Blessed Curse

By Nancy Sartor

In Rugby, Tennessee, Jorie Wainright and the man she loves, Logan Mathis, grew up as two of the Rugby Six: a group of children so closely bound that they experience each other’s emotional and physical pain. And they have the power to affect others.

TO FEEL ANOTHER’S HEART

At twenty-six, tormented by a darker facet of her past, Jorie abandons love along with the desire to ever be a mother. The act plunges herself and the remaining Six into anguish, and it is all for naught. She is already pregnant with Logan’s child. When her father’s death forces her back to her hometown, she goes alone.

Logan’s love for Jorie forces him to obey her wishes. Still, for him there can be no other woman. And, like always, he can feel her pain...and her need. She waits in a rural Tennessee town on the edge of the spirit world, where a dark and sinister presence threatens all she never wanted. All that Logan knows she will never let die. All he knows they must save—together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Boroughs Publishing Group
• Release date: May 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944262716

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a noise? Jorie Wainright added her own corollary to that ancient question. If a woman never takes a pregnancy test, is she pregnant?

She had taken a pregnancy test, to be accurate. It now sat unseen beside her on her dead father’s chipped and stained porcelain bathroom sink. She didn’t want to be pregnant. She took absurd measures to ensure she would never become pregnant.

Yet she was.

As the test would prove, if she looked at it. Her monthly flow was quite late. Her breasts were sore, especially her nipples.

She had looked at the test, of course. One couldn’t take a pregnancy test without seeing the device.

She’d not yet looked at the results of the test.

She didn’t want to confirm this as perhaps the worst day of her life so far, even counting her father’s bad days and the expanded version, her father’s really bad days when she’d raced for the woods with his big feet slamming right behind her. Sometimes she made it before he caught her.

Others, she did not.

She could not be a parent. Her role models hovered somewhere between the Lucille of country music who left her husband with four hungry children and a crop in the field, and the famous writer Pat Conroy’s militaristic father whose idea of love was to beat his children less hard than he beat his wife.

Jorie’s mother left only Jorie behind when she walked out of her marriage, not four children. Paul Wainright, Jorie’s father, who stayed after his wife left, and who fed and clothed Jorie, was not the slightest militaristic, but he did have a handy razor strop. A razor strop can do amazing damage to a child’s tender back if it is driven by the heavy arm of a fully-grown man.

Look at the damned test.

She grimaced at her inner self’s demand. Inner self was quite impatient most of the time and always parental.

The test could be negative. She’d give it about one chance in five million, but strange and inexplicable things happened. A few had happened to her. Jorie cut her glance to the tester. If she could get a hint—pink or blue, negative or positive—she could go on about her business for the day. The tester lay so the result was hidden.

Pick it up. What is wrong with you?

Shut up! She snatched the tester from the sink. Even bouncing in her shaking hand, the result was easy to see. Big blue plus sign. There! Are you happy now?

Shit!

Indeed.

These frequent arguments with herself seldom lasted long. When she’d first realized that not everyone had an alter ego who scolded and demanded, she’d been concerned. Later, after thousands of counseling sessions, she learned that she’d developed this parent ego to make up for not having a mother and not being able to trust her father.

Damned shame she’d not developed a nicer one.

Okay, she was pregnant. There were many courses of action here. Marriage, the option she’d dumped just three weeks ago, was off the list. She didn’t believe in abortion for lots of reasons, large among them the fact that she didn’t want somebody poking around inside her hoo-hah with sharp instruments. Besides, as a reincarnist, she valued the life of the unborn and didn’t think she had the right to interfere in it.

Nobody had interfered in her life, not even the terrible mother who’d obviously not wanted her.

That left option three. Have the baby and raise it on her own, except that she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. It didn’t matter which way one said it, she was not parent material. Kids learned to parent from their parents. She knew how to leave when the going got rough or beat the hell out of the little thing if she spilled milk on her new blouse. Great tools for parenting.

Jorie sank down on the side of the tub and stared at the floor, lost in the misery of her own belief structure and the now undeniable fact that she’d painted herself into exactly this corner with her own words.

From the time she learned women had babies, she’d sworn never to do so, assured her friends at least once a week she would never be a mother. When she was old enough to read up on abused children, her resolution moved from firm to rock hard.

One out of every three abused children became an abusive parent.

Besides the fact that she was looking at nine months or so of increasing discomfort, girth and hormonal insanity, she’d have to explain her situation and proposed resolution to the Six. The Rugby Six, who’d grown up here in the hills of Tennessee, in this village that was not even big enough to be called a one-horse town, were bound to one another in a very strange and unusual way.

