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Chapter Seventeen
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2021-10-20 23:32:11WHEN I CAME TO, the pain in my head was so intense I couldn’t open my eyes. I lay on my back on the cold stone floor and tried to focus, but my brain wasn’t ready to function. The side of my face rested in a gooey puddle and my shirt collar was wet and sticky. As I lifted my head, nausea settled over me. Holding my breath and waiting for it to pass, I remembered going to rehearsal, talking with Dad, and finding the reporters all gone when I got home. Had someone struck me as I came through the door?
The house was dark except for the silvery moonlight coming in the windows. The room spun around me as if I’d pulled a cheap drunk. I sat up drawing deep breaths to clear my head. My hair, shirt, and jacket were wet. I pressed a hand against the back of my head and found a lump at the base of my skull. The room seemed to wheel up on its side. I braced myself to keep from tipping over and vomited between my knees.
I was shaking, dizzy, and weak. I c
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AFTER DARK, I slipped into the laundry room and lifted a slat in the blind to get a look at Ashleigh’s house. The place was dark. I visualized the inside and tried to recall anything she’d said that might be a clue, but nothing came to mind. I located another flashlight, slipped into a dark windbreaker, and stepped out into the night. It was cave black.The darkness was alive with a thousand sounds. Endless rhythms and patterns of drumming, chirping, buzzing, rustling. Nature’s symphony. The sounds of life. Sounds one would rarely hear locked away in prison.I squeezed into the row of bushes at the back of the lot and emerged about thirty feet from Ashleigh’s steps. There was a large seal on the door that hadn’t been there Sunday night. Otherwise, it looked exactly the same: potted plants hanging along the edges of the porch and a pair of dirty tennis shoes sitting by the entrance.I moved forward, lifted the police tape, and starte
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FIRST THING THE NEXT MORNING, I called Scott and left a message on his voicemail telling him what Mrs. Winslow had said about Ashleigh walking off later that Sunday night. The way I figured it, that changed everything. All my appointments for Friday had been canceled and the phones were silent all day. I set up prices for Sydney’s photo packages, ran off twelve hundred order forms, and dropped them off at the dance studio on my way home. The lobby was crammed with moms gabbing noisily and tending to babies while keeping an eye on the monitors.Sydney was teaching, so I left the forms with the receptionist. I did, however, see Sydney on one of the monitors. She and her class were moving in complete unison like a school of fish darting here and there changing directions at the same instant, controlled by the same remote. She was dressed in a black leotard with a short sheer skirt and her hair was back in a ponytail. Even on that monitor I could see the joy on her face and
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I HADN’T HAD TIME to get a coat and the cold air was almost unbearable as I trailed the Corvette through town. The helmet’s interior support straps dug into my stitches and tormented me with every bump. I took down the man’s license plate number and was about to head back when he made a left turn toward Wrightsville Beach and I decided to stay with him a little longer.He crossed the bridge to the barrier island and turned north where the air got much colder and tasted heavily of salt. The moon accompanied me, its reflection sparkling like diamonds off the ocean.Many of the homes in Wrightsville Beach had been built in the first half of the twentieth century. One-story wooden white structures with colorful shutters and screened porches that sometimes wrapped completely around them. The vegetation was minimal and most driveways were sand, shell, or rock. In summer, there would be cars parked all around the cottages with surfboards on their roofs or le
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STANDING MOTIONLESS in front of the window, I held my breath and waited to see what Angie was going to do. Her eyes pleaded with mine and mine with hers. The two of us stayed fixed on each other until the lights in the room went off whereupon she bolted across the porch back toward the door from where she’d come.“Wait,” I whispered, spanning the deck behind her.“Please don’t tell,” she pleaded as I got closer. “I’ll do anything you want.” She let her gown fall open and the wind whipped it out like a sail. She wore nothing underneath. “Please?”I stopped a few feet from her. “I don’t work here. I’m just trying to find out what happened to a girl that’s disappeared.”She pulled her robe closed, clasping it at the neck and waist. “I—I don’t know anything about the others. I just started last week.”“What do they do here?&rdqu
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BACK AT THE HOUSE, I discovered the cassette had been crushed in the collision. Finding an unopened blank videocassette in the entertainment center, I transferred the tape from the smashed cassette to the new casing and, after a frustrating scuffle, managed to get the cassette closed and screwed back together.Inserting it into the VCR, I pressed “play” and stood back. The tape squealed and the video fluttered as the machine dragged the crumpled magnetic ribbon over the tape heads. Through the static and distortion, the silhouette of a woman quivered on the screen. Wobbly music with a heavy beat began to play and the woman seemed at first confused and embarrassed, but then began dancing and posing for the camera in what appeared to be some sort of amateur audition.I pressed “fast forward” and the jerky images scrolled by as the camera panned slightly to the right and zoomed in past the woman to a man hiding in the shadows. I stopped the tape an
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I PICKED UP A FEW THINGS I’d need for the outing: a laminated nautical chart of the waterways from Wilmington to Little River, fresh batteries for a radio, a waterproof flashlight, cans of food with pull-open tops, bottles of Pepsi and water, and a couple of cans of tuna. By the time I got back to the house, my left leg was twice as large as normal and the skin felt like it was splitting open. I pulled myself up the stairs, cleaned the wounds, applied an antibiotic ointment, and wrapped the leg again.I looked up the phone number for Screen Gems’ Wilmington studio and dialed it. The operator reeled off a list of movies in production or about to commence, but said she didn’t know of any Brad Pitt movie scheduled for Wilmington. I thanked her, hung up, unfolded the nautical chart, and laid it out on the dining room table. The Cape Fear River actually runs south from Wilmington and empties into the Atlantic Ocean some thirty or forty miles downstream.
