The Widow's Watcher

by Eliza Maxwell

  Beverly clutched Jenna, who wrapped an arm around the tiny woman, helping to support the weight Beverly no longer could.

  “The medical examiner has confirmed they belong to a small child. I’m very sorry, Mr. Jorgensen.”

  Lars kept his legs beneath him, but he looked older than he had just moments before. He looked broken.

  Owen stepped toward his father and placed one hand on his back and the other beneath his arm for support. Lars was shaking.

  Despite the advance warning of what was coming, despite the hours they’d had to prepare, it was a massive blow.

  “We’ll know more once the ME has completed her examination, but I wanted to tell you personally.”

  Sergeant Allred rotated his cap in his hands. “I’m afraid that’s not all.”

  Jenna’s head jerked upward, and all at once it registered, the words the policeman had spoken.

  “Child,” he’d said.

  A small child.

  Singular.

  Faintly, Jenna heard Cassie whisper again in her ear.

  “Every character.”

  55

  Jenna pulled the van into the driveway of the tiny cottage. It was painted a robin’s-egg blue. From the outside, it looked cheery and quaint, particularly against the snow that blanketed the front yard.

  Jenna took a deep breath and wondered, not for the first time, if she was crazy. But she didn’t think so.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” Owen had asked, the shock evident on his face when she’d asked for a ride into town to pick up her van. “Not now?”

  Any ideas Jenna had been clinging to about somehow managing to skate through this town and this family without making any of those connections she’d wanted to avoid were shown, in that moment, for exactly what they were.

  Delusions.

  “No,” she’d said, shaking her head. “Not yet. But there’s something I need to do.”

  Owen bowed his head and scratched at the back of his neck. He studied her through lowered eyes full of questions.

  “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.” She hoped that would be enough.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “I need to go pick up Hannah anyway. Let me . . . I’ll just let Dad know.”

  Her first stop had been the Raven Public Library.

  “Mrs. Shaw,” the librarian began when she spotted her. “I’m afraid we may have gotten off on the wrong foot before.”

  Jenna shook her head and tried to wave off the woman’s words, but Eleanor Lutz wouldn’t be dissuaded.

  “I spoke with Lars and . . . I owe you an apology. I behaved quite rudely before. That’s unlike me.”

  “Help me now, and we’ll call it square.”

  Eleanor straightened her spine and peered more closely at Jenna. Whatever she saw must have convinced her the matter had some urgency.

  “What do you need?” she asked with a librarian’s innate efficiency.

  It didn’t take long to find what Jenna was searching for. She was quickly gathering her things, her mind already out the door, when Eleanor Lutz placed a hand upon her shoulder.

  “I did love him, you know,” the librarian said, holding her head high even as a blush colored the apples of her cheeks. “I love him still, I suppose. But it was impossible, after everything.”

  Jenna reached up and squeezed the older woman’s hand.

  “Thank you for your help,” she said softly.

  Eleanor only nodded, then briskly stepped back into librarian mode.

  “Of course, Mrs. Shaw.”

  Jenna left the library practically running for her van, a slip of paper tucked into her coat pocket, thanks to the help of the internet and Lars’s childhood friend.

  Hastily scrawled upon it was an address.

  An address for a tiny robin’s-egg-blue cottage.

  The drive had taken just over an hour. A considerable distance to commute several times a week.

  Unless you have a good reason.

  Diane Downey looked tired when she answered the door. Her hair was down, and she was wearing pajama bottoms and a stained T-shirt.

  Her eyes were puffy, like she’d cried a great deal in the last few days.

  Her hand came up, her fingers fanning over her lips upon seeing Jenna.

  “I’ve been expecting someone, but I have to say, I never thought it would be you.”

  Jenna schooled her features into a benign expression and chose her words with care.

  “Can I come in?” she asked.

  Diane took a deep breath and stepped back, holding the door wide for Jenna to enter.

  “I doubt I could stop you,” she said. “Not now that you’ve figured it out.”

  She shut the door behind them.

  Jenna glanced around the room. It was cozy, and neat as a pin. She turned back to the woman she’d come to see, who was considerably less neat. “Only parts of it,” she told her. “Will you tell me the rest?”

  Diane hesitated.

  “It’s been a long time coming, wouldn’t you say?” Jenna said in a quiet voice.

  Diane gave an immense, world-weary sigh. “Twenty-nine years,” she murmured. “You’d better have a seat.”

  56

  “When I said my ex-husband wasn’t a good man, I meant that. Have you ever been mixed up with a truly bad man?” Diane asked.

  Jenna shook her head.

  “I could have guessed that,” Diane replied. “There’s an air about us, a constant kind of nervousness. You don’t have that.” Diane peered closely at her. “You have sadness, but no fear. You know who you are, Jenna, even if you don’t like it much.”

  Jenna shifted in her seat, uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation.

  “I won’t get into ugly details,” Diane went on, staring into the distance. “He was abusive, and he had a badge to back him up.”

  Jenna’s brow furrowed. The path forming in front of them was hazy, but she could be patient.

