Don't Slay the Dragon (The Chronicles of Elizabeth Marshall Book 1) (23 page)

Chapter Forty-Three

“Caitlyn….Caitlyn…” a tiny whisper came from the still figure on the floor. Even though I could barely hear it, I still jumped at the sound. I didn’t know how long I had stood there, staring down at the lifeless form, frozen in place by my fear and shock.  It had been so long since I had seen any movement, I began to wonder if the body was even still alive.  “Is that you?”

“Lisbeth?”
  I choked out, hoping beyond hope it was really her and that Myst was gone.

“What happened?” Green eyes peaked out between a
mess of red hair. It seemed to take all her effort just to pull herself up onto one elbow.  I wanted to help her up, but I was still too afraid to get too close to her. “Caitlyn, you okay?”  She seemed more concerned with my immobile stance than she was with the fact that she was lying limply across the floor. That seemed to break me out of my shock. I reached down and supported her beneath her arms, carefully helping her up into the closest chair.  My own arms and legs ached as though I had just run a marathon.

She allowed me to help her get settled in the chair but as I moved away to take a nearby seat, she took my hand and held onto it.
She gripped my hand as though it were a safety line.

“Something just happened, didn’t it Caitlyn?” She asked the question but already seemed to know the answer.

“Do you remember anything?”  I countered.

She shook her head as if trying to clear it of cobwebs.

“No,” she whispered then cleared her voice, striving to make it louder.  “They kept me away. They do that sometimes.”

She looked around the room as if surprised to find herself there. Her messy hair was still in her eyes as she stole a timid look at the two-way mirror. A knowing look passed between us. She was
silently telling me that it upset her that they had just witnessed what had just happened. They had witnessed everything from the observation room on the other side of the mirror. She hated that. For Lisbeth, my once best friend, it was deeply humiliating.

“You have to tell me, Caitlyn. Who was here?”
She pleaded in her scratchy voice. She let go of my hand to reach up and brush a clump of hair from her eyes. “What happened?”

What to tell her? This was always a struggle for me.  I didn’t want to keep her in the dark, like the other family members did sometimes, but if I told her too much, someone else might appear, and I wasn’t recovered enough from the last one to want to talk to anyone else right now.  I had to take this carefully.

“I was talking to Maxine earlier,” I told her truthfully.  “I was talking to her about how I’ve been working with the detectives on your case.”

“Really?”
  Her face lit up with the first real hope I’d seen in a long time.  “I knew I could count on you. I knew I could trust you to help me.”  Her faith in me was daunting at times like this. “Have you found anything new? Did you find the proof that I didn’t kill my mother?”

“We’re getting closer,” I answered vaguely. The toxicology reports still weren’t back yet and
CSI was still combing through the trailer the last I heard, so I couldn’t give her any false hope until I had something concrete. “We’ve found a few interesting things though.”  This is where I had to tread carefully. I needed to know how much Lisbeth was aware of without bringing Myst back.  It was like walking a tightrope.  “I was in your old bedroom looking around. Was there anything in that bedroom that bothered you or disturbed you when you lived there?”

I tried to make it sound like a casual question.  I didn’t want to alarm or upset her.

She gave me a puzzled look, as though not quite knowing where I was going with this.

“Not really,” she pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.  She rested her head on her knees in exhaustion. “It was a cramped little room,” she remembered, “I never realized how tiny it was until I got my first apartment when I got out of this place the first time. I couldn’t believe
my whole childhood was within those few square feet.”

I watched her face for any odd flicker of emotion.  I had thought
, hoped there would be some kind of feeling towards that room, some memory of what was painted on that wall.  Was Myst right?  Did it really paint that mural? Could Lisbeth really have no memory of it? I had to gently push just a bit further.  I had to know just how much Lisbeth was aware of.

“It was a tiny little room, wasn’t it?” I smiled to reassure her. “But we had a lot of fun in there, didn’t we?” She gave a lop-sided smile in return.
“The talking, the drawing. Sharing all the dreams we had.” I could sense her body relaxing at the harmless conversation. It was at times like this that I felt closest to her, as though the old friendship was still intact, that some of the terrible things that had happened over the years were just a bad dream. I wish that my recent encounter with Myst had just been a horrible nightmare. ”Do you remember how your small bed seemed to fill up the whole room?”

“Yeah, there was barely enough room to walk around it,” she agreed, “and that was when Barbara had forced me to clean it.”  She spoke her mother’s name with little to no heat.  There was almost a fondness there.

              “Do you remember those big roses on the wallpaper?”  I tried to ease into it, carefully watching her face for any reaction, for any change in emotion.  I could detect none.  She smiled easily back at me.

             
“Wow, they were ugly,” she laughed a tired but easy laugh. “I think they came with the trailer. I know I would never pick out such a hideous pattern. Although, after the walls in this place, that old wallpaper doesn’t seem half bad.”

             
There was a wistfulness in her voice that I didn’t miss. She was telling me how much she wanted out of here.  Well, I had set the bait and she hadn’t taken it.  There was absolutely no reaction to her childhood bedroom or the wallpaper.  She must not know about it, the others must have kept her from that memory.

