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Driven from her quaint little house by an energy she didn’t understand, Phyllis stood out by the curb, watching for headlights. Something was wrong.
Her heart twisted as she thought of her friend, and the tortured life she’d led. Shelter Valley was supposed to be Christine’s new beginning. A life where good was possible—and where evil was left far behind. A time for healing. A time for Christine and her younger sister, Tory, to nurture each other.
With a doctorate in psychology, Phyllis fully understood the steps the sisters would have to take, the stages they’d pass through on their way to emotional freedom from their abusive past. But it was as a friend that she intended to be with them, to accompany them on that journey.
Back in her house, Phyllis rechecked the room that Christine and Tory would be sharing. The twin beds were made. The closet full of hangers. The new dressers empty and waiting.
School was due to start on Monday. As the newest psychology professor at Montford University, Phyllis had been ready for the semester to begin weeks ago. Christine, the new English professor, hadn’t had the same time to prepare. She had her lessons planned; she’d shipped them—and all her books and research materials—ahead of her. But still, she’d left herself too little time to acclimate to her new home in Arizona—a far cry from the New England city they’d left—and to Montford’s campus, the small town, the people here.
Not to mention the new climate, Phyllis thought, going in to change the short-sleeved knit shirt she’d pulled on over knee-length shorts earlier that afternoon. Even with the air conditioner running, she couldn’t seem to stop sweating. Arizona’s heat might be dry, but Phyllis certainly wasn’t.
Maybe when Christine got settled in, she could help Phyllis lose some weight. She’d offered to help back when they’d lived next door to each other in Boston, but at that time Phyllis had still been punishing herself because of a husband who’d preferred another woman’s body to her own. Her plumpness had been what she’d deserved.
Then.
Christine and Tory weren’t the only ones reinventing themselves. In the weeks since she’d arrived in Shelter Valley, Phyllis had changed, too. Already she’d made some friends. Close friends. Becca and Will Parsons and their darling new daughter, Bethany. Becca’s sister, Sari. Martha Moore and John Strickland. Linda Morgan, the associate dean at Montford. Will’s energetic youngest sister, Randi. Most of them friends she knew would still be in her life thirty years from now.
Because of their big hearts and their willingness to accept a stranger as one of them, Phyllis had begun to value herself again.
And she knew that if Christine was ever going to find peace on this earth, Shelter Valley was the place.
Having waited so long for the doorbell to ring, Phyllis felt her heart jump alarmingly when it finally did. She flew to the door, flung it open and pulled the young woman standing on the front step into her arms.
“I’m so glad you guys are finally here,” she said, tearing up with relief.
“Yeah.” Tory was crying, too.
“Where’s Christine?” Phyllis asked, urging Tory into the house as she looked past her.
There was a new Mustang in her driveway. An empty Mustang.
Dread crawled over her as she turned slowly back. But there was no reason to think the worst.
“Where’s Christine?” she asked again. Back in Boston there’d been reason to worry, but Christine would be fine now.
“She’s…” Tory seemed to be having trouble breathing. “He…Bruce…”
Taking the younger woman’s trembling hands, Phyllis led her to the couch. Phyllis responded to Tory’s desperation, and her own emotions began to shut down, preparing her for the bad news she sensed was coming.
“Bruce…” Tory tried again.
But Phyllis didn’t need to hear. Tory’s sobs were so filled with anguish Phyllis was choking, too.
“He found you,” she said, trying to keep her own panic at bay. “He’s got Christine.”
Tory’s ex-husband was the reason Christine had accepted the job at Montford—to get Tory as far away from the man as she could.
Tory shook her head. “He…killed her…” The last word trailed off into a tormented whisper.
Numb with shock, Phyllis sat with Tory, held her, comforted her, but she had no idea what she was saying. Had a feeling it didn’t much matter, that Tory had no idea what she was saying, either. A solitary tear stole down Phyllis’s cheek.
Damn.
She’d known something was wrong. She’d known it.
“How did it happen?” she asked softly, more because the only part of her mind currently working, the analytical part, knew Tory needed to get everything out.
