Dark Legacy (8 page)

“Please—” Maddie said to her psychiatrist-turned-suicide watchdog. “You have to go.”

She was coming unglued. And having Jarred there to see it—she couldn’t bear that.

“You’re in no shape—” he argued.

“To drive, I know.” Any minute, she was going to start begging him to stay. “Thank you for getting me here safely. But this is between me and my…”

She couldn’t say it. She fought to meet the gaze of the
mother
who’d written Sarah off and made it so easy for Maddie to do the same. The woman who’d taught both her girls to believe the lies that had destroyed them all. Phyllis eyed Jarred, then took a hesitant step toward Maddie.

“Honey, I don’t know what’s going on—”

“Where are Sarah’s records?” Maddie moved out of reach. She backed into the hall table. A vase, a cluster of happy family photos, crashed to the floor.

“Wh-What?” Phyllis stepped around the mess, her guilt turning Maddie’s stomach. “Why? For God’s sake, what does all this have to do with your sister?”

Maddie risked a glance at Jarred, wishing she could feel something of him in her mind still. But all that was there now was her mother’s regret and self-loathing. Then Sarah’s snort of disbelief.

Are you actually buying this act!
the voice demanded.

She’s sick,
Maddie argued
. She’s been too sick to face any of this for years.

Maddie heard herself defending Phyllis—to nobody—and headed into the den. She’d find proof of Sarah’s commitment to that research center. She’d use the paperwork to force her mother to finally tell her the truth.

“I know you have them somewhere.” She didn’t look back, but she could feel Phyllis follow. “You never throw anything away.” She yanked open the credenza’s bottom drawer and rifled through the hanging file folders. “I can’t believe I never looked…” Her thumb slid across the edge of a folder. The heavy card stock sliced into her skin. “Shit!”

She sucked the cut into her mouth. Ignored the insane laughter chuckling through her mind.

What a baby,
Sarah’s voice heckled.

“Let me see.” Phyllis tried to examine Maddie’s hand.

“Don’t touch me, bitch!” Maddie flinched at the memory of her twin saying the exact same words. They were the last things Maddie had heard Sarah yell at their mother.

Pain and shock flooded color into Phyllis’s pale cheeks. “I don’t know what’s going on or who this man is, but you’re bleeding all over yourself. I have some Band-Aids in the bathroom, and—”

“I’ll get them,” Jarred offered.

“I don’t want a Band-Aid!” Maddie’s explosion stopped him in his tracks.

There was a sea of soothing calm waiting for her in his mind. It was calling to her now, the same way it had that morning, tempting her. Maddie wanted to crawl inside Jarred and hide until everything and everyone else went away.
Trust me, Maddie…I can feel it, too…
But she didn’t dare. She closed her eyes, trying to trap the impulse. Hold it back.

Keep the secret, no matter what…

“Maddie,” her mother prodded. “Your thumb. I—”

“Do you think I give a fuck about my thumb!” Maddie cringed as more laughter accompanied her words. Sarah’s laughter. Laughter only Maddie could hear.

“What’s gotten into you?” Phyllis’s hand rose to her throat.

“Could it be the same thing that got into Sarah?” Maddie could taste her mother’s weakness now, the same weakness that had assigned Maddie the emotional role of parent for a decade. “You remember Sarah, don’t you? The daughter languishing in a coma at a psychiatric care facility so specialized, there’s only one of its kind in the country. A hospital too far away to visit, or so your excuses went. My excuses.”

The ugly truth was that Maddie had been relieved to let her twin go when she and Phyllis had moved away from their mountain home in Lenox. She’d never been able to bring herself to face Sarah’s rehab hospital. Phyllis had been adamant that leaving her twin at peace, with experts to care for her, was the best thing for all of them. And Maddie had drunk her assurances down. Except—

“She’s been here all this time, hasn’t she?” Maddie’s glare dared her mother to keep lying. “We didn’t move to Boston to start over near my college, and then stay for my job. We moved so you could be near her, while you let me pretend she didn’t exist.”

“Who?”

“Sarah! You wanted to be close to her. No matter what happened to Daddy, or what you said afterward. But…” Maddie dove back into the files, leaving a smear of blood on the first folder she grabbed. “…but you didn’t want me near her. Why? Because you were afraid something like this might happen if we were ever together again?”

