Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 02 - Portrait on Wicker (4 page)

I felt like I had been holding my breath forever.
When I heard the car drive away, I slowly crawled out from under the bed.

CHAPTER NINE

I climbed the stairs and tried all the windows and doors all the way around the walkway that ran around the house on the top floor. I now wished that I had taken a key when Julia had offered it to me.

B
reaking a window to get in seemed to be my only option. Running downstairs, I looked quickly around, on the lookout for any cars. I picked up a piece of quartz the Reynolds’ had used around the flowerbed. The flowers were all dead but the stones were still there.

Finding
a good sized piece, I ran back upstairs. Outside of Julia’s bedroom, I hit the window with the stone. It broke into what looked like hundreds of pieces. Reaching inside, I unlocked the window, slid it open and climbed in.

She wasn’t there.
I took off at a run and found her in the master bedroom. She was lying on her side with her knees drawn up. When she heard the door open she looked over her shoulder and it took everything in me not to scream.

She looked like she had been severely b
eaten. Her face was so bruised; if I hadn’t known who she was, I would not have known her. She looked at me through mere slits and grinned.

“He couldn’t beat me enough to get
it up,” she said. “Can you believe it? He couldn’t do anything.”

“Oh, Julia,” I whispered.
“Let’s get you out of here. Can you walk?”

When s
he tried to stand, I noticed the bottoms of her feet were burned. She started crying and I thought my heart would break.

“They did that with
Mackey’s cigarette,” she said. “He’s alive after all, you know.”

I don’t know if it was the adrenaline or what, but I picked her up and she felt like she weighed nothing.
We heard a car door slam and looked at each other. My heart was beating about a hundred miles an hour. Gently putting her back on the bed, I went to look out the window.

There was a young couple putting a beach blanket out by the canal in back of the house.
They must have thought no one was home, since there were no cars in the driveway. It looked like they were ready to have a picnic, or sex, or both.

Running
back inside, I grabbed Julia. Throwing the slider open, I stepped out onto the porch that ran around the house and started for the stairs. At one point I tripped and almost dropped her. She hadn’t said anything for awhile and when I looked at her she appeared to have passed out.

“Get out of here!” I yelled on my way down.

The young couple looked shocked as they took in what they were seeing. They began gathering up their things.

T
he boy yelled back, “What’s going on? You need some help?”

“No, just get out of here.
There are some bad men coming back, you don’t want them to catch you here.”

They hurried up to us as I hit the bottom step
.

T
he girl turned to the boy and said, “We should help them.”

L
ooking back at me she said, “Do you need a ride?”

The boy handed the girl the keys and tried to ta
ke Julia but I wouldn’t let him.

“No,” I said, “j
ust get out of here.”

I managed to get Julia into my car but I can’t fo
r the life of me remember how I did it. White sand sprayed out from under the car as I floor-boarded it.

As soon as I got on the bridge between Vilano Beach and St. Augustine, I dialed Dr. Anna on my cell phone.
She answered after the first ring.

“What’s
going on, Judith?” She asked.

“I found Julia.
She’s in bad shape. She was at her beach house. Dr. Anna, they beat her up and burned her.”

“Who did that
Judith?”

“It was M
r. Lessiter and, get this, Mackey. You remember him from the trial? He was the one they told us who was beaten to death in the shower in prison?”

“Oh
my God! So where are you headed now, Judith?”

“I hadn’t thought that for ahead.
Right now we’re just running. I waited until I heard them say they were going to get something to eat and I grabbed Julia and ran. It’ll probably be awhile before they get back, but right now I’m putting distance between us and them.”

“Take her to Ocean Sands,” Dr. Anna said.
“I’ll meet you over there.”

“But that’s a Psychiatric hospital!”

“It’s a hospital and a place to hide her, Judith. We don’t know who is involved in this and you can’t chance taking her to an emergency room.”

“All right, you’re right.
We’re coming up on I-95 right now. We should be there in about twenty to thirty minutes.”

As I was speeding down the
interstate Julia opened her eyes.

“Y
ou’re going too fast,” She said.

I looked down at the speedometer.
I was going eighty miles an hour. I eased off the gas.

“Where are we goin
g?” She asked.

“We’re meeting Dr. Anna at Ocean Sands.”

“Does she think I’m crazy again?”

“Of course she doesn’t think you’re crazy. You weren’t crazy
then, and you’re not crazy now.”

Julia had been taken to Ocean Sands Psychiatric Hospital after going into a coma due to the stress of her repeating nightmares.
Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds had tried to stifle those dreams and wouldn’t let Julia talk about them. They were suppressed memories. We had both had them since we were three years old. They started after our kidnapping and after witnessing the murder of our parents.

Julia had had her breakdown
just after I had found her and our grandmother. Both Julia and I had gotten a lot of help from Dr. Anna Stevens at this hospital. I knew Dr. Anna was right about bringing her back there.

She would be safe at Ocean Sands
. The staff was top notch. They would keep confidentiality, which included not being able to tell anyone that Julia was a patient there.

I drove by the cottages on the grounds of the hospital where Mimi and I had stayed eleven years ago
, while Julia was a patient. I remembered all the long talks we had on the porch.

