Level Five (15 page)

“If you’re sure, because I really wouldn’t mind,” she replied with a touch of wistfulness in her voice.

God, he knew there was nothing she’d like better than to believe that she’d nursed him back to health with her chicken soup. “I’m sure.  I’ll just see you tomorrow and then look forward to cooking out at your place tomorrow night.”  He murmured a goodbye and then changed his ring tone to vibrate and shoved the phone back in his pocket. 

He would not be interrupted again by any inane calls from a dim-witted, besotted woman who didn’t understand her role in his life.

His breath caught in his chest. Suddenly Edie was there, on her deck, stretching with her arms overhead as a dog ran to a bush to pee.  The intense heat of the day fell away as a shiver of anticipation shot through him.  The pleasure lasted only a moment as the dog suddenly raced toward the fence where Anthony was hidden behind the trees.  Yapping and snarling, the dog focused on his location. Anthony froze.

“Rufus!”  Edie’s voice filled the air, but the damned dog kept barking.  Fearing the mutt would give him away, Anthony walked backward, further away from the fence line.  He breathed a sigh of relief as the barking finally stopped.

His heart pounded painfully as he returned to his original hiding place and saw the dog bounding back to Edie.  He had only a moment to savor the sight of her again before she and the dog disappeared back into the house. 

He leaned against a nearby tree, weak and trembling with his want, his need to have her in the paper room where he could hopefully finally and forever banish the rage that simmered inside him all the time.

She was going to be his biggest challenge yet. With a dog, a boyfriend and a job that kept her at home much of the time, it would be difficult for him to take her.

But he was smart and he had several things working in his favor.  The isolation of her house, the fact that her boyfriend apparently didn’t live with her and the doggie door that indicated the dog came and went at will into the backyard. All would eventually make taking Edie that much easier.

Nobody would hear her screams if he took her from here.  A dog that could run in a fenced backyard could also ingest a piece of poisoned steak to quiet his barks, to remove any threat. 

A week, he thought as he finally turned to go back to his car, two at the most.  He’d take the time to watch her house, to shadow her movements and to see if he could get a handle on her schedule.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t take off work so most of this phase of his plans would have to be conducted during the evenings and over the weekend.

And while he watched and waited for the perfect opportunity, he’d read her book and study her life as she apparently studied the people she wrote about. 

He got into his car, trembling as he thought of the woman he’d just seen.  He felt it in his gut, knew it deep in his soul…Edie was the one who would finally stop his pain.

She would be the ultimate sacrifice that would banish the piercing hole inside his
heart, that would take away the torment of his childhood.

Her eventual death would fix him, make him normal.  He deserved that.  All he had to do was be patient, wait for the perfect opportunity and then claim her.  She was going to be the best project he’d ever entertained in his tower of paper. 

              Chapter 15

              “Triggers.” Colette gazed across her kitchen table at Edie.  It was almost six o’clock and Edie knew Frank would be home soon, but Colette had seemed reluctant to call it a day.

“You never know what triggers a person, but in a situation like I found myself it was vital that I learned what triggered the violence in my captor,” she said.

              “And what triggered him into beating you?”  Edie glanced at the tape recorder to make sure it was still memorializing the conversation and then took a sip of her coffee. She waited as Colette stared out the nearby window, obviously lost for a moment in the nightmare of her past.

             
As Edie waited she thought about all the things that ignited nearly overwhelming emotions in her.  Chocolate cookies, even sitting on a grocery shelf, could take her back to the day that Francine had disappeared.  The sight of a homeless man on the streets could evoke in her such grief she nearly lost control.  A scent could trigger a painful memory, a refrain from a song could cast her back in time, back to those days just after Francine’s murder.

             
She’d convinced herself that the past was the past and she had left it behind long ago, but it only took one of those triggers to cast her back. There were days she felt mired in the loss of the tragic events that had happened so long ago.

             
Colette looked at her once again.  “I learned quickly not to question his warped perception of reality. In his mind the reality was that I was his wife.  He went to work during the day, then came home and had dinner with his loving wife.  He talked to her and made love to her. She was the perfect woman, there to serve and adore him.”

             
For a moment Colette looked like she wanted to retch. Edie could only guess what it had been like for her to be raped over and over again by a man who had not only taken her freedom, but had also nearly taken her very soul.

             
“When he had sex with me, he always used a condom and at least I was grateful for that.  I can’t imagine what would have happened if I’d gotten pregnant.”  She placed a hand on her stomach, where Frank’s baby now grew.

Once again she focused out the window, as if seeking the sunshine to ward off the darkness of memories. Once again Edie sat patiently until Colette was ready to continue.

              “In the first few days I fought against his sense of reality, clinging to my own. I learned quickly that the result was beatings that left me bruised and battered. I knew I would never escape if one day I pushed so hard against him that he beat me to death. 

She turned to gaze at Edie.  “On the outside I embraced his reality to survive, but I held tight to my own reality deep inside where he couldn’t find it or me.”
             

             
Edie had spent much of her adult life avoiding the triggers that would shine a light on her own reality. One of the things she admired most about Colette was that she’d had the strength to embrace not only what had been done to her, but also who she had become because of it.