If one of them felt pain, they all felt it. If one of them was upset, they all felt it. None of them knew why this was true, but it had been so since their twelfth birthdays. Right now, the others felt her worry, her depression.

Soon, they would begin to call asking why, asking what they could do to help. She’d have to do a lot of fancy footwork to keep them from knowing about the baby. Until she told Logan Mathis, the child’s father, the man she loved with every cell in her body, one of the Rugby Six, and the man she’d thrown out of her life three weeks ago, nobody else could know.

Logan had been pretty pissed when he left their condo in Nashville. She didn’t know whether he’d call to check on her or not. Probably not.

She couldn’t blame him.

There was really but one option, a lonely, cold option. She would deliver the baby, hand it to Logan and leave Tennessee and him forever.

Logan would be delighted they were pregnant, would begin planning their wedding, choosing baby names, moving the furniture out of their shared home office to make room for the nursery. In the midst of this joy, Jorie would have to tell him she would not be living with him and the baby.

She’d spent her life feeling responsible for her mother’s abandonment. She would not inflict that on her child. Logan would tell the baby a lie: that its mother died in childbirth, show forged documents when the child was old enough to read.

A single tear snaked down her face at the thought of never seeing Logan again. The child, too, but right now it was nothing more than a plus sign on a test. After it was born, perhaps leaving it would feel as awful as leaving Logan.

Before she knew about the baby, she’d had a chance, maybe, of changing her mind about marrying Logan. That chance ended with the pregnancy. She couldn’t live in the same house with a child, and Logan couldn’t raise the kid and live anywhere else.

They were screwed.

She lifted her shoulders with a sigh. Things weren’t going to get better because she sat on the side of the tub and cried. She took two steps toward the door then stopped as a blast of cold air forced a shiver down her spine.

Hope the heat pump isn’t failing.

Wind gusted around the edges of the closed door, fluttered the legs of her pajamas.

This was strange even for Rugby.

Don’t be an idiot. The heat pump is ancient. It’s failed, that’s all.

A dead heat pump can’t pump cold air through the house. And don’t call me an idiot.

Totally irritated at her inner self, Jorie snatched the door open. A writhing, twisting, tumbling mass of icy air poured into her face. Impossible and yet with her hair twisting around her head, there was no denying that it was real.

Run!

She gritted her teeth and lunged for the hallway. The wind’s velocity rose, shoved her back across the tiny room. She stumbled, caught her balance and plopped down hard on the side of the tub.

She shielded her eyes to keep them from drying and tried again, using the bathtub as a launching pad, throwing herself at the door, her feet churning and her teeth gritted. The wind shoved her back to the tub. This time she managed to avoid the jarring fall.

The temperature in the bathroom plunged, frosting her nose and eyelashes. Her tender nipples became tight, uncomfortable knots.

The wind gathered color as it spun, chestnut, blazing white, rust and green. The colors coalesced with each rotation, made patterns and shapes. Body parts whirled by: an arm, bare at first and then covered with a startlingly white sleeve that ended in lace, a face, oddly shaped and looking unnatural. Seconds later, the parts came together. Head joined shoulders. Arms attached, a torso appeared and connected.

Soon a teenage girl rotated within the wind, her chestnut hair flying loose, her rust-colored gingham skirt blowing, a hologram from another time judging from the clothes. The wind slowed. The clouds fell into individual gray strips and disappeared.

Her flawless skin was alabaster. Her blue eyes were sapphires in a snowbank, an apt description for someone born of an icy wind. The sapphires found Jorie’s gaze, captured it. Freezing, quaking, her teeth chattering, Jorie could not look away.

This isn’t real.

The apparition held out its arms.

Go away. Jorie flicked her fingers at the girl as she might have flicked them at a small animal trapped in this bathroom.

The lips didn’t move and yet words came forth in a voice like the wind soughing in the branches. Help me, Jorie. Please help me.

Jorie leapt into the bathtub, dropped to her knees and stared at the apparition.

This thing that could not exist knew her name!

CHAPTER TWO

The girl, who had no visible legs or feet, hovered above the sink, her body bleeding cold like a freezer locker. She stretched her long arms toward Jorie, her sapphire eyes full of anguish, her nails tapered into perfect ovals, and wriggled her fingers. Jorie threw herself at the back wall.

The girl bobbed closer. Jorie clawed at the plastic tiles. Somewhere in the part of her brain that still worked, she assessed her lack of options. The high window was too small to climb through. The bathroom was on the second floor. Even if she managed to dig her way through the wall, she’d die on the ground below.

There was no escape except through the door.

