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Renee! Where was—? Oh God.
Reality came crashing back and she knew she’d been dreaming, that her nightmares had returned. Her daughter and the dog were beside her on the floor, sleeping, not so much as stirring.
But Lucy’s heart was pounding, her nerves jangling from the too-real images. Her watch told her it was barely three in the morning, that there were hours until daylight. Around her the old house moaned and settled in the wind. She put another chunk onto the fire. Flames crackled and popped.
Shivering, she looked through the window.
The nightmare left her uneasy and brought her thoughts to the night it had all started, when Ray had attacked Mama. That was the way it was, right? Ray had come into the bedroom and started the fight. Mama had been in the bed, drinking and . . . She tried to remember, caught flashes of that horrid night:
Hiding in the bathroom.
Hearing the fight.
The fairy lights showing the anger on Mama’s face, and Ray looming over the bed before they dimmed.
Even now, so many years later, Lucy felt her heart pounding.
She remembered running from her hiding spot in the bathroom, leaping toward the bed, the narrow scissors raised.
Just then, the hallway door opened.
“Oh, Jesus!” Marilyn rushed in. “Stop. Oh God, stop!”
“What the fuck?” Clark yelled.
Lucy plunged the scissors deep.
Ray yowled in pain, but he still had Mama pinned down. “You little bitch.”
Someone was trying to pull Lucy off, and she heard the distinctive sucking sound of the scissors being yanked from flesh. Someone’s hand grabbed the scissors, pulling them from her grasp.
Mama . . . Mama was still writhing beneath a cursing Ray.
Something shifted.
Lucy thought she saw an arm raise, the scissors winking in the barest of light from the doorway before being thrust downward.
Mama screamed again. Gurgling. Coughing. Frantic. Fighting for her life. And . . . and . . .
“And what?” Lucy said aloud in the cabin as the dark memory surged and receded, teasing her as it always did. “What?”
Blam! In her mind’s eye, she saw the flash of the gun as it was fired. Point-blank into the tangle of bodies on the bed.
“Oh God,” Lucy whispered now, dropping her head into her hands, her fingers digging into her scalp. This was where the memory always stopped. She never could remember any further. Squeezing her eyes, she tried to force the rest of the night back to the forefront of her mind, but she couldn’t. There was just dead space. The next thing she recalled was the female officer, Lorna Davis, cradling her and carrying her down the stairs after Mama was hauled off on the stretcher.
“Damn it.” She pounded the floor in frustration, and Merlin raised his head.
Stop, Lucy. Don’t wake Renee. Get a grip.
But that was the problem. Her grip was slipping, her memories still buried. No amount of psychoanalysis had brought them forward. Not Sister Rosa at the school in Salzburg. Not a counselor when she’d returned to the States, not even the hypnotherapist she’d sought out in desperation when she’d felt her marriage was falling apart and blamed the trauma she’d suffered as a child. All dead ends.
She’d testified to what she remembered.
Because of it, Ray Watkins had spent a quarter of a century behind bars.
Don’t dwell on it. Make a plan. For God’s sake, do something. Hiding here is not the answer.
She made instant coffee and told herself not to let it get to her, but she knew Ray Watkins hadn’t forgotten her. He’d somehow managed to find her address and sent her letters from prison, all written on white-lined paper and in pencil. Some had been poems, some had been drawings, and all of them had been friendly, at least on the surface, but Lucy had thought there were hidden messages on those carefully crafted pages. Were there eyes in the weeping willow tree that climbed up the side of one page, ghoulish orbs with severed flesh in the swirling trunk? And the vines that decorated another missive—were they twined branches circling the poem, or were they arms and hands interlocked and struggling?
