The Legacy of Madison Porter

By Rene Kary

The most interesting thing about Caty is she wasn’t murdered. The second most interesting thing about her is she doesn’t know why...

Nine years after surviving a mysterious kidnapping, Caty Foster still can’t remember how she walked away unharmed, or why her best friend Madison Porter didn’t. Caty has spent years dealing with the shadows of her broken memory and the people she disappointed, and is ready to put the events of the past behind her.

But now, Silas Porter is back in town, bringing back old memories of a shocking crime that everyone remembers but Caty. Maddie’s brother hadn’t been back to St. Edward, South Carolina since he was 12 years old, but here he was, working on his dad’s farm and trying to put his life back together.

Though they haven’t seen each other in years, Caty and Silas are inextricably linked by the loss of Maddie, and they can feel a bond forming between them. But can they find a way to release the guilt they’ve each felt for so long? Can Silas help Caty remember what happened all those years ago? Will this bring the closure they both desperately want?

Blending tragedy, mystery, and the excitement of first love, The Legacy of Madison Porter chronicles the unlikely love story between two people damaged by the same event, and the journey they take to learn the truth of that fateful day so long ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rene Kary
• Release date: Sep 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301819379

Rene Kary

I currently work full time in Communications & Marketing. I went to school for Psychology and have degrees in both Counseling and Community Psychology. Some day, I’d like to save the world by day and write young adult fiction by night. For now, I’m content to write in my spare time while enjoying other things like watching movies and television, hiking, and having family dinner nights with my friends. I live in the Sacramento area with my two pups, Dexter and Finn. Drop me a line at renekary at gmail dot com. Oh, and btw, “Rene Kary” is a pseudonym.

Book preview

The Legacy of Madison Porter

Rene Kary

Copyright 2013 Rene Kary

Smashwords Edition

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

For Grams

PROLOGUE

April 19, 2004

Nine-year-olds Maddie and Caty looked at each other. They didn’t know what to do. Silas, Maddie’s 12-year-old brother, was supposed to be there already. But he wasn’t. Caty wondered if they were standing under the wrong tree. Maybe Silas was at the other oak tree on the other side of the school. This thought made her even more nervous. If she and Maddie were in the wrong spot, Silas was going to be really mad. Do you think he’s at the other tree, by the baseball fields? she asked.

Why would he go there? Maddie answered. We always meet him here.

Of course Caty knew this, but she was still nervous. They’d been waiting a really long time, and she didn’t think Silas was coming. He had probably forgotten all about meeting them and they were going to have to walk home by themselves. Their moms were going to be really mad about it. But if they kept waiting for Silas, it’d be dark before they knew it.

Let’s just start walking, Caty. If Silas shows up, he’ll know we went home and he’ll catch up. We can’t wait forever.

Caty didn’t like this idea.  Even though the walk home wasn’t that long, they would have to go through part of the woods, and this always made her nervous. They could avoid the woods and go down Dobbins Lane, but it added 10 minutes to the walk and she knew Maddie would rather cut through. Maddie always made fun of her for being afraid of the woods and she was embarrassed about it. She just thought they were creepy. But she wanted to go home. 

Okay, but let’s walk fast. She grabbed Maddie’s hand and headed for the trail.

CHAPTER 1

Caty Foster was having a bad dream. It was the kind where she knew she was dreaming but couldn’t escape it – the kind that seemed real even when she knew it wasn’t. It felt like forever, but when she jumped awake and looked at the clock, she realized it had only been 15 minutes since she had fallen asleep on the couch.

She needed water. She got up and headed into the kitchen. She was babysitting, and the kids had been asleep for two hours. She had fallen asleep working on her last essay for her senior lit class. It was on Romeo & Juliet, and she had been putting the finishing touches on her lengthy and fairly accusatory dissertation on the juvenile couple when she nodded off.

Sipping her water, she attempted to shake the uneasiness her dream had created. While awake, she worked hard to keep certain emotions at bay, but in sleep she was defenseless.