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SYDNEY GOT ME INTO THE CAR, drove me home, and helped me upstairs. I was bleeding from wounds over practically every inch of the front of my body, but the shotgun shells had been loaded with rock salt instead of lead shot. Although the injuries were not life threatening, they were painful.The house was still in disarray—“from the visitor,” I told her. “If you think this is bad, you ought to see what he did to the back of my head.”As we stumbled into the bathroom, she pushed my hair to the side, pulled off her sunglasses, and examined the lump and stitches. “Richard, you didn’t tell me it was this bad.”“You mean you didn’t notice it?”She lowered me onto the side of the tub. “No, I didn’t. You should have told me.”“You should have seen it Thursday.”She wet a cloth and touched it gently to my face. As she wiped away the blood and cleaned the sa
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AFTER SYDNEY DROVE OFF, I sat alone in my car not wanting the memory of Sydney’s visit to fade just yet—reliving the day over and over, able to still feel her in my arms. Finally, I started the engine and drove to my parents’ house. As I slipped into Martha’s darkened room, she turned her head and blasted me with a radiant smile that I could see even in the faint light.“Hi,” she whispered.“What are you doing laying here in the dark?”“I took a Percocet. I had therapy today.”“Are you okay?”“Fair,” she whispered. “I’m glad you came by. You need to straighten things out with Daddy.”I sat on the edge of the bed. “He’s the least of my worries.”She exhaled slowly. “No, you need to.”“He doesn’t care about me. He’s just humiliated by this whole thing and wants me to get it straight
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OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, we would come to know ourselves, Charlie, and Mother in ways we never imagined. I looked behind the disfigurement of my father and discovered myself within him. His love of the arts, his passion for the theatre, and his gentle manner mirrored mine, and made me as proud of him as he was of me. The tension in my life disappeared. Whatever I’d been running from no longer chased me. I’d been set free.Charlie and Mom married the following spring and she became Mrs. Winston Gaylord. She sold her house and moved to the farm. I’ve never seen her happier.Dane Bonner was eventually found guilty of the murders of Scott McGillikin and Ashleigh Matthews as well as two of the missing Wilmington girls. He was sentenced to death.Dane’s associate, Greg, left the gas station after the explosion and thumbed rides the rest of the way to Bonner's cabin in Boone. He still had the $2,000 in his pocket and the keys to the cabin. He a
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I THOUGHT MARTHA AND I HAD FIGURED every possibility, but we never considered this one. Winston is Uncle Charlie? My heart skipped a beat. Dad? Goose bumps rose on my arms. I’ve often heard that the first time a man sees his newborn child, an emotion of unconditional love sweeps through him like a flame on spilled gasoline. I was meeting my father for the first time and I felt something powerful sweep through me.Sydney stammered like a child who’d just been tricked by a slight-of-hand magician at the county fair. “Wh—What did you do?”Mother dabbed a tissue at her eyes, but looked as if she’d been relieved of a load she had carried her whole life. “All the feelings I thought I’d stowed away forever came rushing back. I went to pieces, burst into tears, and collapsed in the doorway. When he lifted me up, I grabbed hold of him, kissed him, and wouldn’t let go.” That loose shutter agai
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Fifty-Eight
MARTHA WAS BACK TO BEING her old self with her memory fully restored a few weeks later. They replaced the bandage on her head with a smaller one and we got our first look at her face through a plastic shield she would wear for another six weeks.After they removed the tubes from her head, the primary area of concern shifted to her one remaining kidney which was growing worse by the day.Winston continued to stop by for progress reports and was allowed to see her after the third week. He cried like a child and I wondered if seeing her like that brought back painful memories of his own recovery.I was proud of Mother for not only shopping for him and spending time with him all those years, but for bringing him into the family and giving him the opportunity to love and be loved. People are just not people at all until they have someone to love and be loved by. Without love, people are more like animals taking care of their basic needs and living in seclusion. Belie
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SYDNEY AND I were taken by ambulance to Cape Fear Medical Center where we were x-rayed, probed, stitched up, smeared with ointment, and admitted for observation. They told me I had a broken ankle and sealed my left foot in a cast. The D.A. stopped by to tell me that all charges against me were being dropped. I also learned from him that Sam had been transported by helicopter to Duke University Medical Center and that David had been found alive, bound and gagged in another room of the barn, and had been rescued before the fire, but that Ashleigh didn’t make it. They found her body in the other tank that had been sunk in the canal. He also said that although Scott had been severely wounded in the shootout, he was expected to live to stand trial.After two days in the hospital, Sydney and I were released, but refused to go anywhere without each other. After getting a change of clothes and a bite to eat, we returned to the hospital around 4 p.m. that afternoon to spend some
