Free exposed (Twisted Cedar Mysteries Book 3) by CJ Carmichael Page A

talking.
    “For as long as I could remember, I’d dreamed about finding my mother, even though I knew she never wanted me. What a fool I was to think she’d be happy to see me now...”
    * * *
    May 15 1972, Librarian Cottage outside of Twisted Cedars, Oregon
     
    “Why are you here?” Shirley kept hold of the rifle, even though she already knew the moment to use it had passed...
    “Why to introduce myself. Don’t you think it’s time we met? I’m Edward Lachlan, but I’ve always wondered...if you’d kept me, what would you have named me?”
    He was playing games with her, like a cat, toying with a mouse. But she was older than him. Smarter, too. She had to convince him he couldn’t get to her. “I was a mere teenager when all that happened. There was never any question of me naming, or keeping you.”
    “Really?”
    Edward turned his back to her, and before she realized what he was doing, he’d pulled up his T-shirt to reveal skin so red and scarred it seemed reptilian.
    For just a moment Shirley felt the urge to reach out and touch the raised, angry-looking welts. Instead she curled her fingers into her palms. “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
    “Not even a sympathetic word from my own mother? Especially considering it was you who gave me—an innocent infant—to the monsters who did this?”
    “Stop!” Shirley Hammond covered her ears. “I don’t want to hear any more about how they treated you. I was just a kid myself.”
    “You don’t want to hear about the beatings?” He circled her, forcing her to twirl in place, in order to keep her eyes on him.
    “But I came such a long way to tell you my story, Mother. Maybe, instead, I should tell you about the way they starved me, made me scrounge and steal for enough food to stay alive. Or perhaps you’d like to hear how they treated my younger sister like a princess—just to make sure I knew that it was me not them who was the problem.”
    She closed her heart to his words. It was a skill she’d taught herself long ago. He was just a character in a novel. This was merely a story and she could choose to stop reading whenever she wished.
    With a calm voice she pointed out, “None of that was my fault.”
    “But you’re the one who gave me to them.”
    Suddenly it was not a man with a mocking tone in front of her, but a sad little boy, asking why she’d abandoned him. The old pain slammed into her then, and she was shocked that after all these years it could still hurt so much.
    She wouldn’t go back there. She couldn’t. Shirley pushed back against the darkness, imagined shoving it between the covers of a book and replacing it on the farthest, darkest corner of a bookshelf.
    “My parents made the arrangements.”
    “But they’re dead now.”
    Yes. He’d done his homework. Her parents had both died prematurely, her father from a heart attack, and her mother from a bad fall down the basement stairs. And she was glad of it. She had never stopped blaming them. The legacy, it seemed, was to be continued.
    She set the rifle on the kitchen table. “Fine. If you need someone to blame, then let it be me.”
    The man, the stranger, her son, stared back at her.
    What was he looking for from her, if not guilt? “Would it make you feel better to beat me, the way they used to beat you?”
    She stood before him, an easy target, but he remained motionless.
    She turned her gaze to the gun. “Or maybe you’d rather shoot me.”
    The terror she expected to feel, was absent. This was the price you paid when you locked away some of your emotions. Eventually it became harder and harder to feel anything at all.
    She watched his face, saw him study the gun as if considering her suggestion. But then he swallowed and shook his head.
    “When I was a boy I used to dream you would come and save me.”
    Shirley blocked out the image his words painted. No one had saved her, either. “You survived without me.”
    “Only because I was waiting for this day.