Her dream about Maddie was nothing new - it was the same one she’d had for years. In it, she’s sitting in a dark room holding Maddie’s hand. That’s the entire dream. Before she wakes up, she always lets go of Maddie’s hand.

Just as she always did after having the dream, she let her mind wander. She stood in the kitchen, closed her eyes, and felt Maddie’s hand in hers. Just as she had been taught, she let the darkness envelope her, and stood perfectly still. Meditating. Pleading. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not remember anything else besides holding Maddie’s hand.

Caty sighed and opened her eyes. She didn’t know why she still bothered. She knew it was hopeless, just as it had been for the last nine years. She would never remember what happened in the darkness, and the dream would be there to tease and remind her of that forever.

She and Madison Porter had been best friends before they were even born. Their moms had been close friends for years and were both due one week apart. Their fates sealed, she and Maddie were inseparable from the beginning.

Caty was born on January 16, 1995, but came into existence – became That Girl - on April 19, 2004.  That was the day Maddie was murdered. In anyone’s childhood, the violent death of a friend would definitely leave its mark. But for her, it wasn’t just the day Maddie was murdered. It was the day she wasn’t. And she didn’t know why.

Her memory of that day was as clear as any memory she had ever had. She remembered what she ate for breakfast, what homework was due in her fourth grade class, and what games she played at recess. She remembered standing under the big oak tree with Maddie, waiting for Maddie’s brother Silas to walk them home. She remembered her annoyance, the growing fear, and finally the resignation that Silas wasn’t coming. She remembered grabbing Maddie’s hand and courageously leading the way into the woods. She remembered…not much else. It’s at that moment that everything went dark. Anything that came after had simply become a patchwork mosaic of what she managed to piece together from her own fuzzy recollection and what was told to her afterward by the Sheriff’s Department and her parents.

From others, this was what she knew: she and Maddie were taken by a young man named Patrick Jensen to his basement on Greyson Road. After four hours, she crawled out a tiny window and ran for help, and when Shelly Fredericks found her a block away she was screaming and rambling about a bad man and a basement. Mrs. Fredericks then called her dad and the police. By the time they got to Patrick Jensen’s house, he and Maddie were missing. One day later, the state police found Patrick dead in his car on the side of the highway, with a two-word note that said he was sorry. On that same day, they found Madison Porter’s body in the woods near where they had first been taken.

As to any other details, important things like how and why, she had never been any help.  She frustrated and exasperated the Sheriff’s Department, and she devastated Maddie’s parents. Even at nine, she could tell when adults were disappointed. They came over almost every day for a month asking her the same questions and hoping she would remember more. They always said the same thing - that they just wanted closure.  They said if they knew how she had escaped – knew why their daughter had been murdered – it would help them grieve. She hadn’t known what the word closure meant, but she knew she wasn’t giving it to them. No matter how many times they asked, her memory never got better.

Therapists didn’t help either.  She saw three different ones that first year and none of them could help her recover the memories. They’d all use fancy words like post-traumatic stress and repression, but she knew what they really meant was that her memory was broken.

She was still standing in the kitchen, lost in thought, when she heard the front door open. She placed her cup in the sink and walked into the living room. How was the movie?

Oh, you know, they caught the bad guy, Cynthia Robertson replied. She glanced at her husband. It was…thrilling.

Caty laughed. We caught our bad guy too. Kevin almost destroyed the world, but luckily Becca and I saved the day. They went to bed around 8.

Wonderful. Thanks so much. They always have such a good time with you, and somehow you have a magic trick with vegetables that I haven’t yet mastered.

Caty smiled. She really appreciated that the Robertson family liked her as a babysitter and let her watch the kids as much as they did. She found it difficult to find babysitting jobs sometimes, and she knew it had everything to do with her past. If you ask people point blank whether they are superstitious, they’ll always tell you no. But she was turned down by enough parents to know how deep superstition really went with folks.  Even in a small town like St. Edward, South Carolina, people knew about karma. And as far as they were concerned, having someone who was kidnapped at nine years old babysit your own nine-year-old was as bad as bad karma could get.