The ghost’s skirt filled the space between the sink and the tub, but wasn’t voluminous enough to cover the space between the tub and the door. Jorie might be able to squeak by if she launched herself from the other end of the tub.

The hair on her neck rose.

The strange girl turned toward the door.

Jorie swallowed hard and forced herself to look.

For a second, she thought he was someone who’d heard her shouts and come to help. Rugby, for all its faults, was that kind of place. But, like the girl’s, his clothing was not of this time. The dark suit was threadbare but clean. The dingy white shirt was buttoned all the way to his neck. His brogans were heavy and carried mud from some previous place or time. The gaze from his gray eyes was all for the girl. Jorie spared a glance at the teenager, found her recoiled against the mirror behind the sink with her hands held out.

Warding against an attack.

How many times had Jorie sat just that way as Paul bore down on her with his big strop? Her gaze bounced between the two. He filled the space between the bathtub and the door, blocked her escape.

Jorie’s desperate calculations on how to get around him were interrupted when he slapped the girl’s hands out of his way, dragged her off the sink and then buried his hands in her chestnut-colored hair. She clasped her long white fingers around his wrists and hung on as he dragged her toward the door.

Jorie winced, remembering how she’d held to Paul’s wrists just that way because being dragged by your hands is much less painful than being dragged by your hair. Her terror disappeared. Fury filled her throat. She bolted from the tub, intent on snatching the girl from him, wishing she had a bat.

Help me, Jorie!

The duo was now in the hallway. If Jorie went at him with her fists, he’d have to let the girl go to defend himself. She was nearly on them when he oozed into the far wall, dragging the girl with him.

Please, Jorie! The sapphire eyes, already wide with fear, poured tears that ripped into Jorie like acid rain.

Stop! Let her go!

He didn’t glance at Jorie as they disappeared into the wall.

The temperature moderated with amazing speed, but Jorie was frozen even in the marrow of her bones. Self-preservation trumped empathy. She jerked off her pajamas with hands that moved like bricks, raced to the bathtub and turned on the hot water. Its near-scalding warmth drove frozen blood back to her hands and feet in stabbing needles.

For once in its life, her inner parent was silent, perhaps frozen, more likely scared shitless.

Gritting her teeth, she kept one eye on the open bathroom door. There was nothing to keep the duo from returning, but at this moment, her greatest need was warmth. Thirty minutes later, feeling like a bowl of jelly, she slid from the tub, snatched her pajamas from the floor, and ran to the bedroom, leaving wet footprints along the hardwoods. Paul would have beaten her for that. But these were her floors now. If she wanted to leave wet footprints on them, she would. She glanced over her shoulder as she ran, trying to believe what she’d seen.

Ghosts? Or the product of sleepless weeks, a broken heart, wild hormones and fear of coming back to this house? Sleep deprivation caused hallucinations. She’d read that a dozen times.

Pulling her towel tighter, she shivered. She hadn’t hallucinated the cold. Her hands were red and chapped. She flung herself into her oldest blue jeans and a sweatshirt that looked like a used paint rag, stuffed her feet into her tennis shoes, and raced to the kitchen. Her cell phone showed a call from Logan and a voicemail.

Not surprising. She’d doubtless broadcast terror like a high frequency radio station. Her finger hovered over the call back option. Everything in her wanted to hear his voice, to hear him say he was on his way to Rugby. Life hadn’t been very much fun lately, but she’d handled it well.

Until now.

Her finger dropped toward the option, then hovered above it, shaking wildly. It wasn’t fair to leave him wondering.

He knows you’re okay. He felt your fear subside. You just want to talk to him.

Bet your ass I do. But still she hesitated. Three weeks of anguish had brought her to this moment. If she heard his voice, especially when her insides quaked, she couldn’t trust herself not to blurt out that she was pregnant, forget how damaging that information might be to him right now.

Logan was strong, muscled, and smart. He’d been there for her in all of her life’s crises until now. But she’d been forced to throw that away.

Forced?

Forced or not, she’d made a call, hurt the man she loved, thrown his love back in his face and walked away. She didn’t deserve to talk to him. She sure as hell didn’t deserve to hurt him again so soon.

He knows I’m okay, she agreed with her inner parent. He doesn’t need to know what happened. She moved her finger to the delete option.

The house that had seemed so familiar before was now filled with twisting shadows and strange corners. As she raced for the front door, she stabbed her gaze everywhere. Ghosts or hallucinations, she didn’t want to be alone if it happened again.

She opened the door and nearly crashed into Rebecca Boroughs.

What? Rebecca asked, her dark eyes wide and her mahogany face pale. What?

