Waiting for Closure

By Jeff E. Gregory

Agatha Radnik's increasingly erratic behaviour is forcing her eldest daughter, Jaime Elsnor, to move her mother into long-term care, at Maple Hill Manor, an old monastery with a hideous past. Jaime is slowly going under financially, and everyone involved is working feverishly to keep it that way.
ISBN: 978-0-9869492-2-7

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff E. Gregory
• Release date: Sep 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9780986949227

Jeff E. Gregory

At 48, my first novel, Reversal of Redemption, based on an actual event, was published here at Smashwords. I have enjoyed a 24+ year career with the Canadian government and I am looking forward to my final 10+ years in government. I am married, with one daughter, and I have discovered writing is just as enjoyable as reading.

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Prologue

She had hated him, despised him so deeply, that just the thought of seeing his macabre, half-melted face was enough to turn even the strongest of stomachs. The hideousness of the attack all those years ago, a vengeance for all the abuse hurled one’s way for all those years, caused her to crack up, having been pent up inside of her, waiting to explode outwardly. She always knew where it was, where he always kept it – third cupboard door on the right, middle shelf, back row in the far corner.

She had heard the earlier stories, but she never believed any of them. No one believed anything could be that co-incidental, but they insisted it was all true. She plotted, for years, and it took tremendous effort just to get in the door, but it would prove to be well worth the effort.

The mansion was beyond imagination: Three floors, twenty-nine thousand square feet, and indoor everything. It was conceived in 1887, as a Second Empire mansion, with more and more wings added on over the decades, and all of it overlooking majestic Lake Muskoka. Its first occupant, Millard Mulholland, a noted newspaper mogul of his day, lived alone for forty-three years, controlling his newspaper empire from within its echoing walls. His trusted mentor came on the scene too late in life to be of any use, really. And with his death, the Mulholland newspaper empire began to crumble. In just two short years following his death, Mulholland ceased to exist, a victim of neglect, as no one wanted to carry on the business. With no heirs waiting in the wings, Mulholland News Corp was broken up into small pieces, and eventually sold off. One notable exception was a small real estate business that would become the cornerstone for all realty companies nationwide.

* * * * *

He was a bastard with which to deal; so much so, that everyone dreaded the drive between the poplars to that prison of solitary confinement – Mulholland House. Everything about it scared the most ardent visitor, but this particular day was the worst of all. The fierceness of the storm brought back memories for everyone of Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs. He himself had called the meeting, and everyone knew there was going to be trouble.

One of the passengers adjusted his necktie in the rear-view mirror just as a brilliant flash of lightning filled the limousine with bright, white light, and blinding temporarily all those within its grasp. The tumultuous thunder ripped through the night air as another brilliant flash backlit the foreboding mansion on the bluff, and his comforting reassurance was a welcomed gesture. Ian Davissen was a JSR loyalist, as were the other senior brokers, driven by pure greed. That’s how it worked; that’s exactly how JS wanted them to be.

JS was none other than Johann Swift, as he liked to call himself, as opposed to formerly Johann Switzer-Richter, from Berlin, West Germany. Legally, it was unchanged, but he preferred everyone call him JS; although, he often abbreviated his name as JSR. He had bailed the divided city as the wall was going up. He actually grew up in what was essentially East Berlin, but that had been pre-war. In the post war years, he divided his time mainly between Strasbourg, New York, and Lake Muskoka, although there were villas and other estates world-wide. He always enjoyed the summer months on the lake – just him and that huge, empty mansion. The rumour was he’d have conversations with Millard Mulholland himself, and that Mulholland was advising him on various transactions.

In his younger years, JS was a towering figure, both figuratively and literally. He stood 6’3", and his erectness presented an aura of confidence unparalleled elsewhere. He was well educated at Oxford, with a degree in economics, law, and commercial business. It was a perfect background from which to build the JSR realty empire.

By the early 80’s, JSR grossed over $800 million in commission sales, with a vast network of real estate brokerages and agents, all under the JSR umbrella. Real estate was a booming commodity in the national capital, as it always had, and JSR was at the forefront of it all. In 1997, a young 18 year old super hot go-getter joined the team.

In his younger years, Ian Davissen had the drive, the stamina, and the ruthlessness JS demanded; to go for the jugular and get those commissions. It never mattered if the purchaser was floundering, in a bad situation, or just plain desperate, the mantra was always the same – "Hey, you can afford it! Sure your payments would go up after one year, but so what? You get a new home!", and no one drove the point home better than Davissen. But that was the glory of the late 90’s, and now it was the early 10’s, and things weren’t nearly as rosy as they had been back then. But the drive was still there. As long as your numbers were good, you were left alone. Davissen had only been to two prior summits, and they all remembered vividly the last time the clan had been summoned.