             
There was movement at the door and I saw a big, burly hospital orderly step into the room. He was Polynesian and could have easily been a professional linebacker. This was Dr. Ross’ way of saying my time was up. The freak show was over, Lisbeth was back. He wasn’t interested in our little trip down memory lane.  He had seen enough and now wanted to discuss it with his team. I definitely wasn’t in the mood to go back to the conference room and relive the past hour. I felt tired to my very bones.

             
Lisbeth noticed his entrance and understood too that the time was up.  She gave me a resigned look that said she wished we could talk longer but she knew it was useless to push Dr. Ross.

             
I stood and pushed the straps of my purse onto my shoulder.  She untangled her legs and with effort rose to her feet.  We walked a few feet apart towards the door.

             
“I’ll keep you up on anything we find out,” I promised, although I wasn’t sure how much information was safe to give her and who I might be talking to on my next visit.

             
“I would really appreciate it,” she spoke in a tired voice.  “I keep telling you this, but it’s true. I’m really relying on you to help me with this.  I know it’s a lot of pressure to put on you, but you’re really the only person I can trust. You have to prove my innocence. If you don’t, no one else will.”

             
I was beginning to see that she might be right in this. How much vital information on this case would we have missed if I hadn’t been pushing to find more? I still wasn’t completely convinced, but it seemed as though the more I found out, the more it looked as though Lisbeth may be innocent in all this, that Barbara might have set the entire thing up.

             
We were almost to the door, just a few feet away from the orderly, when she turned to give me a hug goodbye.  Lisbeth was the most affectionate of the family, and it had been a long time since she had shown me this kind of emotion. I felt her thin finger dig into my sweater and froze. She leaned close and whispered into my ear.

             
“So, did you enjoy your little visit with Myst earlier?” Her grasp was tight enough that I couldn’t pull away without drawing attention to us. “It’s one of my favorites.” She pulled back just enough to let me see the smirk on her face. She watched as I processed this, wondering just how long Sophie had been here and if Lisbeth had really been present today at all.  My emotions were plain on my face and she was enjoying seeing my confusion.

             
She stepped back and slipped back into her Lisbeth performance.

             
“Please keep working on my case, Caitlyn,” she sounded just like Lisbeth as we reached the door and she paused for just a moment in the doorway. “You have no idea how much I want to get out of here.”

             
She gave me a sly wink that I was sure the orderly couldn’t see as she turned and walked down the hall towards her room.  I stood there for a moment unable to move, thrown again into another wave of confusion.

             
What has just happened here today? What were they trying to tell me? Who could I trust? Lisbeth was my anchor in dealing with all this. What was I going to do if I couldn’t even recognize her anymore?  How could I ever trust her if I never knew if it was really her present or if it was Sophie?

Chapter
Forty-Four

The holidays were right on top of me before I knew it. Between finals at school and the trips back and forth to the hospital I was so busy.  In addition to that, I’d been offered a part-time job as a receptionist at a small, local law firm and felt it might be a good idea to get some help with my growing school loans. A little bit of additional legal knowledge might not hurt either.

I had just deposited my first check and had been frantically running around getting last minute presents for my family. It was getting late by the time I stumbled into my apartment with arms
full of packages.  Our family Christmas party was tomorrow and I had to get these gifts wrapped tonight.

As I was tugging off my coat, hat and gloves and putting them in my small coat closet, I realized I had forgotten to buy gift wrap. I crumpled d
own on my crowded, shopping bag-filled couch, too exhausted to go back out into the driving snow to make another run for the store. Even the miniature, table-top Christmas tree on the table next to the door wasn’t encouraging enough to get me into the spirit of the season at this point.

Jynx came and rubbed himself
against my leg begging for affection.  After a rub or two behind his ears he jumped up next to me and started playfully batting one of the plastic shopping bags.

I was about ready to give up and bundle myself back up in all the winter gear when I remembered something.
I went into my bedroom and got down on all fours to peer under my bed.  It was crowded with numerous plastic storage containers of every shape and size.

When I had left Lewis and my life back in North Carolina, I’d done so in a hurry.  I’d thrown what few personal possessions into whatever spare containers I could find and left with hardly a backwards glance. It wasn’t exactly organized, but I was sure somewhere in here I remembered tossing in some spare wrapping paper.

I rummaged through a few containers before I struck gold and found several long cardboard tubes with various colored wrap in greens, reds, silver and white. I scooped up the whole container and took it back into my small living room. I had more floor space in here and I could do my wrapping while I got caught up on a little news on TV.

I
turned on the TV, found my scissors and tape and settled down to get this done. The local news would be on soon and I was hoping to get this done quickly and sink down into a good night’s sleep.

As I measured the wrapping paper and trimmed it to fit each package, my mind drifted to Logan, as it frequently did when I wasn’t
so absorbed in school or Lisbeth’s case. 

I hadn’t seen him since that night in the trailer when Hammond had discovered the hidden panel in the bathroom and I had found the portrait on the bedroom wall. We spoke on the phone when we could and I kept him updated on my last visit to the hospital and my meeting Myst. We would text each other when we could, but we really had conflicting schedules.

