LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 4

      From the audio journal of a forty-five-year-old woman, taped for the files of Moving On, an underground highway for abused women.

      My parents shielded me from life’s darker side, and whatever their reasoning, they never encouraged me to be independent. I was their only child, and their role as parents meant everything to them. Looking back on my life, I see how ripened I was by grief to replace their love and guidance with more of the same. I was also primed to trust strong men who seemed to know what was best for me.

      Had the Abuser been anything but kind and charming before we married, I think I would have been smart enough to back away. When we met I still believed I was worthy of a good man, a man like my father who would treasure and protect me. This man was knowledgeable and able to help me settle my parents’ estate, and he seemed to be all the things I wanted. Best of all, he stepped forward to help make the decisions that faced me. He helped me sell the house I had grown up in, helped me drop out of school without penalty so I had an opportunity to heal.

      Now, of course, I know this was the beginning of a campaign to strip me of all my connections. My family was gone. Then my home. Finally my college friends. The investments he recommended were long-term, and while sound enough, yielded nothing for my immediate use. By then, of course, that hardly mattered. The Abuser adored me. He wanted me to be his wife. He would support me whenever I decided to finish my degree in early childhood education. We would have the kind of marriage I had witnessed up close.

      We would be happy.

      * * *

      Janine hurried down the farmhouse path toward the road. She hoped leaving the house without waiting to see Harmony wouldn’t scare her. She had promised to tell Bea whatever occurred here, but she hadn’t factored in a lack of cell coverage inside the house. The disposable phone Moving On had given her wasn’t state-of-the-art, and she had nearly used up the minutes that had come with it.

      The sun was going down behind mountains, something she wasn’t used to after a lifetime in Kansas. When she was a young teen, her parents had taken her on a camping trip to Colorado, and they had spent two blessed weeks cooking out, hiking and swimming in crystal-clear lakes. She had thought of that trip so many times over the years, sinking back into the memories when her reality was particularly bleak, lulling herself to sleep at night with dreams of a happier time.

      The Blue Ridge Mountains were nothing like the Rockies. She wasn’t sure why her daughter had stayed in Asheville when the family who had invited Harmony to live with them had moved to California. Perhaps Harmony hadn’t been able to afford another move, or perhaps she had made so many connections she’d felt secure on her own. But Janine guessed that the natural beauty had affected her decision. The majesty of it, a more approachable majesty than the Rockies, would have appealed to a young woman from the plains almost as much as settling somewhere far from Topeka, a city that would be blighted forever by her childhood memories.

      The air under a canopy of hardwoods was turning chilly, and Janine shivered inside somebody else’s jacket. Her body temperature dropped too easily now, probably as a result of the weight she had lost. Losing so much had been easy. She had always been thin, but in the past year her appetite had simply vanished. Her secret would never be marketed in diet books. During meals with Rex she had silently replayed her decision to find a way out of the prison he’d created. Fear of what lay ahead, as well as the consequences if he found her, had made it nearly impossible to eat.

      Rex had noticed, of course, but he had seemed pleased. The shadow she had become was the wife he had wanted all along.

      As she rounded a curve she wasn’t surprised to find Bea lounging against a tree casually observing the driveway. Tall, wiry, threatening enough that her male colleagues called her Grandma Grouchy, Bea was older than Janine, but even in her sixties she exuded a raw power that Janine found a bit intimidating. Bea was a grandmother, but she was more likely to teach hunting and fishing to her grandsons than to play dress-up with her granddaughters.

      “You okay?” she asked when Janine got closer. “This the right house?”

      Janine eased Buddy’s backpack into a more comfortable position. “I haven’t seen her yet, but Harmony’s here.”

      “You okay, Jan?”

      Janine gave a short nod. “The phone didn’t work inside, and I didn’t want you to worry.”

      “You want me to wait?”

      “You go on and settle in for the night. If this doesn’t go well...” Janine swallowed, because the rest of the sentence stuck in her throat.

      “It’s going to be fine.”

      “I’ll find a way into town, and I’ll call the hotline from there.”

      “Just call me direct. I’m going to stay nearby and wait while you have that reunion. Things don’t go well tonight, you just give me a buzz, and I’ll come back. I don’t hear, though, we’ll need to be on our way in the morning early. So you have to let me know where to pick you up then.”

      Janine realized she was crying. Bea didn’t seem surprised, and her voice softened a little.

      “It’s always like this, honey. I’ve seen it too many times before. You been through too much. You been scared practically every minute for years now. You’ll still be scared some, but at least that part will feel familiar. And it will ease.”

      Janine wiped her cheeks with her palms.

      “We did a good job for you,” Bea said, retrieving a tissue from a pocket and handing it over. “It’s not likely he’s gonna find you. And the house burning down, that was a stroke of good fortune.”

      “No, I shouldn’t have burned those photos.”

      “Might have been divine intervention. You just being able to squeeze through the first flames without damage to anything but that old coat of yours. That tank going up like some kind of atom bomb.” Bea smiled as Janine finished wiping her eyes. “And now nobody knows if you burned up or ran away or anything else. Including old Rex.”

      “They’re looking through those ashes for no good reason. I know he wasn’t in the house.”

      “Think of it as good practice for the fire department, forensical training.”

      “But where is Rex? Why hasn’t he come forward?”

      “This point in your life? You need to stop thinking about Rex, and start thinking about yourself and that girl of yours.”

      Janine couldn’t imagine

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