The Widow's Watcher Read online

  “Nora,” Owen said suddenly. “Eleanor Lutz.”

  Lars nodded, unable to look his boy in the face.

  “Probably I should have married her,” he admitted. “But youth is stupid. At least I was.”

  He sighed and shook his head at the arrogant young man he’d been.

  “I ran off and joined the navy instead. By the time I made it back to Raven, I’d given Audrey my heart and my hand. I was in love, and it was exciting, full of passion and life. I thought Nora would be happy for me.”

  Lars frowned, and an old image of the hurt on Nora’s face when she’d met Audrey the first time rose in front of him. He could remember telling her, “She could really use a friend.”

  He closed his eyes tightly. He’d never deserved Eleanor.

  “The hell of it wasn’t that I’d fallen in love with another woman. The part she couldn’t forgive was the time she’d spent waiting. She had more faith in me, and in us, than I ever did.”

  Lars leaned down and picked up a stick where it had fallen on top of the snow. He tossed it over the outcropping and watched it spiral through the air.

  “She was married to Rudy Lutz within a year.”

  “Were you two . . . the whole time?” Owen asked.

  “Having an affair?” Lars shook his head. “No, son. I loved your mother with every fiber of my being. And Eleanor barely spoke to me after that anyway. Not for a long time. She’d cross the street if she saw me coming.”

  Lars sighed.

  “If I were a better man, I’d tell you I missed her. Her friendship, at least, but I had my hands full. I’d sold my parents’ house in town to finance opening the garage, then you kids came along. And Audrey. I loved her, but my God, it was always a crisis. For a while I told myself she was just young. We both were. She’d grow out of it, but that never happened. If anything, time made things worse.”

  Lars picked up his poles and punched them again into the snow. He tilted them this way and that, fidgety and on edge.

  “I’d come home to find a bunch of summer people in the house for a party. Some stranger offering me a beer, telling me to come on in.” Lars shook his head. “The calls from the bank. ‘Your account is overdrawn again, Mr. Jorgensen,’ they’d say. And I’d find the house full of art supplies but no food.”

  “Sprinkles,” Owen said suddenly, as if he’d just stumbled upon the memory. “Do you remember?”

  “That damn pony,” Lars said with a sigh. “How you kids cried when I sent him back. Audrey wouldn’t speak to me for weeks. Barely got out of bed.”

  The memories were painful to revisit, but necessary.

  “It wasn’t until the fire that I forced myself to take a good, long look at what we’d become. What I saw scared me to death.”

  Lars turned to Jenna to explain. Owen needed no reminders.

  “The kids were hungry, but Audrey was deep in one of her depressions. Owen was nine, almost ten. I was at work. He’d taken on a role he never should have been forced into.”

  “I almost killed us,” Owen said.

  “No,” Lars said. “Owen was smart. He got his little brother and sister out.”

  “I remembered not to throw water on a grease fire, but I panicked when the flames started licking up the wall.”

  “They found the little ones outside, Francie holding Will, who was just a baby. Owen had gone back in to try to get his mother.”

  “She wouldn’t come,” Owen said. “She wouldn’t come, and I wasn’t strong enough to carry her.”

  Lars marveled at his son’s presence of mind, his determination to keep them all safe. He’d been just a boy. A boy with too many burdens on his shoulders.

  “Audrey needed help. Help I couldn’t give her. It wasn’t something that was going to get better on its own, and it was past time to face that. You kids . . . God, she loved you. Still does I know, deep down inside. But I couldn’t trust her with you. It wasn’t safe.”

  “I remember,” Owen murmured, “walking home from school, never knowing what kind of day it would be.”

  “I didn’t know what to do. I wrestled with it for a long time. Too long. And, I’m sorry to say, I turned to Eleanor. She was the best friend I’d ever had, and the most logical and compassionate person I knew.”

  “So it was just . . . friendship, then?” Owen asked.

  Lars heard the grain of hope, and he wished he had the capacity to lie. But he wouldn’t. He owed Owen the truth.

