“I killed Pete.” She said it again, determined to make her grandmother hear her. “If I’d come home with you the other night. If I’d just done what you said…” Melissa tipped her head back to find Lucy looking down at her, started to look away again but her grandmother caught her chin to pin her with a quiet look.
“You didn’t kill anyone,” she said firmly, her old, knobby fingers digging into her jaw. “Your mama and that man ran off—that’s what happened. You hear me, girl? You didn’t kill anyone.”
Melissa nodded, her chin wagging in her grandmother’s grip while she swallowed the sudden lump that formed in her throat. “Yes, ma’am,” she whispered, gratefully accepting the lie being offered to her. A lie that meant her mother was still alive. That Kelly hadn’t died because she was a coward.
Lucy turned her loose to smooth a work-roughened hand against her cheek. “I’ll take ‘em home,” she said, that too bright smile back on her face. “When you’re ready, say when and I’ll come get you.”
Then she left, taking the twins with her. Even though she didn’t say it, Melissa knew what she meant by when you’re ready. She meant when Tommy died. They all thought he was going to die. That she was being foolish and headstrong. She probably was but she wouldn’t give up on him. She couldn’t.
Now, out in the hall she could hear the Chief’s booming voice, held low—talking with the doctor who’d just left. The doctor would tell him the same thing he’d told her. That even if he did survive, there was a significant chance that Tommy would never regain consciousness. She tuned it out. Started to count the tiny holes in the weave of Tommy’s blanket. It was what she did when they started saying things she didn’t want to hear, that way she looked like she was concentrating even though she wasn’t listening.
“Hey.”
She looked up to see Wade standing in the doorway and her gaze immediately flew to the large bay window set in the wall of Tommy’s room that overlooked the nurses’ station. “How’d you get in here?” she said. Beyond the window she could see her father—their father—still talking to the doctor. Now that she could see him, his voice didn’t seem quite as loud.
“Dad—the Chief—brought me in…” he lifted his arm. From the end of it dangled a worn backpack. It was hers. “Thought you could use these.”
She stood to take it, pulling it open to look inside. Change of clothes. Hairbrush. Toothbrush and toothpaste. All hers. She set it down on the chair she’d just vacated. Wade had gone to her house. Taken the time to collect her things and bring them to her.
“You saw him,” she said, forgetting what she’d promised her grandmother. “You saw Pete. What I did.” Her glance bounced out the window again to land on the Chief. “Is he here to arrest me?”
She could imagine it—her father putting her in handcuffs. Taking her back to Jessup. What would happen to Jason and Riley? Who would be here for Tommy when he finally woke up?
“What would he arrest you for?” Wade said, brow furrowed slightly. “There was nothing to see.”
Whether her words confused him or he was trying to convey some sort of hidden meaning, it was hard to say. “I stuck some magazines and a deck of cards in there.” He turned, gripping the door handle but didn’t pull. He just stood there for a moment, like he was waiting for something.
“No matter what you think of him or of me—we’re family, Melissa,” he finally said, offering her a quick smile over his shoulder as he passed through the open door. “Family sticks together.”
TWENTY-ONE
THE NEXT THREE WEEKS crawled by, slow and cruel. Melissa met each day with the hope that this day would be the day Tommy would open his eyes and each night she would close her own, crippled by despair and the steadily growing certainty that he would never smile at her again.
Inner cranial pressure. Shunts and drains. Infections and internal bleeding. Tommy would gain ground only to lose it. He’d make progress only to slip farther away from her.
A few days after the last surgery, they removed his breathing tube. They’d done it, expecting him to die. What they didn’t expect was that he’d begin to breathe on his own—which is exactly what he did.
They moved him out of ICU and into a regular room on a crowded, noisy floor with overworked nurses and frazzled doctors. They no longer saw her—she’d become part of the landscape. She was a ghost, perched on the edge of the chair by Tommy’s bedside when they came in to change his fluids. A specter, drifting down the corridor, while they hurried from one patient to the next. As far as they were concerned, Tommy was already gone. To them, he’d never really been.
