Sketched Page 5

  Blood.

  His eyes flickered like two identical flames as he took in all of her. He held her back and appraised her carefully. “What’s funny is I think I know you too.” He laughed outwardly, a pleasant peal that was in direct opposition to his feral eyes. He looked over his shoulder into the room behind him again, “Mother, I really think I know this one.”

  Kingston’s mother stepped into the light. Her lips were carefully sculpted in the same shade as the blood that coated her son’s hands. They curled up with a sneer.

  “You’re pathetic,” she said. “She’s a nobody. A complete stranger. Some slut off the streets. Kingston, listen to your mother. Any minute now there’ll be sirens and police storming in here. Once they see what you’ve done, you won’t have a chance. I won’t have a chance. Do you want your mother to get arrested? Is that what you want? You tell me how long you think you’ll last without me to clean up your perverted little messes.”

  Kingston was still looking at Piper, oblivious to his mother’s lambasting. He continued to stroke her face with his wet fingers. Piper could feel the sticky trails of blood where he caressed her.

  “Now, where is that I know you from? Don’t you hate it when this happens? I’m terrible with faces. It’s embarrassing.”

  “Kingston, kill her now.”

  Piper felt tears beginning to stream down her face. His thin skin, as line-less and smooth as a geisha’s, puckered into what Piper thought might be a frown. “Oh now, don’t cry little bird. Don’t take it personally. I’ll remember soon enough.”

  Kingston’s mother was huffing in rage beside them. Her hands were in trembling fists, causing her bracelets to tinkle slightly in the silence. Piper, her face aching where Kingston still held her, watched helplessly as the woman bent to pick up Piper’s gun.

  “Please,” she managed to whisper.

  “If you don’t do it, then I will.” The woman seethed, glaring at her son with a level of hatred that Piper had never seen before. It made her stomach churn. She opened the chamber and checked the gun efficiently. As posh as she seemed, she obviously knew what to do with it. Uncle Chuck’s gift, useless in her own hands, was about to be turned against her.

  At the sound of the click, Kingston suddenly stopped examining his prey and turned his head in his mother’s direction. A single strand of his hair fell from behind his ear and dangled in front of his emaciated face. With a shocking ferocity, he suddenly yelled so loud it vibrated through his narrow body and into Piper. She felt her knees grow weak.

  “Mother I am going to keep this one. You are not doing anything!” His rage was high pitched and terrible. It roared out of him, filling the room with a power that made Piper’s vision clouded with fear. She closed her eyes against the room that rotated quickly around her.

  His mother went pale, her waxy lips the only color left in her face. When she spoke again, her voice had transformed. It was carefully paced and soothing.

  “Kingston darling, but you’ve already played all day while I waited!” She had taken on the cajoling tone of a mother calming an exhausted toddler. “Now, I’ve been patient sweetness, but two in one day? You’ve been a bit greedy, darling. One after another for the last while? I can barely keep up. We need to finish this one off or you won’t be able to play again. We can’t keep her, Kingston love, you know that.”

  “The other one was fat. You saw her. She was a disgusting pig. You said yourself her blood made this place stink like fast food. Look at this one Mother! Come on, how pretty is she?” He let go of Piper’s face and swung her like a doll toward his mother so she could get a better look. He ripped Piper’s coat off of her shoulder and grabbed her arm. He pinched at her flesh, running his hand with shuddering intensity over her stomach and breasts. Piper heard herself sobbing. “This one is so tiny, Mother. So skinny.”

  There was a pause. Piper watched through tear-filled eyes as Kingston’s mother shook her head. The woman raised the gun, the light above them causing the diamonds in her bracelets to glitter blindingly.

  “It’s time to go. I’m afraid I’ve gone and spoiled you, sweetheart. That’s on Mother, not on you. That’s just what happens when you love your babies a little too much.”

  She pulled back the trigger, her eyes blank and her face as expressionless as a heavily botoxed doll.

  A roiling heat of sheer panic soared out of Piper’s stomach and she began to scream.

  She managed to beg for her life once before she was shot in the head.

  Kingston’s whines of disappointment followed her as she slid out of his arms and into carpet beneath them. She watched, numb and quickly slipping into unconsciousness, as the blood from her wound turned every avocado green strand a horrid shade of rusty brown.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  April 2017 - Five years later

  Kray County, New England.

  The pond in the back of her property was nameless. Although large and exceptionally beautiful, no one in the two-hundred-year history of that particular plot of land had bothered giving it an identity. It was orphaned.

  No wonder Piper felt such an affinity to it.

  There was a ridge in this nameless pond where the sand and mud gave way to what she had always imagined were immeasurable depths. The temperature of the water changed sharply as soon as the gooey warmth of the pond floor disappeared. It was a primeval cold, one that hinted at centuries of perfect silence, a portal to the slumbering subconscious of the property itself.

  She spent a lot of time there.

