Darkness Before Dawn (9 page)

Once out of the car and safely in her apartment, it was a completely overwhelmed Meg
who attempted to put all thoughts of Steve’s death out of her mind. She had to try
to forget, because just remembering brought on a kind of hopelessness she knew she
couldn’t handle. Yet even as she opened a can of tuna fish, pulled some chips from
the cupboard, and turned on the television, depression shook her like a rag doll.
And with every shake, she was reminded of what she had lost and the impossible battle
she faced.

When her iPhone chirped, she quickly grabbed it. The last thing she wanted or needed
now was to face this alone. She needed to talk to someone, anyone! She checked her
caller ID and smiled.

“Heather, I’m glad you called.”

“Just wanted to check on you.”

“I’m glad you did. I just realized something and I need to share it with someone I
trust.”

“Do you want me to come over?” Heather asked.

“No, you don’t have to do that. But I’ve got to explain something to you. I need for
you to listen because I know I’m not myself. I’m not sure I’ll ever be myself again.
I’ve got feelings in me I can’t understand.”

“Meg, I think that’s natural. I just wish there was something you’d let me do.”

“Listen friend,” Meg began, pausing for a moment, trying to put into words what was
written on her heart, “I don’t know how to say this, but Steve and I experienced so
much love, so much of the joy, that now everything seems to be empty. It is like life
is a blank page in a book on which nothing will be written because the story hadn’t
been and can’t be wrapped up. It just seems the rest of my life will be nothing but
meaningless blank pages.”

“I guess I understand what you mean,” Heather replied, “but I’m not sure I can feel
it. I never had anyone like Steve in my life. You know me, I’m our generation’s oldest
and last virgin.”

Meg smiled. Heather always used disparaging jokes to make others feel better. She
loved that about her.

“Meg, where did you have to go tonight? If you don’t mind me asking, what was so important?”

“Maybe it wasn’t that important,” Meg replied. “I think I was going someplace to get
some answers, but instead I just found a big wall that I probably can’t climb.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Meg admitted. “Anyway, thanks for calling and checking on me.
Maybe tomorrow or the next day I can figure out how to share with you my plans. I
don’t know what they are yet and even when I figure them out, I’m not sure you’ll
approve.”

“You’re not going to leave nursing?” Heather asked.

“No, kid, you’re stuck with me there. It has nothing to do with that. See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

Good old Heather! Her call was perfectly timed.

Setting the phone on the coffee table, Heather leaned back on the couch and closed
her eyes. Maybe she should have told Heather what she’d seen tonight. But would she
be able to handle Meg claiming a personal vendetta as a reason to live? What would
Heather think if Meg admitted that the passion of hate had taken root in her heart
and was somehow starting to make up for the devastation of lost love? No, Heather
was too kind and gentle and she wouldn’t have understood those things. To fully grasp
it, her friend would have had to hear the words Jim Thomas had said to his friends.
Those words had proven that life, the same stuff that she and Heather fought so hard
to preserve every day at the hospital, was in reality very cheap.

A
FTER ROUSING HERSELF FROM A FITFUL SLEEP
, M
EG SPENT SEVERAL HOURS
on the Internet looking for DUI cases similar to the one that had taken Steve from
her. Many were settled without a trial and some of those involved sentences that only
included community service. Those who received jail time usually were repeat offenders,
thus her research was anything but satisfying. The thought of Thomas only getting
a few hours picking up trash made her sick to her stomach. Surely, a life had to be
worth more than that!

Refining her search, she began to look at sentences coupled to the wealth of those
found guilty of the crimes. After researching a few of these, there could be no doubt
that money could buy anything, including freedom, for those who could afford the best
lawyers. With the Thomas’s power and money, what hope did she have? Real justice might
have to come outside of the courts. But what could she do to make that a reality?
She yanked out a pad to sketch out ideas just as her doorbell rang. Pushing her hair
back from her face and tightening the belt on her robe, she ambled across the room
and pulled the door open.

“Mom,” she all but moaned.

“You haven’t picked up on my calls,” Barbara said.