  “There came a day I knew in my bones that if I stayed, he’d kill me eventually. So I ran. There’s a cabin on the other side of the lake. It belonged to my second cousin. Gary didn’t know anything about it, so it was as good a place as any to hide while I tried to get my life sorted out.”

  The first missing piece fell into place.

  “I’d never been there before, but it was summertime, and it was beautiful. I was sitting on the tiny front porch, trying to heal, when a small child came wandering out of the woods.”

  Jenna held her breath. This was what she’d hoped and prayed for, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel while she drove the minutes and miles to get here, warning herself not to get her hopes up.

  All for this.

  “‘You’ve got to come,’ she said, running up to me. ‘Please. Oh, please.’”

  Diane was lost in the memory, and Jenna watched, fascinated, as she was pulled along into the current of the past.

  The little girl tugged Diane by the hand, straining and insistent as only a child can be.

  “Please, miss. Please come,” she begged.

  The child had dark hair, with a slight wave covering one eye, but the eye visible was full of apprehension.

  Diane stood without a word, powerless over the sensation of that small, warm hand in her own. She would have followed this child wherever she led.

  Through the woods, down a path, they traveled. The child urged her forward, pulling when she felt Diane might be falling behind. Her little face turning to her, making sure the stranger she’d found was still there.

  Diane heard the sobs before she saw the woman hidden in a copse of trees. She was kneeling, holding a bundle to her, rocking back and forth.

  “Mommy,” the girl said, dropping Diane’s hand and running to the woman. Diane felt the loss of the warm hand as a hole that had been carved there. She shook herself from her daze.

  “Ma’am,” Diane said, coming back to herself. “Ma’am, are you all right?”

  Stupid Diane. Just a
s stupid as Gary always says. Obviously the woman wasn’t all right.

  “Ma’am,” Diane pressed, leaning down and placing a hand on the woman’s back. “Are you hurt?”

  The ravaged face that turned to meet hers was full of a desperate fear she recognized all too well.

  “He won’t let me keep them!” the woman cried, her features contorted with pain and tears. “He’ll take them away from me. He’ll take them and I’ll never see them again.”

  The woman was hysterical. Sobs quaked through her body as she clung to what Diane realized was a second child in her arms, wrapped in a blanket.

  She was hugging the child to her chest, rocking back and forth.

  “Help me,” the woman pleaded. “Oh, please God, help me!”

  Diane could have no more turned and walked away from this little family than she could have pulled her still beating heart from her chest.

  “Of course,” she said, trying to soothe the frantic woman. “I’ll help you. I’ll help. Shh, it’s going to be okay.”

  It took time, but Diane managed to calm the woman somewhat. All while the little dark-haired girl watched, sitting on the grass and hugging her legs a few feet away.

  Diane supported the woman beneath her arms as she stood, and supported her still while they walked the distance back to the borrowed cabin.

  The little girl led the way, glancing back at them now and again, worry on her face.

  The girl had good reason to look so concerned. Despite the hysterics of the mother and the constant rocking back and forth, it hadn’t escaped Diane’s notice that the baby in the woman’s arms had yet to make a sound.

  “He was dead,” Jenna said. It wasn’t a question.

  Diane bowed her head and gave a quick, sharp nod.

  Jenna struggled to comprehend. She didn’t have enough pieces to make a full picture. Not yet.

  “Can I ask . . . Why didn’t you call the police?”

  There were countless lives that would have taken an entirely different path if the woman had just picked up the phone, dialed three little numbers.

  Diane’s face twisted and she stood, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. Jenna watched her pace the room, to the window and then back to the sofa. She watched and she waited.

  Finally, Diane took a deep breath and spoke.

  “I’d like to tell you it was because there wasn’t a phone in the cabin. And there wasn’t. Or I could tell you it was because I’d taken all the money out of our joint account when I ran from Gary and I was terrified of facing him again, which was true too.

  “If it were only that, I probably would have done what any rational person would and found a way to contact the police straightaway.”

  Jenna leaned her elbows on her knees and clasped her hands together. She tilted her head to stare at the woman who’d affected so many, so deeply, with this one irrevocable decision.

  “But that wasn’t all?” Jenna asked, sensing the need to be gentle, even as she grasped for understanding.

  “Oh no,” Diane said with a humorless smile. “Not by a long shot.”

  Diane ran her hands down the backs of her thighs before she took her seat again on the sofa. She sat primly, her back straight, despite her disheveled appearance.

  “I had a daughter, you see.” Her voice was nearly a whisper. “I had a little girl of my own. She’d passed away less than six months before that day. Leukemia.”

  Jenna sat back in the chair and let out a pent-up breath.

  “She was my child, only mine,” Diane continued. “Gary had nothing to do with her after conception. She was my . . . my everything.”

  Diane’s eyes bored into Jenna’s, silently begging her to see.

  Unstoppable, thoughts of the bottomless cavern that had opened inside of Jenna when her family was taken rushed in.

  “When that child materialized from the edge of the woods,” Diane went on, “for a moment—one brief, miniscule moment—I believed, with every ounce of my being, that she was Paige. That she’d come to find me. To take me back with her.”

