The Follower Read online

  Her visitor, seeing the door finally open, hastened back up the steps and lifted the steaming Dutch oven from where she’d left it on the bench by the door. She held it up to Cora like burnt offerings.

  ‘Seems like I caught you at a bad time. Sorry to come without calling, but like I said, the phone is out. Maybe you didn’t realize?’

  Cora stepped out onto the porch and closed the door, holding the knob with both hands behind her.

  ‘Oh, no. That’s so strange. I’ll have to get it checked out. Maybe that storm last week. I never use the landline really. We just have it for emergencies.’

  The woman nodded, looking past Cora toward the door.

  ‘Mind if I come in? I can just drop this in the kitchen. How is Mrs. Johnson? Well enough for a visit today?’

  ‘Oh, n-no. Definitely not today. She’s sleeping now. Had a rough night, but she’ll love the soup. Don’t worry though. I’ll just take it.’ She reached out for the pot, feeling that she’d dodged a bullet.

  As Ellie handed it over, however, she glanced down at Cora’s wrist, which was swollen now with an unmistakable bluish hue.

  ‘Oh, my,’ Ellie said, pulling back the pot. ‘I can’t let you carry this. Look at your wrist. What happened?’

  A chill shot through Cora’s heart. Everything was lost. She’d have to kill her. And then what? Her mind quickly ticked off the tasks that would be involved. Bury the body, burn her clothes, throw her jewelry in the river. Her eyes swept out over the driveway. She’d have to ditch her car somewhere in the woods, wipe it down of all traces, prints, DNA. If anyone had known she was coming—

  Then Cora saw it. There was someone else in Ellie’s car.

  ‘Oh, who’s that?’ she asked, trying not to let the panic sound in her voice.

  ‘Never mind him, that’s just my husband, Fred. He’ll read the paper while we visit. My car’s been in the shop for weeks, so he’s had to be my chauffeur. The truth is, we’re newlyweds, so he secretly enjoys it,’ she laughed, turning red. ‘Third time’s the charm.’

  ‘Fred,’ Cora muttered, frantically recalculating the odds of surviving this predicament.

  ‘Well, here, let me just take the soup in and then we’ll go. I don’t want to take up your time. I’ll come back to visit Mrs. Johnson another day. Perhaps we can schedule it now?’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ Cora said, her mind too overwhelmed to stop her.

  Ellie had her hand on the doorknob. Cora would have had to openly fight her to keep her out of there. She was going to have to admit this small defeat to win the war.

  The door swung open and Ellie, as Cora had expected, gasped at the scene before her. Cora closed her eyes, trying to think.

  ‘Good grief, what’s happened?’ Ellie exclaimed, rushing to the counter and putting the pot down on a tea towel. She turned to Cora, a confused look on her face.

  Cora stared at the floor, seeing it with fresh eyes now that she had a witness. Not only was the console smashed into a thousand bits, but there was an obvious trail of blood droplets smeared through the shattered fragments.

  ‘Hold on, let me get Fred,’ Ellie moved swiftly to the door.

  ‘No, no, please. Don’t bother him. I’ve already arranged for someone to come and deal with it. They’ll be upset if they don’t get their money, you know?’ Cora laughed nervously. ‘They’ll be here in a bit. I was just waiting. That’s who I thought was at the door, in fact. See,’ she said, pointing to the path wiped through the glass, ‘I was starting to mop up. Gracious, I didn’t want you to see the place in such a mess.’

  Ellie smiled, relaxing for the first time. She’d fallen for it completely.

  ‘Now I understand. I thought something strange was going on. I was ready to call the police.’ She paused, pushing the bits of splintered wood around with the toe of her shoe.

  ‘How did it happen?’ Ellie went on. ‘You weren’t trying to move this by yourself, were you?’ She looked up at Cora in horror.

  ‘Well, yes, I was. I can usually handle that sort of thing, but I guess I overestimated my strength this time.’

  Cora heard the girl moan softly from her hiding spot. She had to talk louder, drown out the sound.

  ‘It was very silly of me,’ she said, moving in between Ellie and the pantry.