The physical therapist was the only one who seemed to see her. She came in and showed her range of motion exercises. How to lift and bend his arms and legs to help keep Tommy muscles from atrophying. She did it every day without fail. It was the one thing she looked forward to because it felt like preparation for the future. A future with Tommy instead of without. For the fifteen minutes a day that she bent and stretched his limbs, she was hopeful and it was that hope that carried her.
She had a routine. After breakfast, she’d take Tommy through his stretches. Then, she’d exercise herself, taking four laps around the busy ward. On her last lap she’d stop at the nurses’ station. Retrieving one of those pink plastic pitchers, she scooped ice chips into it for Tommy’s mouth. His lips had begun to chap and crack and the ice seemed to help. She filled the pitcher and grabbed a towel before hurrying back to the room Tommy shared with another patient.
She’d been gone less than fifteen minutes but as soon as she stepped through the door, she felt it and she rushed to Tommy’s bedside. The monitors that surrounded him beeped and pinged, telling her that nothing about his condition had changed but something was different. Wrong somehow.
She didn’t see it at first. A scrap of paper tucked into Tommy’s lax fist. The corner of it peeking out at her from the curl of his thumb. She felt something heavy settle into her chest when she pulled on it, tugging the scrap loose. It felt like she was pulling on the pin of a grenade. Like as soon as it was free, her whole life would be destroyed, only this time, there will be no chance to put it back together.
She read the note twice before letting it flutter from her hand to rest in her lap. It was a joke. Some sort of trick.
Rumors constantly swirled in Jessup. It was impossible to stop them—in a town of less than a thousand, everyone knew everyone else’s business. Who got fired. Who was sleeping around. Who spent Saturday night in the police station drunk tank. News of what’d happened to Tommy had traveled fast and blame had landed squarely on her.
She’d flirted with her mother’s boyfriend—come on strong and when he responded to her obvious advances she rejected him. Angry, Pete beat her up and when Tommy found out what’d happened he’d tried to take up for her, only to get stabbed for his trouble. Rather than wait around for her to cry wolf to her daddy, Kelly and Pete lit out of town, leaving her to contend with her own mess.
Things like facts or logic never meant much to the Jessup rumor mill.
She’d heard at least a dozen versions of the same story in the past three weeks floating around the hospital. Some had her and Tommy as lovers. Some had Tommy as just a nice guy with a crush who got in over his head. Most people were angry with her for what happened. None of them would invite Tommy into their home for a glass of water, let alone Sunday dinner but that didn’t matter. Most in Jessup had tolerated her at best. Simply waited for an excuse to point at her and say, See? I knew it. I knew she was trash, just like her mother.
Now, they finally had one.
They hated her. It made sense that someone in Jessup had been at the hospital visiting family or friends and, seeing her haunt the halls, decided to play a cruel and nasty joke on her. To scare her. Shame her.
It was a joke. Some sort of trick, that’s all it was. Melissa retrieved the piece of paper and read it again.
Leave him or I’ll finish what I started.
This time s
he saw the words for what they were. Not only a warning, but a vow. A promise that curdled her stomach and filled her mouth with cotton.
The person who hurt Tommy was still out there and he’d just proved that he had no problem getting close to him. That if he wanted, he could do exactly what he’d promised. She’d been gone from his bedside less than fifteen minutes—long enough to walk around the ward a few times and grab some ice. How long had he needed to slip into Tommy’s room and tuck the note into his hand? How long would he need to kill him?
The answer pushed her to her feet. Had her leaning over the bedrail so she could press a kiss against his dry lips. “I’m so sorry, Tommy,” she said, digging her hand into the pitcher at his bedside. She pulled out a piece of ice and smoothed it across his mouth, watched the dry, cracked tissue absorb the moisture as if it were dying of thirst. “I love you. Whatever you hear about me, try to remember that and that you loved me too.”