She accepted her payment, said goodnight, and got in her car to head home. She counted her take-home for the night and was pleased. Not only was she happy that she’d found a family that liked her, she was grateful for the funds. In the fall, she was going to the California Institute of the Arts and needed to hoard every cent she made this summer.

Caty discovered a love – and talent – for art soon after Maddie’s death. In her therapy sessions, she couldn’t talk about the dreams she was having, so the therapist would ask her to draw them. Even though she was illustrating her nightmares, she fell in love with drawing. There was something about taking the images in her mind and transferring them to real life that gave her a sense of calm and accomplishment in her sessions. At the time, it was just kind of a bonus that she was good at it.  She didn’t take it very seriously until her ninth grade art teacher told her she should apply to art schools. So she did.

Her parents didn’t get her art thing. They considered it equal to her brothers’ toy car collection - an amusing way to pass the time, but nothing that should be taken too seriously. They were even less thrilled when she told them she was planning to go out of state. Both her parents had gone to the University of South Carolina, and it had been an unspoken assumption that she would go there too.  But she was set on CalArts. It was one of the most prestigious art schools in the country, and they had accepted her (she still wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened). How could she not go?

Her parents hadn’t been the only ones she had to convince. Her grandparents – her mom’s parents - were very wealthy and had set up a trust for each of their grandchildren to be used for education expenses. While there were no explicit limitations in the trust about where she could choose to go to college, her grandmother, still being alive and all, controlled it. After receiving her acceptance letter, her parents told her she’d have to call Grandma Ruth and tell her how she was planning to use her hard-earned money (she had wisely refrained from reminding them that Grandma Ruth’s hard-earned money had been passed down from generation to generation, earned long ago by tobacco farming).

Her parents figured they were being clever – they never even briefly considered the notion that Grandma Ruth would say yes. But Caty had been clever too, and sent Grandma Ruth a copy of her artist’s statement – part of the application requirement to CalArts – which documented her passion for art and how it had helped her recover from a traumatic experience when she was nine years old. Grandma Ruth had given her unconditional blessing.

 Though they said they accepted her decision, her parents told her that she would be responsible for all miscellaneous expenses she’d incur living in California. Hence the babysitting. She knew her parents still thought she would change her mind when she realized how far away it was from home. She figured it hadn’t yet dawned on them that that was precisely the reason it was so appealing.

After the kidnapping, her family tried to move on as best they could. Her mom, Lily, wanted to move. Not only was she tired of shouldering her share of the unspoken blame being placed on their family, she also became increasingly unsettled. In the wake of Maddie’s death, people kind of forgot that something bad had happened to Caty too. They only remembered that she was saved and Maddie wasn’t.  She knew her mom couldn’t help resent the way people didn’t seem to care that her daughter had been kidnapped. Caty didn’t blame people for caring more about what happened to Maddie, but she didn’t really blame her mom either. Regardless, her mom became what Grandma Ruth calls a worry wart. Her mother was convinced St. Edward was no longer safe, and wanted to move to Charleston to be closer to her family. Caty’s dad, Tom, didn’t want to move. Even with what had happened, he insisted they stay.

About six months after the kidnapping, her parents got into the worst argument she’d ever seen. Her mom even threatened to take Caty and her younger twin brothers and leave. But somehow her dad convinced her mom that staying and dealing with everything was what was best for them. She remembered her dad saying over and over, Caty’s strong.  After that argument, the discussion about leaving ended, and they stayed.

