AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Cortez Residence
Eleventh Avenue South
Birmingham, 10:30 p.m.
She should have brought something stronger than coffee.
Sadie screwed the lid back on the thermos and tossed it into the passenger seat of Heck’s shitty yellow car.
She stared at the Cortez home. There were no outside lights. Just the moonlight sifting through the trees, spotlighting the house in an eerie glow. The windows were like boxes outlined in gold. The curtains blocking most of the interior lights caused a gold-colored edge to encircle each one.
The girl was in there.Isabella.Maybe it was Sadie’s inability to maintain a coherent thought between the blasts of voices from the past intruding in her head, but she was pretty much convinced at this point that it washer.
They’d had trouble with the girl. She’d remembered Eddie telling her how the behavior problems had started at age five. Before her death, the girl’s mother had refused to allow any sort of real discipline. Eddie had blamed himself and his father mostly. She was the only grandchild and spoiled completely. Everyone, the staff, the guards—they all spoiled her, were enchanted by her.
She was the perfect angel. As entertaining as any child movie star.
Except when she didn’t get her way or failed to receive all the attention. Then she became cruel and violent.
Eddie refused to try the medication route. His thinking was that the child would outgrow the tantrums.
All those pieces of memory had sifted through Sadie’s brain the last couple of hours as she sat here watching the house. The words, his voice, had slid over her as if he’d touched her. She shivered even now. Shaking off the sensation, she focused on the house. Her mind conjured up the images from inside ... the masks, the crosses, the drawings Devlin had shown her. All far too familiar.
Now, if this Alice was in fact Eddie’s daughter, she was up to far worse than tantrums.
But the big question still hung like a flashing caution sign in Sadie’s brain. Why send her to Birmingham?
Why not keep her hidden away as they had before?
Made no sense. Sadie closed her eyes and dropped her head back against the seat. She was so tired. For years now she had struggled to remember all the missing fragments. But they had refused to come beyond a snippet here and there.
Suddenly they were like a meteor shower.
Maybe the old man couldn’t deal with the kid any longer. There had been a nanny. Maybe the kid had killed the nanny or tried to hurt the old man. He was too old to deal with that kind of shit.
Sadie wanted to smile at the thought of the kid hurting the old man, but she had a bad feeling she could actually be right.
Her mind drifted back to that night ... the night when the girl—wearing that bizarre mask like the one in the photos Devlin had shown her—had led Sadie to the shack at the far back corner of the compound. It had been dark. Or maybe Sadie had been dreaming. She couldn’t tell anymore. The sound of laughter and music had still wafted from the main house. Inside people had been dancing and drinking, and probably a few had been hidden in quiet corners doing other stuff.
Isabella’s little girl voice had been saying that she was taking Sadie to her secret place to meet her secret friend. She’d twirled around in the night, whispering things Sadie couldn’t quite make out.
That was right, she realized. It was definitely Isabella who’d led her down those stairs and then through the darkness.
Sadie had been so drunk that night. Like so many nights since her return. Her mind had refused to stop revisiting those dark places she couldn’t quite remember. Some errant brain cell kept stirring the pieces of her fragmented memories in an attempt to put them together like a puzzle that had scattered over the floor.
Only she couldn’t find all the pieces. They wouldn’t all come together.
She was like the nursery rhyme,she thought again. Old Humpty Dumpty in too many pieces to manage.
Oh, but that had abruptly changed. Whether it was seeing all those photos or the girl herself, something was happening in Sadie’s brain, and she couldn’t shut it off.
She’d followed the girl in the mask that night nearly five years ago. To the shack where the little old woman lived. The one who served as the compound’s healer. She was a tiny, bent woman, not much bigger than a child herself. Her gray hair was long and worn in a braid. Her clothes old and clearly homemade.
Sadie’s breath caught at the new rush of sensations, not exactly memories. Images, voices, a knowing.
“Toma,” the old woman said, ushering a cup toward Sadie.
“Drink it,” the girl in the mask said.