  “If I’d been a stronger person, maybe it would have been. But no. She and Rudy were in trouble too. Not the same sort of trouble as your mother and me, maybe, but we found each other again in our weakest moments. I’m not proud of it, but I’m long past excusing my sins.”

  Owen said nothing. If there was condemnation, if there was scorn, Lars knew he’d earned it.

  “Beverly knew. We’d talked things over. She was considering moving here, to be with you kids and your mom . . . after. Or if maybe it would be best to send Audrey to live with her, while you three stayed here with me.”

  The words clogged his throat, and Lars forced himself to push through it, to tell both his son, who was the most important thing in his world, and this woman who’d come to matter more than he’d expected, the most damning truth of all.

  “But it wasn’t just about the kids. It was more. I loved . . . I love Audrey. But I couldn’t do it anymore. I wanted out, selfishly, for my sake. I was sacrificing your childhoods, and my own life, on the altar of Audrey’s illness.”

  “Were you with her that day?” Owen asked.

  Lars took a deep breath, then nodded.

  “I told your mother I had to work. I did go to the garage, for a while, but I left to meet Nora. I had no idea Audrey heard that call.”

  He shook his head at his own blindness. It was easier to see nothing at all than to look his own guilt in the face. His father, faced with the loss of his wife to an illness he’d brought home to her, had known that.

  “All these years, I never knew what set her off, sending her over that final edge. It was me.”

  Bitter regret threatened to engulf him.

  “Dad,” Owen said.

  Lars felt his son’s hand on his shoulder. Owen said nothing else, but Lars held tight to that one word and everything it meant. He held tight to it, hoping it could lead him home.

  “I think I’ll stay here for a while, if you two don’t mind.”

  There was a pause. For a moment, Lars thought Owen might argue, then he said, “All right.”

  The sound of their shoes crunching through the snow barely registered, but Lars heard Owen say, “We’ll see you back at the house. When you’re ready.”

  Once the footsteps had faded, Lars let his shoulders drop, the weight of them too much, and wrapped his arms around himself. His legs would no longer support him, and he dropped to his knees in the snow. His head hung low and his chest began to shake as his face contorted.

  He sobbed, silent and alone.

  46

  The heavy curtain of evening had drawn closed around them. Jenna pushed thoughts of the looming holidays away. One day at a time. That’s enough for now.

  When Lars returned, he was quiet and withdrawn.

  “Keep an eye on him, will you?” Owen had asked before he left.

  She didn’t know how she was supposed to do that if he didn’t come out of his room. At least he wasn’t alone.

  Jenna, after a shower that served no purpose other than to warm her and pass the time, dressed again in her secondhand pajamas. There was no one here she needed to impress.

  When she walked back into the living room, running a comb through her wet hair, Lars had emerged from his room and built a fire in the fireplace. It was snowing again.

  She wandered to the windows, drawn to watch the lacy layers fall with a childlike wonderment.

  “It really is incredibly beautiful.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Lars replied. “Apple cider or hot buttered rum?”

&nb
sp; Jenna thought for a moment. “Buttered rum. I’ve never tried it, but if it’s hot, I’ll take it.”

  She snuggled into the sofa, curled her legs, and pulled a fleece blanket around her.

  The rum was as hot as advertised, and delicious.

  “Mmm,” she murmured, as the liquid warmed her from the inside. “I could get used to this. Matt would have loved it here.” Saying his name plucked a string deep in her center, the sound it made a haunting one.

  “Your husband?” Lars adjusted the fire with an old iron poker.

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  “You had a happy marriage?” Lars asked. She felt his eyes on her.

  She smiled a small, sad smile.

  “Yes,” she said. “We did. The kind of marriage our friends envied.”

  The kind of marriage it’s easy to take for granted. Until it’s gone.

  “No mean feat,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I can’t take any credit for it. Mostly, it was Matt. He couldn’t hold a grudge worth a damn. It’s hard to stay mad at a man whose primary argument tactic is to hug you and apologize, whether he was to blame or not.”

