Where the Blame Lies(20)
All those old feelings of intense rejection had slammed into Josie. She was an outsider. Again. It felt horribly, heartbreakingly . . . familiar. An insidious association between pain and love that she didn’t know how to untwist.
Josie had confronted him later. He and his wife were on the rocks, he’d said, but didn’t they all? When she’d pointed out that it didn’t look that way at the gallery, he said it was where she worked, and they had to pretend for her co-workers. His wife wasn’t ready or willing to deal with the gossip that surrounded a separation. And they hadn’t yet told their daughters. He’d said that the only time he felt like he was truly himself was when he was with Josie. She had given him hope that true love—the kind the poets wrote about—was possible. If his story had been a novel, the reviews would say it had plot holes ten feet deep, but she’d chosen not to explore them, not to listen to her gut. She’d chosen to suspend disbelief and learned the hard way that suspended disbelief has no place in real life.
Suspended disbelief in real life is called willing stupidity.
She’d kept seeing him for another six months before she’d been unable to lie to herself any longer. Regardless, even after it’d ended, she still thought of him, still missed him, her heart still flipped and that old familiar neediness filled her chest when she saw him across campus, walking with some other pretty student. She still longed for the way he’d made her feel. She thought of what Marshall had asked her a moment before. Did she keep seeing Vaughn after she knew he was married—with two daughters nonetheless—because she was trying to get back at her father? “I wasn’t trying to get back at anyone. It’s like . . . I recreated the situation with my father unconsciously. The feelings were the same. Are the same. I craved the rejection as much as the acceptance. I wanted to hurt myself.”
“Why?” he barked. He seemed upset in some way she couldn’t discern, and she wondered if she was going too far here. Wondered if she’d accidentally say something that, instead of cultivating empathy, would create anger, cause him to revile her more than he did. But it was all she had. The truth of her life as she was finally beginning to see it. She felt a sudden kinship with her captor—that Stockholm Syndrome rising up. It was a . . . familiarity that went beyond words or understanding. She tried to move closer to him but her chains pulled her tight, trapping her where she was.
“I didn’t set out to hurt myself intentionally, but seeing it now, yeah. Yeah, I did. Somewhere deep down.” She paused. “Maybe we’re all just going through the motions, trying to rework the stories that ended so badly in our early years. Trying so desperately to play a different role in the tragedies of our lives, yet using the same flawed script. Do you ever think that, Mar—” She realized her mistake and cleared her throat. He didn’t appear to notice. He didn’t react at all. “Do you ever think that?”
“What about the other p-players? What about them?”
Josie sighed. “You can’t change them.”
“No,” he murmured. He turned his head, his hazel eyes catching the light for a moment. She saw that he had a ring of dark brown surrounding the lighter hazel. She’d never seen eyes like his before. “But you c-can make them suffer.” He smiled then, she could tell by the movement of his mask. A deep chill went down her spine as he stood and left.
CHAPTER TEN
Josie peeked out her curtain, watching as the patrol car drove slowly past her house, the window rolled down, the officer peering at her property. Officer Horton. He’d come to the house earlier and introduced himself, given her his card with his cell number so she could call him if she had any reason to. Assured her he’d be at her service within a few minutes.
It was comforting, she had to admit. And surreal. Her mind was still reeling from Detective Copeland’s visit and as she stood there, going over what he’d told her once again, she wondered what the likelihood was that the case of the girl they’d found dead had anything to do with her. More likely it had to do with the man who’d abducted her, right? Someone was mimicking him for reasons unknown. Finding new victims and using Marshall Landish’s MO. She dropped the curtain, turning away and walking to her desk. She sat, opening one of the file folders in front of her. Marshall Landish’s photo greeted her as she knew it would, his grainy, black and white features staring at her from the employee photo of the grocery store where he’d once worked. She picked it up, her stomach tightening with anxiety. She made herself look at it, her eyes moving over the features of the man who’d caused her so much trauma. The father of her baby boy. A deranged and evil man, who’d believed his actions were some sort of twisted right.
Just as always, though, she had trouble meshing the face of the man in the photo with the man under the ski mask who’d raped, terrorized, and starved her. She couldn’t stop picturing him in her mind as that faceless monster who’d first attacked her in her bed in the middle of the night. Her counselor had printed out the picture in the file for her after Josie had asked. Josie had wanted to . . . picture him as he was, not as he’d chosen to appear to her. Faceless. She’d sought to humanize him so her panic abated. He wasn’t some supernatural devil she had to fear. He was just a man. And he was dead. Gone forever.
Plus, if—no, when—she found her boy, she had to know he might look like his father. His heart and soul would be his own, but his face might be that of her tormenter. She had to make peace with that. She could never cause her child to think she saw evil in him because of the features he could not change.