House of V (Unraveled Series) (15 page)

“And do they have any leads on
her?” Michael asked, slowly processing the information.

“A few
- ”
I started, but Ann beat me to what I wanted to say.

“Michael, she said we’re safe, so
let it be. I trust her,” Ann said, stepping in front of Michael. “She’s only
got ten minutes, and I’m sure there are more important things we should be
talking about.
Evie
, we were just finishing dinner,
why don’t you come sit down.”

“Sure, ten minutes, though. Sanchez
is waiting,” I said, letting my growling stomach follow my parents into the
kitchen where the sweet smell of barbeque wafted through the air. My eyes
caught the family portrait of a beautiful family. It was the same picture I had
set my eyes on back in Delaney’s house when I first discovered Holston was
following her. All five of them were smiling at the camera. I averted my eyes
from the portrait and directly into my father’s heavy gaze.

“Maybe we can take another photo
one day?” he offered softly before he broke into a wide smile. “Or maybe I’m
moving a little too fast? Your mother tells me that all the time.”

“Oh my God, Michael,” Ann chided as
she herded me into the kitchen and to a wooden chair at the counter. “I hope
you don’t mind, we don’t use the table when it’s just the two of us.”

“No, no. Not at all,” I said as I
sat down and pulled my feet onto the stool.

“So I don’t know where to start. I
guess, I mean, I just never thought
- ”
Ann stopped
mid-sentence as her hand fluttered up to the back of her ear. “I just have
never done this before.”

“Me, neither.”

“That makes three of us,” Michael
added as he dished a large serving of mixed vegetables and chicken onto a
plate. “I should have asked. Are you vegetarian?”

“No,” I said with a shake of my
head, realizing that they knew nothing about me. I was a stranger in their
house. “That’s more than enough. I only have a few minutes. We’re heading back
to Appleton. We’ll actually be staying at Mark’s house.”

“We?”
Ann
asked with raised eyebrows.

“I’ll let Delaney explain that
one,” I said as I picked at the vegetables before I set the fork down without
eating anything. The clank of the fork echoed through the kitchen as all three
of us held our breath. As much as I didn’t want this
normal
- as normal as it could be - scenario to end, I needed to
know something. I needed to ask a question that had been burning in my mind for
the last year. I needed to understand, and I needed to know that she was
remorseful for everything that had happened, that she was sorry for who I had
become. I needed to hear it from her, my mother.

“Did you love him?” I asked,
staring at Ann. Her hand fell off her ear and into her other hand. She clasped
them both in front of her waist. Michael glanced at Ann, whose face was stoic
and beginning to pale as she looked at me. It was the question she didn’t want
to answer, but that had played over and over in my head. I had to know. Michael
put his hand over her clenched hands.

“No,” she answered flatly. “I never
did love him. And I desperately wish that I’d never spent that night with him.
I’ve played that night over in my head a million times, wishing that I would
have chosen differently. That I would have walked out of that diner and back
home where I belonged. But he was so persuasive and what I thought was passion,
wasn’t. What I thought was exciting, wasn’t. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t anything
except a man who was artfully skilled at charming the pants right off a
vulnerable woman at the time. I regret it, I do. And don’t think for one second
that I am not ashamed and haven’t lived with that regret for my whole life.”

Michael was silent as he held her
hand. I realized that they had unconditional love between them. That’s what
true love was supposed to look like. It’s hard to know these types of things
when you grew up like I had, with a monster as a father.

“But I don’t regret what became of
that night because Delaney was brought into the world nine months later,” she
continued. “But the loss we endured after that night, now that I know what
really happened, I’ve beat myself up every day for the last year over that.”

“However, no amount of crying,
regret or self-abuse will bring Seth and Owen back to us,” Michael added.
“They’re gone, and there’s nothing that we can do about it. We’re moving on
because that’s what we do. That’s who we are. Besides, we’re thankful that we
were able to give Ben and Mark a fair chance at life. And now, you have been
brought back to us and we can’t begin to tell you how blessed we feel.”

