A biting chill tugs at the back of my brain.
Cold.
Cold.
So, so cold.
My teeth chatter and my entire body begins to tremble.
Suddenly a gasping breath rips from my chest, and I surge forward into a sitting position. Water sloshes all over the floor, and tiny specks of ice rush away from me.
I’m sitting in the bathtub, stark naked. It’s full of frigid water, and I see the last remaining bits of dozens of ice cubes floating around in the water around me.
I hold a hand up. My fingers are well-pruned and utterly purple.
Climbing from the tub, I wrap a towel around my violently shivering body. I look in the mirror, and find my lips nearly completely blue.
The door to the bathroom is wide open, and just outside the door, in the hallway from the living room to the bedroom, lay my clothes.
My brain goes back, trying to recall what happened over the last few…minutes? Hours?
I was making dinner. My thoughts drifted to Jack.
But there’s another memory, hiding in the back of my brain, reluctant to show its face.
One of me going to the freezer. Pulling out the four ice cube trays. Dumping them into the tub and filling it with cold water. After refilling the trays and placing them back in the freezer, I stripped my clothes off on the way to the tub, and climbed in.
I breathe hard, my lungs feeling too frozen to work. I look down at my skeletal arms, and somehow, they look even thinner. It hurts to move, and every movement is stiff and jerky.
I don’t have enough body fat to insulate me.
I grab my clothes and duck back into the bathroom, cranking up the heat of the baseboard heater. I squat down beside it, but I’m too frozen solid to feel its heat.
That’s how I sit, for at least an hour. Huddled by the heater, with the door cracked open, clutching my clothes to my chest. Slowly, slowly thawing.
And I know. I can’t deny it anymore.
Something is wrong.
Something snapped in my brain. It’s sent me down this path that makes it so I don’t even recognize myself, anymore. And if I don’t do something about it, I’m afraid I’ll soon be dead.
My body still hurts and aches as I pull my clothes back on. I hold my ear to the door and hear the sounds of Sully’s deep breathing. I cross to the phone on the wall and call the directory.
“Marvin County Prison, please,” I request.
A few minutes later, I’m patched through to the right person. I make my appeal.
“I see here that there was an assault last time you visited Mr. Raymond Douglas,” the man with the gruff voice says. “Says here all future visits are revoked.”
“Please,” I beg. “I need to speak to him. He has some answers I need to get. I promise there won’t be another incident.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s nothing I can do.” He hangs up on me.
I stare at the phone for a long minute, in utter shock.
No. No. I need some answers.
But, what else am I supposed to do?
The shuffling of feet behind me draws my attention.
“Are you ready to get the truth?” Sully asks. His expression is open, but empathetic to how difficult every single breath of this is.
I swallow once, and place the phone back on the receiver.
And finally, I nod.
Chapter Forty-Three
SULLY
At dawn, we make the drive back to Roselock.
Two hours down the highway. Down the forgotten road that breaks off of it, and then, I feel it.
My heart beats faster. My veins dilate, allowing my blood to flow more easily. The second we drive past the Roselock sign, my chest loosens. I actually lean back in the passenger seat of Iona’s car, and sigh.
It’s difficult to make it through the town and up to the church. Snow blankets the ground and there haven’t been any plows that have cleared these streets in fifteen years, and even then, it was only Mr. Kebler in his truck, with his homemade plow attached to the front.
“Come on,” Iona begs her car as we crest the final stretch up to the church. The tires spin and we slide backward a bit. She pumps the gas, and finally the wheels catch and we lurch forward.
She pulls right up to the front doors of the church and the two of us climb out. She tries to support me as we climb the rotting steps, and I try to hold her upright as well, which leads to an awkward, slipping climb.
The scent of rot and dust is familiar as I pull the doors open. The rows of pews haven’t moved at all, there are no new boot prints.
I’ve been gone for four days, but locking up never once crossed my mind.
Who is around to break in?
I’m still exhausted from my hypothermia. Slowly, I shuffle across the chapel, but only make it to the bench at the organ before I slump down onto it.
Iona sits in the pew closest, looking around. Dread and fear but determination settle into the tiny wrinkles in her forehead and the depths of her eyes. She rubs her hands together, pinning them between her knees.
“I should go start a fire,” she says, and steam billows out from between her blue lips.
“No,” I grunt. “I’ll get it. Just give me a minute.”
She nods, and I think she’s relieved. She’s a city girl. I doubt she knows how to start a fire.
“You said you got a degree in music engineering,” Iona says. She looks up at the organ pipes.
I nod. “I wanted to be a producer someday. Work with all kinds of music. Every aspect fascinated me.”
“You would have been amazing at it,” she says.
My gaze falls to the keys. And like they are magnetic, my hands rise up. My fingers fall to them.
One by one, my fingers depress keys. Bleed out a tune from the back of my head. They’re never ones I’ve heard before. Just whatever flows into my mind at the moment, demanding that I open the valve and let the notes free-flow out.
My eyes slide closed. My back hunches, my shoulders lean in toward the organ. My song today is a simple one. A hesitant one. One that is scared to learn the truth.