It was the last thing she said to him before she walked away.
TWENTY-TWO
SHE WALKED DIRECTLY TO the bank and closed her account. Nearly six thousand dollars but there was more. Including the one hundred dollars Michael had given her, she had almost three hundred dollars hidden in the wall of her closet.
She couldn’t just leave it behind.
When she knocked on her grandmother’s door, Lucy had been surprised to see her. Had instantly thought the worst. That Tommy had died.
“He’s still alive,” she said, pushing her way into the house. “But he won’t be for long if I stay here.” She pressed the scrap of paper into her grandmother’s hand. Watched her nervously while she read it. Waited for her confused gaze to find its way from the note in her hand to her face.
And then she told her everything.
Lucy was quiet. Stone-faced and patient while she told her about the pair of underwear belonging to her that she’d found in the woods outside their trailer. About the person who hadn’t been Tommy outside her bedroom window. About what she’d heard him do to her mother.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. The twins were napping and she didn’t want them to wake and hear her. “I’m so sorry...”
“For what?” Lucy whispered back, her face no longer stoic. “Far as I can tell, none of this is your fault.”
She was wrong but Meliss didn’t argue. Instead she stood, pulling the scrap of paper from her grandma’s hand. “I need to use your car.” She had her license but aside from taking Kelly’s car to the liquor store or walking to the bar to drive her home, she didn’t have much experience. “There’s something I need to get from the house.”
Lucy stared up at her like she was stupid. “After what you just told me, you want me to just let you go back to that place, all by yourself?”
“You can make it easy for me and give me your car keys,” she said in the same tone she’d used on her father all those weeks ago. “Or I can just walk there. I’m going either way.”
After a few moments of debate, Lucy gave her the car keys.
IT was strange, being back in Jessup. She’d been gone for only a few weeks but it felt like years. The person she’d been—the frightened girl who’d climbed out her bedroom window was gone. She’d died by inches, confined in a hospital room, watching Tommy fight a battle she’d become increasingly sure he could never win.
The girl that was left was harder. So full of sadness it almost seeped from her pores. Despite herself, the girl she’d been before cared. She cared about what the people in this town thought of her. She wanted to make her grandmother proud. To prove to her and them that she was better than the woman she came from.
The girl she was now didn’t want any of that. What they thought of her didn’t matter. They stared at her from store windows. Stopped and whispered on the sidewalk as she drove past. None of it touched her. It didn’t even register.
She stood on the porch for a while, staring at the front door, unsure of what she’d find when she went inside. Stuck to the door was a large, bright orange piece of paper.
An eviction notice.
It was proving harder than she thought it would, walking into that trailer. Half the town knew she was back, had known the second she crossed the county line and the other half was getting an ear full about how she was just standing on the front porch like a moron, staring at the front door. They’d say she was gutless. Scared to face the mess she’d made. Not even able to find the courage to open the front door and go inside. It was those whispers, the one she could almost feel that finally pushed her across the threshold.
Closing the door behind her, the interior was cast in heavy shadows. She stood in the doorway for a moment, staring at the floor.
The spot where she’d left Pete was empty, the worn linoleum scrubbed so clean she could see the floorboards beneath it in spots.
Flicking the switch next to the door—the lights wouldn’t turn on. The electricity had been shut off. She had maybe twenty minutes until nightfall, which meant no time to fall apart.
Get it over with.
She walked into the kitchen. It was as she’d left it, a few dishes in the sink. Drained vodka bottles littered the counter. Empty milk jug souring in the trash can.
Not daring to open the refrigerator, she passed it and started down the hall, past her mother’s room. She walked, not intending to stop but she found herself pushing open the door all the same.