  One corner of Lars’s mouth curled upward and he lifted his glass.

  “A smart man.”

  She smiled. “That he was. Smart, kind, a fantastic father.” Her smile faded, her memories jagged and painful. “He was a hard act to measure up to.”

  Jenna stared down at the rum left in her glass. She swirled it around.

  When she glanced up, Lars was watching her, waiting to see if she had more to say.

  Jenna took a deep breath.

  “I used to have this fantasy about running away.” She kept her gaze on the crackling fire. “Living alone in a little English village somewhere, with nothing but a cat and a garden to tend to. Which is stupid. I’m allergic to cats.”

  She risked a glance at Lars. He wasn’t smiling. She sighed.

  “I never would have sacrificed my marriage or left my kids. Not ever, for any reason. It was nothing more than a daydream to help get through the hard days when the kids were small. But it was always there, in the back of my mind.”

  She threw back the last of her drink.

  “If I lived alone, I’d never feel like I was letting someone down.”

  “You can’t beat yourself up for that,” Lars said slowly.

  She shrugged, pulling her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around her legs.

  “Maybe, maybe not. But I can beat myself up about the business card. It was tucked into my wallet, folded up in the back. A card for a family lawyer.”

  Jenna shook her head at her own carelessness, and the hurt it had caused.

  “I’d had it for years, since Ethan was small. I’d like to say I’d forgotten it was there, but that’s not true. It didn’t matter that I’d no intention of ever dialing the number. I didn’t want a divorce. But I held on to the card. A talisman to a life I’d never lead, but one I could imagine so vividly.”

  “You didn’t do it,” Lars said.

  “That’s not much consolation,” Jenna said. She let her legs drop. “Cassandra, my oldest, found it. She was looking for stamps, and stumbled onto my dirty little fantasy.”

  Understanding dawned on Lars’s face.

  “She knew what it was straightaway. The attorney was one of her friend’s dads. She confronted me, and like an idiot, I got defensive.”

  Jenna squeezed her eyes shut, but she couldn’t block the memory of Cassie’s face, twisted in betrayal, as she’d hurled accusations Jenna had little defense for. She hadn’t even bothered to try. Cassie was too young, Jenna had thought. She’d never understand the push and pull of all the responsibilities that came with being an adult, a wife, and a mother. Not until she experienced them for herself.

  Jenna didn’t even attempt to explain.

  She thought she’d have time to make it right.

  “It was just weeks before the crash. We were barely speaking when she died. And now I hear her voice in my head.”

  She leaned her head back against the sofa cushion and closed her eyes.

  “I know it’s not really her,” she said, trying to reassure him. Or perhaps herself. “I’m too disgustingly sane to think I’m really communicating with my daughter from beyond the grave. But my subconscious, or whatever it is, has chosen to use Cassie’s voice. Not Matt’s or Sarah’s or Ethan’s. Only Cass. And the pitch is so perfect and so . . . so Cassandra.” She sent him a heartbroken smile. “My daughter was amazing, Lars. And I let her down. All the way down. I can’t forgive myself for that.”

  Lars finished his own drink and stared into the fire again.

  “Karma is a nasty old bitch, isn’t she?” he finally said with a sigh.

  Jenna couldn’t help but smile through the tears she hadn’t noticed escaping down her cheeks.

  “That she is, Lars. That she is.”

  47

  Despite the success of Audrey’s first hypnotherapy session, it was three days before Drs. Young and Nordquist were willing to move forward with a second session.

  “Hannah’s been on my back about being here for this,” Owen murmured to Jenna when she noticed his worried expression that morning. “And she went to school entirely too easily.”

  Owen knew his daughter well, because Hannah strolled through the front door of the cabin twenty minutes later, looking defiant.

  Jenna tried not to eavesdrop as the pair had a heated debate in the corner of the kitchen over her cutting class again.

  Hannah Jorgensen’s truancies weren’t Jenna’s responsibility.

  The living room was set up exactly as it had been before, with the camera pointed at Audrey seated on the couch. Beverly had made the drive the night before, after the hospital notified them they were cleared to move forward. She was again seated at her daughter’s side.