“Blessed.”
The word stung in my throat as I thought of Holston and his lifeless body on
the ground. He was anything other than a blessing to this world. He had
tortured our family.
Destroyed it.
And now they sat
here, calling it a blessing. I felt cursed.

“We have no other choice than to
move forward,” Michael said.

“Holston is gone now, thanks to
you,” Ann whispered. “I can’t even begin to tell you how thankful I am that you
saved us all. I don’t know where you learned to shoot like that, but I don’t
care.”

“Out of necessity, I guess,” I
responded, finally putting a carrot in my mouth. I chewed slowly and
contemplated my next question. “Did you ever believe I was alive?”

“Not once,” Michael answered.

“I didn’t want to believe that you
were all gone, but the evidence was there. Your bodies
- ”
Ann stopped, unable to finish.

“Why didn’t you chase after me?” I
asked, looking into the same blue translucence I recognized in my own
reflection.

She didn’t respond, and instead
stared at me, her eyes beginning to well with tears.

“After I shot him, I saw the relief
in your eyes and I knew then that you never loved him, but I needed you to tell
me that. I needed to hear it from you. And now I need to hear from you why you
didn’t believe I was yours,” I said. “That’s why you didn’t run after me. You
didn’t think it was true. You didn’t believe that something
so
evil as myself could be yours.”

The tears brimmed over her eyes and
the streams flooded down her face like a dam that had broken after decades of
holding strong. Michael wrapped his arm around her waist and handed her the
towel from his shoulder. She wiped her face and let the tears run into the
cotton with full force. I had made my mother cry.

“I was in shock,” she whispered.
“The past was tumbling back to me, and I believed I deserved everything I was
getting. I was ashamed and broken, my actions devastating our family. Then you
came back into that house that he built to haunt me, like a pale, little ghost.
I didn’t believe it was you at first, and when I finally did, I was too scared
to go after you. I didn’t know what you had become. What I had let you become.”

She paused and wiped more tears
from her face. She finally let out a deep sob as her back crumbled into
Michael’s arms. She wailed, “I was ashamed. I’m so sorry.”

I watched my mother cry, her body
shuddering as my father held her close, from my own words. I hadn’t intended
the conversation to go as it was, and I was unable to cope, so I was about to
do what I did best - run - when my father uttered the words I’d never known I
was missing my entire life.

“We never stopped loving you."

12

June 17, 1:00 p.m
.
Location Unknown

Sister Josephine attempted to peel
open her eyes, but the dryness formed tight seals on her lids. They were so
heavy, yet she pulled up anyway, willing her lids open with every ounce of
strength in her body. Her head throbbed and pulsed as she tried to inhale the
musty air through her mouth. Instead, she choked for air, feeling the tightness
of the duct tape against her lips and cheeks. Her nose took over, just as it
had before, inhaling the smell of a building long forgotten.

Her eyelids finally obliged to her
prodding and lifted open just a crack to filter a bright light through them.
She pulled again until they fully opened as her mind tried to process where she
was, but all she could see was the pain. The excruciating ache near her temple
consumed her as she felt the sudden urge to throw up crawl into her throat.

Stay calm
, she said to
herself.
One, two,
three, four, five.
She
swallowed the vomiting feeling down, concentrating on the position of her body.

She was seated on the hard floor,
its cold surface running through the bottoms of her skirt and legs. No surface
was cold like this in the summer except for concrete.
It’s just
c
oncrete
, she
told herself. She looked down at her legs to see them tied together with a set
of rusty chains. Her arms were set in front of her on her lap; her hands bound
together with the same type of chain. She lifted them just a few inches from
her lap, the weight and bulk of them almost hid her fingers from view. She
wiggled them, ensuring they were still there.

I’m okay. I’m alive. I’m in one piece. Thank
you, Lord.