             
“Do you have nightmares?” Edie asked, thinking of the demons that sometimes reared their ugly heads in her own sleep.

             
Colette released a dry laugh.  “The first couple of months after I was home it was as if all the screams I’d held inside during my captivity released themselves at night when the monster returned in my dreams.  I’d wake up in Frank’s arms, the sound of my screams still echoing in the room as he held me tight and assured me I was safe.”  She shook her head and smiled.  “That man should be in the running for sainthood.”

             
She took a sip of her coffee.  “It’s funny, I don’t have the nightmares as often as I used to have them, but I don’t dream pleasant dreams anymore.  It’s either a nightmare or nothing.  It’s as if his final horrible act wasn’t just to scar my face but also to steal my happy dreams from me.”

             
“You’ll have happy dreams once again, Colette,” Edie said.  She wanted to, needed to believe it for the woman who had become not just research for a book, but also a close friend.  “You’re going to have a baby and he or she will bring your happy dreams back.  You’ll be filled with such joy it will be impossible for the nightmares to find you.”

             
Colette reached across the table and grabbed Edie’s hand in hers.  “You’re absolutely right.  I won’t allow him to win and that’s the most important thing you need to write in your book.  No matter what, I never let him win.”

              “That’s exactly what this book is about…the fact that you are a survivor, not a victim,” Edie replied.  Colette squeezed her hand and then released it and sat back in her chair.  “When you were first found in that parking lot after so much time in captivity, you could have made a fortune selling your story anywhere.  I’m sure every news agency in the country was clamoring for an exclusive interview.  Why didn’t you do any at that time?”

             
“I had enough offers that I could have made myself a wealthy woman,” Colette agreed.  “But, I didn’t want to be the tabloid sensation of the week.  I knew I wanted to tell my story my way. It was a matter of choosing the platform I wanted to use.  During the first year after I was back Frank often brought home books about crimes.  I think he believed that I needed to know that other people had suffered heinous crimes that changed their lives.  He brought home a couple of your books and when I realized you were a local author and especially after I read your book about your sister, I knew that you were a kindred spirit, that you were a survivor, too.”

             
Edie frowned, remembering that Colette had said the same thing the first time they’d met. “I’m not a survivor,” she protested.  “Francine was the victim, not me.”

             
Colette looked at her in obvious bemusement.  “You know better than that, Edie,” she chided.  “You know that when a crime happens to a person, it doesn’t just affect the victim. It radiates out to touch everyone in that person’s life.  Haven’t you ever considered how different your life would be if your sister hadn’t been murdered?”

             
Edie laughed but was aware of the discomfort crawling up her spine as Colette gazed at her with the knowing look of a member of an exclusive club of heartbreak.  “Hey, this book is about you, not me,” Edie replied with another uneasy laugh. 

For the first time since she’d begun working with Colette, she was grateful to hear the sound of the garage door rising, signaling an end to their time for the day. Frank was home.

Minutes later as Edie headed home, she tried not to think about how her life would have been different had Greg Bernard not killed Francine.  The question often haunted her in some of her darkest hours. 

What if? 
Two words that held a wealth of torment.  What if Bernard had lived and hunted his young prey in another state?  What if he’d never seen the beautiful, sparkling Francine?  Thinking about how life might have been different was like picking scabs off a wound that had never managed to heal.   

Edie knew that there were five stages of grief, and that somehow she was stuck in the middle. She had never really reached the final stage of acceptance.

As she pulled down the long lane that led to her home, she decided that she would spend the rest of the evening doing something other than writing.  She would not spend another minute today thinking about not only the crime against Colette, but also the horrendous events of long ago that had taken everything she’d held dear and smashed it into shards that could never be pieced together again.

  With a punch of her remote, the garage door opened and she pulled in.  As she shut off her engine she heard Rufus’s welcome bark behind the door that led inside.  It was the sound of love, of home and soothed some of the ragged edges that had momentarily gripped her.

After spending a raucous fifteen minutes in the backyard with Rufus, Edie turned on her favorite rock and roll station and threw a frozen dinner into the microwave.

“Sorry, buddy,” she said to Rufus who sat at her feet as she ate at the table, but before she was finished she broke down and gave him a few nibbles of chicken.  There was just something about his furry face and soulful chocolate eyes that she couldn’t resist.

Rufus had come into her life two years before Jake.  She’d been at a strip mall picking up some dry cleaning and right outside the dry cleaners a pet rescue organization had set up shop for the day.

Edie had never thought about owning a dog, but as she’d walked past the cage that held a younger, smaller Rufus, he’d
jumped up and sharply barked as if to get her attention.  It had been love at first sight.

Rufus had filled some of the silence of Edie’s life.  His unconditional love had softened places that had grown too brittle, too sharp to endure. Rufus had become something to love in a life where she had nothing else to love, nothing else to cling to.

When she thought of life without him the grief became nearly too hard to bear and she consoled herself that he was just five years old. Hopefully she had lots of years left with him.

After dinner he followed her from the kitchen to the sofa, where she decided to veg on the sofa until bedtime.  She turned off the music and turned the television to a news channel. As the anchor droned on about the failing economy and Wall Street worries, she fell asleep.