  Piper had perfected a method of swimming where she was able to hover in the chasm. With slow, controlled movements of her limbs, she managed to stay cradled in the mouth of the drop, the gradient chill wrapping itself around her legs and arms like fingers gently urging her downward. Her eyes closed, she would hold her breath until her lungs screamed at her for air. Breaking the surface, the warmth and noise of life was always jarring to her. It was always a fight not to simply sink back down.

  How long had she been down there this afternoon? Although she didn’t normally count the seconds, today felt like it had been an inordinately long time since she’d dropped like a pale stone off the ridge. Her lungs weren’t aching but she could feel the glacial water beginning to creep into her bones.

  Piper looked upward at the surface. She was deep enough today to see where the sunlight breaking through the surface began to lose its power. Sheets of spring warmth hung overhead like gauze curtains, billowing ever so slightly with the movements of the pond. It would take more than a few kicks to reach the surface this afternoon. Despite the warning aches in her freezing toes, Piper was having a hard time working up the motivation to do so.

  Dr. Adam Broughton would call this a warning sign.

  He had no idea.

  What if she just let herself sink? What if Piper Cooke, celebrated illustrator and painter, finally succumbed to her horrifying injury and took her own life? She could almost picture the tweets and news reports. Would her name be trending?

  She closed her eyes for a moment and let herself begin to drop. She allowed the fingers that had been steadily gripping her weary legs and arms harder start to tug her downward. To where? She opened her eyes and looked beneath her. A few feet below her, the pond water started to turn black. It was astoundingly clear, as if she were somehow descending into space rather than to the bottom of a back-country swimming hole.

  If it was as deep as it seemed, they’d have to drag the pond for her body. The media would probably concoct about a hundred different stories about what might have happened to bring her to this point. They’d look at everything. How much she had been drinking since the accident would certainly come up. Dr. Broughton would hide her ever-increasing collection of wine bottles, certainly. But still…they’d find out. There would be talk of insanity. Of her dark past. They’d drag up her mother and her childhood years back in Dixon. Ugly adjectives would be thrown about. There would be hateful words like ‘troubled’ and �
�underprivileged’ used without hesitation. No doubt some over-educated hack might even throw ‘Dickensian’ in the mix.

  Piper stared down into the darkness, feeling the cold increase as she dropped slowly further. They’d no doubt publish pictures of her mother, eyes glazed over in one of her tragic dancer’s photos. The one where her mother’s hair was sprayed into an unmoving lioness mane would be the one they would choose. It would really bring that ‘white trash’ angle to the forefront.

  Fuck that.

  With a sudden jerk, Piper began to kick her legs. She lifted her head to the light, grabbing handfuls of water to push herself upward. As the cold slipped away and the warm water began to surround her, she realized that her lungs had been demanding breath for some time. Her chest was burning with urgency.

  Nearing the surface, she was able to see the pier she and Adam had built when they moved in. Piper had been unable to stand the feeling of the warm mud between her toes and so the two of them had combined their lack of skills to create a rickety walkway out to where the depths began. She was nearing it now, her muscles propelling her expertly toward the crooked pillars.

  Two more kicks and Piper’s face broke through the surface. She gasped through the heavy veil of her wet hair, feeling her chest swell with air. For a moment, her head spun as she grasped for the side of the pier.

  Instead of wood, she felt a warm, wide hand grab hers where it flailed.

  “That was a record.” Adam’s voice was jocular, but there was an unmistakable twist of sarcasm to it. When wasn’t there? “Took you a while to decide to come up, didn’t it?”

  He pulled on Piper’s arm and with barely an effort, pulled her onto the smooth plywood of their makeshift pier. She weighed less than his bike. He thought for a moment that with a little more oomph, he might have been able to actually fling her. How much weight had she lost anyway?

  Piper lay on her stomach for a moment, gasping for breath. Adam crouched down beside her, hitching up his shorts and looking at her with his warm, dark eyes. He watched her rib cage move in and out, her bare skin glinting in the afternoon light.

  “You know, swimsuits are fairly easy to come by this time of year. You might want to consider picking one up,” he said dryly.

  Piper’s breathing had slowed and she turned her head to the side. Her hair, still black and sleek with pond water was in her eyes and she pushed it away. She looked up at him.

  “Overrated. Bathing suits are for amateurs.”

  “And people with a sense of modesty.” Adam reached behind him for the towel he had brought out of the house. “I suppose you have no idea how long you were down there do you?”

  Piper sat up. Now out of the water, her limbs felt weary and awkward. She should jump back in where it was silent. Where she was weightless. A breeze blew across the pond and over her nakedness. She was instantly covered in gooseflesh and she began to shiver.

  “I’m freezing,” she said, rubbing her bare arms where they prickled. Adam wrapped the warm towel around her shoulders, adjusting it like a worried mother.

  “The answer is forty-five minutes, if you’re interested. And, of course you’re cold. It’s not exactly summer yet.”