His department offered a lot of overtime over the holidays. The small towns and communities here in Utah were often so close together they almost over-lapped, and it wasn’t uncommon for different jurisdictions to help each other out with coverage during the holiday season.

I wanted to see more of him. I wanted to spend some time with him without Lisbeth’s case between us, to see what was there without this crazy puzzle tugging at both of us.  I wasn’t even sure if there was a relationship there yet.  But for the first time since my painful marriage to Lewis, I felt healed enough to at least consider giving it a chance.

Briefly, I’d thought about inviting him to the family Christmas party tomorrow, then immediately decided against it.  Inviting a member of the opposite sex to the family Christmas party was about the same as announcing an engagement to my family. We were far from that at this point.

I reached into a shopping bag and found the deep ochre sweater I’d found for my sister Meghan.  I hoped she’d like it. She and her husband Greg were expecting their first child this summer and she was just starting to show. The sweater was loose and left some room for expansion, so I thought she’d be able to wear it for a while. They’d recently had her first ultrasound, so I was expecting them to make the big announcement at the party tomorrow, about whether it was a boy or a girl. A simple phone call or a text would do, but Meghan still enjoyed making a big, dramatic announcement. This sweater would look great in
silver wrapping paper.

As I reached down into the plastic tote for the metallic
silver paper, I noticed something lying on the bottom.  A shimmer of bright, florescent blue caught my eye.  I pulled the rest of the wrapping paper tubes out of the container and spread them out across the floor with little notice.

There, lying on the bottom of the clear plastic was a beautiful picture.
It was no more than 9 X 13 inches. The background was a vibrant green of a mystical forest. Ferns and foliage were thick and plentiful. The details, even in the background, were so realistic you felt as though if you reached out to touch a leaf your finger would come back damp.

The
central focus of the picture was a tall, statuesque figure, gracefully leaning against a large rock.  She was dressed in a sable brown sheath that went to her knees. She had deep blue eyes and long, wavy blue hair. A long bow was held in one hand and a quiver full of arrows was strapped to her back. She wore a bemused smile, as though holding back some private secret. Skye. 

It really was a unique piece. It was the only time that I was aware of that Lisbeth had actually given a solid form to a member of the family. 
It was the one chance I had to see one of the family as a separate individual from her, with entirely different features and so life-like.  Even though she had been a fantasy figure, she still looked so real in this picture, so touchable, so approachable.

The first time I had seen this, I thought it was just a picture of her fantasy alter-ego.
She always had such a vivid imagination and could describe all manner of fictional characters as though they were real and standing right next to you. I had no idea at that time that a real
being
had existed within her by that name along with many others.

I reached in to lift it out of the container when several small, square sticky notes fell down around me. That was when I remembered that day. Christmas gift wrap fell away as I was sent back in time to that bright spring day of our youth.

She had told me before I came over to her house that day that she had a surprise for me. It was my birthday soon and she was so excited she couldn’t wait for me to get there. I’d had to finish doing the dishes before I could come over and she had called several times asking me what was taking so long.

When I arrived at her house,
she met me at the front door, bouncing with energy. Caught up in her contagious excitement I could hardly wait myself to see what that surprise was.

When she handed me a small sticky note folded in two, I looked at her in confusion and probably a good deal of disappointment.

“Read it.” She commanded with a grin.

“’Come and find me if you dare. I might be found
beneath a wooden stair.’” I gave her another puzzled look. She looked back at me with that silly smile as if to say: “Come on, dummy, think!”

“What is it, a clue?” I guessed with a shrug
of my shoulders. She beamed.

“Go look!  Go look!” She directed with her arm outstretched and her finger pointing outside.

The “wooden stair” turned out to be the stairs going out the back door of the trailer. Underneath them was another sticky note. A scavenger hunt. That note led me to the rear-view mirror of her mother’s car parked out front. That note lead me to another trailer down the way. On it went, one note at a time, one clue after another. Each clue was a rhyme and a riddle. There was just enough information from each note to send me searching for more.

The last note led me to a large rock next to a birch tree along the river. Behind the rock, propped up against the tree was this picture of Skye, framed in a simple, home-made frame. I’d loved it immediately and had kept it all these years, along with the little notes full of clues that had led me to it.
She had had just as much fun following me along as I discovered more clues as I was having finding them. I had loved the game and always appreciated the creative surprises she came up with.  These were the small things that had bonded us. That she would take so much time to put all of this together for me as well as creating the unique picture.

It was one of my best memories of our friendship all those years ago.
Life was so simple and there were so many wonderful possibilities waiting out there for us. Back when we were both young and innocent. Before all the nightmares came to life.

“Now, for Breaking News.
We’ve just learned that there has been a S.W.A.T. team stand-off with a suspected wanted felon in Weber County. An undercover DEA team was there to serve a search warrant when multiple shots were fired from the suspect.  We’re just getting this in but they’re saying there has been at least one officer fatality and several others injured. We have news crews on the way to two local hospitals where they’re taking the injured officers now.”

The fanciful picture drifted to the floor from my suddenly limp fingers.