When I drove up to the front door
, I noticed Dr. Anna was waiting for us outside. She was pacing. I jumped out and hugged her.

“We need a stretcher or wheelchair, Dr. Anna.
She can’t walk. They burned the bottom of her feet.”

“Son-of-a-bitch!”
She yelled as she rushed back inside.

As they were putting Julia
on a stretcher, she faded in and out of consciousness.

“Take her to PICU,” Dr. Anna said to the attendants.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It stands for P
atient Intensive Care Unit. That’s where we put her when she attempted to kill herself, remember? She’ll be watched twenty four, seven. They have all the emergency equipment to deal with just about anything.”

While they were patching Julia up I followed Dr. Anna to her office where she ordered coffee
, and I filled her in.

When I finished, she said, “Thank God you both got out of there before they came back.
What are you going to do now, Judith?”

“I think I should call Tracy.
John has enough on his plate, with Rosa about to deliver anytime, and now with Trudy staying there.”

Dr. Anna stood up and gathered up the cups.
“I’ll take these and drop them off on my way to check on Julia.”

CHAPTER 10

Tracy has always been a role model for me, since the first time I met her. She is an FBI agent. When I met her, she was posing as the housekeeper for Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds. I admired her and was happy when she and my uncle Mark got married.

She was on her way here
, to Jacksonville. She had called the local agent but wanted to be here herself.

I waited out front of Ocean Sands
. When her rental car drove up my mouth fell open. Mimi was in the car too.

“Mimi, are you well now?” I said as I hugged her.

“I still have the little nagging cough you get at the end of a cold that seems to take forever to go away. Other than that, I’m fit as a fiddle.”

I hugged Tracy and she said, “How is she
, Judith?”

Now that they were
here, the tears started coming.

“She’s in bad shape.
They beat her and burned the bottom of her feet with cigarettes.”

“Judith, the local FBI agents went to the house but they had cleared out already.
They probably came back and found Julia gone and panicked.

“We’ve got to keep this under
wraps, even from the local police and the judges. I don’t know who to trust since it was a federal judge who told us that Mackey had been murdered. Of course, he could have been going by what he had been told.

“This is probably the best place for both of you right now.
Are you going to be staying here in the hospital or in one of the cottages?”

“Why don’t the three of us rent one of the cabins?” Mimi asked.

After we were checked into a cottage, we put out luggage inside and walked over to the hospital and straight back to the intensive care unit. Julia looked a little better than she had since I first found her. They had cleaned the blood off her and she had what looked like a thousand bandages.

When Mimi saw her, she gasped, “I’m madder t
han hell right now. As if you two girls hadn’t been through enough! When is it all of this going to end, damn it?” She ended in a coughing fit.

“That cough sounds bad
,” Dr Anna said as she walked into the room. “It’s good to see both of you. Wish it was under more pleasant circumstances.”

She hugged Mimi and Tracy
. “We’ve got Julia sedated so she can’t give you anything right now. Why don’t we go to my office?”

It was ge
tting late by the time we had caught up with everyone’s news. We decided to get something to eat in the fabulous restaurant there at the hospital. It was delicious.

CHAPTER 11

The next morning we arose early, anxious to check on Julia. She was still asleep when we got to her room, so we decided to go get some breakfast. As we were heading out of the room, Dr. Anna was coming down the hall.

“Are you going to the cafeteria?” she asked.
“I need some coffee.”

After we were settled at our table with breakfast, Dr. Anna filled us in.

“Julia had a rough night. She’s in a lot of pain and we’re keeping her sedated. I hope you catch the bastards that did this to her, Tracy.”

“We sure will no doubt about it.
When do you think we’ll be able to talk to her?”

“It’s hard to
say, at least a couple more days. I want her to sleep until she’s out of most of her pain. Can you tell me how you’re going to go about tracking these two men down?”

Tracy drank down the rest of her coffee and slammed the cup down on the table.
The three of us jumped.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “It’s just that it’s so frustrating.
We have to be so careful in our investigation. I haven’t even told my boss about any of this. He thinks I’ve taken a couple of week’s vacation.

“The agent I had worked with in St. Augustine before, when we we
re investigating the kidnapping knows. I trust him. I told John Shepherd in New Orleans and that’s it. John is watching the Lessiter’s House, but it’s hard for him with his regular duties. Rosa is expecting a baby any minute.”

“I think Mrs. Lessiter needs to be locked up anyway,” I said.
“I think she was in the early stages of dementia when I lived there over ten years ago. And I told you about her coming after us with a butcher knife the other day.”

“You’re right.
In fact I already talked to John about her and he was going to check up on that. I’ll call him in a little while.”

Dr. Anna looked at her watch.
“I need to finish my rounds. I’ll talk to y’all later.”

After she left, Mimi said, “I really don’t see any sense in hanging around here if we can’t talk to Julia.
I think we should go shopping. Where’s a good place to shop around here?”

Tracy and I looked at each other and busted out laughing.
Leave it to Mimi to always find a reason to shop. We went to The Avenues, a new mall not far from Ocean Sands. Mimi insisted on buying Tracy and me some new clothes. We spent the next couple of days shopping and walking on the beach. Tracy took advantage of the heated swimming pool and swam twenty laps every morning.