  ‘Please promise me you’ll call me if you need something like this again. I can have Fred help you.’

  ‘Oh, I will, I definitely will.’

  Ellie was still staring at the floor, obviously perplexed.

  ‘Why, there’s blood here.’ She leaned down, wiping a bit of it with her fingertip.

  Cora swallowed hard.

  ‘Is this yours? Oh, that’s what happened to your wrist. Why, you’re hurt. You’re really hurt,’ she said, stepping over to Cora. The cut on her head was bleeding again.

  ‘Come on, Fred and I will take you to the hospital. You need to have this checked out.’

  Cora pulled back and away.

  ‘No, no, I don’t need that. I’m fine, really.’

  ‘You aren’t fine. Look at your wrist. That could very well be broken.’

  Cora heard a movement in the pantry. The girl must be coming to. She was shifting around in there. In another minute, Ellie would pick up on it too.

  She grabbed Ellie by the shoulder, much to her surprise, and firmly but politely walked her to the door.

  ‘Really, I will be fine. I’ll tell you what, after the guys come to help me get this out of here, I’ll have them drive me over to the hospital and get checked out. I need to be here when they arrive. You know how hard it is to get people out to take care of anything.’ She laughed. ‘And I can’t bear it another minute to have this place be such a mess. You can understand that, right?’ They stood in the doorway, Ellie obviously reluctant to leave.

  ‘Okay, well, I’ll come back in a few days to get my pot. I’ll check on you then.’

  ‘No, no, we’re so far out. I’ll bring it to you at the diner, and then I’ll let you inspect me for cuts and bruises.’ She forced a smile.

  ‘Well, all right then. We can set up a visit then too. I’m warning you though, if you don’t come by there this week, I’m coming back to see how you are.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I will absolutely be there.’

  Cora shut the door, sighing with relief, and then rushed to the dining room where she could get a better view of the driveway. Fred and Ellie sat there in their idling Buick, not moving. Ellie was chattering on to Fred, who listened intently. Ellie talked with her hands, waving them around frenetically. She was upset. She was worried. But it was none of her damn business.

  ‘Come on, Fred,’ Cora said aloud. ‘Calm her down. Tell her to leave it well enough alone.’

  Then Cora heard a thud in the kitchen. The girl. She had to get back to the girl.

  As soon as she stepped into the kitchen she saw her. She was crawling along on her belly, wincing in pain, moving slowly back across the glass on the floor, the straightest path out of the house. Her face and hands were sliced up from the broken screen and her cheek was covered in a massive blue-and-purple bruise. She wasn’t letting that stop her. Determined little beast.

  Had Cora locked the door behind her when she’d let Ellie out? She patted her front pockets. The keys weren’t there. Her eyes flew to the lock and there they were, jutting out. The girl’s freedom dangled there, inviting catastrophe.

  She crossed the room in two great strides, jumping over the girl. As she yanked the key out of the lock, Cora glanced quickly out of the kitchen window, checking on Ellie and Fred as best she could from this vantage point. The car was still there, but now only Fred was in it. Ellie must be coming back. But where was she?

  Cora had no time to track her down though. She ran to where the girl slithered on the floor, pulling her backwards first by the hair, and then getting a grip around her torso. She flung her toward the pantry, and grabbed her by the arms, dragging her away from the door. The girl could hardly struggle, she was so weak,
barely alive even, but she managed to kick her legs and twist her body so that Cora had to work hard to keep her moving in the right direction.

  She had to find a better place to put her for the time being. Someplace with a door at least. She moved past the pantry farther down the hallway this time, to the bathroom they never used. The toilet was broken, so Cora mostly used it for storage. The grime had built up in the corners, and she could see a small hole in the corner of the wall shoved full of pillow stuffing. The mice had moved in.

  She pushed the girl into the corner and hoisted the three cardboard boxes filled with household miscellanea out of the claw-foot tub and onto the floor. Using all her strength and force of will, she heaved the girl up waist high and dropped her in on top of the golden-brown-streaked porcelain. As she tumbled in, the girl’s head hit the curved edge hard enough to knock her out again. Afraid that she was faking it, Cora slapped her face and watched the bright red spot flare up on her cheek, but the girl didn’t move. Cora closed the door and propped a kitchen chair up under the knob.

