Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 02 - Portrait on Wicker (5 page)

On the third day
, Dr. Anna came by the cottage to tell us that we could see Julia. We were sitting on the porch having our coffee. Mimi and I had spent many hours on this porch when Julia had been a patient here eleven years ago.

“She’s still in pretty bad shape,” Dr. Anna said, “but she is talking, or I should say complaining
. I think she’s very upset with you for bringing her here, Judith.”

When we got to Julia’s room she was telling a nurse to leave.
Her face was still black and blue but she didn’t seem to have as much trouble opening her eyes.

When she saw us she started crying so hard her shoulders shook.
All three of us tried to hold her at the same time. I hugged her legs, Tracy hugged her middle and Mimi hugged her shoulders and neck. She was literally wrapped in love. After we finished hugging, Mimi handed her a tissue and she wiped her eyes.

“Tell us what’s been going on, Julia,” Tracy said while wiping her own eyes.

“Is this an official statement, Tracy?”

“Nothing’s official yet since we don’t know who all is involved.”

“Good. I’ll start at what I believe is the beginning. One day Mr. Lessiter walked into my art gallery. I didn’t know who he was, but he seemed to know me. Of course I realized right away that he thought I was you, Judith.

“He called himself Calvin.
He seemed so nice and polite. Jean took to him right away, offering tea. You know how he gets, Judith?

“He bought a small painting and insisted on taking Jean and me to lunch.
I thought it would be fun to let him think I was you, Judith. I told Jean to go along with me. You know I’ve always been attracted to older men?” She smiled over at Dr. Anna.

“It’s because of my adoptive dad and what he did to me.
So, when I have the attention of an older man, I mistake it for love, right Dr. Anna?”

“You know it is Julia
, but you also know just knowing it intellectually is only a small part of the healing process.”

“I know.
I remember.” She smiled at Dr. Anna.

“Now, where was I?
Oh yeah. So I started dating him and thought I was deeply in love. It was more like obsession. By the time I realized who he was, I was hooked, just as sure as if he had been a drug.

“I wanted him so badly and at the same time I knew the whole relationship was sick.
I didn’t really care at this point. I had trouble sleeping or eating. I could paint though.”

She looked at Dr. Anna, “I’m sure you would love to analyze some of those paintings.”

“I’ve seen them, Julia,” I said. “They are very disturbing.”

“What did you think of the one of Mr. Lessiter?”

“Someone had painted over it with black paint and left the paint to dry in one of your good brushes. Trudy recognized the hand.”

“Oh, you met Trudy?
She probably thinks I forgot about her. I did tell her I would help her. How did you get her out of there and into my condo?”

“When I got to your condo, I
found the letter you left me, ingenious place to hide it, by the way. I knew what you meant and immediately went to the Lessiter’s house.”

“You shouldn’t have done that, Judith.
He’s a very dangerous man.”

“So is his wife.
She got after Trudy and me with the butcher knife. So I got Trudy out of there.”

“She can’t stay at my condo, Judith, he’ll find her there.”

“No, no I left her at John and Rosa’s.”

She breathed a deep sigh of relief.

Tracy looked at her watch. “We need to get back on track. What happened after you became obsessed with him, Julia?”

“Oh, o
kay. I kept telling him I was in love with him and he would just smile. It was as if he enjoyed torturing me. He would disappear for weeks at a time and by the time I did see him I was afraid to complain.

“
He kept telling me he intended to put his wife in a home, divorce her and marry me. I decided to paint his portrait and when it was completed, I invited him over for dinner.

“I thought it would mean something to him but it seemed to make him angry.
After dinner I excused myself and, I’m ashamed to say this, I went into the bedroom and took off all my clothes.

“When he saw me, he jumped up and picked me up and threw me on the sofa.
I was so excited. I thought it was finally going to happen.

“He put his knee in my belly and held me down and slapped me hard.
My dad had always been very gentle when he had sex with me and that’s the way I thought it would always be with older men.

“Y
ou would have thought that would have cured me of him, but it made me want to please him all the more. I had apparently offended him.

“I finally found out where he lived and went to see him.
Trudy was sitting on the front porch. I told her I was going to help her.

“I was planning on helping her by getting Calvin to marry me.
I thought if he had me, he wouldn’t need any more little girls.

“He saw me and went ballistic.
He told his wife to call the police and that he didn’t know who I was or what I was trying to pull.

“I got out of there as quickly as possible.
I thought I was finally cured but when he called three days later, I was on cloud nine.

“He said he wanted to take me on a trip, sort of a pre-wedding honeymoon but I couldn’t tell anyone.
I didn’t even let Jean know I was leaving. I was afraid he would try to talk me out of it.

“On the way to the airport, I decided to tell
Calvin that I was Julia instead of Judith. I then invited him to come and stay with me at my beach house in St. Augustine.

“He chuckled like
he appreciated the joke I had played on him and for the first time told me he loved me. This meant everything to me and I would have walked on hot coals for him at that point.

“While we were waiting for the plane to Jacksonville, I excused myself and went to the ladies room.
When I came back toward him, he was on his cell phone and he was saying something like, ‘wait for us at the airport and then follow us, but don’t let her see you.’

“When I asked him who he was talking to, he hung up and said he had been arranging for someone to stay with
his wife.

