It didn’t.
Above her, Hillary’s mouth dropped open, and she teetered sideways.
Bette scrambled away as the shovel dropped from Hillary’s hands. A plume of red blossomed on her white shirt.
Weston Meeks stood behind her, his face and neck slick with red, a blade, blood covered, clutched in his hand.
He gave a loud, grief-filled howl and sank the knife into Hillary’s back a second time.
Hillary twirled away from him, losing her balance and falling to one knee.
Weston collapsed onto his hands, heaving, blood dripping from his mouth into the dirt mound beside Crystal’s grave.
Hillary cried out and stumbled back to her feet. The dark blade of the knife stuck from her back. She stood, fell, and stood again, half running across the grassy space.
She stopped suddenly next to a mound of grass topped with a pile of rocks.
Bette watched, frozen, as Hillary dropped to all fours and collapsed facedown onto the mound.
“Crystal,” Weston’s voice bubbled.
Bette blinked, and managed to look at Weston. Unsteadily, she crawled back to her sister.
He rested a blood-smeared cheek on Crystal’s chest.
“Get help,” he mumbled. “Hurry.”
She shook her head.
“CPR. I have to do CPR…”
Weston slid off Crystal.
He thumped his palm against her chest, over and over.
“Go,” he gurgled.
Bette stood and started running away. She looked back, suddenly terrified that Hillary would have found her feet once more to return and finish them off.
Hillary lay still in the grass. Beside her, sat the little girl in the nightgown. She stroked Hillary’s blood-matted hair and gazed at her not with fear, but with love.
Bette turned and ran from the clearing.
54
Now
Crystal stepped to the edge of the cliff, Weston’s hand snug in her own.
He turned to face her, his eyes boring into hers with such intensity, she felt as if she could fly.
He slipped his hand away from hers.
“No,” she laughed. “Let’s jump holding hands.”
He kissed her nose, her mouth, and then shook his head. “Not this time. You’re not the only one in that body now. Time to move away from the cliff.”
He put a hand on her belly, flat and warm from their day in the sun.
She remembered the baby. How could she have forgotten? She and Weston were having a baby.
“Okay,” she agreed. “I’ll do the safe thing this time, but our little girl is going to be a cliff jumper.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said, kissing her again and taking a step back.
She reached out for him. He was too close to the edge, but he opened his arms like he might fly and fell backwards off the cliff.
“No," she cried out, running to the edge.
He hadn’t jumped out far enough. He might hit the rocks, but as Weston fell, he grew radiant — as if the sun shone from below him instead of above. Bright shimmering light, rather than the dark water of the lake, swallowed him whole.
* * *
Most would have considered the red-haired victim a lost cause, but paramedic Steve Fisher had been around a long time. More than once, he’d given CPR to children who’d turned blue or men who’d had heart attacks and were ice cold. More than once, they’d come back to life.
After twenty-three minutes of CPR, Crystal Childs took a tiny shuddering breath. A weak pulse began its rhythmic thrum beneath his fingers.
His partner, Orlando Tustin, didn’t have the same luck with the male victim. Although he was alive when they lifted him onto the stretcher, his blood pressure dropped rapidly on the short drive, less than a half mile, to the hospital.
When they wheeled him through the hospital doors, Weston Meeks was DOA.
* * *
“I finally got up the guts to kiss Brian and right then, as I was leaning forward, you and your friend Collet jumped out of the closet and yelled ‘Boo!’”
Crystal heard Bette’s words, but they seemed to come from some far-off place, a back room in a big empty mansion. Walls and hallways and heavy wooden doors between them.
“I was mortified,” Bette continued. “And your friend started singing, Brian and Bette sitting in the tree, but you grabbed her and ran. I chased you guys for two blocks. I was so mad, but when I got back, Brian kissed me right away. And later, I realized it was better because if you hadn’t spooked us, I would have kissed him, and it was way more fun to tell my school friends he kissed me.”
A splinter of light slipped beneath Crystal’s eyelids. She tried to open her eyes, but they didn’t budge.
“Anyway, I wanted you to know that I was happy you scared us,” Bette continued, her voice breaking. “It was such a little sister thing to do. And that’s why, on top of the other three hundred stories, I’ve regaled you with in the last forty-eight hours, I need you to be okay. Do you hear me, Crystal?”
Bette’s hands pressed into her right forearm. The touch was soft and warm.
Crystal tried again to open her eyes. They stayed closed, but she managed to wiggle her fingers.
“Did you see that?” another voice asked excitedly. It was her dad. “Bette, her hand just moved.”
“They did?” Bette demanded.
Crystal felt Bette’s fingers entwine with her own. She tried again to move them. When her thumb twitched, Bette gasped.
“Oh my God, they did. She’s waking up. Right? Is she waking up?” Bette’s voice boomed, no longer far away but so close Crystal flinched.
“Nurse, nurse,” her father yelled, followed by the slap of his shoes on the floor. “She’s waking up. Hurry, quick.”
Another woman’s voice joined Bette’s and her dad’s.
“Okay, calm down. We don’t want to get her excited.”
A hand brushed across Crystal’s face and then pushed one of her eyelids open. A light shined into her eye and Crystal shrank away.
“Her pupils are constricting. That’s good, very good. Crystal, can you hear me?”
