Chapter 2.

I wake to a pounding in my head.

Bang, bang, bang.

My eye lids are heavy and I can feel the sweat all over my body, my scarf now feeling like hands wrapped tightly around my throat.

My body is heavy, trying to move through the left over foggy effects of the Xanax in my system making waking up feel like the hardest struggle. My body wants me to give back into the warm comfort it provides.

Come back to sleep, back where it is safe. You don't want to be here. Come back with me...

It whispers to me, scratching at the edges of my consciousness. It begs me not to leave.

But the pounding in my head, and the hands around my throat, they beg me to wake up. They pull me back to the real world. The one I hate.

I grip lazily at the scarf at first, then as it begins to feel even tighter with my efforts, panic starts in.

I jolt upright, my head screaming from the quick movements, everything hurts. I can still feel and hear the banging inside my skull.

Bang, bang, bang.

I open my eyes and am stunned for a short second, realizing where I am. Seeing that fireplace in front of me again. The fire crackling softly in the firebox.

I don't remember lighting a fire.

The stiffness in my body suggests I haven't moved since I sat here on this loveseat last night, but sometimes that's how the drug works too. I always wake up feeling like a corpse being reanimated, cracking the rigor mortis as my stiff joints begin to once again bend and flex.

I must have gotten cold last night.

Outside the window I can see the snow is still falling, heavy even for this time of year. The window fogged over. The light hurts my eyes and I lean forward, holding my aching head in my hands.

The banging happens again, only now I realize it isn't in my head at all. It's someone at the front door.

Shit.

I pull myself off of the couch, finally releasing myself from the scarf and my parka, throwing them both down onto the scuffed hardwoods floors. My threadbare sweatshirt sticks to my clammy skin, sending goose flesh across my chest and down my arms.

I stumble towards the door, my legs not quite ready to support my weight.

The heavy wooden front door rattles in front of me as the person on the other side continues to knock incessantly.

I press my face to the small peep hole, having to creep onto my toes to see.

A man stands there, his arms wrapped tightly around himself as he looks around, shaking in the cold wind I can feel coming in from the crack bellow the door.

"What do you want?" I yell through the door and he quirks his head to the side.

"Hello?" He shouts back at the door. "Miss Jacobs?"

"What do you want?" I repeat the question through the door. Leaning my weight into it to keep from falling back flat footed to where I cannot see him.

He steps in closer to the door, using his arm to push his wet glasses back up onto his nose.

"Miss Jacobs, I'm Elroy Jinks, I work for the-." I already know what he's going to say. I drop down, no longer needing to see him.

"No comment." I shout back, cutting him off. I wish I could just tattoo that statement onto my forehead to just save us all the trouble. I've been repeating that phrase over and over since I was seventeen years old.

"I don't mean to bother you, Miss Jacobs, I just wanted to get-."

I cut him off again. "No comment." He starts to talk again. "No comment." And before he can open his mouth. "No comment."

It's like I am seventeen all over again. Standing with my mother and brother in front of a room full of reporters. They shout over each other. Only certain bits and pieces from each making it to my ears.

"Why did he do it?"

"Did you know?"

"Was there abuse?"

"Were there signs?"

"Who found the bodies?"

Rape, murder, killer, complicit, why, why, why, why....

I scrunch my eyes closed as if I can still see the flash of dozens of cameras. All those people who only wanted photos of me so that they could blast them into every magazine, newspaper, and blog they had. They wanted to see me. The daughter of a man who raped and killed girls my age. Some I even knew.

They all wanted to know the same things. One specific question was their favorite and the one that always haunted me the most.

"How could you not know?"

How could we have lived underneath this same roof with a man we each loved so much, who held us as babies and kissed us goodnight and slept in my mother's bed, his arms always wrapped tightly around her. How could we not know, that all that time, the monsters weren't under our beds or hiding in the closets. They weren't the people on tv or the strangers lurking in alleys on dark nights. The monster was the one right there with us, sitting at our dinner table, asking us each about our days.

The monster was inside all along, and we were too stupid and blind to see him.