Taking a single step backward, Jorie said, Tell you at your house. Let’s get outta here.

Without another question, Rebecca raced down the steps.

Jorie leapt into her own car and followed Rebecca, talking out loud to herself as she drove. You can’t live like this, afraid to be inside your own house. The bravado melted as her jerky thoughts hopped to that poor girl. If the man was the girl’s father, Jorie had just hallucinated a perfect scene from her childhood.

"Maybe it was a hallucination, she whispered. Maybe it’s part of being back in that house, sleeping in Paul’s bed, living where he lived. Maybe he’d sent the vision to her, an ugly reminder of the control he once exerted over her life. You’re dead. Dead and buried. Leave me alone and go wherever you’re supposed to go."

She felt better for having said it.

A little better.

Maybe.

CHAPTER THREE

The Lindens, which lay a mile from Paul Wainright’s house, was two stories tall with a long porch that ran around the front and the right side. A graceful balcony jutted from the front of the upper story, its columns white and fluted. It had belonged to Rebecca’s husband Tim’s family for more than a century. There had never been anyone not named Boroughs living in that house, and if Tim had his way, there would never be.

The Lindens had been their go-to place as kids. Tim’s mom was a small round body packed with goodness, an old country cook who understood what kids liked. Cookies filled the jar unless they were cooling on the pan. Fresh milk was always available, and anyone with a boo-boo got a big hug in Mrs. Boroughs’s ample arms before she applied first aid, at which she was somewhat of a wizard.

Jorie’s memories of this house, totally unlike those of the Wainright abode, were full of warmth and love. This was one of her safe places in Rugby.

She parked her Audi beside Rebecca’s Honda, still jazzed from her morning and trying to draw comfort from the familiar backyard with its tall linden trees. Rebecca had built a patio since Jorie was last here. Crab Orchard stones lay in perfect alignment along the ground, hosting padded wicker furniture that looked sinfully comfortable.

Before she could leave the car, Becca pecked on her window. Let me get the Tills down and I’ll bring out some tea. Tilly, Rebecca’s eighteen-month-old daughter, was nestled against her mother’s shoulder with her thumb in her mouth, already half asleep. You be okay out here alone?

Sure, Jorie said, but she was still reeling from her visitation, unable to put it in a box in her mind because people who formed out of wind tunnels or simply sprang into being in the middle of one’s bathroom fit into nothing approaching normal. The man who’d visited her this morning might feel normal because he’d acted so much like Paul Wainright, but Paul had been an aberration, a boil on the ass of righteousness, a bad man who’d been allowed to have his way for much too long before the Six stopped him.

Jorie gazed around. The Lindens’ yard lay beneath the towering trees that had given it its name. Now, in the early days of March, the backyard was full of sunlight, but once the linden trees fully bloomed, it would enter a perpetual shadow until fall. Yet, Rebecca, who had the greenest thumb in the world, a gift from her Cherokee parents, still managed somehow to grow herbs and hostas.

They were all different, the Rugby Six. Paul Wainright had been the English part of Jorie’s heritage, her mother, the Irish. It was from Georgiana that Jorie got her deep auburn hair and green eyes. If she’d inherited anything from Paul, she’d tried over the years to ditch it, believing in her heart that nothing that belonged to him could bring good fruit for living.

The fact was she looked like Georgiana. She knew what Georgiana looked like because once a year in the summer, the woman demanded Jorie’s presence, or had when Jorie was a minor and therefore disallowed by law to refuse.

She’d spent one twelfth of her year in a mausoleum devoted to the acquisition of things, forbidden to touch or even investigate a single thing inside that cold castle. She’d suffered horribly, even though Georgiana had never lifted her hand against Jorie. She didn’t care enough to discipline the child, pacing through her motherly duty exactly once a year and then sending the child back to her abusive father with a sigh of relief nobody could have missed.

Jorie coughed away the anger that had her stomach burning and took a tour of Rebecca’s new patio.

God knew how hard Becca had fought Esther Walker for the right to put these stones in her backyard. Crab Orchard stone, quarried in Crab Orchard, Tennessee, had not been available when the Second Sons established Rugby and was therefore forbidden in the yards of historic homes.

But Rebecca had her ways, some of them less than civilized, but effective. She often said she was born free and would die before she would kowtow to Esther’s demands.

Rebecca and Esther weren’t friends any more than Jorie and Esther were, although Esther, who creamed in her jeans any time Logan was around, had never expressed the slightest interest in Tim Boroughs. Probably afraid Rebecca might scalp her.

You’re avoiding again.

Jorie would have told her inner parent to get screwed, but it was right