She should never have trackedhimdown. She had started this horror.
The nightmares had pushed her to do it. Once the nightmares had begun, she’d started to remember things. Little snippets of a life that wasn’t the one she’d always thought was hers. A woman with blond hair and blue eyes rocking her, singing to her. A smaller girl, maybe two years old, sucking her thumb and holding on to Cherry’s hand. An infant in a crib in her and the other little girl’s room. She’d remembered the pink girly wallpaper. Toys, especially a stuffed bear.
Then she was under the water.
Hot tears burned her cheeks. Something or someone was holding her beneath the surface. Eventually the images in the nightmares started to change, became Cherry and her sweet daughter. In the awful dreams, she would hold her precious baby beneath the water, ignoring the child’s frantic struggles. Her baby’s eyes would widen, and then her little mouth would open and the battle was over.
Desperation had pushed Cherry to find answers. She hadn’t told her husband, but she’d driven all the way to Jackson and spoken to a psychologist—using a different name of course. Skeletons in one’s closet were bad for political careers. The psychologist had told her that the sort of memories she was experiencing were likely real. Repressed by some childhood trauma. Was it possible that she had been adopted? Had some traumatic event blocked those memories until now?
That was when Cherry had started her search. She was an attorney, she’d known the places to go and the buttons to push to find what she was looking for. She’d quickly discovered that she had, in fact, been adopted. She’d learned her real name and the names of her siblings. But not their new names—the ones they’d been given, as she had, in their new lives. She’d struggled with the need to question her parents, butshe couldn’t bring herself to drag them into the misery overtaking her existence. So she’d kept quiet and kept digging.
No one from the diocese would give her the priest’s name who had handled the adoptions. They had pretended the information had been lost years ago. But she had known they were keeping their secret.
Since her brother had been the oldest at the time, she began her search with him. Reason dictated that he would be the most likely to remember what really happened. Cherry had gone to the reporter who’d followed the Solomon case the closest thirty years ago. He’d been in a nursing home. Macular degeneration had stolen his sight. Complications from diabetes had stolen his legs. She’d told him she was a writer and wanted to do a true crime novel on the case. The enticing scent of a story still alive somewhere in that shell of a body, he’d given her everything he remembered, including the fact that the boy had gone to the Healing Institute in Jackson.
Finding her brother from there had been a breeze.
Along the way she’d discovered that Sarah Solomon was now Penny Arnold and Tessa Solomon was Adeline Cooper. She’d printed pictures from the internet of both women. Of the two, locating information on Penny had been the simplest. Though her adopted parents were now deceased, as a real estate agent Penny maintained a significant presence on the web. Adeline had been a different story. All the information Cherry had found on her was around nine years old. But her adopted mother had still been alive.
Cherry had been so damned clever. No one had suspected for a moment that she was involved in a clandestine investigation into her murky past. As painful and confusing as all she’d found had been, she hadn’t shared even a hint of it with her parents or her husband. She’d told herself at the time that it was the only way to protect them. Hurting them had been the last thing on her mind.
What a fool she’d been. Her most monumental mistake had been going to Daniel Jamison first. She’d taken the photos of their sisters she’d gotten from the internet. She’d so hoped to gain some insightinto what had happened to them as children. And to see if he had the nightmares, too. He’d refused to talk to her. Had ordered her off his property. She’d left him the photos, including one of her, in hopes that he would have a change of heart.
A couple of weeks later, when she’d worked up the nerve, she’d gone to Penny. The reception hadn’t been much better there. She hadn’t believed Cherry. No matter that she’d shown her the proof. But Cherry had seen the fear in her eyes when she’d asked about the nightmares.Are you afraid of water or do you have bad dreams about water?Like Daniel, Penny had promptly ordered Cherry to stay away from her.
Eventually Cherry had again summoned her courage and attempted to find her other sister. Adeline’s mother had repeated that pattern. She’d denied everything. Refused to give Cherry any information about where Adeline was now. Disgusted at that point, Cherry had prepared to go home. She’d climbed into her car, tears pouring from her eyes, her nerves frayed.
Andhehad been in the back seat. He’d forced her to drive to a remote location. He’d injected her with something that rendered her unconscious. When she’d awakened, she had been in this despicable place.
Cherry shuddered, let the hot tears gush. At least her baby was safe now. Cherry couldn’t harm her baby now.
She was here with poor Penny.
They couldn’t hope to break free. Their wrists were tethered to their ankles by a length of chain, then the chain was attached to a support beam that held up the roof of the old shack.
Cherry had tried so hard to get free, her wrists and ankles bled from the metal abrading her skin.
Defeat sucked the last of the hope from her.
They were going to die. He’d said so.
Maybe they should die. Maybe they had inherited their biological father’s compulsion to murder. Daniel had ranted on and on about his wife and how she would die. Cherry had suffered the dreams of killing her own baby girl. Just maybe they all should have died thirty years ago.
But she didn’t want to die. She wanted her life back.
No one was going to find them. Fate had caught up to them after three decades. They would die.
The only delay to that promised end was Adeline Cooper.
Daniel had boasted that to their families they were already dead, but the final departure from this earth would come when all the princesses were together. Then they would march to their true destinies.
He would take the three of them to the river and send them to heaven.
Adeline would be here soon, he’d promised.
Cherry closed her eyes and placed another urgent plea in the hands of her Lord.Don’t let him catch Adeline ...
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