We were a spectacle.

Three humans entirely too stupid to know to fear the one who was supposed to protect us. The one we called Husband and Father.

Tears prick at the corners of my eyes.

"No comment!" I scream it as loudly as I can, letting the words scratch their way violently up my throat and passed my teeth. "No comment." This time, to myself as I turn away from the door.

He can stand out there until he freezes to death for all I care. What's one more dead body on these grounds? At least he'd have plenty of other souls to keep his company as his slipped from the fleshy casing that surrounds us all.

I've only got two pills left, but I don't care. I don't care about anything but getting away from this feeling. Away from being that seventeen year old girl who's life went up in a blaze.

I scramble through my coat, finding that pill bottle and already feeling the ease of my pain before I've even placed the pill onto my tongue.

I don't bother with the couch this time. I lay down on the warm floor in front of the fireplace, watching the flames dance until my eyes close and I'm safe from it all once again.

The next time I'm woken, it's to my phone blaring somewhere in the distance.

I want to ignore it of course, but I'm assuming it's a call to tell me that I'm late. Something I most certainly didn't want to be.

I crawl around until I find the phone stuck between the cushions of the loveseat and I fumble with the buttons, blinking furiously as I try to clear the glaze over my vision.

"I'm sorry." I say into it instead of hello.

"Oh honey, where are you?" Mrs. Statham asks, sounding as worried as she should be. "Everyone is here waiting."

I repeat my apologies, promising to be there as fast as I can before ending the call. I don't need to hear her disappointment in me. She can get in line behind everyone else I've disappointed in my life.

It's a long line.

I don't have time for a shower and if I'm being honest, I'm not ready to make the trek up those stairs yet. Being in this house is enough all on its own without having to see my old life in every single space.

I change out of my sweaty clothes in front of the fire. Shoving my legs into my thickest pair of jeans and pulling my snow boots up over them, lacing the leather ties at the sides.

I run a brush through my mess of dark hair and throw it up into a ponytail before covering it with a toboggan and then shoving my head into a black sweater.

I dread going out into the snow. I hate being cold. I feel cold enough all on my own, my insides frozen in time the day they dragged my father out of this house in handcuffs. I don't need the snow to make me any colder.

Bundled back up in my parka and scarf, I quickly put out the fire and rush out the front door.

There is a Manila envelop wedged up close to the door when I walk out but I don't bother looking at it. I let it fall over into the couple of inches of snow that gathers on the creaky planks of the front porch.

Driving faster than I should in this weather I make the familiar drive into town. Thanks to my visitor this morning, I'm all too aware of the fact that my presence here has not gone unnoticed.

Turning onto the long downtown street, I try my best to only keep my eyes on the road right in front of me. I've learned this trick of tunnel vision for when I'm in places I don't want to see or remember.

I focus instead only on the brick road in front of me, but it doesn't do much. I can still see the shops lining the street, I can still see the twinkling lights crisscrossed over the road, I can still feel the looming white capped mountains all around me.

I don't have to look to know what's all around, and I hate that. I hate how every inch of this town is so deeply imbedded onto my very soul, weaved through every memory I have growing up here, that I can still see it all even with my eyes closed.

I park the rental on the street outside of the courthouse and rush up the front steps and into the warm hearth of the building.

I keep my eyes down, careful not to look anyone in the face as I take off my coat and pass through the metal detector, letting the security guard pass the wand over my body before giving me the all clear to grab my stuff and go on in.

My boots squeak across the white marble floors as I make my way through the vast hallways. I feel like everyone I pass is staring at me. Like everyone knows. Part of that could be my paranoia, at least I like to tell myself that it is. Likely, it's just the truth.

When I reach Mr. Polis's office I quickly dip inside, shutting the door behind me.

"Oh good, you made it." He says flippantly from behind his large mahogany desk that takes up most of the space in his office. He has no windows, and I immediately feel claustrophobic.

"Sorry I'm late." I take the only empty seat in front of his desk between another man and Mrs. Statham.