JS never left the lake now. The estate in Strasbourg, and the penthouses in New York, Maui, and Singapore were still there, but they were long forgotten, long removed from a mind solely focused on the events of the distant past. JS wasn’t the towering figure he once was; he was ninety-seven now, old, and hunched over with a huge lump at the top of his back. His old friend Mulholland was always there for him, and now more than ever, JS engaged in lengthy conversations over the latest figures, figures that he had quoted over and over and over again, the same numbers that for sixteen years, never changed, but he knew them cold. No one dared to tell JS his was losing his marbles. The dementia was a slow, rotting of the mind, endless in its attack, and insidious in its manifestation.

* * * * *

"I said, ‘Hot!’ Do you not understand that word through your pea-sized brain you manic idiot?"

JS had been on a tirade ever since our arrival. She picked up the mug with her trembling hand, making her way back sadly to the great kitchen at the other end of the long hall. She felt different now, somewhat outside of her body just all of a sudden. It was a strange, eerie feeling one gets when one is dreaming, and realizes it.

She had assumed the kettle had already boiled during the dinner hour, and she had no clue the kettle was a poor insulator and trapped next to no heat from the once-steaming water. She entered the gargantuan galley through the main doors that towered upwards to the twenty foot ceiling well above her. To the left were the three stoves the kitchen staff used to prepare the dozens of great feasts in days gone by, a seldom-seen event these days. The kitchen was a drab, depressing ancient decorum of antiquated technology. The cupboards required foot stools to reach the upper levels, and she had to strain hard to reach the tea bags. She knocked over the canister, a canister that had been stowed in the third cupboard, middle shelf, near the back-right corner. She went to right the canister. That was when she paused.

All those insolent verbal tirades were directed only at her, and other females before her, and no one else; a young up-and-coming real estate broker who was along for the ride to learn more the ropes of the inner circle, and who was also Davissen’s personal choice as the next senior broker. Her numbers were excellent; she had the drive, the shrewd business practices to shore up purchase agreements from which no one dared to bail, but she was given a secret agenda that evening.

JS had blasted her that the Earl Grey tea was tepid, not hot, as he had ordered, and he demanded she re-make it. She grudgingly went back to the kitchen in earnest to make a fresh pot, but that was then. The deep, wide mug was meant to last over three hours; its specially insulated Pyrex glass interior guaranteed heat retention for an extended period of time. Once a meeting began, there would be no interruptions. The meeting before that had gone on for over nine hours.

She had come back in, and everyone noticed the Cheshire Grin she bore as she blasted the mug, full to the brim, at his round, chubby face, surrounded by long, stringy grey hair that was matted in places; open sores oozing pus on his cheeks and forehead, forearms and neck – he was a ghastly sight, but she was determined to worsen his condition ten-fold. The nitric acid went straight to work melting the flesh even more, as it dripped off the exposed skull, and the screams of ultimate agony were heard throughout the mansion. He wailed uncontrollably, clutching his face with his oozing hands and arms, pulling away strips of dripping flesh and muscle, the blood running down the white, oozing cheeks.

The first of the vomiting had already started, and the projectile hurling of those assembled began in earnest among the screams of old JS, mixed with the others present with stronger constitutions. Ian shot straight up; his shiny, white head glistened in the erupting lightning flashes continuing outside as the storm raged on.

"It is avenged!" she shrieked at full volume. She had no control over her movements, as she ran for the window directly behind JS and lifted both heels off the crimson, plush carpeting, crashing through the stained glass icon of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus in the manger in Bethlehem. She screamed anew as she arced through the air heading for the rocks below, skewered shards of stained glass protruding from her torso, where her blood had begun spewing in all directions with the severing of several arteries. As she descended, she could still see JS leaning back in his chair, he arms outstretched with gobs of still-dripping flesh suspended below his enlarged and puffed hands.

She continued a slow clockwise spin as well as a slow backward dive, smashing her skull on a sharp outcrop of solid granite, piercing her slender neck and severing her matted head from her flailing body, her head bouncing off two other boulders before landing in the midst of the algae of Mulholland Bay. Her head, with its grotesque eyes looking skyward, and bulging outward from the hauntingly bluish skin that covered her bobbing severed head looked skyward into the great electrifying abyss. A wayward frog leapt onto the mouth, falling inside and coming out the throat before leaping back in again. Her final scream seemed to linger despite the driving rain, as if the entity inside her had gone round and round, rather than straight to the very bottom of the shards among the boulders piled at the bottom of the vertical bluff. Her earthly body had dissolved almost instantly, and her ghost was now laying in wait, biding its time to rise up again in the lonely, not-so-distant future.

