Confessions From the Dark Read online

  CONFESSIONS FROM THE DARK

  CONFESSIONS SERIES BOOK 2

  A novel by

  T. B. MARKINSON

  Published by T. B. Markinson

  Visit T. B. Markinson’s official website at tbmarkinson.wordpress.com for the latest news, book details, and other information.

  Copyright © T. B. Markinson, 2016

  Cover Design by Erin Dameron-Hill / EDHGraphics

  Edited by Jeri Walker and Karin Cox

  Proofread by Kelly Hashway

  e-book formatting by Guido Henkel

  This e-book is copyrighted and licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owner. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Prologue

  “Kat, I’m home!” I entered the front door of our redbrick home. When I had moved in several years ago, my mother, the flamboyant author, joked I’d moved into a retirement community. It wasn’t an insult. I preferred modest over showy. Order over chaos. Boredom over drama. Not that I had a boring life. At the moment, my life buzzed with anticipation.

  No lights were on in our home blocks away from Boston College, and it was deathly quiet, even though it was only a little after eight in the evening. Confused, I closed the blue front door, removed my hooded, down puffer jacket, and hung it on the coat rack affixed to the wall in the entryway. Then I set my canvas satchel on the bench. There wasn’t a message scribbled on the board, unless Kat’s hand-drawn Christmas tree was some kind of code. She must be home. “Kat? Are you here?”

  The kitchen was off to the left, and I stopped at the fridge to fill a glass of water, the whirring of the ice machine grating on the headache that’d started to form behind my eyes. I chugged half, dehydrated from drinking beer since three that afternoon, and then grabbed a banana to replenish my body with potassium. I peeled it and bit off a third.

  “Kat?” I called again, holding a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t dribble banana onto the floor.

  Still no answer.

  “Why are the lights off?” I asked the empty hallway as I wandered to the back of the house. I was still gripping the water glass in one hand, the banana in the other, as I inspected her studio, my office, and our bedroom—Kat’s usual haunts.

  Odd.

  The doorbell rang, and I stopped mid-step, nearly upsetting the water glass.

  “Jesus, Cori. Pull your shit together,” I chastised myself, unable to get my pulse rate to slow.

  The light in the front room came on. “Kat?” I called from the end of the hallway, one foot in the nursery door.

  “Cori?”

  It was a male voice. “Roger?” I reached the end of the hallway in seven long strides.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He stood in the entryway, looking like a ghost of my usually cocky uncle.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  It was highly unusual for Roger to stop by my house. A blistering cold wind forced the temperamental front door open and slashed through the house like a knife. I’d been meaning to have the door shaved to make sure it closed properly. Some snow drifted onto the welcome mat. Eyeing the mess, I realized I hadn’t taken off my shoes, and there were pools of water marking my trek through the house. Kat, the uber housewife, was going to kill me.

  Roger slammed his weight into the door to shut it completely. “I’ll bring my tools over this weekend, so we can fix this door. Can we sit?”

  “Oh, God. Is it Aunt Barbara? Is that why Kat isn’t here? She’s with—?” I stopped. My legs wobbled as if they understood it wasn’t, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask what my body clearly already surmised.

  “No.” He signaled for me to sit on the couch in the front room. I did, placing the water cup on the glass coffee table on a Salvador Dali coaster. I continued to claw onto the half-eaten banana.

  “Mom? Dad?”

  He studied my face as if he was trying to break the news to me without having to verbalize anything.

  “Kat?” I finally said it, although my voice quavered.

  He shifted uncomfortably on the arm of our newly purchased charcoal-gray, stain-resistant couch to go with the new stain-resistant carpet. For the past few months we’d been prepping our lives, including the house, for the new arrival. Just last week I’d purchased over thirty power socket protective covers.

  “Please, Roger. Is she okay?”

  He nodded, eyes filled with sadness, not alleviating the million thoughts rifling through my mind, the worst being death. The second worst was almost too unfathomable to think.

  Roger sighed, clamped his hand over mine, and said, “She’s going to be fine. She’s in the hospital. We’ve been trying to call you.”

  “I dropped my phone on the way to class. The screen is shattered,” I explained. It was the third phone in six months I’d either lost or destroyed.

  Roger squeezed my hand.

  “What happened? Why are you here?” I wriggled his hand off mine.

  He didn’t flinch. Usually, Mom or Barbara delivered messages.

  “Looking for you.” His steely blue eyes glistened. “You weren’t in your office.”

  I shook my head. “Had drinks with some professors to celebrate the end of the semester.”

  He swallowed.

  I was going to skip the end of semester ritual, but Kat had insisted I go, saying we’d both soon be up to our necks with responsibilities.

  “We should get you to the hospital.” He yanked the banana out of my hand and set it on the table; my squeezing had rendered it almost unrecognizable. My uncle wrested a silk handkerchief out of his suit breast pocket and wiped my fingers, staring at the messy cloth before shoving it into his coat pocket. He stood and waved for me to get off my ass. Light from the street outside danced on his silver, helmet-style coif.