The Porters, though, didn’t stay. About two months after everything happened, they moved. Well, two of them. Susan, like Lily, struggled with living in St. Edward. Everything reminded her of Maddie. She started staying inside her house and not coming out. She also couldn’t stand to see Caty. Susan and Lily grew distant. Her mom knew how painful it was for Susan to see them move on, and Caty could tell her mom didn’t really know how to act around Susan anymore. Their friendship was broken, and it was pretty much just a matter of time before Susan bolted. Like Caty’s dad, Maddie’s dad, Adam, was born and raised in St. Edward and did not want to move. But, unlike her mom, Susan could not be convinced to stay. She and Silas moved to Florida, where her parents lived. Adam was supposed to follow them after getting their affairs in order, but he never did. They ended up getting a divorce, and Susan Porter had not been back to St. Edward since.

Maddie’s dad was never quite the same after losing his family, and kept to himself after that. He stopped coaching the high school baseball team and didn’t come to things in town anymore. He moved out of their house and into his parents’ old farmhouse outside of town, where he raised animals and grew produce. Caty knew he sold what he grew at the grocery store, because she saw labels that said Porter Farm of St. Edward on the strawberries her mom bought.  From what she’d heard, he hadn’t spoken to Susan in years and only saw Silas every once in a while.

Silas. If there was one person who understood at all what it was like to be That Girl, it was the one who was labeled Him. Any time she felt sorry for herself, she just had to think of how Silas must have felt. She found out later that Silas wasn’t there to walk them home because he simply forgot. After school, Silas and his friends went to the park to play basketball – a careless mistake that on any other day would have ended with him just getting into trouble. But that’s not how it happened, and if Silas is anything like her, he’s relived that day over and over and tried to change the outcome.

Silas was questioned even more than she was about his whereabouts the day of the murder. She was sure that in the same way they kept asking her about what happened in that basement, hoping one day she’d change her answer, they harassed Silas with questions about what he saw and why he hadn’t been with them. She asked her dad once why she and Silas had to keep talking to the police, and he said it was because Patrick Jensen was dead and the town was robbed of justice. Like so much of what people said to her during that time, she didn’t understand what her dad meant. But she knew not being able to talk to Patrick Jensen upset everyone, so they talked to her instead.

She pulled into her driveway. The living room lights were on, and she could see her parents sitting and reading. Surprise, surprise, she thought. No matter how many times she told them they didn’t have to wait up, they always did. She opened the door, and her dad looked up. There’s my girl, he said as each of them closed their books.

Here I am – tada. Caty waved her arms. You can return to breathing now. It was an old joke of hers that never failed to make her dad wince. But he didn’t say anything back.

Alright, let’s all go to bed, her mom said.

She kissed her dad’s forehead, hugged her mom, and headed to her room. She let herself fall onto her bed, and idly looked around her bedroom. Despite being That Girl, she didn’t hate St. Edward. Even when everything was crazy the first couple years after Maddie’s death, she had never hated it. Most people were kind to her, even if she knew they gossiped about her. She had a great group of friends, she was on the swim team at school, and in the summers she worked at Camp Possibility. Her dad was right – she had been strong and built a life for herself. Still, she couldn’t lie – she was definitely ready for a change.

As she got ready for bed, she was still trying to shake the dream. About three years after Maddie’s death, almost all of her nightmares stopped. The one that remained, however, was the one she hated most. And no matter how many times she had it, the dream unsettled her. She knew deep down hidden in that dream were the answers everyone wanted from her, and she felt disappointed and confused every time she woke up with nothing but blackness.  She had tried hypnosis, meditation, dream journaling, and every other technique designed to help recover memories. For whatever reason, those four hours in that basement, and her exit through that window, were lost. The only thing she knew for sure was that she was alive, and Maddie wasn’t.

CHAPTER 2

Silas Porter stirred awake. As he opened his eyes, he felt disoriented.  He rubbed his face, trying to get his bearings, and looked out the window, but that did no good. He looked at his phone: 3:15AM. He’d been on the bus for nine hours. He felt like shit.

            The guy in the seat next to him had fallen asleep with his headphones blaring, and he assumed that was what woke him up, since Axl Rose was currently screaming at Silas to take him to Paradise City. Silas grabbed a water bottle from his backpack, pulled out his own headphones, and leaned his head on the glass.