  It might have been Jenna’s imagination, but it seemed Audrey was more aware of her surroundings than she’d been before. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking, she thought as Audrey slowly turned her head to look at the doctor who was speaking to her.

  Fascinated, Jenna watched alongside the rest of the Jorgensens as Dr. Young walked Audrey through the relaxation techniques designed to bring her to a suggestible meditative state.

  “That can’t possibly work,” Hannah whispered loudly to her dad.

  “Hush, I’m warning you, or I’ll take you right back to school,” he told her.

  Hannah kept further opinions to herself.

  With gentle doggedness, Dr. Young brought Audrey to the point where they’d left off.

  “Can you tell me about after the phone call, Audrey?” Dr. Young asked. “Without experiencing the emotions, I’d like you to describe to me in words what you’re feeling when you hang up the phone.”

  “Scared,” Audrey whispered, unaware of the effect she was having on the room. “I’m so scared. Lars is going to take them from me. I can’t lose them. They’re the only good things I have. I know I’m not the best mother. I know. But I’m their mother. I can’t lose them.”

  “Oh, Audrey,” Beverly murmured, forgetting herself. Dr. Young silenced her with a sharp shake of her head.

  “Is your husband still there, Audrey?” Dr. Young asked, covering the interruption.

  “He’s at work. He says he’s gone to work. Maybe he has. Maybe he’s with her.”

  Jenna snuck a glance at Lars. He looked drawn.

  “And your children?”

  “They’re with me, where they should be. Owen, though. Owen wants to play with his friend. I don’t want him to go. I want them all here with me, close where I can touch them, but Owen doesn’t listen.

  “‘You told me I could!’” Audrey suddenly said in a new voice.

  “I did, I know I did, honey, and I’m sorry . . .” Audrey tilted her head and held out her hand, as if to place it on the cheek of a child who wasn’t there.

  “I try to hold him, but he pulls away. ‘You’re al
ways sorry! You’re always saying things, but your words don’t match what you do! You’re a liar, Mom!’”

  Audrey’s words were a bucket of cold water down Jenna’s back.

  “He runs from me, out of the house,” Audrey continued. “There’s nothing I can do but watch him go.”

  Jenna reached out to place a hand on Owen’s forearm and give it a small squeeze. He didn’t look away from his mother.

  “Owen is gone, then, playing at a friend’s house? What do you do now, Audrey?” Dr. Young asked.

  “I can’t stay here,” she said. “I can’t stay. Everything will spin up and away again. Every time, it’s like a tornado. It whisks me up with it, but when I come down, all the pieces are jumbled up and they don’t get put back in the right place.”

  Audrey was picking up speed, and though her intonation stayed constant, Jenna wondered if the doctor’s instructions were enough for Audrey to remain untouched by the memories.

  “I can feel it starting to spin, in my head, and I’m afraid, so afraid when I come back down it will all be gone. Lars, the kids, all gone, and I’ll be left wandering around alone in the broken pieces.”

  Dr. Young shifted in her seat. If Jenna could see the doctor’s control of Audrey’s state of mind was slipping, then Dr. Young certainly could sense it too.

  “Let’s slow down a bit, Audrey. Remember, this is—”

  Just like a movie, Jenna thought as Dr. Young said the words. Only it wasn’t, was it? These were real people, with real lives and real regrets. Whatever happened to the Jorgensen children may have been shrouded in mystery, but it was real.

  “Let’s start from there, Audrey, and keep it slow and steady,” Dr. Young was saying.

  “I have to go,” Audrey said, her words back to the measured pace she’d begun with.

  Dr. Young relaxed her shoulders slightly.

  “I have to go, and I have to take the kids. I’ll take them and hold them tightly through the storm. I know it’s coming, but if I hold them tightly enough, they’ll be with me when it stops.”

  But you were wrong, Audrey, Jenna thought, filled with sadness. You were so wrong. Pity for the woman stirred inside of Jenna for the first time.