  I wasn’t able to move. He tried to pry me off the couch, but I wrenched him back. We stared each other down.

  “Tell me what happened,” I demanded.

  “She was in a car accident.”

  “No, that can’t be.” I jiggled my hand free from his grasp. “No… no.” I darted up and paced the small space in the front room, pausing to straighten a baby Jesus ornament on the Christmas tree. “When I left for class, everything was fine. Kat told me she was going to curl up in bed and read all afternoon and evening.” I stopped to gather my thoughts and then snapped my fingers. “That’s right. The Paying Guests for next week’s book club discussion. They call the club The Smut Patrol, but I don’t think Waters’s book counts as erotica. Sexy scenes, yes. Erotica, no. Mom and Kat love to get under my skin, though. That’s the reason behind the club’s name.” It was like I couldn’t stem the absurdity leaving my mouth, afraid that if I stopped saying inane things, reality would hit me hard. The news Roger didn’t want to tell me would slice me like a karate chop to the throat.

  Roger’s face was sympathetic but stern. In four steps, he reached me and drew me into his arms. “I’m so sorry.”

  “The baby?” I whispered into his black Burberry trench coat.

  He squeezed me tighter, unable to say out loud
what I’d known in my heart the moment I gazed into my uncle’s eyes at the front door. At six foot two, Roger only had a few inches on me, but I dissolved into a small child enveloped in his embrace. My body shuddered with sobs. “Nooooooooooooooooooo!” I wailed, banging his chest with my fists. It didn’t seem possible that our baby had died before ever taking a breath.

  He didn’t let go.

  ***

  As soon as the glass doors to the hospital slid open, both my mom and aunt rushed to console me. I didn’t want consolation. I was desperate to see Kat. The thirty-minute stop-and-go car ride through the slushy streets of Boston was the longest half hour of my life. A small pond on Storrow Drive was particularly vexing, considering several timid drivers were afraid to drive through in fear of their car stalling. Roger, in his Jeep Grand Cherokee, had plowed right through the center.

  “Where is she? Is she alone?” My eyes panned the waiting room needlessly, but I couldn’t stop searching for Kat.

  A woman across the room perked up in her seat, catching my interest, but it waned quickly when I saw a meek-looking individual, not Kat.

  Aunt Barbara encircled an arm around my waist and led me past the front desk. “Your dad is sitting with her. She’s asleep.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was a hit and run…” Mom shuddered. “Someone skidded into her car on the ice and pushed it off the road. Didn’t even bother stopping to help her.”

  “They tried, Cori.” Barbara patted my arm. “She had a caesarean, but—” Barbara couldn’t utter the unspeakable either.

  I sucked in a ragged breath, trying to staunch the flood of tears, but they streamed down my face anyway.

  “Is Kat okay?”

  “She’ll be fine,” Mom said, without her usual moxie. She rested her head on my shoulder. I wondered what we looked like, walking arm in arm down the OBGYN corridor, sobbing. I imagined this wing was used to jubilation, not sorrow of this magnitude. I wasn’t even sure how I managed to move one leg in front of the other. My system operated on autopilot, and my sole mission was to find Kat.

  “Has anyone called her parents?” I asked.

  “I left a message saying to call me back. I stressed it was important, but I haven’t heard from them yet.” Mom’s stiffened spine indicated she didn’t expect a response. Kat’s family situation was complicated, and all contact was on her father’s terms, which usually consisted of getting together for dinner once a month.

  Dr. Wicks stepped out of a room and motioned she wanted to speak. Both my mom and aunt gave me a look that said Be strong. Barbara handed me a wad of Kleenex. I dabbed my eyes and nose.

  How in the world could I be strong when the woman I loved more than life itself had just gone through hell while I was out having drinks with colleagues to celebrate the end of the fall semester? While I was drinking, Kat was… I was gripped with a sudden wave of guilt.

  “The placenta was torn from the inner wall of the uterus.” Dr. Wicks’s words drifted into my ears, alerting me to the fact that she had been talking to me for some moments. Maybe she’d noticed the blankness in my eyes, because she halted. “I’m so sorry. There was nothing we could do.”

  “Will she be able to—?” I shook my head, angry at myself for even thinking about trying again. Our baby was gone, and nothing would ever bring her back.

  Dr. Wicks clasped a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry. There was too much trauma. It’s more than likely Kat won’t be able to fall pregnant again, or be able to carry to term.” A deep well of sadness dulled her eyes, and the tremor in her voice conveyed how much she hated having to inform me of the brutal truth.

  I bobbed my head, feeling like I should say something—what, though? Should I try to comfort her? Thank her for trying? No words came to me, so I just stood there awkwardly.

  “Would you like to say good-bye?” asked the doctor.

  “What?” I said, her words shattering my insides when I realized what she meant. Say good-bye to our daughter, Charlotte, Lottie for short, who we were expecting to officially welcome to the family in mid-January.

  “Uh, y-yes. Yes, I would.” I smothered my quivering mouth with a palm, sniffled, and said, “Can I see Kat first, please?”

