The Shadow Grove Chronicles - Book I: Fated Reunion

XI - The Book and the Beast

It was late May by the time the divorce was finalized. Derrick had disappeared altogether soon after the paperwork was filed. I was told that they couldn’t even serve him the papers because he was nowhere to be found. I was relieved over the divorce’s finalization but Derrick’s Houdini act worried me enormously. It worried Becca too. She insisted that we stay with her until the Judge made his ruling. I had made a couple of trips back to the house to pick up more clothes for the girls and myself, but always with a police escort, just in case the house was being watched.

Now, the house was in my name, awarded to me because Derrick had been “in absentia” for the entire proceedings, not even having a lawyer present. I got everything, except his business, which I didn’t want in the first place.

Becca came with us as we returned to the house and stayed with us for a few days as we started to settle back into our old surroundings.. It seemed different now, and I couldn’t put my finger on how or why. I changed the locks and security code the day I took possession of it.

Summer vacation was getting closer and the girls were getting ready for their day at Six-Flags. Becca had gone back to her studio a couple of days earlier and I was going to have my first day in this big house by myself for the first time in months. Before the s**t storm, I had felt safe here, but now every sound or moving shadow would set off my anxiety.

I had gotten up before Jessi and had breakfast ready for them by the time they came downstairs. I sipped on my coffee as they finished eating and set their plates in the sink. They kissed me on the cheek before they left to go catch the bus. This had been a good morning, admittedly, but it did little to assuage the gut feeling I had that something was wrong.

I checked my email to try to distract myself. Hey! There’s one that looks familiar:

From: Joanne Darcy | !!! Fourth Attempt !!! - I’m sure you don’t remember me…

Fourth Attempt? Really? I opened it:

Hi Allie,

I’m sure you don’t remember me but this is to let you know that there will be a package arriving for you on May twentieth. Keep an eye out for it.

- Joanne Darcy

I wasn’t sure what to think about this. Something would be arriving for me on the twentieth? Today? There’s no way this could be real. I sent it to the trash and then set my phone down to go get started on the breakfast dishes.

***

The delivery driver arrived at the house around eleven, ringing the doorbell and startling me half to death. I told the driver through the intercom that he could leave the package by the front door. When he drove off, I went to the door and brought the package inside. Inside was a hardcover novel with a dark haired beauty wrapped up in the arms of a handsome broad chested man with long flowing hair. It was titled, “A Reunion with Ellie” and was written by Joanne Darcy. Well! I’ll. Be. Damned! Whoever sent me that eMail and the package was for real. I read the back of the book, the Author’s Bio. There wasn't a picture of the author like there normally would be.

Inside, the copyright page said that this was a first edition copy of this book, published four years ago. It was the dedication page that caught my attention however.

Dedicated to someone who set me out on the right path. You may not know who you are, but I will remember you... Always.

Underneath, in flowing cursive, was a message written for me:

Allie,

Come to the Reunion. I would like to talk with you and catch up. It’s been far too long.

-Joanne

Okay… This is one of the weirdest things that has ever happened to me. I sat down in the living room and started reading. Okay, now this was the weirdest. The characters and subject material seemed like they had been plucked straight out of my life, like whoever wrote the book had been watching me somehow in secret. I knew that this couldn’t have been my husband doing this. He rarely read anything, let alone would be comfortable writing a novel. There were a couple of direct quotes that I remember saying a long time ago, before I had even met my husband. What other possibilities did this leave? I had nothing, so I kept reading.

There was the morning after the last time Derrick struck me, and my fantasies about suffocating him with a pillow that I had when I first woke that morning. It mentioned how the oldest daughter was supportive of her mother instead of the other way around and the shame that felt because it shouldn’t have happened that way. Even the conversations I had with Becca, before and after I had proof of him cheating on me, were written down in surprising accuracy. It wasn’t like I was being watched. It was like someone was reading my very thoughts. My skin prickled electrically with goosebumps with that last thought and I shivered despite the warm sunny day outside.

I got past the part about the divorce and moving back into the house after it had been awarded. When I read the section that said that the main character’s ex-husband had sneaked into the house while she was reading a book alone in the living room, I froze solid and beads of cold sweat glistened on my skin. I read further and found out that he was right behind her. Behind me?

The hair on the back of my neck rose as I read those words. I slowly turned my head to look behind me and there, just as the book predicted, was Derrick standing over me with his arms crossed and a dark smile on his face.

“Oh, s**t…”

“Oh, you damn right, ‘Oh, shit.’”

Panic welled up in me and I ran out of the room as fast I could. He caught up with me at the foot of the stairs and knocked me to the floor with a savage punch aimed at the back of my head. I landed on the stairs, my nose crunching on one of the treads. Blood started streaming down my face and into my mouth. The sudden flood of the copper tang spreading across my taste buds caused me to gag.

He was on top of me, grabbing me by the hair and lifting me back up to my feet.

“Oh, you couldn’t leave well enough alone could you, b***h!” His face was not even an inch away from my face when he started to bellow at me, his cold gray eyes filled with dark intent.

“You are my wife. My b***h! My plaything! Do you understand? Mine! If you think that a divorce is going to settle a God damned thing between us, you must be f*****g high!”

I started praying in my head, too scared to say anything out loud: Dear Lord, let me live through this, please! It became a mantra that I said over and over in my head. He started to punch me in the stomach, the ribs, the face; each blow felt like a sledgehammer as it connected. He started to violently drag me up the stairs by my hair, yanking out small bloody handfuls of my long black wavy mane as I stumbled on the way up.

He kicked in the door to what was once our bedroom and threw me onto the bed. With the tension pulling on my scalp removed, my head hurt so badly that I saw two of everything, including Derrick. My terror flared again as he started to rip off my clothes. He undid his jeans and pulled out his c**k, already hard, and slapped me in the face with it. Satisfied with doing that, he spun me around and forcefully entered me.

I lost track of time as he r***d me. My mind dissociated itself from its body in order to protect itself from the brutality I was experiencing. It was like I was watching the whole tableau from over the bed, watching as that son-of-a-b***h violated me. He came quickly inside me and wiped himself off on my leg after he pulled out. Either to be extra vicious, or to prove a point, Derrick punched me so hard on the side of the head, my temple, that I blacked out from a single strike.

When I came to, I was cold, naked, and hurting everywhere. Oh, where was my phone? That’s right I had left it in the kitchen. Determined, I got to my feet and hobbled to the doorway, through the hall, down the stairs, and onto the kitchen tiles, my phone right where I had left it on the counter. I looked at the time, It was already three o’clock and the girls would soon be home from school. No, they had a trip to the amusement park today. They weren’t scheduled to return until closer to six in the evening. Thoughts were jumbled in my head as I tried to think of what I should be doing. I was muttering, bleary-eyed, “Okay, what now?”

I called Becca and told her the large strokes of what had just happened to me. She told me to call nine-one-one and that she would be there immediately. I sat down on the couch, the soft suede feeling good against my aching bare body. I must have passed out because the next thing I saw was Becca’s face contorted in concern, and rage. I could see that she wanted to kill Derrick for what he had done to me. She took a blanket off the couch and wrapped me in it, trying not to touch the swelling bruises that covered my body.

Paramedics were there soon after Becca covered me. They checked my eyes, examined the fresh marks from the beating, my broken nose, etcetera. Soon I was strapped to a stretcher in the back of the ambulance. Becca was talking to them and to me, but I was already too out of it to really understand what she had just said. I passed out again on the way to the hospital.