Furious (2 page)

T
WO

The bright lights prevented Faith from opening her eyes. Whenever she tried to take a breath, she panicked and choked. Her airway was constricted.

Machines beeped all around her.

She tried to say something, but no words would come forth. Her throat was dry, scratchy. Her head pounded. And then she recognized her sister’s voice as Jana brushed her hair.

Somebody was crying.

The baby she was carrying . . . had something happened to her baby?

As she faded in and out, she caught glimmers of shadows and people. Mom was somewhere close, reading to her. Her cheerful tone contrasted with the excruciating pain.

The room reeked of antiseptics and sadness.

The beeping stopped. Finally. For the first time in forever the room was blissfully quiet. Death was coming. Its loving arms wrapped her in warmth and filled her with peace.

Mom stopped reading.

Dad hovered close. His smooth jaw touched her cheek as he whispered into her ear. “Don’t give up without a fight. You’ve been a fighter since the day you were born.”

The blood swooshing through her veins slowed to a crawl.

Why was she here? It was the oddest sensation, not remembering. And even stranger was the fact that she knew she was dying, and she was glad.

“You can’t leave us, Faith,” Dad said. “You’ve got to think of Lara and Hudson. They’re out there somewhere, and they need you.”

Faith shot up in bed and sucked in a deep, shaky breath.

She’d been having a dream—a nightmare.

It took her a moment to remember she was no longer in the hospital. She was home.

How long had she been here? She looked at the calendar on the bedside table. Today was November 16—ten days since the attack, three days back at the house. Or was it four? The clock’s neon numbers told her it was five thirty in the morning.

The days had all blurred together. With a steadying hand on her chest, she waited until her heart stopped racing and the dizziness passed.

Panic attacks—she’d been plagued with them since returning home. When they struck, they woke her in a blinding rush and made breathing a chore.

Her fingers went to her throat, where she could feel the thick keloid scar that ran across the lower part of her face and neck. The blade, she’d been told, had sliced her carotid artery and stopped just shy of her jugular vein. According to nurses and doctors, she had beat incredible odds. If not for her neighbor Beth Tanner’s quick thinking, she wouldn’t have survived.

After nearly a week in intensive care and then a few days being weaned off machines, she’d returned to a house that no longer vibrated with life. The walls were cold and hollow, the pictures lining the mantel sad. Every creak startled her. Her parents and siblings took turns watching her disintegrate, molting before their eyes. People had been coming and going. She didn’t know who. She didn’t care. Her former self, vibrant and exploding with life, had quickly been shed and replaced with a pale, thin shell of grief and sadness.

She could hardly eat or drink.

At the hospital, after being brought out of a drug-induced coma, the heartache was numbing—a vast hole of nothingness tucked beneath a layer of physical pain. Knowing that Craig was gone forever and her kids were missing was too much to bear. The misery and despair touched her very core: blinding, deafening, debilitating. Easiest just to wrap herself in a blanket of grief and never get out of bed.

The psychotherapist she’d talked to on her last day at the hospital told her the memories of that day might come back not all at once but instead in tiny pieces. He had prescribed her medication, but she didn’t take it. She
wanted
to see the images when and if they returned.
Needed
to see every bloody detail.

She vaguely recalled the police coming to see her on her first day home—too soon. She’d tried to answer their questions, but her mind had been a giant blank slate of nothingness. The harder she’d tried to remember the sequence of events and what the men looked like, the more distorted the images became, everything melting into a bloody mess. Although she had no recollection of the detectives leaving, she did remember two FBI agents paying her a visit the next day. She’d wanted to help them. She needed them to find her children. But again, the harder she’d tried to focus on their questions, the more difficult it became to breathe until she was gasping for air, leaving Mom to usher them from the room.

Friends and coworkers stopped coming by once they saw the state she was in. No need to bring casseroles and meatloaf since the freezer was full and she had no appetite. The phone calls stopped, too, which was a relief because she had nothing to say to anyone.

Faith pushed herself upward to a sitting position.

Something strange had happened last night.

The images from
that
day had started coming back with a vengeance.

And that wasn’t all.

She’d experienced an odd sensation. For most of the night, her mind had flickered, as if fireflies were darting around inside her head, trying to find a way out.

At the moment, one tiny speck of light remained.

If her sister were there, Jana would immediately latch on to the idea that the light had something to do with hope and optimism, but Faith knew it had nothing to do with sanguinity. Not even close.

This speck of light was bloodthirsty.

The pinpoint of light was real. So real she could taste it, metallic and bittersweet on her tongue. It was also dark and cold, and it had fangs that refused to let go. She pushed the covers aside. When her feet touched the wood floor, an odd sensation swept through her, almost as if her body and mind were no longer hers.

She walked to the bathroom, stared at her reflection in the mirror. For the first time since she’d returned home, she let her gaze roam, at a slow and measured pace, over the jagged red scar that started at her left ear and continued on a drunken sideways path to her chin before free-falling down and across her neck to an inch below the right ear.