Crystal tried to open her mouth. It was so dry. The sound that emerged was barely a rasp.
“Squeeze my finger, if you can hear me," the nurse told her.
Crystal directed all of her strength into her thumb and index finger, managing a weak pinch.
“Good. That’s good, Crystal. I’m your nurse at the hospital in Traverse City. You’ve been asleep for a couple days, but you’re with us now.”
Epilogue
“In total, we’ve excavated six graves,” Officer Hart told Bette. “We haven’t identified all the remains, but based on some jewelry, we believe Tara Lyons was one of them.”
Bette sighed and pushed her cuticles lower into her fingernail.
The half-filled grave her sister had been lying in careened across her mind. She squeezed her fingers tightly and tried to banish visions of the soft grassy mounds, the bodies within them too late to be saved.
“Crystal’s information has been very helpful,” Hart continued. “We’ve identified the man in the blue tuxedo. He disappeared from Traverse City in 1970. He was in town for his brother’s wedding that weekend.”
“What about the woman in the black dress?” Bette wondered, thinking of Crystal’s story as to why Maribelle Claude had ended up in the asylum.
Hart shook his head.
“A lot of the remains are too degraded, but we’ve tracked down a missing person’s report from 1966 that describes a woman who vanished from the Acme area, east of Traverse City. Apparently, she’d been to a funeral that day, hence the black dress. After the funeral, she disappeared. She wore a ring like Crystal described, but we haven’t found the box yet.”
“Why do you think she killed all those people? Why did her father?” Bette asked.
“Mental illness often runs in families,” Hart said. “Hillary Meeks was raised by a psychopath, and event
ually she became one.”
“But what about everything Crystal mentioned about feeding the land? And a chamber? She said Hillary Meeks talked about a chamber in the forest?”
Hart shrugged. “Unfortunately, it’s out of our jurisdiction. My thoughts? Joseph had psychotic delusions. David Berokowitz claimed his neighbor’s dog told him to commit murder. Other murderers have made similar claims. Claude created a story to justify killing people. Maybe he even believed it.”
“Hillary, Greta, whoever she was, told Crystal that she helped her father for years and then… and then when he died, she started the killings,” Bette said, still trying to come to terms with the torture her sister had experienced at the hands of Hillary Meeks.
Hart’s face darkened. “That’s the cycle of abuse. I see it all the time in my line of work. Never anything like this. I mean this is just…” He shook his head, disgusted.
“Terrifying,” Bette muttered.
“Yeah. It’s that. I can look forward to a few sleepless nights after this case. But your sister is alive. That’s a victory and we rarely see in these cases. How’s she doing?”
Bette smiled.
“She’s… Crystal. Full of light even on the darkest days.”
* * *
“Want me to come with you?” Bette asked.
Crystal shook her head.
“I’d like to do this one alone.” She leaned over and kissed Bette on the cheek before maneuvering her growing belly from the car.
The hike up to the heart-shaped cliff at Pictured Rocks was a slow one. Her body had not fully recovered from the ordeal at the Northern Michigan Asylum, and the pregnancy often left her weak and longing for sleep.
When she reached the top, she sat on a rock and caught her breath.
Crystal pulled off her backpack and took out a velvet pouch. Tucked within the pouch was a plastic bag containing some of Weston’s ashes. The rest she’d placed in an urn with the words from his fortune cookie inscribed in the dark wood: Love is the only true adventure.
She opened the bag and stepped to the cliff edge, remembering her last glimpse of him in the world between worlds as she returned to life and he left it.
The breeze lifted the silty gray ash and carried it away.
Crystal rested one hand on her belly as she watched the dust of her beloved disappear into the sky.
Don’t miss the next novel in the Northern Michigan Asylum Series: Let Her Rest
Also by J.R. Erickson
Read the Other Books in the Northern Michigan Asylum Series
Some Can See
Calling Back the Dead
Ashes Beneath Her
Dead Stream Curse
Rag Doll Bones
Dark Omen
Let Her Rest
Available in Ebook, Paperback and on Audible!
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the people who made this book possible. Thank you to Scott Roberts for contributing his true paranormal experience, which inspired the story of the man in the blue tuxedo. Thank you to Rena Hoberman of Cover Quill for the beautiful cover. Thank you to C.B. Moore, for copy editing Dark Omen. Many thanks to Will and Donamarie for beta reading the original manuscript. Thank you to my amazing Advanced Reader Team. Lastly, and most of all, thank you to my family and friends for always supporting and encouraging me on this journey.
About the Author
J.R. Erickson, also known as Jacki Riegle, is an indie author who writes stories that weave together the threads of fantasy and reality. She is the author of the Northern Michigan Asylum Series as well the urban fantasy series: Born of Shadows. The Northern Michigan Asylum Series is inspired by the real Northern Michigan Asylum, a sprawling mental institution in Traverse City, Michigan that closed in 1989. Though the setting for her novel is real, the characters and story are very much fiction.
Jacki was born and raised near Mason, Michigan, but she wandered to the north in her mid-twenties, and she has never looked back. These days, Jacki passes the time in the Traverse City area with her excavator husband, her wild little boy, and her three kitties: Floki, Beast and Mamoo.
To find out more about J.R. Erickson, visit her website at www.jrericksonauthor.com.
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