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THE FIRE NOW CONSUMED the barn and licked high into the air. The cold water slowly filling the barrel helped to cool our brains, but I knew it was only a matter of time before it would eventually drown us. Ten minutes tops. Our only hope was a gun that wouldn’t fire even if I could get to it. And what would I shoot to get us out? More holes and we’d drown quicker.My right arm was pinned, but I could move my left…slightly. Sydney’s legs were wedged back against her chest and I was squashed against them upside down. Our heads rested near one another, mine bent under with my abdomen pressed against the back of her calves. I worked my hand down my left side and tried to find a way to get around her legs to her waist. The water was now midway up my thighs. Sydney had gone quiet—passed out from pain, heat, loss of blood, or a lack of oxygen. But she was still alive. I could feel her expand…occasionally…to take a breath of the r
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THE TEMPERATURE INSIDE THE DRUM instantly began to rise and my claustrophobia drove me into a panic. Without air, we would suffocate in minutes. There was light coming through the opaque sides and I could see shadows moving around it as the drum tipped and fell on its side slamming us against the hard shell. My heart pounded so loudly I could hear it. A drum within a drum. Fear gripped me, its sharp spears ripping my senses. I pressed my knees against the lid and pushed. My muscles cramped, but nothing gave way.Scott’s shadow fell over the barrel and I could hear his clothes rubbing against it as we began to roll—the heavy container crunching the ground like shoes on soft rocks. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Baimbridge?” he grunted. “You and Sydney together forever? Is that what you wanted, Baimbridge?”The tank turned another revolution. My right arm was locked behind my back, and I could barely move my left. The temper
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Fifty-Four
IN MY MIND, I SAW MYSELF LEAP from the shadows and lock my hands around his neck. I saw the shock in his blood-streaked eyes as I choked the life out of him with my bare hands. I felt panic ripple through his body as he realized that he was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it. In one glorious flicker of thought, I watched him die in my hands. But death would be too good for Scott—or Dane Bonner—or whoever the hell he was. I wanted him to suffer as my sister had, to know her pain, to curse my name every time his cell door closed for the rest of his tortured life.As his shadow followed him into the barn, I grasped a chunk of firewood, flattened myself against the rear of the building, and trod on quaking legs to the edge of the doorway. Drunk on hate, I didn’t care about the law. I didn’t care about the other lives he’d torn apart. He had destroyed my sister and I wanted to punish him for it. I wanted to be the one t
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MARTHA HELD ME TOGETHER all through high school when my relationship with Dad had totally come apart. What a blessing that was. No person should have to live without a sibling. If I ever have children, there’ll be at least two. But even with Martha there supporting me emotionally, I’d not been complete.Until Sydney.With Sydney, I felt I’d come full circle. As if she’d taken hold of my spine and given me some sort of adjustment. A spiritual realignment. My breathing slowed. My muscles relaxed. I felt a presence within me that had long been missing—a thousand voices singing.Looking at her leaning against the carved headboard of her bed holding a sheet to her breasts, I felt I was looking more into her than at her. I wanted her heart more than I wanted air to breathe.“Come home with me,” I said. “Have dinner with me. Have breakfast with me. Bring a plant if you like. I don’t
My Sister's Keeper Chapter Fifty-Two
TIFFANY FOUND THE NOTE and the key, and immediately ripped the tags off a new string bikini her mother would never have allowed her to wear. Strutting about under the watchful eyes of every man on the dock, she cranked the engine, brought in the lines, shoved the magnificent sailboat off, and motored Steal Away out to the channel where she found a strong southerly breeze—perfect for a reach down the river.Bringing the vessel about, she headed directly into the wind, set the brake on the wheel, and raised the mizzen to steady the boat. Electing to keep the mainsail furled, she climbed barefooted onto the roof of the cabin, sidled toward the bow, and—bending her knees as the vessel rose to meet each wave—reached to the low side and tugged the line to release the jib. As the massive sail unrolled like a window shade, its bitter end flapped loosely in the wind, snapping and popping against the mainmast, sending her heart to racing as she jumped back to