Part I

Chapter 1

"I really don’t understand how it got to this point; I mean, really, do I really deserve this? Seriously?

"I suppose looking back, I only have myself to blame. I should have gotten help a lot sooner. The help was there of course, but I wouldn’t listen. I was in denial; that much is for sure! Everyone did their best, some of course more than others, but that’s okay, I guess. I told them I would take their advice, but I never intended to do that. I guess I annoyed most of them, but they forgave me soon afterward. I should really be thankful for the circle of influence, my friends and my so-called family. Yeah, well, everyone has at least one in their own, but I had several.

"I guess Leo and I could have worked things out, but I was really spent! Dad never liked Leo to begin with. He warned me not to go through with it, but I never listened. That’s part of my problem, of course. We stayed together for dad’s sake only, certainly not for us. I know; we should think of it as a lesson learned, without the burden of kids to get caught in the middle. At first, I wanted to establish a career and start later in life, but he was more than ready, and he never let me forget it. By the time I was ready, he had long given up on fatherhood, and my biological clock was ticking. Then I hit forty.

"That was it. Dad was dying of colon cancer, and mom was suffering internally, a slow spiral downward, watching her husband of forty-seven years waste away in front of her gorgeous green eyes. I took responsibility for the family; I had to. Jerry, that’s my oldest brother, by the way, and only brother thank god, was too busy fucking the tutor he and Jann had hired for Leslie’s betterment at school. Some tutoring that turned out to be! Mom and dad never knew because I hid it from them. I told Jerry never to mention it…EVER! Mom was in a fragile state as it was, and she didn’t have to hear about her only son getting divorced, not to mention my pending split.

"I guess I should really introduce myself. I’m known as a SWF; that’s Single White Female, just in case you didn’t know. I’m just another dumb blonde, living alone in an isolated world. I have a good job and all; it’s just the family ties that don’t bind – probably never will, not after what happened. I’ll be the first one to admit that having no contact with my remaining family is entirely my fault. Oh yessiree, buddy, mea culpa all the way. They no doubt blame me, and only me, for what ails me and all my endless woes. I inherited the trait from my mother of course. Dad was far too sharp an investor to be shucked like a cob of corn, right! Leo was certainly no help, and as for Jerry, well, his wife could tell volumes about their split. I missed their whole court thing. I was far too busy with my own messed-up life to even begin to comprehend what was happening around me. Things started going wrong about five years after dad died. The family had splintered – all three of us. I was the only one talking to mom. My brother and sister never cared about her, and since I had the Power of Attorney, the jealousy drove them even further away from me.

"Mom and dad weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination. We had a house in the suburbs, and we always went on a family vacation and all, but we weren’t what you’d call a happy family. We knew mom and dad used to fight over money, but it never happened in front of us. Mom was a shopaholic, and so am I, of course! But it went deeper than that.

Dad was gullible, the most gullible person that ever lived. First there was the prized bull he bought for ten grand. It died that month in action". Then there was the crooked lawyer he had for the condominium building that never existed. Oh sure, he was honest and polite and everything, but it took an outsider to get him to realize it was all a scam. There was no condominium project underway in Thunder Bay, Ontario. There were investors, but no investment to be had. He lost a bundle, and mom never ever let him forget it. Then there was the Nigeria Scam.

Dad got a letter stating a close friend of his had recommended him to funnel money, all legitimately" out of Nigeria - $20 million. He showed it to Jerry, and Jerry just egged him on. That’s how little my brother cared about his parents – he egged him on the whole time, and then laughed at him when he had burned through $300 thousand for taxes and fees in a fruitless attempt to collect a portion of the money.

"One Christmas, just to rub it in, we were saying grace before dinner, and instead of saying ‘Johnny Appleseed’, Jerry purposely spouted, ‘Jarvis Abraham’, the name of the bull on which dad had blown ten grand. Nice, real nice, Jerry!

"My younger years were not good. I was constantly picked on at school, constantly nagged at home, and even abused by a family member. But, I soldiered on, as my father used to tell me, ‘Soldier on, dear, you’ll make it through,’ and he would go back to reading the paper. That was it. That was my entire therapy, and I was being abused, by a family member! I never had it in me to tell him when he was on his deathbed, "Oh, get over it, dad! Just soldier on.’ I can only imagine the wrath for the rest of my days my mother would have rained down upon me, yet it was okay to do that to me. Whatever!