"I've got other meetings lined up, so we will make this quick." I can hear the annoyance in Polis's voice so I just nod, staring at the Newtons Cradle on his desk. Part of me itches to reach over and pull back one of the balls to watch them clank together back and forth back and forth, but I don't. I just stare.

I can feel Mrs. Statham smiling at me, but I don't turn.

Polis makes the introduction to the man sitting beside me, some lawyer handling Ruth Jacobs' estates. I don't bother remembering his name.

"As you know," he begins. "When your great uncle, Terrance Jacobs past," I physically flinch at hearing his name. My body recoils into itself and my breath hitches, but no one notices. Why would they? No one else knew what he had done. "he left the entirety of his estates and assets to his wife, Ruth." The lawyer continues. "Since they have no children or any other still living relatives,  and seeing as she had no will in place, those estates pass to you." I nod. "This includes your family home."

After everything that happened, I wanted no part of that home. No part of anything my father or great uncle had touched. Our home had passed to my brother, and since he was gone, the decision on what to do with it all fell on me when I turned eighteen. I'd signed it all to Ruth.

Now, here I am, getting it all back all over again.

"I want to sell both homes and the land Ruth owned." I say, the line Mrs. Statham had practiced with me.

"And I'll be assisting in getting both of the Jacobs homes on the market and a colleague will be handling the selling of the land. There are already a few commercial projects interested in those plots." She says beside me.

"Vehicles and the money in her accounts are yours as well." Polis tells me. "There is a lot of paper work and red tape to get through but everything is yours now."

"I plan to sell the vehicles." I nod, wishing to be anywhere but here.

"What you do with any assets is up to you now." The lawyer informs me.

"Once the paper work is finalized we can have that estate sale you wanted to monetize all of the belongings." Mrs. Statham says. "Are you sure you don't want to see if there is anything you'd like to keep from either home?"

"Positive." I say. I want nothing from anywhere. I'm only here for the money. It's dirty blood money, but now it's my blood money. And as much as I didn't want anything from this place when I was eighteen, I now know just how hard it is to get by with nothing.

I was stupid to walk away from it all to begin with. I can't help but wonder how much of the shit I've been through since could have been avoided if I had just had someone to council me on how much I'd need this money.

All I'd been focused on was escaping, but with barely more than a cent to my name, I only found more trouble when I got out.

My family wasn't rich, and by the time we paid all of my father's lawyer and court bills, there was nothing left. I got $10,000 dollars and a cursed home.

That money went fast, and the house is still standing, taunting me with its ever present existence.

"You'll be inheriting $100,000 from Ms. Jacobs joint accounts, as well as at least that much after the liquidation of her assets."

Though to most that wouldn't be much, for a girl like me, he might as well have told me I'd just hit the lottery.

My stomach felt tight  with something that might have been excitement? Had it been that long since something had made me happy that I no longer recognized the feeling?

The next hour consisted of an outrages amount of paper work, signing my name so many times that the words didn't even look like real words anymore. I'd set up a bank account a few days earlier in preparation, but since it was a new account I still wouldn't be seeing any money from the check I would be depositing until next month.

I have $100 dollars to my name right now, but come Christmas I'd have enough to start a whole new life. I could go anywhere, buy a small house, never have to think about Faulkner Montana again.

The thought thrilled me.

It would be the first Christmas gift I'd gotten since I was a child.

When everything was set and I said my goodbyes to everyone, I was on my way out of the door when Polis called to me.

"Missouri?" He said.

"Missy." I corrected and he smiled in apology.

"Do you know where Dallas is?"

I'd been asked this question more times than I cared to remember. Where is my brother? What happened to him after he disappeared? Is he still alive?

Everyone wants to know what happened to the eldest child of John Jacobs. His disappearance just part of the lure of my families secrets.

Every time I I got asked that question. Do you know where Dallas is?

I give the same response.

"Dallas is in Texas, it's a city near Fort Worth."

"No, I meant-."

With that I turned and walked out of the office.

No one knows where my brother is, and that's exactly how he likes it.