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But Sherry didn’t know that sometimes the predator lives right there. Among us. In that perfectly regulated world. And he looks just like all the other fish in the bowl
She was writing to keep her mind off waiting, as a way of moving forward.
That was the appeal of the genre. It made people feel a little more in control of a world where bad things happened to good people. They gravitated to the genre because it gave them real-life heroes—cops, prosecutors, judges who helped bring closure to victims. Who righted the natural order of things.
Until she’d started peeling back layers to reveal a dark web of lies and misdirection and eyes turned blind to the fact that someone else could have done it.
“It was . . . I think the fallibility of memory has always intrigued me. How it works, its role in criminal investigations, identification, prosecution, trials. How our own minds can deceive, and protect us from pain. And here was a perfect case in point. A forgotten crime. But not entirely erased. In some ways it had been oozing just under Gloria’s consciousness her entire life. It fueled her drinking, her self-destructive behaviors, her inability to form proper relationships.”
What is locked in your memory might have changed the outcome . . . or is this the one story you cannot write . . .
You can’t put roots down here, yet you can’t go back, either. See? You have not put it behind you. This is not about your work. It’s about your problem with intimacy, with letting people in. You want connection, yet you push people away.
And we all know what happens to heroines who go down the stairs into the basement, candle quavering
But whenever spaces are rebuilt or remodeled, whenever the vellum is scraped down to be reused, evidence of its former use always remains, the ghosts of the past perpetually whispering just below the skin of the present.
watching our lives unravel like skeins pulled from carefully knitted sweaters—some rows collapsing faster, others thick and slow—as we all struggled with the aftermath.
listen for some desperate message she might be trying to impart from the other side. A nudge perhaps. A clue to my missing chunk of memory that would tell us all what had really happened. How it had happened. Why. But I couldn’t recall. Either because of the concussion, or because it was so terrible that I’d repressed it. And it’s still down there inside me somewhere—a dark, festering, inky thing.
She sat for a while, feeling a strange sense of dislocated identity. And guilt. And a sudden stab of longing for something long gone. Her mother, father. Sister. Family. A time when she’d been happy. A time when she used to come here to peruse the new books.
Then wham. Yet another image. A flicker of black shapes against blinding white. It came with a sharp slice of pain up the back of her head. Then it was gone. Trees in her headlights bent suddenly in the wind, the gust tearing debris free that hurtled across the road and smacked into her windshield. She jumped, pulse racing, past slamming into present—a dark, wet, black horror trying to rise out of the abyss of her mind and crawl into her consciousness. With it came a raw instinct to flee. South. On the back of it rode a compulsion to stand ground, fight it. Make it show itself—this horror.
Meg Brogan was not one to shy away from a challenge. If she wanted something. He hadn’t realized she truly wanted him.
Poor kid. She’d been a mere shadow of herself. Skin so pale and translucent her freckles had stood out like floating stars. In the following months she’d begun to cover her freckles with chalky makeup, and she’d cut her hair brutally short, dyed it punk black. As if somehow needing to wear her own aura of death. Or stamp it out, or something.
thinking of dreams versus reality. How you made big shiny goals when you were young, and how life turns out misshapen in the end. How people settled. Found a comfort zone. Or a rut that just kept on getting deeper, and harder to climb out of.
“What I saw on the spit that day is still inside me. I know it’s there, repressed. And it’s like a sick black cancer that has never stopped growing. It festers. It circles my dreams. I wake up nights, hot and . . . it’s messing with me.” She took a beat, marshaling herself. “Forgive me if I need to try and heal it.”
I’ve put it all behind me.” “Clearly, Meg, you haven’t, because look, here you are, needing to resolve something unresolved.”
And as Meg watched, she felt torn. The shape of her world had just shifted, and she was no longer certain where her center lay.
Today was a start. She still had time. And suddenly this was no longer just about the book, but so much more. It was about setting right all sorts of past wrongs. It was about growing up and beyond being the self-indulgent “victim” as Blake had so brutally called her this morning. And he’d had a right to do so.
The choices we make, the secrets we keep for those we love, the ripple effect down the years, the prices we pay . . .
Emotion clawed at her throat. But her mouth tightened. She refused to give in to it. Refused to be the “victim” that Blake had called her.
But her so-called self-indulgence, her cutting everyone out of her life, had been an act of survival, not the act of a victim. It took courage. Not cowardice.
He also harbored the dark and secret places of an imaginative introvert.
There are as many ways to love people as there are people.”
The ways in which we deceive ourselves . . . the stories we tell others to hide from our own truths . .
