Blood in the Past (Blood for Blood Series) (10 page)

JILLIAN SAT ON
her bed and focused her longing gaze out of her bedroom window. She had mostly stayed in her apartment for six months, watching the trees change from golden leaves to snow-laden branches. From late sunsets to early darkness. The melting snow provided an audible crackle, ironically similar to a fire. But such comparisons only served to remind Jillian that she needed to get out of the house for more than just food and doctor’s visits.

She’d managed to earn a decent income writing articles from home for psychology publications such as
gradPSYCH
and
Psychology
Today
. But sooner or later, she needed to put the past behind her, put the box of bloody keepsakes behind her. With spring fast approaching, Jillian could not fathom a better time to rise from the ashes. She chuckled at her clichéd desire and storybook plot of spring and rebirth and rising from the ashes. She was no Phoenix. She wasn’t resolute or resilient. In fact, she was terrified. But the timing felt right.

Jillian shoved off the bed with some effort and crossed her bedroom. She pushed the box full of bloody clothes way back into the recesses of her closet—and her mind—and prepared to begin her new life. Jillian picked out a deep-purple suit and held it against the newfound convexity of her midsection. She hoped it would fit. The next day, she was applying for an open psychologist position at a Center City practice. But that day would be the first day she left the house out of more than sheer necessity. The first thing on her agenda: visit the grave of her fallen but not forgotten lover, Calvin Kyle. Pushing a box behind a pile of shoes wasn’t closure enough to embark on the future.

Jillian strolled through the cemetery gates, blue sky above, stone-gray pavement below. The sun felt good and warmed her body beneath the woolen trench coat. As she abandoned the walkway in favor of the grass, weaving through the headstones, she realized how much she had missed the sun. Allowing her body and mind to bask in the warmth, Jillian thought about all the things she would do after finally putting the past behind her. She smiled—wondering if the practice she planned to join offered opportunities for partnership—as something tugged on her pant leg. She gasped. Broad daylight or not, it was still a cemetery, and cemeteries were eerie in any light.

She looked down to find her pant leg had simply snagged on the weeds sprouting from the base of a small headstone. Jillian bent to free herself and someone brushed past her, causing her heart to skip again. When she stood, she sighed with relief. A man, slightly younger than herself, had bumped into her. He had a rather odd haircut with a short, stubbly section above his right ear reaching around to the back of his head.

“Excuse me, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t watching where I was going,” he stammered. He glanced backward at a woman crossing the threshold of the iron gates before mumbling, “I thought I recognized her.” When he turned, the sun highlighted the shaved area of his head, revealing his odd haircut was the result of a jagged, pink scar.

“No problem,” Jillian said tersely. She continued to her destination. Her voice sounded foreign to her ears; she hadn’t spoken to anyone other than Mel in months. Even when she visited her doctor, she spoke very little. But as she neared her lover’s gravestone, she felt the urge to speak to it. To speak to
him
. She would soon get used to hearing her voice again.

She unbuttoned her coat to sit next to the grave, but her pants dug into her expanded abdomen uncomfortably. Instead, she stood and looked down upon the stone. She opened her mouth to speak. Her unfamiliar voice did not follow. An overwhelming bout of nausea struck her, and she braced herself against Calvin—well, his stone, anyway.

The nausea passed, and Jillian sucked in some fresh winter air while she leaned against Calvin’s headstone. She rubbed her swollen, upset belly and released the cold air, ready to begin again.

“I’m ready to move forward, Cal. I may have done a horrible thing, but it looks like I won’t be held accountable for it just yet. I’m sorry for that, but I needed you to see me, to talk to me, one last time. I thought I could change your mind, but I see now I probably couldn’t, no matter what the circumstances. I’m ready to move forward, but not entirely without you. A piece of you will always be with me, always in my life. I love you. Goodbye.”

Jillian tucked her black hair behind both ears and leaned forward to kiss the gravestone. When she rose to her full height, she noticed a woman heading in her direction. Storming in her direction, in fact. Jillian recognized her as the lady who’d distracted the young stranger. Now that she was closer, Jillian also recognized her from the news: Calvin’s daughter, Lyla.

Buttoning her coat around her pregnant stomach and yanking the collar up around her chin, Jillian hurried off the way she came, soothing her unborn baby through the lining of her deep coat pockets.

***

Young Jason Brighthouse Jr. emerged from the outpatient facility, finally finished with physical therapy. He’d gone from his muscles quivering if he tried to sit upright for fifteen minutes to talking and walking normally.

“Just like a real boy,” he said in a high-pitched whisper. He chuckled at the reference to his childhood favorite,
Pinocchio
. But Jason no longer felt stiff and awkward. Six weeks of rehab and three months of physical therapy had done away with that for good. The doctors said he might experience exaggerated fatigue, but outside of that, only a scar remained.

Chief Tunney had visited Jason in the hospital several times, inspiring him like his father had and encouraging him like his father had not. After much debate, Jason decided he would join the police force. He wanted to honor his father’s life, not his wishes—or rather, his orders. Once committed to the idea, Jason gleefully pored over the stack of reading materials the Chief had left behind and anxiously filled out the Police Officer Recruit Application.

But something still nagged at him. The Chief had assured him he would pass the psych evaluation, as long as he was telling the truth about not remembering the accident, but Jason wasn’t quite sure it
was
an accident. His mother said it was, but she didn’t act like it. Nor did Jason feel like it was. But perhaps his memory loss was a blessing, allowing him to become a police officer. The taint of an attempted suicide would certainly prevent it.