But it’s an honest one.
I lay my soul bare, spilling it out of my body.
When the exhaustion takes over and the notes have drained out from my head, I stop. It takes every muscle and ounce of will to move my body and rise from the bench. I grant just a brief glance at Iona as I walk past her. She simply stares blankly at the organ pipes.
A few minutes later, I have a fire started and the flames grow bigger by the moment. I kneel before the fireplace, staring through the glass at the flames. Slowly, so slowly, I feel the heat radiate from it, warming my half-frozen face.
Any normal day, I would be going out to gather roses now, to lay them on the graves of all those individuals I know. Despite the snow, it’s something I always do.
Later, I’d gather my family to keep me company, pulling them from the other side to have a grim conversation. Because, in the Whitmore family, every one of them is dark and grim.
But as I rise back to my feet, somehow everything feels different. I don’t feel that duty and call.
All that occupies my thoughts is getting Iona’s answers.
Iona stands in the doorway to the chapel. Her eyes drift from place to place on the floor, but she has that far-off look that tells me she isn’t really seeing anything. She bites her lower lip and it takes me just a moment to realize why my chest suddenly feels tight.
She’s holding her breath. Her chest doesn’t rise and fall.
Before I can begin to worry that she’s going dark again, she speaks, and releases me.
“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, you know,” she says. And then, her eyes find mine once more. “To accept…this. Everything that’s going on. To realize…”
Her voice trails off and moisture pools in her eyes. “To realize that everyone but me was right. I loved him. Loved Jack with everything in me. So I thought…I thought that seein
g him die, losing him was the hardest thing I would ever have to go through. But really, it’s this. Doing what we’re about to do. It means I’m cutting a piece of me off. A big one. And throwing it on the fire to burn.”
Her lower lip trembles slightly. But she raises her chin. She swallows once, twice. And holds herself high.
I cross the room. And tentatively I reach out, and take her hand. She looks up to meet my eyes and nods once, before walking by my side to the Sunday School room.
Dust is thick in the air and the room bites with its bitter cold. A small draft around the window allows the ice cold to blow straight in. Together, Iona and I rearrange the room, just as it was before with two chairs facing one another. We light half a dozen candles, and draw the drapes.
Our eyes lock, each of us mentally preparing for what is about to happen.
Are you really ready? I mentally probe.
I’m scared, but ready, her eyes answer in return.
In unison, we lower into our seats. Iona never once looks away, locked in on my eyes like everything in the world depends on it.
Into my pocket, I reach. I produce the bit of cloth I wrapped around the ring. For a moment, I hold it open-faced. Despite the door being opened to the now roaring fire, the temperature in the room drops.
Iona’s hand suddenly darts out, her thin fingers gripping around my wrist.
I look up to find her eyes locked on the ring.
“Their names,” she says with a near frantic urgency. “I…I don’t want to go into this and not know their names.” She looks up at me. “I think it will help make it more real for me.”
“Simone,” I recall immediately. “She was the last. Joanne and Sharon. Simone is dark skinned with curly, black hair. Joanne has black hair and a sharper looking face. And Sharon is blonde, short. All beautiful.”
Iona nods, pale. I wait until she meets my eyes, and then nods, granting me permission to continue, telling me that she is ready.
Holding my own breath for a moment, as if I’m about to slide under ice cold water, I close my fingers around the ring.
“Thank you,” one voice immediately cuts through the silence.
“She looks better,” another says.
“It’s working.”
Like a floodgate with a crack in it, the three women come crashing through, drowning me in their surge.
“They’re here,” I tell Iona.
“All three?” she asks, her voice a quiet squeak.
I nod, looking around the room. Sharon stands in the corner, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes wide and scared. Joanne paces, a look of anger and possibly disdain on her sharp face. But Simone, she walks to stand at Iona’s side, just looking at her.
“Is she really to learn the truth now?” Simone asks. She squats at Iona’s side, and watching my eyes, Iona looks in the same general direction.
“She is,” I reply. “Please, tell us what is happening.”
Simone looks up to Joanne and then to Sharon. The other two take a step or two forward, closing into a circle.
“Jack was the beautiful and charming new psychologist in town,” Simone begins. She looks to the others, and both of them nod.
“Where were you all living when you met Jack?” I ask after relaying Simone’s words.
“Pittsburg,” Simone says.
“Richmond, Virginia,” Joanne tells us.
“Long Island,” answers Sharon.
“How…” Iona struggles to get her feet under her, stumbling over her words, but determined looking. “How old was Jack when you met him?”
“Twenty-four,” Sharon says. She twists her fingers into her black dress. “I was eighteen when we met. We were together for two years, Jack was twenty-six when he asked me to marry him, and when I died.”
“And Jack was working when you first met him?” Iona questions.
Sharon nods, even though Iona cannot see her. “He’d just graduated from NYU and was working with another doctor in town. He was brand new. But everyone really liked him. That’s…that’s how I met him. He was working with my younger sister and I was usually the one who dropped her off and picked her up.”