  Comprehension had finally dawned.

  “Of course,” Diane continued, “it wasn’t Paige.”

  The quiet child with the large eyes may not have been her daughter, a fact Diane had realized within moments, but the child and her mother needed Diane’s help.

  She found the sensation, after years of caring for her own child, a familiar one.

  “You can’t tell him,” the woman was saying, over and over. She was more coherent now, but barely. Still she clutched the bundle to her chest, refusing to set the second child down.

  “I can’t go back, I can’t go back there. He’ll take them all and I’ll never see them again,” she kept repeating.

  “Shh,” Diane said, trying to soothe the woman. “I won’t tell your husband, I won’t. No one’s going to make you go back.” She stood beside her, rubbing circles along her back. “It’s going to be all right. Just breathe. That’s right, breathe deep.”

  Diane’s gaze returned, unwillingly, to the girl. That explained why the child had sought a stranger rather than going home. Diane could see the woman’s state was upsetting her daughter.

  Somehow, she convinced the woman to lie down on the bed.

  “Just rest, then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  “You won’t send me back?” the woman asked fervently.

  “No.” No matter what, Diane could never do that. It wasn’t difficult to infer, given the woman’s extreme fear of returning home, who exactly was the villain here.

  The woman’s eyes were unfocused, but she nodded. Diane didn’t have to imagine the horrors playing across the woman’s mind. She’d lived through her own for many years.

  When Diane left her in the cabin’s only bedroom, the woman was still clutching the bundle to her chest. Diane couldn’t conceive of taking the baby from her arms.

  The little girl sat, quiet and alone, on a chair while her legs dangled beneath her, too short to reach the floor. She was so heartbreakingly beautiful Diane could hardly bear to look at her.

  Averting her eyes, Diane turned to the cabin’s poorly stocked kitchen. She found a packet of powdered hot chocolate of indeterminate age and busied her hands making the girl a cup.

  “My little girl was about your age, you know.” She immediately regretted the words. If the girl asked where her daughter was, or what happened to her, Diane wouldn’t be able to hold it together.

  The child didn’t ask.

  “Can you sing to me?” she asked instead, in a thin, wavering voice.

  Diane’s heart ached, and she fought back tears. The last thing the child needed was to see another adult weeping. It would scare her to death.

  Instead, she stirred the cup of chocolate in front of her until she had a better handle on her emotions, then walked to the table and set it down in front of the child. She took a seat in the chair beside her.

  “Here you go.”

  The dark-haired beauty stood, ignoring the drink. Then she closed the short gap between herself and Diane and climbed into the woman’s lap.

  Diane’s heart fell wide open.

  “Sing to me?” the child asked again, laying her head against Diane’s chest.

  Diane couldn’t sing, because to sing, she would have had to open her mouth, and if she did that, nothing would escape but an endless howl of wrenching pain.

  Instead, she brought her arms up and encircled the child in a feather-light grip, and she hummed.

  She hummed every song she knew, while she closed her eyes and shed silent tears onto the top of the girl’s head. She hummed and she rocked the child and she grieved for the daughter she’d lost.

  Diane was content to stay that way for eternity. The girl had fallen asleep snuggled in her arms. She should lay her down and deal with whatever came next.

  The problem was, Diane didn’t know what that was. The woman and the girl clearly couldn’t go home. She’d given her word.

  We’ll h
ave to run. It’s the only way.

  It was irrational. It was borderline insanity. She could think of nothing else.

  She had the money she’d taken from Gary. It wouldn’t last forever, but it would get them away from here, where people were bound to be searching before long.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was something. Diane rose, intending to place the child on the couch, but found she didn’t want to give up her warmth.

  There had been no sound from the bedroom, and Diane hoped the woman had fallen asleep as well. She needed to rest. Maybe rest could take the haunted look from her eyes.

  It was a slim hope, one Diane clung to all the same.

  She gingerly sat on the couch, allowing the girl to continue sleeping.

  I can give this up when she wakes. She closed her eyes and breathed in the child’s woodsy scent. I can. Until then, I’ll just hold her. It won’t hurt to hold her just a while longer.

  When Diane woke, the woman and the baby were gone.

  She and the child searched, running from the cabin down the path into the woods. They didn’t call out, though—the child because she was crying too hard and Diane because she’d never learned the woman’s name.

  They ran instead to the only place she could think to check.

  The small copse of trees that sat beside the lake.

  Dusk was beginning to fall as they rounded the corner. She took in the tiny clearing at a glance.

  The woman wasn’t there, but there was no denying she had been.

  She’d spent a great deal of time there while Diane and the woman’s daughter had slept, blissfully unaware.

  The woman must have wandered through the woods and picked every flower she’d come to, because the clearing was bursting with them. They hung from branches. The ground was littered with them. Blooms that were still fresh, but would inevitably wither and fade.

  Love was evident in the careful bed of leaves and flowers that had been arranged just so. A mother’s love.

  On that bed, the poor broken woman had placed the body of the child Diane hadn’t been willing to take from her arms.

  In this place of beauty she’d created with her own hands, a mother had laid her child to rest.