A hand brushed across Crystal’s face and then pushed one of her eyelids open. A light shined into her eye and Crystal shrank away.
“Her pupils are constricting. That’s good, very good. Crystal, can you hear me?”
Crystal tried to open her mouth. It was so dry. The sound that emerged was barely a rasp.
“Squeeze my finger, if you can hear me," the nurse told her.
Crystal directed all of her strength into her thumb and index finger, managing a weak pinch.
“Good. That’s good, Crystal. I’m your nurse at the hospital in Traverse City. You’ve been asleep for a couple days, but you’re with us now.”
Epilogue
“In total, we’ve excavated six graves,” Officer Hart told Bette. “We haven’t identified all the remains, but based on some jewelry, we believe Tara Lyons was one of them.”
Bette sighed and pushed her cuticles lower into her fingernail.
The half-filled grave her sister had been lying in careened across her mind. She squeezed her fingers tightly and tried to banish visions of the soft grassy mounds, the bodies within them too late to be saved.
“Crystal’s information has been very helpful,” Hart continued. “We’ve identified the man in the blue tuxedo. He disappeared from Traverse City in 1970. He was in town for his brother’s wedding that weekend.”
“What about the woman in the black dress?” Bette wondered, thinking of Crystal’s story as to why Maribelle Claude had ended up in the asylum.
Hart shook his head.
“A lot of the remains are too degraded, but we’ve tracked down a missing person’s report from 1966 that describes a woman who vanished from the Acme area, east of Traverse City. Apparently, she’d been to a funeral that day, hence the black dress. After the funeral, she disappeared. She wore a ring like Crystal described, but we haven’t found the box yet.”
“Why do you think she killed all those people? Why did her father?” Bette asked.
“Mental illness often runs in families,” Hart said. “Hillary Meeks was raised by a psychopath, and eventually she became one.”
“But what about everything Crystal mentioned about feeding the land? And a chamber? She said Hillary Meeks talked about a chamber in the forest?”
Hart shrugged. “Unfortunately, it’s out of our jurisdiction. My thoughts? Joseph had psychotic delusions. David Berokowitz claimed his neighbor’s dog told him to commit murder. Other murderers have made similar claims. Claude created a story to justify killing people. Maybe he even believed it.”
“Hillary, Greta, whoever she was, told Crystal that she helped her father for years and then… and then when he died, she started the killings,” Bette said, still trying to come to terms with the torture her sister had experienced at the hands of Hillary Meeks.
Hart’s face darkened. “That’s the cycle of abuse. I see it all the time in my line of work. Never anything like this. I mean this is just…” He shook his head, disgusted.
“Terrifying,” Bette muttered.
“Yeah. It’s that. I can look forward to a few sleepless nights after this case. But your sister is alive. That’s a victory and we rarely see in these cases. How’s she doing?”
Bette smiled.
“She’s… Crystal. Full of light even on the darkest days.”
“Want me to come with you?” Bette asked.
Crystal shook her head.
“I’d like to do this one alone.” She leaned over and kissed Bette on the cheek before maneuvering her growing belly from the car.
The hike up to the heart-shaped cliff at Pictured Rocks was a slow one. Her body had not fully recovered from the ordeal at the Northern Michigan Asylum, and the pregnancy often left her weak and longing for sleep.
When she reached the top, she sat on a rock and caught her breath.
Crystal pulled off her backpack and took out a velvet pouch. Tucked within the pouch was a plastic bag containing some of Weston’s ashes. The rest she’d placed in an urn with the words from his fortune cookie inscribed in the dark wood: Love is the only true adventure.
She opened the bag and stepped to the cliff edge, remembering her last glimpse of him in the world between worlds as she returned to life and he left it.
The breeze lifted the silty gray ash and carried it away.
Crystal rested one hand on her belly as she watched the dust of her beloved disappear into the sky.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the people who made this book possible. Thank you to Scott Roberts for contributing his true paranormal experience, which inspired the story of the man in the blue tuxedo. Thank you to Rena Hoberman of Cover Quill for the beautiful cover. Thank you to C.B. Moore, for copy editing Dark Omen. Many thanks to Will and Donamarie for beta reading the original manuscript. Thank you to my amazing Advanced Reader Team. Lastly, and most of all, thank you to my family and friends for always supporting and encouraging me on this journey.
About the Author
J.R. Erickson, also known as Jacki Riegle, is an indie author who writes stories that weave together the threads of fantasy and reality. She is the author of the Northern Michigan Asylum Series as well the urban fantasy series: Born of Shadows. The Northern Michigan Asylum Series is inspired by the real Northern Michigan Asylum, a sprawling mental institution in Traverse City, Michigan that closed in 1989. Though the setting for her novel is real, the characters and story are very much fiction.
Jacki was born and raised near Mason, Michigan, but she wandered to the north in her mid-twenties, and she has never looked back. These days, Jacki passes the time in the Traverse City area with her excavator husband, her wild little boy, and her three kitties: Floki, Beast and Mamoo.
To find out more about J.R. Erickson, visit her website at www.jrericksonauthor.com.