“Some…Something like what?”

Maddie ripped folders from the drawer, yanking them open, then flinging them to the carpet.

“Mr…” her mother asked.

“Keith,” Jarred answered. “Dr. Keith. I’m a friend of your daughter’s at St. Chris.”

Maddie snorted.

Friend.

Unwelcome images cavorted through her mind. Flashes from their dates. From that morning and what little she could remember of the last hour. Jarred’s anger when he’d wrestled the gun away. The gentleness of his touch…his thoughts…even then. The sting of his concern, wrapping around her while he’d pushed her to confront what she’d never wanted to know.

“What’s going on?” Phyllis’s tone achieved the pitch reserved for when she was truly scared. Crazy scared. “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“Maddie’s been having a difficult time,” Jarred began. “And…”

Leaving him to his doctorspeak, Maddie dug until she found a folder hidden at the bottom of the drawer. The tab wasn’t typed like all the rest.
Trinity
had been handwritten instead, in Phyllis’s loopy script. She pulled it free and confronted the woman she’d believed was the one person on earth she could trust unconditionally.

“What have you done?” She threw the folder at Phyllis and ignored the roaring in her ears. Roaring that sounded
too much like her twin’s haunted summer storm. Like the truth hurtling toward Maddie on a raven’s wings.

“I…” Phyllis tried pulling her into a hug. She began to cry when Maddie shoved her away. “You have to understand. I wanted to protect you and Sarah both, but—”

“Protect us from what? From knowing that we’re insane, all of us? Ten years after the accident, and Sarah’s still a vegetable. You can barely leave the house on your own. I’m turning into a raving lunatic. Whatever your secrets have accomplished, they haven’t protected any of us from a damn thing.”

Maddie looked from the fragile woman standing before her to Jarred’s frown, then back. She could remember the bite of the pistol against her temple. The pistol she hadn’t bought. Hadn’t put in that drawer. And hadn’t been able to let go of without Jarred’s help.

“Protect Sarah and me from what?” she repeated. “The…curse you didn’t want us to know about when we were kids?”

“What?” Phyllis eyed Jarred as if he’d grown three heads. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t worry about Dr. Do-good.” Maddie jerked her head toward Jarred. “He already knows more about our family than I do. He’s the one who found out where Sarah was. He already thinks what happened to her might have something to do with what’s happening to me.”

Phyllis rubbed her hands over the sleeves of her conservative oxford shirt. Then down the front of the khakis that had been her uniform for as long as Maddie could remember.

“Mom!” Maddie shrieked.

“What…What does your doctor think he knows?” Phyllis asked.

Jarred stepped closer. Pulled Maddie’s hand from where it was scratching her already-abused wrist.

“Ms. Temple—”

“Honey!” Phyllis rushed closer, her hands shaking as she reached for Maddie. She gasped at the angry welts on Maddie’s inner arm. “What have you done to yourself? That’s…that’s exactly what…”

“Is this something your other daughter used to do?” Jarred asked.

Maddie flinched away from her mother, but closer to Jarred. She hated that a part of her needed him standing between her and Phyllis. Filling her with enough of his presence that there was no hint of Sarah now. No drive to hurt herself or someone else. He pressed some tissues he’d found into her hand, then pressed both against her wrist.

He was always pressing. Closer and closer. His touch. His…thoughts…

You can do this, Temple. You can face anything. Trust me…

Another nod of assurance followed, and Maddie felt her own tears start up again. He really was there, in her mind. Then his gaze slid back to her mother.

“How bad did Sarah’s cutting become before her final breakdown?” he asked.

“Cutting?” Phyllis’s gaze dropped to Maddie’s wrist.

“It’s an altered form of coping for children and teens who can’t process the pain and emotion they’re enduring.” Jarred stepped closer to Phyllis, blocking her from Maddie’s view. “It can become a lifelong compulsion, if not halted soon enough. But it’s very rare for it to present itself for the first time in adulthood the way it has with Maddie. Every time she’s forced to confront her memories of Sarah, as a matter of fact. There’s often an emo
tional connection between twins that isn’t clearly understood. There are likely other parts of Sarah’s childhood behavior that might be blending with Maddie’s worldview, even after ten years.”

“What struggles?” Phyllis tried to get closer to Maddie.