Christine’s life was over. Her struggle was over. Phyllis just couldn’t believe it.
“Somehow he discovered that we were heading out here,” Tory said, her voice weak from crying. Her slim, perfectly sculpted frame and beautiful face were sagging with strain. Watching her, Phyllis was taken aback at how much she resembled her sister. She’d thought so when she’d first met Tory earlier in the summer.
Not many months ago, Christine had sat on this same couch back in Boston, her body bent in defeat, her big blue eyes—exact replicas of Tory’s—dark with shadows as she recounted for Phyllis the horrors of her childhood.
As Phyllis had then, she sat quietly now, allowing the other sister to do her telling in her own time.
“He caught up with us at the New Mexico border.”
Oh, God. The landscape was so barren there. Hot. Unyielding.
“He kept motioning for us to pull over, but Christine wouldn’t.”
Tory’s eyes filled with helpless tears again as she looked at Phyllis. “I told her to stop,” she said. “He wanted me, not her.”
“Unless he was angry with her for taking you away from him,” Phyllis offered, already seeing the blame and guilt Tory was heaping on herself.
Tory shook her head, her short blond hair bouncing with the vigorous movement. “He only ever wanted me,” she said, her voice bitter. “Other people don’t matter enough to make him angry.” She paused, her eyes dead-looking. “In his mind, there’s no one alive who can beat him. People are merely ants he occasionally has to step on.”
Though she’d heard such things before—in clinical settings—Phyllis was sickened by the description. And by young Tory’s far-too-mature account of the man who’d made her life a living hell.
“So what happened when Christine finally stopped?” Phyllis coaxed softly when it appeared she’d lost Tory to places Phyllis had never been—places she probably couldn’t even imagine.
Tory shook her head, hands trembling. “She didn’t stop,” Tory whispered, her eyes wide with horror.
“She told me I was the only good thing in her life, the only thing worth living for, and she wouldn’t stop.”
“You sound like that surprises you,” Phyllis said.
“If it hadn’t been for me, Christine’s life would have been perfect once she left home,” she said sincerely. “I let her down so many times. I didn’t go to college. I married Bruce. I ran from everything.”
Remembering that she knew things Tory didn’t, Phyllis chose her words carefully. “Christine chose Bruce for you, Tory,” she said, revealing the part she could.
“What?” the young woman asked, shocked.
“How? She couldn’t have. I met him at a party.”
“And when you brought him home, when she met him, knew that he came from a good family, a wealthy family, she did everything she could to throw the two of you together.” Phyllis repeated what Christine herself had confessed all those months ago. “She thought he was your ticket out.”
Silently Tory listened, her gaze turned inward, as though she was remembering back to the unreal days of her courtship.
“She did, didn’t she?” Phyllis finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Tory said, her brow furrowed.
“I guess. Yeah, she was kind of always there, encouraging me, helping me get ready for dates, choosing just the right clothes for me to wear. But then, she was my older sister. She was supposed to do that.”
Feeling the other woman’s confusion, her pain, Phyllis smoothed the bangs from Tory’s eyes—and saw, for the first time, the ugly red scar marring Tory’s forehead just beneath her hairline.
“What happened?” she gasped.
Tory rearranged her bangs self-consciously.
“When Christine wouldn’t pull over, Bruce got more and more reckless, bumping into the side of the car, trying to force us to stop.” Head down, she played with her fingers. “I don’t remember much else,” she confessed. Tears dropped onto her hand.
“When I came to in the hospital, they told me there’d been a one-car accident—no one’s fault. We’d lost control on a curve and driven over a cliff—and that my s-s-sister was dead.”
Phyllis drew the young woman into her arms. “Oh, Tory, honey, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, over and over again, as her own tears fell on Tory’s hair.
Oh, Christine. Dear, sweet, tortured Christine. Have you finally found your peace?
TORY COULDN’T BELIEVE she’d slept. Coming slowly awake Saturday morning in the comfortable bed, the comfortable room, feeling almost rested, she wondered at first if she was still dreaming. A dream she didn’t ever want to wake from.