“I should hav
e been warned by this, but I shut it out of my mind. Judith could you pour me some water. My mouth is dry from all this talking.”

We waited silently while she drank her water.
Mimi looked like someone had drained the life out of her. Tracy looked both angry and like she was trying to figure something out.

I can’t say what I looked like
but I felt so sad to think Julia had been going through all this by herself. I was also angry that she hadn’t reached out to me. I could understand in a way, but it still made me both angry and sad.

Finally Julia took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“This part is so hard to talk about because of the shock I felt when I knew I had been betrayed.

“Calvin rented a car at the airport and we drove to the beach house.
As soon as we pulled around the back of the house and parked the car, another car pulled in behind us.

“At first I thought it might be so
meone who had the wrong address, or someone turning around. He got out of his car as we were getting out of ours. I recognized him. It was Mackey Broleen.

“Calvin laughed when he saw the shock on my face.
‘Yes, he is alive,’ he said. ‘The look on your face is priceless. He’s here to help me dispose of your body after we’re finished with you.’”

Julia put her face in her hands and began to cry.
I hugged her and she kept saying she was sorry.

“It’s all right,” I told her.
“Can you finish your story? I know it’s hard.”

I took some tissue and wiped her eyes.
“We’re going to catch these jerks and you’re going to be okay. You are so brave, Julia. Believe it or not we’re both strong women, and this experience will make you stronger.”

She blew her nose and continued.
“I started to run but he had anticipated this and grabbed my arm. Mackey came over to help him and together they got me inside the studio apartment under the house.

“I think they thought this was the downstairs of the main house.
When they realized the layout, they put me on the bed and tied me up while they explored the main house.

“I managed to get paper and pen from the nightstand and leave you a not
e. Did you find it? I put it under the nightstand but who would think to look there?”

“I did find it,” I said.
“There was a corner sticking out.”

“You’re so smart, Judith.”

She continued. “I heard them coming down the stairs and managed to hide the note. I put the paper and pen in my pocket of the skirt I was wearing.

“They took me upstairs and I then began to really see w
hat a monster Calvin was. Mackey is an angel compared to him.”

She picked up a corner of the sheet and began tying it into knots.
She looked like she was trying to wring someone’s neck. We waited her out. When she finally spoke, her voice was so low we had to strain to hear her.

“They had taken me into the master bedroom and laid me on the bed.
Mackey stood looking at me like he was going to attack me and, at first, I was more afraid of him.

“When Calvin started interrogating me I almost lost it.
First he asked me how my slut sister was doing. He said you would be next, Judith.

“I became so frightened that I almost wet myself and I asked him if I could go to the bathroom.
They both went with me and watched me pee. It was so degrading, but then that’s what the first two days were about, degradation.

“They didn’t hurt me physically at first.
They made me strip and tied me spread-eagled on the bed. They openly discussed my body. Calvin told me that a grown woman’s body didn’t turn him on at all. Mackey said it turned him on all right but he had no interest in rape.

“The
n they quit talking to me. They discussed me as if I didn’t exist. A few times I tried to talk to Mackey when Calvin wasn’t in the room. I tried to reason with him to let me go but he acted like he never heard me. They gave me bread soaked in vinegar to eat and water to drink.

“I think they had p
ut some drugs in the vinegar, because I slept a lot. Or it might have been the hopelessness I felt. I knew I would never make it out of there alive and that they intended to eventually kill me.

“They came and went and continued to discuss me in my presence.
Sometimes they discussed me just outside the door and I knew I was meant to hear them.

“They were always arguing about the pros and cons of using an adult woman co
mpared to a female child or young teenager.

“They watched me shower, when I was allowed to shower and go to the bathroom.

“
On the third day they brought me a huge steak, salad and French fries and a large coke. My stomach rebelled after being starved for two days and I was sick all over the bed.

“They
told me how disgusting I was and made me clean the whole bedroom, change and wash the sheets and shower. I was so weak by this time it was hard to do all this.

“When they left me I curled up on the bed and went to sleep.
They had left me untied. They probably knew I was too tired to escape. I slept the sleep of the dead and thought at one point during the night I was dead.

“They didn’t come to the room at all the next day and I thought they had left.
I didn’t hear them at all. I snuck down the stairs and raided the refrigerator. They had left doggie bags of food from all the best restaurants in town.

“After I ate
, I ran upstairs and got dressed. I put on my shoes and, had just as I grabbed my purse when they walked in and grabbed me. I knew then that this had been their plan, to get my hopes up and then dash them.

“From then on it was all physical, but by this time I didn’t care to the point that I didn’t feel anything.

“I heard Calvin tell Mackey that if he could get me to fight him maybe he could get it up and that he might as well get something out of all this before I was gone. Mackey told him that he was one sick dude. Calvin told him to shut up and rough me up. By now I didn’t care one way or the other and I was determined not to fight.

“Things got rougher and rougher and I was going in and out of consciousness.
It was like this was all happening to someone else and I was watching from above.

“They would leave me alone for a few hours until I gained consciousness an
d then come back. I heard Mackey tell Calvin at one point that this wasn’t his thing. That’s when Calvin suggested that Mackey burn my feet with his cigarette. While he was doing that, Calvin started punching me in the face and rubbing himself. But it didn’t work for him and I was glad.