Jarred blocked her with his body.

“It’s better if you talk with me for now,” he warned.

Then he tensed—Maddie’s first clue that she’d laid a hand on his back, near his shoulder blade.

“This is between me and my daughter,” Phyllis challenged.

“Which daughter?” Maddie managed to stay. “The one you abandoned, or the one you convinced that she wouldn’t end up in a loony bin herself. God, Mom!” Maddie buried her face against Jarred’s back. Her arms snaked around his waist until she could clasp her hands across his belly, giving in completely to her need to keep him close. “Why not just let me go, too, when you did Sarah? Why put us through all this? Why pretend I’m any different, if you knew it was hopeless from the start!”

Jarred turned to Maddie. “It’s not hopeless,” he insisted.

“You
are
different, honey.” But there was defeat in Phyllis’s voice. “You’re doing so well. And you’re going to keep doing well. That’s why…That’s why I’ve let them study Sarah for so long. I thought—”

“Study her?” Maddie shoved Jarred away. She found herself backing Phyllis against the wall. “You turned my twin over to a research facility, because you thought, what? That they’d find a cure? That they could fix me, fix what’s wrong with us? Whatever’s wrong with our entire family. You sacrificed her so—”

“There’s…there’s nothing wrong with our family.”

“Really? Then why are you shaking, Mom? Like every
thing I say, every horrible thing I’m thinking, hurts you—physically hurts you. Why did Sarah and I have to hide all those years exactly how much we knew and felt about everyone else, so no one would know we were there, somehow, in their minds? Why have I been avoiding you for months, so I wouldn’t upset you more? Why do I feel like if I let myself explode right now, I might take both of you and this entire house with me!”

Sarah’s laughter was back, as if Maddie’s twin was enjoying the show.

“You have to calm down,” Phyllis insisted. “You’re talking like—”

“A crazy person?” Maddie’s glance to Jarred challenged him to deny that’s exactly what he saw.

Phyllis stumbled to a nearby chair, the fear and fight draining out of her. Until her expression was the kind of blank page Maddie had seen too many times.

“It is crazy…” Phyllis mumbled through her tears. “It’s not true. It can’t be true…It was just a stupid piece of paper. A family myth. Witch trials and public executions…because someone hundreds of years ago thought she could read people’s emotions and make them do whatever she wanted…it’s crazy…”

“A myth?” Jarred asked as Phyllis’s rambling petered off. “Reading…”

“People’s…feelings,” Maddie finished, childhood secrets bubbling up until they found the crack that Jarred had become in her control. “Sarah and I have always…felt more than we should…”

“There’s a fix…” Her mother was rocking now. Forward and back, her arms wrapped around herself like a child. “There has to be a fix…The doctor said they’d try to help Sarah. Then, if you needed it, they could help you, too.”

“Help with what?” Jarred demanded. When Maddie
could only stare at her mother, he knelt in front of Phyllis. “Help your daughters with what?”

Phyllis swallowed, her head shaking, her gray-green eyes vague. Glassy. She was gone, the same way she’d left Maddie in the hospital ER ten years ago. The way Phyllis was always gone whenever knowing the awful truth about their family had mattered most. “I did it all for Maddie. For Maddie and Sarah…Sarah was asleep. Gerald was dead. Then the scientist at the research center said he might be able to find some way to stop…the legacy. And I couldn’t lose Maddie, too. It…it’s crazy. It can’t be true. It just can’t be.”

Phyllis couldn’t help Maddie. She’d never been able to. Maddie was on her own, same as always, finding the answers she needed. And without her mother’s help, Sarah and the Trinity Psychiatric Research Center were Maddie’s last hope.

“Your mother thinks all this has something to do with one of your ancestors being persecuted in the witch trials?” Jarred followed Maddie out of her mother’s house.

He tripped over the uneven brick sidewalk and glanced back through the open front door. Phyllis was no doubt still sobbing in the den, unaware that they’d left.

“Did you hear something?” Jarred asked.

“Something?” Maddie stopped beside his car. Dug into her purse for her phone. “You mean like a menacing bird swooping down on us, only it’s not really there?”

“What?”

“Sorry.” She shrugged, pressing send. “Must just be me.”

He grabbed the phone and flipped it shut, disconnecting the call.

“What the hell’s going on, Temple?”