  “I wasn’t holding my breath for that long,” Piper said, absently. The towel was soft and smelled pleasantly of the detergent he insisted on importing from England. Unlike the other rainforest mists and autumn breezes, Adam’s choice simply smelled clean. It smelled orderly. It smelled like him.

  “Of course you weren’t, you dunce. I made sure to check that you surfaced once in a while.”

  She smiled at him. Half mother hen, half brilliant psychiatrist, his strangely handsome face had been the first one she had trusted after the accident. She loved how they all called it that. It was as if everyone involved had forgotten that she had driven across town and wandered into a house full of murderers on purpose. They made it seem like the bullet lodged in her head was all a big mistake.

  After she had been shot, all she saw for months were the dour, colorless faces of doctors. They were trying so hard to understand why she wasn’t dead that she eventually started to believe they wanted her to be. Once out of the hospital, the medical doctors were swiftly replaced by a legion of small handed, puffy psychiatrists trying to decipher how her brain was still functioning. From designer couch, to sterile institute, and back again, the world’s most respected intellects had trotted her out like the elephant man. The girl with the bullet in her brain. The girl who shouldn’t have survived.

  During those long, painful years Dr. Adam Broughton was the only one who had really seen her. Within a day of meeting him, he had somehow transformed seamlessly from Britain’s psychiatric wunderkind to her best friend. Within a year, he had given up his practice and moved in with her full time. She became his pet project and he became indispensable.

  “What time is she coming?” Piper looked back at the barn conversion that was her studio. “I don’t see the Tesla. Tell me I missed her and you sorted it all out for me.”

  “It’s your optimism that’s so infectious, you know that?” Adam swung his legs around and dipped his bare toes into the pond. He shivered dramatically. “Christ Almighty, that really is freezing. We should get you back in the house before frostbite kicks in. And no, she hasn’t arrived yet. She’s due in fifteen minutes. I thought I’d give you a little heads up so you could actually put some clothes on like a decent human being. Maybe get some of the pond scum out of your hair?”

  Piper moaned and allowed her head to droop dramatically. Adam picked out a stray leaf from the crown of her head and flicked it into the water.

  “Why can’t she just come when I’m not here, look at the paintings and then leave. I don’t know why I have to be here for the whole dog and pony show.”

  “She’s excited, Piper. It’s been years since your first showing. Oh, I’m sorry…wait…what was it again? Since you ‘exploded onto the art scene with a series of unsettling, almost paranormal works that stand to redefine the portrait genre.’”

  “Oh, my god. You memorized that?”

  Adam laughed, his schoolboy giggle always sounding as if he had just heard a dirty joke.

  “I’m a proud house husband, what else do I have to do with my time.”

  Piper scoffed and stood up, her legs protesting. Adam automatically stood up alongside her.

  “Isn’t there a bunch of slobbering psychiatrists waiting for your next brain injury bible next month?” She grasped Adam’s t-shirt for a second to keep steady. She told herself he didn’t notice, but she could see the flicker of darkness in his eyes.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “Odd how it slipped my mind. Let’s go get you warmed up and dressed. I’ve seen enough woman flesh for one day, to be honest.”

  “Happy house husband,” she smiled even though her chin was shaking with the cold. The muscles in her face felt almost as stiff as her legs. “I’m afraid I don’t have the proper equipment to keep you sticking around, though.”

  “True,” Adam said, scrubbing at his neatly trimmed beard. They began to walk toward the shade of the farmhouse behind them. “There’s that little issue of gender and sexual orientation going on.”

  “Just a tiny issue.”

  When they were closer to the house, the shade of the tall wooden building caused Piper’s shivering to increase. When was the last time she had eaten? She could still taste the tannins from last night’s wine in the back of her throat and she quickly did an inventory on her stomach’s contents. It had been at least a day. Last night’s dinner was still on one of the many tables in the studio, gone cold hours ago and still wrapped carefully in moisture beaded plastic. She vaguely remembered telling Adam how tasty it had been.

  They walked up the broad, uneven porch that led to the back door. Pulling the towel around her tighter, Piper pulled open the screen door that led into the kitchen. Once inside, the two of them were practically dwarfed by the double height ceilings. Both the same diminutive height, they looked
like a pair of kids who had been left to fend for themselves in a giant’s castle.

  Piper padded across the tiles toward the hall that led to the front room.

  “I’ll make tea,” Adam said, moving automatically to the stove to get the kettle. “And don’t think you’re going to get away with not eating today either.”

  Piper stopped at the hall entrance. Of course, he knew she had been lying. You can’t be someone’s therapist for three years and not be able to sniff out a fib here and there. She decided to be coy.

  “Whatever do you mean, Dr. Broughton?”

  He placed the kettle, now filled with water, on the stove. He turned, his hands on his hips, looking more irate than she’d seen him be in a long time.