My fingers tighten around Iona’s, an automatic reaction of anger.
She was eighteen. Hardly an adult, and Jack being six years older than her.
I can just picture it, Jack giving a flirtatious smile to the young, naïve sister of one of his clients. Wooing her. The charming, older, professional man and the honey sweet young girl.
“Jack was still twenty-six when I met him,” Joanne speaks up next. “We were the same age. He’d been practicing in Richmond for about three months when we met at the movies.” She bites her lower lip, her eyes falling to the floor for a moment. I’m sure the recall is playing through her head. “I was there with some girlfriends, and there he was too, all by himself. I wasn’t very nice, I guess. I teased him about being on his own. But by the end of the night, he walked me home, and we went out again the very next night.”
“And how old was Jack when you…” I trail off, because saying the words feels rude and cruel.
“Jack had just turned twenty-eight when I died,” she replies harshly.
“I didn’t quite make it to two years like you two,” Simone pipes up. All eyes shift to hers, Iona’s following mine as I repeat everything that is said. “He was twenty-nine when we met and thirty when I died. I was twenty, and trust me, everything about our relationship was a problem for everyone.”
She rises to her feet once more, angling slightly to the side, her eyes fixing on a wall. “We met outside a bakery, where the owner had just thrown me out for having the wrong shade of skin. Jack watched the whole thing and stepped in, putting the owner in a different frame of mind. He bought me a croissant, and insisted on walking me the rest of the way to work.”
There are dark scars on this country’s history. Certain things may be illegal now, but far too much is still within the law.
“Within six months, that ring you’re holding was on my finger,” Simone continues. She looks empty and sick at the same time. Hollow disgust haunts her eyes, the slant of her mouth. “But like I said, there were complications at every turn, every direction we faced. Even our upcoming marriage wasn’t formally legal. It was going to take time, to figure it all out. So our engagement lasted seven months, and things got more and more dire, before suddenly I decided the bottom of the Ohio River was where I needed to be with pockets full of rocks in the middle of December.”
Shivers work their way up my veins, imagining the scene. Iona cringes visibly.
“Jack lied to me.” Iona’s voice is a croak. Rough words spoken through a dry throat. “He told me he had a fiancée who died. He never said it was suicide. And he also told me she’d died a year and a half ago. But…” She shakes her head, her eyes unfocused. “If Simone died in December… Jack moved to Ander in January. Simone had only been gone for three months when we met.”
Her words gain in pitch before trailing off and she shakes her head.
“Thirty?” I say, immediately moving on, because I can feel the tug at the back of my brain saying that our time is limited. “You said Jack was thirty when you met him, Iona?”
There’s a distant look in her eyes, and I can see it: she’s shutting down. But she nods, her gaze fixed on a blank space of wall.
“So he spent roughly two years with each of you, building a relationship, eventually proposing, but then the end came before he ever married any of you,” I fill in, feeling that tug grow stronger, a little more frantic.
Each of the women nod, even Iona.
“And then there was roughly, five to eight months between each of you, where he moved to another city, established a new practice, and met another woman.” Each of them looks around, nodding in unison.
My heart thunders, races, crashes against my ribcage, threatening to stampede as the gate grows heavier and heavier.
“Thank you,” I say quietly, my grasp on Iona’s hand loosen
ing. “You can rest now. We will see you soon.”
And just like that, the three of them are instantly gone.
Iona’s hand shakes, but she doesn’t leave it in mine for more than a moment once the gate is shut and the room instantly warms before ripping it out of mine and standing.
“I need paper,” she says, crossing the room and walking out. “Do you have some paper here, and a pen?”
Chapter Forty-Four
IONA
Sully unearths a stack of papers and I grip them with enough force to wrinkle and crease every one of them. He hands over a pen and I drop it in my urgency, half tripping over myself as I walk back out of his room and into the common room, to the couch.
I grab a big, old book from a shelf and lay it on my lap to write against.
SIMONE
JOANNE
SHARON
I write their names in big letters and cross to the old bulletin board that looks half molded, half falling apart and pin them up. Next, I write each of their cities where they met Jack, and how old he was during each relationship.
There. Now I have a timeline.
“You forgot one,” Sully says as he watches from one wall, his arms crossed over his broad chest.
I look back at my board with six pieces of paper pinned to it.
Iona.
I forgot myself.
My movements slowing down by the moment as the forced adrenaline I was riding on ebbs away.
IONA.
Ander, West Virginia.
30-31.
When I pin up my own two pages and take a step back, I marvel at the timeframe.
From the ages of twenty-four, to thirty-one.
This has gone on for over seven years.
“How can anyone ever trust their heart?” I say as I look from one name to the next. “He seemed so normal. It was just a love story. You meet all these couples, and they tell you how they met, and it’s sweet, but of course never feels as real as your own love story.”
I wrap my arms around my waist, hugging myself tight. “I loved Jack. I loved how we met. I loved our story. It was so sweet and…normal. But there were three others. And they loved their stories, too. With the same man I loved. And in the end…”