“No, I haven’t felt like talking.”

“It’s kind of cold out here,” the older woman noted. “May I come in?”

Meg said nothing as she stepped aside. Barbara strolled uncertainly across the room,
fiddled with her gloves, finally placing them on the coffee table before yanking off
her coat. As Meg watched, her mother patted the couch, something she always did when
she wanted her daughters to join her for a conversation. Barbara took her place on
the couch. Meg parked herself in the chair that had been Steve’s favorite, crossed
her legs, and waited for the lecture she was sure would follow. She didn’t have to
wait long.

“Megan, it’s not good for you to be alone—to be here. You need to come and stay with
me for a while.”

“This is my home and I’m staying here,” Meg defiantly argued.

Barbara shook her head. “And I hear you’ve gone back to work. It’s much too soon.
You need time to process—”

“Process what, Mom, that Steve is dead? I sleep in an empty bed, have received a hundred
condolence cards, and now only set the table for one; I figured it out.”

Her dark eyes painfully examined her daughter.

“I’m still me,” Meg said. “I’m the same girl you’ve known for almost three decades.
Except it’s different now. I didn’t scrape my knees. You can’t fix what happened this
time with a Band-Aid and a kiss. In fact, you can’t fix it at all. This is all on
my plate and I have to work through it in my own way.”

Barbara smiled weakly as she offered a predictable suggestion, “You might talk to
Reverend Brooks. He’s dealt with this sort of thing many times.”

Meg almost laughed. She knew her mother would trot this line out and she was ready
for it. “Mom, so Reverend Brooks has had a spouse killed by a drunk driver?”

“No,” came the reply, “I didn’t mean that.”

“Exactly! His wife is still by his side. They sleep in the same bed. They go on vacations
together. So he doesn’t have a clue as to what I’m going through.”

“But he’s a trained minister . . .”

“Yeah and that makes him about as prepared to deal with my issue as a trained seal.
In the case of the latter, at least, I might get a laugh or two. I know that probably
sounds horrid. And maybe I sound that way as well. But Mom, when you are hurting like
I am, when you have a person you love die at the age of twenty-eight, well, tact goes
out the window. So if you toss something at me, you have to expect me to be bluntly
honest when I toss my words back your way. I hope you can deal with that.”

“That’s just not like you,” Barbara argued.

“You’re right,” Meg agreed. “It’s not like the way I used to be. But being sweet and
accepting isn’t working for me now.”

“Well, there’s this group of women at church who’ve lost their husbands. They meet
each Thursday night and . . .”

Meg shook her head. “They’re all over seventy. Their situations are much different
than mine. And they’re not facing having an upcoming trial where they’ll have to relive
the details all over again.”

“I don’t care what you say,” Barbara argued. “You need to go to those meetings!”

Meg rose from the chair and moved back to the door. She opened it and glanced back
toward her visitor. “I think it is time for you to go.”

“Megan! You better listen to me!”

“Don’t use that indignant tone on me. I’m not five years old. The fact is I don’t
want you around right now. When I need to talk, I’ll call. Until that time, give me
my space.”

“But, Baby,” Barbara pleaded as she got up from the couch, “I can’t bear the thought
of you being alone.”

“Get used to it, Mom, that is what I want to be. When I decide to rejoin the social
scene, I will let you know. Until then please respect my wishes. And make sure and
tell Reverend Brooks I don’t want any visits from him here or at the hospital. I don’t
need any preaching right now!”

The older woman nodded and reached for her coat. It was obvious she was hurt, but
she wasn’t the only one in the room who was in pain. And no meeting with other widows
was going to take care of that pain. What Meg needed was to make someone pay for Steve’s
death. When that happened, maybe she would be ready to once more show her softer side.

Barbara slowly walked to the door, pausing in front of her daughter, lifting her eyes,
and tilting her head. Her lip quivered for a moment before she whispered, “Can I at
least hug you?”

Meg opened her arms for the woman who’d raised her. As the two embraced, a tear rolled
down Meg’s cheek. She patted her mother on the back and then stepped back. Barbara
took a final look into her daughter’s eyes and rushed through the door.

