4.

Jack was never one to overthink things. When he talked to victims in a crime, he usually could get them out of his head pretty fast and separate himself from them like they were part of a puzzle that he needed to solve. There was something about Ellie Briarwood that was different, though. He didn’t want to say that she was different than all of the other women he’d talked to because that sounded like something that would come out of the mouth of Joe Goldberg from Caroline Kepnes, ‘Hidden Bodies’. It was more this look in her eye that he knew very well. Someone who had experienced something awful like this before.

So, he started reading her books. Making notes and trying his best to piece together snippets of her life and think of the reason some psychopath would leave a finger in her mailbox. Ellie’s debut book also catapulted her into the limelight. Jack read some reviews about it and they all said it was a revolutionary horror book that was a terrifying look on the struggles that every woman faced as they tried to navigate the world. He was skeptical at first, because basically every New York Times best seller was groundbreaking and revolutionary, but he was a fast reader so he figured it would not be that hard of a read.

The first page started out like this:

“They found my mother’s body on a Tuesday,” All of the air was sucked out of the room when I said that. People in group therapy were used to hearing odd, out of pocket things that would send normal people running and screaming, but there was really no way to tackle a sentence like that. Especially when it was part of your introductory monologue.

“Hello? Earth to Jack,” A hand waved in front of his face, breaking him out of his conversation. He looked up to see Lana walk to the chair across from him at the Starbucks that he had chosen to get holed up in. “Why didn’t hear me call your name? What’re you doing?”

“Doing homework,” He held up the book that he was reading, mildly annoyed that she had interrupted him like this, but she came with a chai tea latte for him so didn’t mind too much.

“By what? Reading some fictional b—”

“The woman who got sent that finger; this is hers. She’s the author,”

“Ah,” Lana nodded and sipped her drink, “and how is it?”

“Well, the first page seems promising, I’ll tell you more when you give me a chance to actually read it without getting distracted.”

“Okay then, someone’s snippy today. Didn’t get any sleep?”

“No, and you know that.” He sipped at his latte.

She shook her head in mock sympathy, “Sucks. Well, since you’re being cranky, I’m just going to tell you that Nick wants a report by tonight.” Jack rolled his eyes, but before he got the chance to complain, Lana had already started to leave. He just shook his head, resigned. At least he would get the chance to read more of the book.

Every dream that Augusta Lawrence ever had was stained with blood. The blood of her mother. Her aunt. Her sister. Her own. It was a sick repeating cycle that hadn’t stopped itself in years.

Jack found himself more engrossed in the first book as time went by. This book was about a girl who claimed to be a medium and a tragic life surrounded by murder and men who wanted to kill her and take her power. They believed her blood would give them her powers. They believed that fashioning her bones into jewelry would make them irresistible to any woman they desired. Augusta Lawrence was going to die. It was a matter of time. He found himself gripping the book and turning each page as he read more and more, and the character’s life unfolded before his eyes.

Augusta had survived a near death experience at childhood. Her parents were dead, and she was a shut in. She didn’t trust people. Jack wrote down details and marked down pages and passageways that might grab someone’s interests. He noticed that there was a lot of violence in this book, but it was never oversexualized or overplayed for the audience. It was described in the way that only someone had seen a dead body in real life could describe it as looking.

This made him wonder, had Ellie been a victim of a violent attack in the past? The Starbucks closed before he had the chance to do any further research, so he went back to his hotel and got to work, scrawling down notes to keep track of.

It turned out that his assumption about the woman had been correct. She had indeed had the misfortune to have suffered a heinous attack when she was a small child. There was not a lot of information about it, other than the fact that she had been home with a babysitter who had gotten killed. She was six years old. She was deaf and nonverbal so she couldn’t call 911, she had been dragged out of a closet and stabbed but apparently had fought back so violently that the killer got discouraged and left. Perhaps someone had seen something going down at the house, there weren’t many articles about it and none of them mentioned if there was some sort of divine intervention.

How she survived ten stab wounds at six years old, Jack would never understand. But now the contents of her book made a little more sense.

Back to reading.

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