She glanced sleepily around the room and saw the luggage she and Phyllis had carried in the night before, the new dresser—and the empty twin bed across from her own.
For Christine.
That split second was all it took for everything to come tumbling back. The dread. The fear. The soul-crushing despair.
“You awake?” Phyllis’s voice followed a brief knock on the door.
“Yeah, come in.” Tory quickly pulled her bangs down over her forehead. After years of hiding bruises, the action was purely instinctive.
“Good morning.” Phyllis smiled, carrying a cup of coffee, which she set on Tory’s bedside table.
Being waited on in bed warmed Tory even more than the coffee Phyllis had brought.
They discussed trivial things for a while—the unbelievably hot Arizona weather, the pretty house Phyllis had found in August when she’d preceded Christine out to Shelter Valley. Also some of the people she’d met. People Tory would likely meet.
Trying to listen, to absorb, Tory settled for concentrating on Phyllis’s smile, instead, the steady cadence of her voice, the calm strength she emanated as she sat in the middle of Christine’s bed. Her nerves bouncing on the edge of her skin, Tory somehow made herself stay put, made her thoughts stay put. Forced down the panic inside her.
Phyllis was being so darn nice. Other than Christine, no one had ever been so nice to her before. And for no reason that she could fathom.
“We’re going to have to call Dr. Parsons and let him know Christine isn’t coming,” Phyllis finally said gently.
Here it comes, Tory thought, taking a deep breath.
She’d rehearsed the speech. A hundred times on her trek across the barren New Mexico and northern Arizona landscape.
Another deep breath, and still nothing happened.
She couldn’t do it.
“Life insurance was part of her benefits package,” Phyllis said, her eyes full of compassion. “I know Christine’s was already in effect because it was done at the same time as mine. We can give Dr. Parsons a copy of her death certificate, and at least you won’t have any financial worries.”
Tory stared at her.
“I’m counting on you to stay right here with me, just like we planned,” Phyllis continued. “Until you have time to decide what you want to do, anyway. It’s kind of lonely having an entire house to myself after living in an apartment for so long,” she said, obviously giving Tory whatever time she needed to enter the conversation. “I guess I need to hear life on the other side of my walls.”
“There isn’t one,” Tory stated bluntly.
Phyllis frowned. “Isn’t one what?”
“Death certificate.”
“But—”
“At least, not for Christine.”
“I don’t understand.” Phyllis was still frowning. “The hospital told you your sister was dead, but no one signed a death certificate?” Her face cleared. “If they haven’t seen her body, she may still be alive.” She looked at Tory. “Maybe Bruce has her, after all.”
Watching the expressions chase themselves across Phyllis’s face, Tory shook her head.
“The hospital authorities saw her.” She paused, swallowed. “I…saw…her.” Arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees, Tory stared down at the bed. “I had her cremated like she always said she wanted.”
Maybe most sisters didn’t talk to each other about their burials while still so young, but she and Christine had. With the lives they’d lived, the home they’d grown up in, death had been a constant possibility.
“You can’t do that without a death certificate.”
“I had one,” Tory admitted, biting her lip. “Just not Christine’s.” Her head hurt and her face was numb as she silently spun in the unending loop of terror inside her mind.
“Christine and I look so much alike….”
Chin resting on her knees, Tory studied the bed through blurry eyes. Tears dripped off her face, rolling slowly down the sides of her knees, but her voice was almost steady as she related what she’d been told so compassionately by the clergywoman who’d visited her in the hospital.
Tory’s bed sank on one side with Phyllis’s weight. She tried to concentrate on the comfort of the other woman’s hands rubbing slowly back and forth along her back.
“My driver’s license was brand-new. Christine’s was six years old….”
The hand on her back slowed, stopped moving, hung there suspended.
“We were both pretty messed up in the crash….”
“Tory—”
“She’d gotten cold, my monogrammed sweater was the only thing within reach for her to put on without stopping and—”
“Oh, my God.”
“When word got out that the woman who died in the crash was presumed to be Tory Evans, Bruce, who was apparently beside himself, sent one of the family staff to identify me. Her.”