Jason hailed a cab and tried not to focus too much on the psych test. He’d been told he only needed to exceed expectations. He had done that. Tenfold. He felt stronger than he’d ever been, and tomorrow he would take his written competency test. But first, he needed to visit his father’s grave and apologize for disobeying his orders.

Jason walked briskly to his father’s plot. When he reached it, a small tattered flag stuck out of the ground, fluttering in the wind. Presidents Day had only just passed, but the elements had already assaulted the flag. Beside it lay a bundle of dead daisies whose dried petals jumped into the breeze one by one. He plopped down, sat cross-legged, and stared at the majestic stone before him. He traced his father’s name—his namesake—with his index finger and spoke.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I won’t apologize for the admiration I hold for you. I won’t apologize because you were and always will be my idol. I won’t apologize for wanting to be just a fraction of the man you were. It’s not what you wanted for me, it’s not college, but I promise, I will make you proud.”

With that, Jason set a photocopy of his completed application before the headstone and stabbed the flag’s little wooden staff through the paper, pinning it to the ground. He stood up and kissed the cold stone, feeling good about the life before him. On the way back to his car, he heard sobbing competing with the whistle of the wind in the bare tree branches. Jason wondered about the woman he’d accidentally run into earlier.

Jason searched the cemetery and soon located the source of the crying sitting on the ground against a tombstone: a young lady with dark hair, the one he’d thought he recognized. She wore large sunglasses, and her dark hair swallowed the sunlight, reminding him of the woman he had seen at his father’s funeral six months earlier. Perhaps that’s why she looked familiar. She must have sensed his eyes because her head snapped up and she lifted her shades. The gaze she offered pierced him.

***

Last night, Lyla had finally done it. She sat up against the pillows on her bed. A mixture of disbelief and excitement made her shake with a borderline erotic tremble as she recalled the details of the previous night’s festivities. Casually, the man had mentioned his wife. Just sprinkled that information in among civilized conversation. The smoldering coals that forever resided inside of her flared up.

Lyla’s cheeks had burned. Flashes of her mother’s bloodless, broken body emerged. Inwardly, she justified killing the man, her decision made without hesitation. She couldn’t recall the rest of the date except for repeatedly checking the time, reading it upside-down on his wristwatch.

After dinner, Lyla and her date had walked arm-in-arm out to the parking lot. They had driven separate cars. Lyla pretended to scratch around in her purse for her keys as she pried open her mother’s tortoise shell eyeglass case. She had removed the glasses long ago and filled it with syringes of the last of the succinylcholine she’d recovered from the hospital.

When the man had walked her to her car door, she drew him near with her left arm firmly around his waist. He leaned in for a goodnight kiss. Lyla kissed him back as she snaked her right arm up and around his neck. Seconds into the kiss, she felt his body jerk at the surprise of having been jabbed with a syringe. His body froze. Lyla glanced from left to right. No one around. She jumped in her car and pulled off before his body had time to hit the pavement.

She’d driven away with a newfound exuberance and slept soundly. In the clarity of a new day, it felt like a victory for her mother. Lyla had to tell her. She quickly dressed and headed for her mother’s grave.

Lyla arrived and crept up the paved walkway through the towering, wrought-iron gates. Only a few living souls meandered among the deceased, and the phrase s
ilent as the grave
entered her mind. Emotions danced in her stomach as she neared her parents’ plots. She hadn’t visited since their funerals because she felt torn between her love for her mother and her contempt for her father.

But Lyla pressed on, partially frozen blades of grass crunching underfoot. When she looked up from the frost-covered ground, she noticed a woman huddled near her parents’ graves. Lyla quickened her pace, but the woman scurried off at her approach.

“Hey! Hey, you! Get back here!” Lyla called, trotting through the grass in her high heels.

Lyla’s failure to recognize the woman drew her stomach into her throat. The stranger had most likely come to visit her father’s grave. One of
his
girls
. Perhaps
the
girl,
the one who had led her mother to her miserable end. Lyla furiously pursued the woman, threading between the headstones, ignoring the bare willow branches whipping at her cheeks, but the intruder had vanished. Lyla was left alone among a sea of names etched in stones.

Lyla panted, both from the chase and from her fury. Like a snorting bull, she stood hunched over in the center of the cemetery, eyes searching for her father’s mistress. Seeing the woman reminded Lyla of the anger she still felt toward her father and husband. Not sadness—for she felt none—but the raw anger that fueled the power of it all. The power she’d felt last night.

She longed for that again. She craved it even then as she glanced from grave to grave, wondering if the men buried beneath them had been faithful or philandering. That wasn’t the first time she found herself thinking such thoughts about men. Because of that, she no longer felt capable of living an ordinary life. Last night proved that something extraordinary pulled at her. At first, Lyla had found herself startled by the urge to kill the men who sat across from her at the candlelit tables and cozy booths of romantic restaurants. Now she knew better. Abandoning her pursuit, Lyla again headed for her mother’s grave.

The late-winter chill had absorbed into her mother’s headstone. When Lyla approached, the sight of her father’s grave next to her mother’s sickened her. He didn’t deserve to be near her in death any more than he deserved to in life. Lyla turned her back on him, then she sat and inched backward to lean against her mother’s stone.

She tried to imagine herself as a girl, leaning into her mother’s arms after her nightly bath as her mother gently brushed her hair. In reality, the frost penetrated her clothes and reminded Lyla of her mother’s lifeless body the day she’d found her. In that moment, the tears overcame her. She sat sobbing for what felt like an hour.