As her mother walked to her car, a thought rose from Meg’s heart and lodged in her
brain. She had always known that emptiness brought pain, but until this moment she
hadn’t understood that it also brought a complete void of positive feelings. There
were no longer any memories that soothed her heart. Love, which only last week had
been the most powerful force on earth, now seemed like a cancer. So, unlike the women
in that group her mother begged her to join, Meg didn’t just feel a sense of loss,
she had gone numb, focusing not on her
own broken heart, but on something else. And it was that something else that called
her right now.

Closing and locking the entry, Meg made her way back to the table. Sitting in front
of her was a blank legal pad. Picking up a pen, she wrote down the number one and
began to sketch out a concept for revenge.

T
HE AFTERNOON AIR WAS COOL, BUT AFTER A LONG, COLD WINTER, THE
steady sun, coupled with a southerly breeze, made the forty-degree temperature seem
almost balmy. The sunshine, the first Meg had noticed in days, seemed to be a good
omen. Perhaps all of her plans and efforts would come to fruition today. Maybe the
right things would finally begin to happen.

She stood just a few feet away from a sheer cliff, some two miles out of town on hilly
and curving Route 63. This was an area the local kids called Lovers’ Leap. A small,
two-foot stonewall, built in the 1920s and now crumbling with age, separated the road
from the deep valley on the other side. Countless times, drivers coming down old Jenkins’s
Hill had failed to slow enough to safely make the almost L-shaped turn. The fact could
easily be verified by even casual observation as many places on the wall were marked
by a large number of different paint scars, the most recent red. Still, because rarely
did anyone but locals use the road, most knew just how dangerous the turn was and
how tragic going over the cliff would be, so they slowed down. Therefore, this had
been the site of only a few significant accidents. The last fatality had been more
than
twenty years before when a trucker had lost control of a big rig hauling gasoline.
That fire had burned for hours.

Checking her watch, Meg wandered over to the edge of the wall. Glancing down at a
patch of snow that still stubbornly remained only because it had been safely hidden
from the sun’s rays by the shadow of the hill, she wondered just how it would feel
to go plunging over the wall. What would it be like to hurtle through the air, knowing
that within a second, maybe two, your body would crash into a mound of boulders and
trees some four hundred feet below? Could a person hope to survive such a fall? From
what she’d been told, no one ever had.

Picking up a rock, she stood on top of the wall, her body now just inches from the
edge, and pitched the three-pound piece of stone down toward the bottom. She listened
as it rebounded from boulder to boulder until it finally reached the end of its fall.
Smiling, she glanced toward the road. Even God would forgive her this one time. Everyone
would understand, but the best part was that no one would know. Not a single person
would suspect sweet little Meg.

The noise of a distant car turned her attention from the cliff and valley and back
to the road. Glancing at her watch, she nodded. It was time. Quickly jumping off the
wall to the safety of the road’s shoulder, she ran to a place she’d picked out weeks
before. There, safely hidden by two large oak trees, she could watch every car come
down the hill, but the drivers and their passengers wouldn’t be able to see her.

Easing her face from behind the tree, she glanced up Jenkins’s Hill. There, at the
very top, now only a few hundred yards away, Jim Thomas’s new Corvette drove into
view. She knew it would be him because he was the ultimate creature of habit. His
girlfriend, Kristen Jennings, lived just a mile up the road and he brought her home
from school between 4:10 p.m. and 4:15 p.m. every day.

The two of them would talk and kiss for two or three minutes before Kristen went inside.
Then, rather than take the quick way back to town, he always challenged his driving
ability and nerve by going home via Lovers’ Leap. Down the hill he would race, accelerating
more and more as he reached the curve, and at the last moment, he’d jump down on his
brakes, causing the tires to squeal and the vehicle to jerk violently to the point
where the rear tires all but lost contact with the asphalt. With a quick turn of the
wheel, he would literally slide the car around the outside of the curve, coming just
inches from the wall. Today, it would be different.