  She’d bought herself a few minutes at least.

  She raced back out to the kitchen and stormed to the window as she tried to catch her breath. Everything looked to be in its usual state. The car was gone. The trees and grass and flowers were still as a painting.

  What had Ellie been doing though? Had she peered into another window of the house? What had she seen? Had she noticed missing family heirlooms they’d sold to pay the bills? Or Mrs. Johnson’s wheelchair thrown onto the scrap pile behind the barn? Were they racing off to alert the cops now?

  She’d told James they shouldn’t make so many changes so quickly, but he’d wanted to erase all traces of that senseless biddy, as he’d dubbed her. They’d been told she didn’t have any family living and that she was such a mean old codger that there was no one left on earth to care for her, but this Ellie Rainey was exactly what she’d been afraid of. There always seemed to be a flaw in their plans, one thing they hadn’t considered that changed every calculation.

  Cora wouldn’t be able to rest easy for days, she knew. What a stupid mistake she’d made. A stupid mistake James had made forcing her to raise that kind of money on short notice. She’d risked everything now for two hundred and fifty dollars. Everything.

  Well, she certainly couldn’t raise it now, she thought morosely as she scrutinized the exploded hunk of wood in front of her. She sank down to the floor, rubbing her finger along the edge of a piece of broken glass, hoping the pain of the cut would drown out the pain she felt inside.

  Tomorrow she’d go to Western Union. She’d send him fifty dollars out of her savings. It was the best she could do. She would have to let James down. She’d tell him the rest would arrive as soon as she could get it together. There’d be hell to pay, even if she did eventually raise the funds. But she had no choice.

  She shook her head and stood up. It was time to get to work. Nothing left but to drag the girl back upstairs and pick up the pieces of this mess.

  CHAPTER 34

  When Julie came to she thought she was in her bedroom at her parents’ house. It took her a moment to register the absence of her four-poster bed with its pale blue ruffled canopy flanked by white bedside tables and porcelain lamps shaped like teapots. No, she realized hazily, she must not be there.

  Maybe she was in the city.

  She’d been dreaming the most amazing dream. There was a white sand beach with crystal-clear water reflecting an achingly blue sky. Mark was there, laughing, reaching out for her. They splashed together, dipping in and out of waves as warm as bathtub water. The sun burned bright above as she tasted the salt from the foamy water rushing up around her on its return from the coast.

  They held hands and walked out of the sea, stepping across rocks that grew up, sprouting like weeds from the ocean bottom to form a path through the waves breaking against them in their wake. They walked along a gradually sloping incline toward a huge white house that stood on the pinnacle of a cliff in the distance. Its shutters clapped against ivy-covered walls, its doors flung open, inviting them home. It was her grandparents’ place on Nantucket, where they’d gone every August of her childhood, except it wasn’t. It was bigger, more ornate, a house lowered down from the heavens.

  She and Mark stopped, their feet sinking into the sand as their eyes met and they embraced. Suddenly she wore a long white gown that clung to her with damp, and little wisps of her hair blew around her face and his.

  She turned back toward the house. In each window stood someone beloved, waving to her from above, smiling, beckoning her to join them.

  ‘They’re waiting for us.’

  There were her mother, her father, her brother, her best friend from middle school, her long-dead grandfather. She ran toward them, still holding Mark’s warm hand.

  Then the dream faded and she glided back into consciousness. She resisted it, squeezing her eyes shut, trying to recapture that vision, to rewind and play it out to the end, but it was gone, drifted away into the ether.

  She rolled over, nestling into the mattress, smiling as she clung to the ephemeral threads of the dream.

  It was the smell of the putrid sheets and the soft brush of the fleece blanket that brought her back to reality. She felt that familiar sinking in her chest that would inevitably be followed by the onslaught of recent memory. She opened her eyes and bolted upright, but slumped back down again immediately, her head throbbing.

  ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ she whispered. She was still here.

  The room was spinning, but she could see that it remained unchanged from before except for an empty spot along the far wall where the console had stood.

  It was coming back to her in bits. The last thing she remembered was crossing the threshold into the hall, the rest of it gone. How had she ended up back here, back in this room, and with every muscle of her body contorted with pain? She put her hand behind her neck. It felt worse than when she’d had whiplash from the car accident last year.

  She moaned and lay back against the flattened pillow.

  Then she remembered the baby. Panicked, she put her hands around her belly, splaying her fingers across it. She held perfectly still, waiting for it to move. In that moment, she was a tightrope walker, balancing a thousand feet in the air. Was it still there? Was it alive? Suddenly nothing else mattered. Not Mark, not her parents, not even getting out of there.

  Why wouldn’t it move?

  It was in that moment that she knew she could never fulfill her plan, she could never kill this child. If only it would move, she would protect it with every ounce of energy she had until her dying day. If only it was okay, she swore, she would make any bargain with any devil to keep this child alive. It wasn’t the baby’s fault, she suddenly understood with perfect clarity. Evil wasn’t genetic.

  ‘Please, little one,’ she whispered, ‘please move.’

  And then, finally, she felt it kick and could exhale at last.

  ‘Thank God.’

  For a moment after, she was the one who didn’t move. She sat there clutching her stomach, picturing this precious fetus with tiny moving fingers. It floated inside her, unsuspecting and naïve. She breathed deeply in and out, eyes closed.

  How could she have ever wanted to do this child harm? She was going crazy in here, succumbing to their influence. She was turning into an animal, a vicious and depraved murderer. She’d let her mind slip into these dark patterns, had allowed herself to think that the ends justified the means, and in the process had rationalized her way into planning the most despicable act possible. She had almost killed an innocent baby. She shivered, thinking how easily it could have happened.

  ‘They are making you crazy but you can’t let them, Julie. You can’t.’

  This child was a survivor, just like she would be. Once she got them both out of here, it wouldn’t be a symbol of her suffering, but of her strength. And she would get out of here. She had to get back to Mark, to that house on the hill, to where the waves rolled fr
eely over the earth, washing it clean of sin.

  When she opened her eyes, she noticed something else, as if her vision had been directed by an outside force. Across the room, shoved up against the wall, was a canvas bag rumpled up in a ball. At first, she didn’t recognize it, but something about it made Julie go numb all over, sparking some buried memory.

  Then she knew.

  ‘No fucking way,’ she murmured.

  The shears. She remembered the dressmaker’s shears. The woman had forgotten to take this bag out of here, and with that one misstep, had sealed her doom. Whatever had happened must have been enough of a shock to rattle her at last because she had always been so careful, checking and double-checking, locking and re-locking, but now she’d made her fatal error. This was it, the miracle Julie had been waiting for.

  She hurt everywhere, but she had to get up. She shifted her weight onto her right side so she could roll off the bed, but found that, for some reason, she couldn’t do it. Something was wrong. Her left leg wouldn’t move. And then, she realized with horror that she couldn’t feel it.

  She threw off the covers in a panic and immediately understood the problem. A rope was wrapped around her calf at least ten times, like a crude gladiator sandal, and the end of it was tied fast to the bedpost. The skin beneath the rope was blue, with bulging trapezoids of flesh pressed through the crisscross pattern. The stupid woman had tied it too tightly. There was no circulation and it had gone past the point of numbness. It was like a plastic doll part sewn onto her flesh, floppy and useless.

  ‘Okay, Julie. Stay calm.’ She wiggled her toes. ‘It’s not too late. It’s fine. This will be fine.’ But she knew in her heart it wouldn’t be fine for long.

  She swallowed hard and pounced on the knot, searching for a weak point, a crevice she could use to pry it loose. Then she drew back from it in despair.

  She took a deep breath, leaned back against the pillow.

  Why had that woman tied her up this time? Why now? Julie knew the answer. She knew why patterns changed. That woman was panicking, losing her cool. Julie could have the advantage here if she could just stay calm and think rationally.