Strange in Skin (24 page)

My mother sighed. You could tell she was trying to gather her thoughts. She always did this. She
thought too much before she spoke. It always drove me crazy and even more so now. I had always
thought of her as being so honest, one of the best people I had ever met in the way of values and the
goodness of the heart, but now all I could think about was that her pausing to say anything meant that
she was only stalling to allow herself more time to come up with an even better cover-up lie. She
played the part well. Her and my father deserved an academy award.

“No more lies!” I shouted, weary of her lingering silence.

 

She began to cry. “It’s true,” she cried out. “It’s true.” She covered her face with her hands as she
began to sob.

 

I looked up. Seeing her like that almost made me feel sorry for her again, but no, I would stand my
ground and demand nothing but the truth.

 

“I’m so sorry, Anna.” She continued to wail as she bent downwards toward the carpet. “It wasn’t
supposed to happen like this.”

 

“No, you hoped it would never happen at all, that I’d never find out!”

She looked up at me, her face soaked in tears. “I never meant to hurt you. I have always felt as if
you were truly mine, Anna.”
“The
truth
,” I insisted again, crossing my arms. I went over and pulled her to a standing position. I
looked her straight in the eye so that she would know I meant it. I was so tired of these games.
She gave me an apologetic look again. “I could never have children. Something’s wrong with me.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know if I could feel complete without having children in the house.”
“So Matthew, too?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

I tried to think back to the time when I was little and Matthew had come into the house. I would
have been around four. I couldn’t remember what it was like before he came or when he came. I had
been too little to understand at the time, I supposed. “Why didn’t you tell me? How could you have
kept this from me?”

“I thought it was best this way. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
“You’re just sorry you got caught.”

“I know you’re angry. You have every right to be, but please know that I love you, Anna, more than
anything, and I have never wanted anything but the best for you and your brother.”
She was probably right. I shouldn’t be so furious at her, but I was. This was just too much to bear
right now on top of everything else.

“It’s hard to find out, but it changes nothing,” my mother continued.
“It changes
everything
,” I corrected her.
“Please,” she began to beg again. “I love you.”

“It’s like I’m living a nightmare. Maybe I’m not really even here. Is somebody going to pop out and
tell me I’m dead next, that I’m really just some spirit wandering around?”

“What are you talking about?”
I took a deep breath. I had been rambling. I had to calm myself down and think clearly.
“I know it’s a huge shock, but you are still my daughter and I’m your mother.”
“Who are they?”
“What?”
“My real parents?”

“Oh.” She sat down in a large chair stuffed into the corner of the room. She ran her palms over the
smooth leather exterior. “I don’t know.”
I raised my eyebrows at her.

“I really don’t know, Anna. You had been abandoned as an infant. Someone had found you and took
you to the adoption agency where I then got you shortly after you were born.”

 

Abandoned. The word rolled around in my head like a heavy log. “So my birthday?”
“Well, the doctors were certain that you had only been a few days old when you were found. I
guess it may not be completely accurate, but …” she whispered.

Unbelievable. I had no real name, no real birthday. I might as well not exist at all.
“Anna, you can’t tell Matthew. He’d never understand.”
I glared at her. “I’m not going to tell Matthew,” I said with irritation in my voice.
“Hardly anyone knew,” she said. “Please tell me how you found out.”

I hesitated. Should I tell her? It didn’t seem to me that she deserved to know. “Lainey Tritt,” I
suddenly blurted out.

She removed a tissue from her pocket and began dabbing her nose with it. “Who’s that?”
“She’s the woman who adopted Emry Logan.”

My mother’s face twisted up again at the announcement of the name. What did it mean to her if my
father hadn’t told her about our little rendezvous yesterday in the prison courtyard?
“What do you know of him?”

“I should ask the same of you.” I stared at her, wondering what my father told her and what he
didn’t. It was obvious she knew
something
.

 

“Well,” she began hesitantly again. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I guess I will
anyway.”

 

I tapped my foot impatiently.