Sister Josephine looked around the
expansive area in front of her. It was a large, open building with nothing
except a few old machines that were caked with black dirt and dust. The light
filtering into the room was coming from the windows placed maybe ten feet apart
from one another. Almost all of the windows had cracked glass, the hot breeze
easily flowing through them. The windows were filthy and had a layer of grime
and film covering what was left of them.

A mouse ran past her feet,
scurrying by quickly to disappear into a crack in the bricked wall. She yelped,
pulling her feet toward herself, but they didn’t move; the chains were too
heavy for her legs. Whoever had done this to her had made sure that she wasn’t
going to go anywhere.

She closed her eyes, concentrating
on the last memory she had. She was standing in front of the church, about to
go in, when the man appeared. He was wearing a ski mask and holding a rock.
There were only three other people, besides her, that had known about that rock
when she was a small girl. One of them was dead. Holston Parker was long gone.
Then there was the cook, she presumed to be dead as well, considering he would
be well over a hundred-years-old by now.

Holston had promised Sister
Josephine over twenty years ago that the only remaining person that knew about
the rock, the boy that had instilled the fear deep inside, was dead.

She laid her head against the wall,
feeling the heaviness of her rosary around her neck. It was still very much
there, and although she couldn’t roll the beads along her fingers, she could
recite the prayers she had chanted for years without the placeholders. She
quickly made a small prayer to God for water, her throat parched to a dryness
she never knew existed, before she bowed her head again, beginning the rosary.

In the name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen. I
believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth….

She was only into the second prayer
when the sound of a door sliding open echoed against the walls. The door
screeched as metal slid against metal. She desperately tried to put her hands
up to her ears to protect them, but they stopped short of her chest, her arms
aching as they tried to lift higher. She relented, setting the heavy chains
back into her lap.

No fear, Sister Josephine, God
is with you
.

A man appeared though the doorway
dressed in blue jeans, a black t-shirt and black ski-mask. He strode toward her
at a quick pace, his long legs moving with a slight restraint. It wasn’t the
movements of a young man, but that of an older man; a body aged and worn,
though still fit.
Could it be?

She inhaled, searching for the
strength to confront the man that had killed Father
Haskens
.
She knew God would judge the man before her, but she needed to know why she was
here, and above all, she needed to get out.

Only a few feet away, the man
stopped and clasped his hands in front of his chest.

“Sister Josephine,” he
started,
his voice low. She watched his lips move in the
opening of the ski mask, listening to the voice, but she couldn’t place it. It
wasn’t familiar at all. “You’re awake.”

Sister Josephine nodded her head
slowly and suddenly wished that she hadn’t woken up. She knew she was supposed
to be
brave,
however the thought of being tortured
here to die a slow painful death anyway was nauseating. It would have been much
easier had he just killed her and sent her to be with God. She didn’t fear
death, but she did fear the amount of pain that this man might inflict on her.

“Good, I’m glad to see you’re
awake,” he continued. “This is going to make the next task a little easier. Can
I take the duct tape off your mouth?”

Sister Josephine nodded her head
again, this time with more eagerness. She would take the small victory in hopes
of breathing easier and getting a drop of water.

He bent down, about to reach toward
her when he stopped. “Just so we get some things straight here. If I take this
off, you are agreeing not to yell, scream, spit or
curse
at me.” He said the word curse with a smugness that settled
into the pit of Sister Josephine’s stomach. Of course, she wouldn’t curse at
him. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cursed, aloud at least. Nuns
were subject to their own inner thoughts, just like everyone else. She nodded
her head slowly, smelling the diesel that wafted from his body.

“You’re a sister of God, after all.
I wouldn’t expect anything less from you,” he continued as he reached toward
her and peeled the corner of the tape. She scrunched her eyes as he peeled
slowly, the adhesive tearing the delicate layer of skin. He stopped after a few
seconds, making her open her eyes, before he grabbed hold again and ripped it
all the way off.