Blake wondered if it might be that simple, the answer to some troubles, a little bit of magic in the pocket. Belief.
acceptance is at the heart of love. Differences are what make the world a wonderful place.
The fog thickened as the clock ticked inexorably down toward 4:00 a.m., a time when the biorhythmic ebb of the human cycle dipped to its lowest, a time of night when it was most likely for a death to occur in the very old, or very ill. A time when temperatures fell to their lowest, just before dawn, and currents of air stirred across the earth, and it became easy for the grim reaper to reach through that fragile membrane that separates life from death, and crook a finger to softly summon a soul.
A blank slate upon which to rewrite fate.
Meg jabbed off her recorder and lurched to her feet. She paced, clenching and unclenching her hands, palms damp. From that point her memory was blank. She’d slammed right back up against that black hole again, but this was the farthest she had gone into it. And she felt a sense of several shapes moving, like shadow puppets, evil silhouettes, just beyond her mental reach. “How late was I, Sherry? Were you still alive? Were you struggling, calling for my help? What did I do? Who was there? What did I see, dammit—” Wait. Stop! Don’t run, Meggie, don’t run! Meg froze.
Meg forced herself to calm down,
She shivered, unable to get warm. The cold seemed to have sunk down into her bones.
“What made you go into this true crime business anyway? Because of Sherry?” She snorted. “You sound like Jonah. Or Stamos Stathakis. I just like the genre, the promise of justice at the end, of real heroes who save the day. Closure. And the story structure. The bonus is these stories are real.”
act normal. Appear as if nothing is wrong, even if it’s all falling down about your ears, even if it’s all finally coming to an end.
Was her hope so blind and stupid?
Careful who you trust, Meggie. None of us were what we seemed back then . . . Everyone has secrets, even secrets from themselves. It’s a marvel we can trust anyone at all . . .
Emma made a moue, then shook her head. “No. I don’t think so. I don’t really recall.”
Her most fervent hope was that baby Joy would arrive, and become hers before doom hit. And she was certain doom was going to hit now. In what form she did not know yet.
This was all too much. She didn’t understand it, didn’t want to try and unpick it for fear of what lurked, what terrible thing might have been done.
Blake met his brother’s eyes. Mistrust swirled in with the mist. Who was Geoff Sutton, really? How far could he be trusted, this own flesh and blood of his, this brother for whom he’d always covered. The secrets we keep for love . . . the lies we tell ourselves . . .
“Oh, hon, come here.” She moved quickly around the counter and hugged the little body tightly against her own. And it stirred a deep power in her. A kind of energy. A drive. To help this little boy. And it struck Meg square and hard in the face. This is who she was. It cut to the heart of why she’d loved Sherry, tried to save her. Why she hadn’t been able to bear her own failing to do so. She needed to protect, to save, to nurture the vulnerable. She’d kill to do it. And the realization was profound. She’d lost this part of herself. She’d left it behind in Shelter Point. And she was
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Meg smiled inside as she watched him, awash with affection she didn’t quite understand. But she was in no mood to fight it right now. No mood to fight herself any longer. Engaging him was her plan.
Noise roared in her head. Her vision narrowed. Trees seemed to close in around her. Wind, rain began to lash hair against her face. She knew there were others, in the shadows.
A smile began to play over his lips, but it faded as he watched her laugh. A predatory intensity entered his gaze. His pupils turned dark, large, and an electrical heat began to thrum off him in waves. Meg’s laughter slowly quieted. She swallowed. Her heart stuttered as a molten, tingling heat leaked into her belly, and a gentle throb began in her groin, each delicious pulse matching the beat of blood through her veins.
It was reaching the end. One way or another, it would all come back to that day. It would come out. There was no way in hell that genie could realistically be squeezed back into the bottle that Meg had opened. Good or bad, maybe it was a relief.
she felt a tightening, a kind of unarticulated claustrophobia. She put it down to the low pressure from the storm. But deep down, she knew it was more. It was about her fear of intimacy. And commitment.
“Do you believe in evil, Meg? As a force external to man?” “Like the devil?” “Yes. Or a force that can inhabit people. Turn them into monsters.” “It’s an interesting question. Mostly I take the Jungian view that we create the idea of monsters in order to externalize the bad that potentially lurks within us all, and we call this monster a devil, or beast, so we can examine it objectively, without having to see the beast in our own eyes when we look into the mirror.”
Sometimes the predator lives right here, and he looks just like the rest of us . .
And I love you. I want you. I don’t want to lose you.