Beth Tanner had heard her screams, after all, and she’d called the police. She was a retired ER nurse and had known what to do. According to Mom, Beth had used two fingers to pinch the artery and somehow managed to stanch the flow of blood.

Faith continued to look intently at her reflection.

She blinked.

Eyes, dark and hollow, stared back at her.
Don’t turn away,
her eyes seemed to be telling her.
Look at me. Look closely.

These eyes were no longer the sad, woeful eyes of yesterday or the day before that. These eyes were on the brink of insanity. She leaned forward until the porcelain rim of the sink pressed into her stomach. In that instant, Faith knew what the flickers of light meant.

Every muscle inside her body twitched. Electric.

Anger, red and raw, nipped at the inner regions of her skull, its gnarled fingers repeatedly flipping the “On” and “Off” switches inside her head.

She could feel it. Hell, she could see it.

It
wanted her attention, and it wanted out. The thing rattled her bones and knocked on her chest, telling her it was time to
wake up
and find her kids. Her legs wobbled, forcing her to hang on to the veiny gray marble countertop for support.

No more crying.

Tears weren’t going to help her find her children.

Tears would not bring her husband back.

No more lying in bed like a worthless corpse.

Your children need you!

She knew suddenly what needed to be done. Every time bits and pieces of that day came to mind, she needed to snatch them up and put them to paper.

Quickly.

She stripped off her clothes, took a clean towel from the rack, then went to the shower. Ignoring the tightness in her chest and the light-headedness she felt with every dizzying step, she turned on the water and stepped into the stall.

The water was icy cold. Goose bumps sprouted.

One time since her return home, Jana had attempted to wash her hair while she lay curled in a fetal position in bed, but this was the first time Faith had stepped into the shower. Her hair was matted to her skull. She picked up the shampoo bottle, struggled to open the lid, then drizzled its contents over the top of her head. The nerve damage to her left side made it difficult to reach for the soap, so she used the soapy suds from the shampoo to wash her body.

The water went from freezing to scalding in a matter of minutes, turning her skin pink by the time she turned off the faucet and stepped out.

Her jeans were loose around her hips. The T-shirt fell across breasts that had shrunk to half their former size. She lifted her right hand and used her fingers to comb through her hair, then made her way to the kitchen, a room that used to mean happy chaos but now meant nothing at all.

She ignored the section of the hardwood floor in the family room that had already been replaced with new wood planks. Bloody or not, she would’ve known the exact spot where she’d watched Craig die.

Her family hadn’t wanted her to return to this house of nightmares, but she’d refused to listen. When her children found their way home, Faith would be there waiting.

She opened the kitchen drawer, found a notepad and a felt-tip pen. Then she found her laptop and turned it on. Taking a seat on a stool, she made a short list of possible suspects, anyone who popped into her head. Next she researched pedophiles and known criminals in the area. Finally, as she tried to summon the images she’d seen last night, images of the day her life was destroyed, she began to sketch. For the first few minutes, the particulars flowed from mind to paper without too much effort, but she was running out of room. She needed a bigger canvas.

She glanced from the pad of paper to the living room wall, then hurried to the garage, where she ripped plastic lids from containers stacked high. One at a time, she moved through the contents until she found what she was looking for.

For a few seconds, she stood motionless, staring at the art supplies, and her heart twisted. Visions sizzled and flashed like bolts of lightning inside her brain. So clearly she could see her children. Smiling, laughing, glue and glitter everywhere.

Think of something else, Faith. Anything.
She concentrated on the blood traveling through her veins, pulsing, carrying oxygen to her cells. Because now was not the time to think about when she’d used the paints and glitter.

Put the memory away! Eat it. Swallow it. Save it for another day.

Once she had her bearings and found a way to breathe again, she carried the art supplies into the house and got to work.

Time held still until hours later when the front door flew open.

Faith’s sister, Jana, swept into the room like a gust of wind, then merely stood there, her eyes wide, her chest rising and falling with each ragged breath. “Faith. Oh, my God, you’re OK.”

Faith kept painting. The visions from that day were still there but fading fast, like a filmy ghost sliding back into the walls. She concentrated on each stroke of the paintbrush.

“We’ve been calling the house all morning. Why aren’t you answering your phone?” Jana turned toward the living room wall. Her mouth fell open. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “What are you doing?”

Faith painted faster in an attempt to tune out her sister’s voice. Another minute or two; that’s all she needed. She couldn’t stop if she wanted to, but then Jana placed a hand on her shoulder. Faith whipped around. Paint splattered across the front of Jana’s pea-green long-sleeved sweater.

Her sister’s gaze, now fixed on Faith’s feet, traveled quickly upward, stopping midface. Their eyes met. Jana attempted to cover a gasp with her fingertips before she dropped her hand and said, “You’ve got to start eating. You’re wasting away.”

Faith turned back to the task at hand.

“That’s not paper,” Jana told her. “In case you didn’t notice, you’re painting on the living room wall.”

Faith had always had a flair for artwork, dabbling in charcoals and oils during her college years and later watercolors, but what was happening at the moment was an out-of-body experience. She’d been at it for more than three hours now. Her arms were beginning to feel the weight of her efforts.