 

“A group of townspeople in Seneca have gathered together against him. He’s dangerous, a man to
stay away from,” she said.

 

“Dangerous how?”

She eyed me as if still trying to figure out how I knew of him. “A threat to society. A killer. He …”
she hesitated but then looked at my face and knew she had to spill everything she knew now. It was
the only way to regain what little trust I had of her. “There’s something different about him. He has
this special gift. Well, I shouldn’t even call it a gift. He’s into black magic, Anna. He worships
Satan.”

I almost laughed aloud, but I quickly removed the smirk from my face. “How do you know this?
Does he go around wearing all black and have horns growing out of his head?”
She frowned at my sarcasm. “Anna, you have to believe me.”

A sound similar to a snort escaped from my throat.

“Of course you have every right not to, but about this, I am telling you the truth. Your father has told
me things about him. He isn’t someone to take lightly. Please tell me that you’re having nothing to do
with him and his kind. Mrs. Anderson knows things.”

His kind.
How very ironic. Emry didn’t even know who his kind was. My father thought he was a
devil worshipper. Now it was starting to make sense. He would feel it his duty to rid the town of such
an evil, and so they had formed a group of people to seek him out and take him down, to lock him up
so he wouldn’t be able to get anyone else involved with his witchery. I was assuming that the only
thing that Mrs. Anderson knew was what Buck had told her about his ability to move things, things
such as Buck.

I took a deep breath and looked at the woman I had always assumed was my birth mother. She had
always seemed fragile, yet had this strength about her, a way with people that could calm them down
and get them to trust what she said, but now that image was completely destroyed. She only looked
fragile, sad, pathetic. I almost wanted to shake her and ask how she got this way, but then I really
should be shaking myself and asking the question of why hadn’t I ever figured this out before? Why
had nothing seemed out of place as far as my belonging until today?

“So Mrs. Anderson knows things you said. What do you mean? Like if she knows things, doesn’t
that make her a witch, which technically would put her into the category of
her
practicing black magic
also?” I crossed my arms and raised my eyebrows at her.

She began chewing on her nails nervously. “Mrs. Anderson is … different herself, but not in that
way. She can be trusted. She knows what she’s talking about. She’s helped gather a group of strong
men in the community who can also be trusted and who will help rid Seneca of any black magic and
send out the message to anyone who might be like Emry Logan, that we don’t tolerate such practices
here. We’re a God-fearing community. They’re actually meeting again tonight. All of them.”

“The witch hunting the devil. Interesting.” I couldn’t hide the smirk this time. What she was saying
was all too ridiculous. Of course, they probably weren’t to blame for their lack of understanding of
what was really going on with Emry. Worshipping Satan was the only kind of logic they would pin on
him for what had happened that night with Buck.

“I really shouldn’t be telling you this,” my mother blurted out, pacing back and forth in front of the
chair.

“I just don’t get how you can trust anything he says.”
“Who?”
“Father.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on, as if you haven’t recognized it.”
She gave me another puzzling glance. “I really don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, come on!” I shouted out. “The affair. Why do you even make me have to say it? You have to
already know.”

 

She became very still and very quiet, more tears streaming down her face as she stood there and
stared at me. “He’s not having an affair,” she whispered.

 

“Of course he is! I
saw
him with
her
. He tells you he’s going over there to talk about what? Satanic
people in Seneca? Don’t you think they’ve spent a little too much time together
alone
?”
Her eyes moved to the floor and she crossed her hands in front of her and clasped them together.
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

 

“No, of course not,” I snapped. “I never do. I don’t know anything. Everyone treats me like a child,
a child that’s not even theirs to begin with.”

 

She ignored my remark about the adoption. “John’s a good man. A great man. He loves me. He
loves all of us. You’re mistaken,” she said in a voice so soft I had to strain to hear every word.

“Well, I’ve said my piece about the subject. I won’t bring it up again.”
Pathetic
, I thought to
myself. I was almost glad she wasn’t my real mother now. I didn’t want to be anything like her. I
headed toward the door and then looked back. She was still standing there staring at the floor. “Just
tell me one thing.”