He still couldn’t really wrap his head around the fact that he was here, on a bus headed for South Carolina at three in the morning. Just two days ago he had been in New York, bunking with a buddy while he figured out his next move. He’d never have guessed it would be returning to the place he despised so much. But here he was, on his way to see his dad after getting a call from him yesterday. Unlike the hundreds before it, this one seemed different.

His dad called him once a month like clockwork. They’d talk about nothing for 10 minutes, pretending to care about what was going on in the other’s life, and then his dad would always say, I’ll let you go. Be safe. Bye now. It never changed, until this last time. Adam had sounded strange, and had asked Silas something he hadn’t asked in years: could he come to St. Edward?

Silas surprised himself when he had agreed. Just before his dad’s call, he was trying to figure out his next move. He’d been living in New York City for the past year, working odd jobs during the day and playing guitar in his band at night. He had been making it work, and was optimistic that his band was about to hit the next level. But then his lead singer, one of his best friends, landed a producing gig in California and had taken off without even saying goodbye. Though Silas knew there was no shortage of wannabe rock stars in Brooklyn and he could have found a new lead singer, he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep it up. He loved his music, but he was sick of living paycheck to paycheck, coming home to a barren and roach-infested apartment.

When Adam had called, he was telling his buddy that maybe he’d head back to Florida and work for his granddad. He was annoyed when his dad seemed chattier than usual, and the call was lasting longer than the allotted 10 minutes. At the 20-minute mark, as Adam was telling him about one of his dairy cows being pregnant, he had reached his limit. Well, Dad, glad you called. Congrats on the impending calf. I should go.

Uh, Silas? I had one more thing I wanted to talk to you about.

He was caught off guard. He couldn’t remember his dad ever being this talkative. What’s up, Dad?

Well, the thing is, Adam started. I was wondering what you were up to these days. I know you’re doing your music thing and enjoying New York City. Just curious if you’ve ever thought about making your way back down here. To St. Edward, I mean.

Again, he was surprised. Did his dad sound nervous? What was this about? He hadn’t been to St. Edward in five years. The last time he’d gone was for his grandmother’s funeral. Whenever he saw his dad, it was in a neutral location, usually in Savannah, which was about halfway between St. Edward and Jacksonville. Adam knew he hated it. Why was he asking him to come now?

Dad, what’s this about? Is everything Ok there? He could hear his dad take a deep breath.

Everything is fine. I just miss you, son. Adam paused. I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately, and I’d really like to see you. It’d be great if you could come for a visit. And I could sure use the help on the farm. It’s just Lance and I, and there’s a lot to do.

Lance Fredericks was Adam’s friend and foreman. Together they ran a decent-sized farm, growing various fruits and vegetables, as well as managing a very small dairy operation. His dad had never been in the farm business to get rich, but to work just enough to sell locally and live a quiet life on his farm. Silas knew his dad had succeeded in both.

He was quiet for a long time, until finally his dad had to ask if he was still there. He heard himself reply, Yeah, Dad. I’ll come. Give me a couple days.

And here he was. He didn’t know who had seemed more shocked, him or his dad. Hell, he couldn’t even explain why he said yes. He hadn’t seen his father in a year, and had no idea what to expect. All he knew was that it was time for a change. He’d been constantly moving since leaving Jacksonville the day after his high school graduation three years ago. He hadn’t known where he was headed, he just knew Jacksonville wasn’t for him. He loved his grandparents, with whom he and his mom had lived after leaving St. Edward, but Jacksonville wasn’t home. He had very few fond memories of the place, and the minute he could leave, he was gone. Thus started a string of fresh starts, all ending when he grew tired of whatever place he happened to be living. He’d landed in Raleigh, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and now New York. The constant newness was comforting to him, and he liked entering a new city with nothing but his clothes, guitar, and a willingness to work. But this stint in New York was getting old. He hated to admit it, but he was tired.

He was also nervous. He felt stupid, but he was. They passed a sign for Charleston and he felt butterflies set in. He was getting closer. The last time