“Jude, I’ve got a bad feeling, okay? I think we need to get out of here.”
“Clayton, I think we can take five minutes….” And then they heard the voices.
Jude ran to the window and saw two officers picking through the long grass that had once been the driveway.
“No,” she murmured, turning to her mother whose face had gone white.
“Out the back, fast. Go through the woods. I’ll pick you up down the road,” he insisted, shoving them both toward the back door.
“Get rid of those,” Jude spat pointing at the state-issued clothes on the kitchen counter.
“Go,” he urged.
Jude held her mother’s hand, and they fled through the backyard. The police would be near the front door and blocked from view by the house, Jude hoped anyway.
Her mother stayed close, breathing heavily after only a few yards. In the shelter of the woods, they slowed.
“Are you okay, Mom? Can you breathe?”
“I’m out of shape,” Sophia whispered, still holding tight to Jude’s hand.
Jude squeezed and urged her on, moving deeper into the woods.
“Oh God, what if they question the neighbor boy?” Jude muttered.
“Jared,” Sophia breathed. “They won’t. House looks empty today, everyone’s at work.”
They didn’t speak as they huddled in a thicket of weeds, close to the ground. Sophia took long slow breaths and when Jude’s car appeared, Jude pulled her to her feet and they ran from the trees, climbing quickly into the car, and both lying low as they sped away.
Sophia
“Apparently that doctor, Kaiser you said his name was? Called the sheriff here in Cadillac. One of the officers said the man’s been so persistent they finally decided to come out and look around,” Clayton explained, driving and glancing at Sophia in the back seat.
She lay almost flat on her side and gave him a forced smile. Jude was in the front, sitting low, with one hand sliding awkwardly into the backseat where Sophia held it, stroking her fingers again and again over her daughter’s knuckles. She could only see Jude’s profile, but marveled at the grown woman who had once been her baby girl.
“We need to print something about that nut job,” Jude spat and then caught on the last words as if she might have offended her mother.
Sophia laughed.
“Jude, I’m not a nut job, despite spending the last decade in an asylum.”
Clayton and Jude laughed too, and Sophia saw tears pouring down Jude’s checks.
“I have so many questions, Mom,” Jude whispered, turning in her seat. “How did this happen?”
Sophia pressed her lips together and squeezed her hand.
“I have questions too. Let’s get somewhere safe first and then we can talk.”
Hattie
The asylum looked different during the day. Lush green grass, and leaves turning gold as the sun slanted through. Hattie walked to the door she and Jude had entered previously. She paused and looked up at the massive structure noticing a man staring down at her from a window. She could not see his face though he appeared tall.
Inside the entrance, a different woman in a white smock sat behind the table. She glanced up when Hattie entered and adjusted the large spectacles perched on her nose.
“Can I help you?” she asked. The woman looked kind and soft around the edges. Her hair was like heavy mink.
“Umm…,” Hattie cleared her throat knowing the words mattered and she had to get them right.
The door behind the woman swung open and a tall dark-haired man in a white coat strode into the room. He was long in the arms and legs and torso. Black hair slicked back from his high forehead, and he looked at her intently from two pale blue eyes.
Hattie had once come upon a bird dying in the forest. She had cradled the robin in her hand and when it passed a film seemed to slip over its eyes. The man before her had similar eyes.
He stared at her as if they knew on another and perhaps they did. Hattie had a terrible time remembering people because she often barely noticed them the first time around.
“Walk with me,” he said abruptly.
The man took Hattie’s arm, linked it with his own, and nudged her out the door. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the woman at the table watching them, puzzled, but then she shifted her gaze downward and the door swung closed.
“I know why you’re here,” the man told her, squeezing Hattie’s arm.
She allowed him to move her, studying the pale white hand on her arm, those long fingers, skeletal, like the decorations people hung in their windows on Halloween.
“You do?” she asked, troubled. The hair on her arms and neck stood up, and her chest felt tight as if she forced every breath through a pinhole.
“I knew your mother, Hattie.”
Hattie stopped and looked into his startling, eerie blue eyes.
“How do you know my name?”
“She told me all about you,” he continued, pulling her along again, meandering from the grassy lawn to a forest trail. The leaves blocked the sun, and they walked in shadow.
Hattie should have responded. Gram would have told her she was being rude, speak up, but her mouth had gone dry and like a child she wanted to dig her heels into the dirt and refuse to go any further. She wanted to rip her arm out of the man’s grasp and run back to the light of the open lawn. A steady murmur of words she barely heard flowed from his lips Sophia… children… love… spirits… help. She could not hear his message, but she knew the intent beneath it - to lie.
He was stringing together lies all the while watching her with his hungry, dead blue eyes and leading her further into the woods.
Chapter 36
September 20, 1965
Jude
“This is your home, your very own home,” Sophia murmured walking around Jude’s apartment touching framed photographs, pressing her hand against a quilt that hung over the back of Jude’s sofa, pausing at the book shelf to scan the titles.
Jude watched her mother in silence, repeating she’s alive again and again in her mind. She had tried twice to call Hattie and even considered driving to her apartment, but a selfish part of her didn’t mind that Hattie was out. For a little while she got their mother all to herself.
Sophia turned and moved back to Jude, wrapping her daughter who stood only to her chin in a hug. She rested her head on Jude’s, something that took Jude back to her younger years, not that she’d grown much taller since then. She pressed her hands into her mother’s back and smelled the familiar soap she’d always used.
“You’re so skinny,Mom,” Jude said, releasing her and walking to the refrigerator. “I’m not much of a cook, but I have some cheese and salami in here. Would you like a sandwich?”
Sophia smiled and tucked a long blonde hair, loose from her braid behind her ear. Jude could have been looking at Hattie aged twenty years.
“I’m not hungry, Judy. Come sit with me. Let’s talk.” Sophia went to the couch and sat reaching forward to touch a vase of wilted flowers on Jude’s coffee table. They had been roses but now drooped with waxy brown petals soon to release to the table beneath them.
“I’ve been meaning to throw those out,” Jude admitted, remembering how Damien had bought her the flowers during their single night together and in her reverie, she’d planned to press a petal between the pages of a book to preserve it.