She refused to make eye contact with me.
“Why won’t you stand up to him?”
She remained very still for a few moments before making any kind of response. “I trust him.”

Chapter 12

I shivered as I opened my eyes. The chill of the night felt as if it had crept into my bones as I
huddled my arms around my stiff body. Piles of snow were heaping all around me. I squinted as my
burning eyes seemed to refuse to open revealing how tired I still was. I could see that most of my car
was now covered with snow also. My hand fumbled around blindly in the air until it felt the dangling
keys sticking out of the ignition. The car whined from the cold as it finally gave in and started, and I
waited for it to warm up before I could blast the heater.

I had fallen asleep in my car. I was sitting in an abandoned parking lot of a boarded up building that
had once been a local grocery store before the main stream of commercial food places pushed their
way into town and bullied the local companies out of business. I pulled my coat around me tightly.
Somehow while I slept, it must have fallen off of my shoulders, and it too was cold from lying on the
seat beside me.

The air shooting out of the heater felt warmer. I sighed relief as it hit my skin. I turned the knob to
high and just sat there, trying to stretch out my rigid limbs. I tried to clear my mind, too. Hadn’t I had a
strange dream? Oh yes, I remembered, it had been about Emry. I smiled. It wasn’t strange at all. It had
been wonderful. We had been lounging on the sparkling beaches of Evadere, his arms wrapped
around me. I laughed at the irony of it all. I had first thought that he had only imagined such a place,
and here I was recreating it in my mind. I felt my heart ache suddenly as I realized how much I longed
to be near him again, to touch his perfectly smooth tan skin again and feel the warmth of his breath on
my neck. I closed my eyes and tried to hold still, waiting for a numbness to come on to block out my
misery of being forcefully separated from him. Then I remembered my mother crying on her knees in
my father’s office telling me that I was not their child. And the numbness came then, another sort of
pain but less severe and different from the one I felt when thinking of Emry. This I could tolerate, and
so I allowed myself to continue feeling it.

The heater began to thaw me out as I thought about how I had gotten to the point of falling asleep in
my car in the middle of nowhere in the first place. My eyes shifted to across the street. Just almost out
of sight behind a line of barren trees I could see the edge of Buck’s driveway. I hoped he hadn’t come
home while I was asleep. I looked at the green glowing numbers on my dashboard: 10:21p.m. I had
been asleep for almost an hour, and the snow had fallen heavily between now and then, too.

Great, just great,
I thought to myself as I made sure my boots were on tightly. I reached in the
backseat for the ice scraper. I exited the vehicle and began to clean off the front windshield. The night
had suddenly become very peaceful and calm. There wasn’t a single snowflake in the sky, and there
were no clouds. It was clear and brisk, the moon shining down bright against the blinding snow. Even
the abandoned parking lot looked serene and beautiful, renewed by the fresh coat of white it had just
received.

Out of the edge of my vision, I saw taillights heading up the driveway leading to Buck’s house. My
heart skipped a beat as I felt a sense of urgency rush over me. My hand brushed off the snow in long,
rapid motions as I headed to the back of the car and cleaned off the rear windshield as well. I looked
down at my boots as they sunk into the snow. A couple of inches had to have fallen at least I guessed.
I finished up the car and hurried back inside to the warmth. I shuddered, my eyes glued to edge of the
driveway. I wasn’t sure how this was all going to go down tonight. I wasn’t even sure if I had a plan.

My mother had told me that the whole group was going to be meeting tonight, which had led me
here to his creepy lot where I could be hidden as well as be able to see Buck at the same time. I had
hoped that he would come home first to change out of his police uniform before going to meet up with
Mrs. Anderson and the rest of the group, and I was glad I had been right. I was also glad that I hadn’t
slept any longer or else I would have missed his coming home at all. Now I had to wait until he had
changed and somehow follow him to this meeting. That was all I knew for now. When I got there, I
had no idea what I was going to do then. Being a stalker didn’t come easily to me. Too much anxiety
was attached to it.