There was no blood. Not a drop. Blood spatter had been scrubbed off the walls. Blood-stained sheets stripped away. Even the mattress was gone. The closet door hung open, empty. Hangers strewed across the floor. It looked as if Kelly had left in a hurry, taking only what she could carry.
But she knew better, didn’t she? She knew what had really happened to her mother. That she was dead.
She could still hear her screams. The way they’d been cut off mid-wail. How she’d simply cowered in the corner, hands over her ears. Letting it happen. Choosing to preserve her own life rather than help her own mother.
It was a choice she could never take back. One she’d make again if she was forced to but not one she was proud of. The twins were safe and they would stay that way. She would kill and die, sacrifice anyone and anything to make sure of it. It was all that mattered. It was all she could allow to matter.
The sun was beginning to set. Starting down the dim hallway toward her bedroom, each step pulled her deeper and deeper into the dark. She felt a tightening in her belly. A light dusting of unease fell against her skin and she became acutely aware that she was not alone.
She stood still now, no sound save for the push and pull of her own shallow breathing, and listened. She heard nothing. No creaking floorboards. No door clicking shut. But the silence felt occupied. It felt full.
Like something lurked in the darkness. Waiting.
She pushed forward, forcing herself to venture farther down the hall. The feeling intensified until fear stalled her footsteps, leaving her still and exposed.
Turning toward the bathroom door, she found it cracked just a few inches. Beyond the crack, all she could see was a bottomless dark. A slice of black so perfect and dense she couldn’t make herself move past it.
She saw the blood—her mother’s blood—splashed on the counters, soaked into the neatly folded hand towel, and she felt her breath begin to hitch in her chest as her vision began to swim.
Stop it. Just stop it.
She was being childish. Wasting time. There was no one here. No one was waiting. She forced herself past the bathroom. Nothing reached for her from the dark. Nothing pulled her through the crack to devour her. She was alone.
Her bedroom was a shambles. The window had been smashed out. Clothes pulled out of her drawers. Dirty clothes hamper knocked over. Her belongings broken and strewn across the carpet. Beer cans and used condoms littered her bed. The unmistakable stench of urine emanating from the corner.
Someone—probably the same kids who hung out in the woods and threw loose change at her windows—had spray painted
WHORE on the wall above her bed.
Suddenly, she didn’t want to touch any of it. Her clothes. Her things. They were all tainted. Made foul. Too disgusted to be afraid, she threw open her closet door. It was empty, all her clothes pulled off their hangers.
Crouching, she peeled the paper back and stuck her hand into the hole near the floor. She half expected it to be empty but it was still there.
Pulling the zippered pouch from its hiding spot, she shoved it into the pocked of her jeans. It was the only thing she’d come for. The rest of it was trash—not even worth the effort it would take to carry it to the curb.
She decided to leave it all behind. Start fresh. Start over. Alone.
Mind made up, she was halfway across the room when the whistling started.
TWENTY-THREE
JAUNTY AND TUNELESS, IT floated down the hall, moving away from her. The sound stopped her in her tracks. Made her hesitate but only for a moment.
One second she was paralyzed, the next she was flying through the door. Down the hall. She didn’t know what she was doing. She only knew she was angry. That the person who hurt Tommy was here. That she had to stop him. Charging down the hall into the dark, Melissa refused to think further than that.
Stop him.
The front door was open and she headed straight for it but before she cleared the kitchen she crashed into something solid and warm. Something with arms that banded her own to her sides and hands that clamped over her mouth, leaving the scream that erupted from her throat to die, unsounded, behind clenched teeth.
“Shhh.” The voice was close to her face, the breath of its single sound traveled up her neck, brushing against the fine hairs at her nape. Her eyes were popped wide but they couldn’t find the light. It was full dark now and knowing that pushed her to fight. She strained against the arms that held her but her struggles were weak and her captor held her easily.
Waiting In Darkness: A Sabrina Vaughn Thriller (The Sabrina Vaughn Series Book 1) Page 12