  “Of course.” She chaperoned me to Kat’s hospital room. “Go inside.” Dr. Wicks withdrew down the hallway.

  My beautiful wife was asleep, hooked up to a machine I assumed was keeping track of her heartbeat and other vitals. Minor cuts marred her face and her left eye was swollen with bruising already starting to show. Was that the side that had struck the car? My eyes roamed to her midriff, and my legs started to tremble.

  An IV was inserted into Kat’s left hand. Dad held her right hand and glanced up when he detected the shuffle of my feet toward the bed. Only the whirring machines and the beeping heart monitor disturbed the eerie quiet.

  Dad rose, paused, and then glanced between Kat and me as if trying to fix the situation, like he had when I’d broken a favorite toy as a child. The pain etched crinkles around his soulful brown eyes and made me catch my breath. On the way out, he gave me a rib-crushing hug, and it took every ounce of energy to lock my emotions deep inside. Be strong, Cori. I wanted to be there for Kat.

  “I love you, kiddo,” he whispered as he exited.

  He hadn’t called me kiddo since I was ten, when I’d accidentally smashed a gravy boat during Thanksgiving at my grandparents, ruining both the gravy boat and a tablecloth that’d been crocheted by my great-grandmother as a wedding gift to her only daughter. After I’d received a harsh dressing down by my grandfather, Dad, who was soft-spoken and never quick to anger, had whisked me aside and reassured me everything would blow over.

  This, though, would not blow over.

  I forced some bile back down and steadied my nerves.

  Sitting in the chair my father had vacated, I took Kat’s hand in mine. She stirred and slowly opened her good eye.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  She blinked.

  Carefully, I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed it. “I love you, Kit Kat.”

  She burst into tears, grimacing from the pain.

  That was the moment I lost it too. Our tears wet the pillow as Kat tugged me to the crook of her neck.

  ***

  It was three o’clock in the morning, but I refused to close my eyes. When I did, I pictured Charlotte in her mahogany casket, her tiny body shrouded in satin, as if she was just sleeping.

  Forever.

  I bolted upright in bed.

  Kat lay on her side, clutching a pillow. Her furrowed brow and restlessness led me to believe her sleep was troubled, and even though her injuries hadn’t healed, I imagined the source of discomfort resulted from similar images running through her mind.

  I kissed Kat’s cold forehead, soaked with perspiration, and tried closing my eyes, only to be haunted again by Charlotte’s image. Her perfectly formed body, never taking a single breath of air. All of her tiny fingers, none of which ever had a chance to grip mine. The hollowness inside as her casket was lowered into the frozen ground.

  My eyes snapped open, and a singular thought flew through my mind. Run.

  I needed to run, to keep moving, or the memories would never leave me in peace.

  In the bathroom, I changed into thermal running pants and a fleece jacket, not thinking, just doing. I had to run.

  Outside, no one stirred on our street. No cars. No people. No signs of life.

  Some houses still had Christmas lights twinkling, and I made a mental note to set up a time to help Old Man Henderson remove his, like I did every year.

  I loped off toward the reservoir. Vapor seeped from my mouth, but at least the cold hadn’t yet infiltrated my skin or my boots as my feet crunched through freshly fallen snow.

  Numb. I’d been numb for weeks. Since the hospital. Yesterday, the sun had blared down on me as I walked to and from the university. Yet it wasn’t until my mother greeted
me at home, remarking about the weather, that it had dawned on me it hadn’t been dark out. Both Mom and Barb had been switching off staying at the house to help me with Kat. I’d been encased in darkness for days on end, and I didn’t see any end in sight. Perhaps, I didn’t want to see one. Darkness—I craved it. So did Kat, who hadn’t decamped from our bedroom since the funeral.

  Moonlight skittered along the water’s surface as I completed the first mile and a half lap. “Go away!” I shouted at the shimmer. “Leave me be!”

  The moon ignored my plea.

  I lowered my beanie, nearly covering my eyes completely, and ran six more laps.

  ***

  Inside the house, light streamed from the kitchen.

  “Kat?” I whispered.

  Barbara appeared around the corner. It was her turn to stay over, helping out simply by being present. “Cori, what are you doing up?”

  “I went for a run,” I said as if it was perfectly normal to run at this time of day. “Why are you up?”

  “I thought I heard Kat cry out.”

  I started down the hallway, but she pulled me back.

  “No, don’t wake her. She settled down. I didn’t even have to go into the room.”

  I wilted against the wall in the front room. “I don’t know what to do, how to ease the pain for her.”

  “Ease the pain? I don’t think that’s possible for either of you.” She motioned for me to take a seat on the couch. “She needs time. That’s all we can give her.” She eyed my running gear. “How long did you run? Your clothes are soaked.”

  I shrugged, checking the digital clock on the DVD player. It was after five. It’d been well over an hour. I should have been exhausted, but all I wanted to do was go back out. Keep on running.

  Chapter One

  “You ready, Kat?” Mom’s shrill voice hollered from the front room.

  Kat’s head emerged from our bedroom. As she inserted a dangling earring into her left lobe, she said, “Two minutes.”