice cracks around the words, “The child is where she belongs, with her uncle, your brother. The chere bebe is finally where she belongs, sweet boy.”
Chapter 25
The sound of Roman’s voice echoing through the corridors pulls me from my happy dreams of playing in the back gardens and hiding behind the wisteria canopy’s, counting to twenty while Ivy and her cousins run and hide. I try to remain in either my daydreams, or better yet, my lucid sleeping dreams at night. It helps me keep the pain away. So when I’m ripped, or jerked from the only place I know I can find my precious little girl, I get pissed. Anger doesn’t even come close to defining what I feel.
Yet, before I allow my body to do what my mind is screaming for me to, defeat blankets the turmoil with a sigh and I roll over, pulling the pillows over my head to block out not only my pain and anger, but the sound of my husbands as well.
“Sleeping beauty with her head stuck up her ass, from what I can gather from your Neanderthal husband’s tone and words, I’m pretty fucking sure now’s a good time to begin participating in the real world instead of up here on my turf. You are the daftest woman I’ve ever met. Yes, I said daft, it’s a fantastic word and I will have it back in regular rotation, mark my words.”
Roman’s voice splits through the house again, “Fucking say it! Say you know where my little girl is, or so help me God! Say it, D! Say it!”
In my minds’ eye I see Mace throwing her hands up as if she’s asking. “Hello? What are you doing?”
Then she says it, “Umm…hello? What the fuck are you doing? Are you playing deaf, or just intentionally choosing to be a pathetic excuse as a mother? Get your lazy, pitiful, selfish ass up and see what’s going on!”
Bitch. I huff climbing from the bed, slip on a robe, and head in the direction I heard Rome’s voice, all the while glaring at the cocky tattooed bitch grinning in the shadowy corners of my mind.
I’m near the end of the hallway and as I walk by Roman’s office the screen of what I’d always believed to be a television is on. As I register the figures, room, and scene, I feel myself beginning to hyperventilate and it takes me a few seconds before I can look back at the TV.
He’s going to kill her. Roman slams Dolores’s head against the wall again and again. Even as Andrew pulls him away, he’s like a beast, not once does his assault slow down. When I see Dolores’s lifeless body fall to the floor my hand snatches up the phone and dials Roman’s father, Richard, and for the life of me I’ll never understand the reason why.
What’s playing out on the stage of my life doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s like watching a movie, but the sound drags slower than the actors lips move and the scene playing is a raging volcano, erupting and destroying everything in its path, yet what I hear is church bells, the sound of a baby cooing, a child giggling, and lover’s murmuring sweet nothings to each other.
Richard’s voice pulls me back to the present, “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Heather.-“ I feel somewhat in control, maybe a little freaked, scared, and confused as hell, but even as all these emotions stormed through me, not once do I feel like I can’t handle the circumstances.
Not until Dolores’s words ricochet, sending me spiraling and Mace’s shit kicking boots barreling their way into the forefront and in control.
“The child’s where she belongs, with her uncle, your brother, the chere bebe is finally where she’s always belonged, sweet boy.”
I knew it. I didn’t know how she fit into it or where, and, well shit, I still don’t, not really. But at least I’m not the only person paying attention to her on the sidelines.
“Heather?”
Shit. Why, Mac? Why call him?
My eyes scan the screen and when I see Andrew is having a hard time holding Roman back, I concede we may need back up. I need to know what the hell is going on and where Dolores stands in this game, and dead people don’t talk.
“Rich, I may need you to swing by. There’s an issue that doesn’t seem very favorable occurring between Rome and Dolores. She said, he said, blah, blah, blah, but whatever it was she said last, must have pissed him off and I say that because I think he may be trying to kill her…”<
br />
“I’m already in the car, I’ll be there in less than twenty minutes. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“I need you to stay on the phone with me dear and tell me what is happening. Alright?”
“Okay, I can do that.”
The sound of glass and wood shattering draws my eyes back to the monitor.
“Umm…yeah, I gotta go.”
Click.
I hate how hard it is for me to gain control back and how easily Mace seems to take it away, but I will say I am getting better at it while she stays the same. I just hope it accounts for something.
I hear Richard before I see him at the exact moment Mace lets loose of her control and I step into whatever hell she has left me in.
“Roman Payne! Explain the meaning of this!” Richard looks from Roman, to me, then to Andrew and finally stops on Dolores.
Mace really doesn’t even have to say it, because yes, immediately I see when it flashes in both their eyes.
Once upon a time, they were lovers, and this realization makes my heart break for my silent friend. Nudging me away from dusting the base boards and windexing the three story wall of window’s overlooking Payne Manor when she heard Roman’s car pull up in the drive. The only woman who’s ever been a part of my life, the only mother figure, the older sister I never had, and the first person to hold out a helping hand to me in the middle of my self- imprisoned hell, all in the name of loving a man who didn’t want or deserve to be loved. All just for the sake of seeking the goodness in a man who believed he was Lucifer, or Lucifer’s Belial himself.
The one soul I always thought would be on our side is the same woman willing to die just to tear us apart.
“They’re Romeo and Juliet, well son of a bitch. Pun completely intended. Motherfucking modern day, Romeo and Juliet, gotta tell ya, Mac. I did not see that one coming.”
Are you kidding me right now? Romeo and Juliet didn’t fake people’s deaths, have children as a product of their infidelity, they didn’t lie, cheat, betray, and kidnap!
Roman's Redemption: Roman: Book II (Roman's Trilogy) Page 12