"I couldn’t get anyone to help me with my homework in grade school, but Jerry always did. I can still remember my father’s words, ‘Why can’t you be more like Jerry?’ I was ten, and I was my own person. My father never understood me. I was mama’s girl, I guess. Dad always favoured Jerry. Jerry this, and Jerry that. Jerry, Jerry, JERRY! I stopped all contact with him when I was thirteen. I never wanted to speak to him again after what he did to me, but no one would have believed me, and Jerry knew this, of course. It’s always the ones that are the most liked that are the worst offenders: ‘Oh, it couldn’t be Jerry, oh no, no ,no, NO!’ That’s what mum would have said; she’d be in full denial. I guess that’s where I get it from, because I’m no better: Oh no, he would never do that to me! Oh, no, no, no, NO!’ Yeah, I guess I really can’t blame the family gene pool for that.

"I’ve had a rough life, far from the cake walk my so-called friends enjoyed. They were just a horrible bunch of back-stabbing whores bent on getting laid at twelve, and getting pregnant at thirteen. I remember my last birthday party when I was eleven. Betty-Anne Drysdale was one of those so-called friends, and she told mum that I had had sex with my boyfriend. She was the one who was all over him all the time, and her parents didn’t care. I was whipped for that, for something I never did. Leo was one of the guests that year, my once and future husband, and dad believed Betty-Anne instead of both of us. That just goes to show how horrible my home life was.

There was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on all those years ago, why mum and dad acted the way they did, but it all made sense years later, when I found out the truth. Oh, that was another day I’ll never forget. I was going through hell, and I discover that…that…oh, I can’t even describe it.

* * * * *

"Sorry about that. Dad never forgave mum for what she did, as he put it, but really, it was both their decision, and I bore the brunt of that resentment.

"So, here I am, all alone, well, not really alone per se, but I feel like I’m alone. I lived with my mother after dad died, but for the last little while, I’ve been on my own: A sweet deal on a house I just couldn’t refuse. The timing was absolutely perfect, and the price was sure right, that’s for sure. My friends helped me break free of my mother and made me realize there’s a whole other world out there. I never realized what I was missing until I opened my eyes. I wish I had done it years earlier, but at least I’m young enough to still enjoy myself.

"Leo never liked living with mum, and I guess that’s what brought on our drifting apart. He stopped coming home some nights, and I knew what was going on. Jeepers, my neighbour, Judy, knew more about it than I ever did, but once again, I went straight into denial: ‘He’s just working late; he’s missed the last bus home, so he’s at a friends,’ and other thoughts like that. Boy, what a piece of work I was back then.

"I’ve matured a whole lot, and I’m still a bit of a home body of sorts, but with a lot more worldly experience than I could ever imagine, thanks to my friends, including my neighbour, Judy. I’m fifty now, slowly going prematurely grey, just like my mother. I have my trusty two cats, Rocky & Bullwinkle, who have seen me through these last eighteen years or so. Mom’s doing okay, but she’s getting on in years. She’s seventy-three now, and slowly slipping away. Yeah, that’s when it all began – on that day. Oh, I’ll never forget that day as long as I live. That was when things began to change once again, when my life took a turn for the worse, once again, when she uttered those words – words that still haunt me to this day every time I close my eyes. I’ve seen others go through the same thing, including my other neighbour, Mike. He went through it with both parents, so he helped a lot to get me through it, but it was still really difficult.

"I must say that I’ve had wonderful neighbours throughout my adult life. I don’t know what I would have done without them! Mike was there when the going was toughest, and Judy’s family, wow! I just can’t say enough about them. They came out of nowhere to help me out, just when I needed it most.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but maybe it’s best if I start where things began to turn worse once again. Yes, that would be the best place to start. I was feeling so wonderful that day, like that day was the first day of the rest of my life, but I guess the good Lord had other plans for us. Seconds after it happened, I wondered aloud: Just what does the good Lord have in store for me?

Chapter 2

It was a beautiful fall evening, and Jaime Elsnor was visiting her mother in the eastern suburb of Chartres, outside of Ottawa. Most of the trees were bare now, especially the red maple on her mother’s front lawn, the tree she had planted the day Peter, her father, had passed away. Agatha always gave the trunk a soft pat every time she walked past it. The other row houses on Joachim Crescent had dying ash trees that were rotting from the inside out. A type of fungus was laying siege to the root system, and each of the trees on Joachim had been affected. Some were not blooming at all, while others were slowly, year by year producing fewer and fewer leaves; the great black splotches on most of the leaves were indicative of an ever-losing battle. Some of the neighbours had already cut theirs down, and