Deception: Illusions: A Psychological Thriller, #2

By J. S. Chapman

The woman in the mirror is the picture of madness.

 

Sometimes there are lies that must be said. Other times there are secrets that should never be spoken.

 

Kendra McSweeney is a troubled woman whose family has been hiding secrets and lies for years. Now that her mother has finally confessed to those secrets and lies, Kendra must face who she really is and where she fits into the scheme of her life.

 

When she locates the parents who abandoned their child to the whims of fate, Kendra is haunted in a way she never expected. Blackouts, time gaps, and perplexing events plague her. Is she going mad? Or is someone else happening?

 

After being trapped in a corner where her very freedom is at stake, Kendra must wrestle inner demons. When she finally breaks free, a worse fate awaits her.

By teaming up with a police detective, she sets out to unravel a haunting mystery that forces her to confront her own life.

 

Book 2 of ILLUSIONS will have you on the edge of your seat.

 

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. Buy the book now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Weatherly Books
• Release date: Feb 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393953647

J. S. Chapman

J. S. Chapman is a paperback writer, recovering screenwriter, genre shifter, and research glutton. She writes thrillers, mysteries, historical fiction, romantic comedies, and nonfiction. You can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the girl. Born and raised in Chicago USA, she may be a suburban transplant but her heart still lives in the Windy City, where she learned her street smarts the hard way. After earning her degree from Northwestern University, she briefly taught in the Chicago Public School system before signing on with the corporate sector. It was in a dreary cubicle around the corner from executive row where she dared to dream and began writing nights and weekends. A little bit crazy and a little bit rock ‘n’ roll.

Book preview

Deception

I L L U S I O N S

Part II

J. S. Chapman

Deception

I L L U S I O N S

Part II

J. S. Chapman

Copyright © 2019 by J. S. Chapman

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Weatherly Books

Chicago, IL, USA

This book is licensed for your personal reading enjoyment and may not be resold or given away to others. Reproduction in whole or part of this book without the express written consent of the author and/or publisher is strictly prohibited and protected by copyright law. Short excerpts used for the purposes of critical reviews is permitted. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

From the Author

Chapter 1 

SOMETIMES THERE ARE lies that must be said. Other times there are truths that should never be spoken.

Over tea one afternoon on a pleasant day in spring, Emily McSweeney made two confessions in the presence of her daughter Kendra and her caretaker Birdie. The first: Emily had poisoned her husband. The second: Kendra had a twin sister.

Both claims could have been truths or lies or a combination of fact and fantasy. Who knew what went on in the mind of a madwoman? Neither claim spoken with such sincerity could be brushed aside.

Emily was full of secrets. Bottled up with secrets. Over the years, the secrets spilled out.

She lost a child to miscarriage.

She had several abortions before Kendra came along.

Her husband had affairs with other women.

She had an affair of her own. A lovely man, she told Kendra. A man already married with children of his own. A man rich beyond compare. But a man who would never leave his family, even if Emily were to leave hers.

And now her latest bombshells. She poisoned her husband. And Kendra had a twin sister.

Since Emily’s previous confessions had been told repeatedly, varying only slightly in their retellings, Kendra believed her then, which meant she had to believe her now. She and Birdie tried to draw her out, but Emily was tired and said she wanted to take a nap. She climbed upstairs with her caretaker in tow, and Kendra left the house shaken up and bewildered.

In the days to follow, she sought out her father’s physician and asked her whether Alan had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The doctor was kind. She was caring. She reached for Kendra’s hands. She held them gently. She looked into her eyes as she spoke. She told her the hard truth with soft words. Mac was suffering from pancreatic cancer. It was caught too late, but even had the disease been diagnosed earlier, the prognosis would not have been good. She had given him the choice of a surgery that could have extended his life for six months to a year, perhaps longer, who knew. He was the only one who could make the decision. She told him this and everything else he ought to know. He needed time, he told her, to talk it over with his wife and put his affairs in order. He never returned. She read about his death in the obituaries. His demise had come quicker than anticipated, but sometimes it happened that way. A fast death, she told Kendra, was better than a lingering one. Did Kendra have a chance to say goodbye? Soulfully she shook her head and left the doctor’s office dry-eyed. She went home feeling empty. Then she felt guilty. Guilty that her father did not love her enough to confide in her. Or possibly, loved her too much. Or didn’t think she could handle the truth. Then she was angry. Angry at Mac. Angry at Emily. Angry at God.

The truths her mother told her about her sister ... her twin sister ... her identical twin sister ... were either the ravings of a schizophrenic personality or a reality that could not be borne by either her father or her mother. Wherever the truth lay, it changed everything, including the person Kendra thought she was and where she fit into the scheme of her life. A part of her had always been missing. Perhaps this mystical sister had been the root cause. Kendra could not work out all the implications in a single swallow. She kept the secrets to herself. Birdie would say nothing. No doubt Emily already forgot what she told her only living child, either in a flash of complete lunacy or a moment of perfect sanity.

Two weeks went by. Three. Eventually she put this mystical twin sister out of her mind. She had to. To get back into the swing of things. To make her marriage work. To experience the semblance of an ordinary life, a mundane life, a life without dramas. It worked. For a time. Until she began to see her likeness. Walking on the other side of Michigan Avenue. Disappearing around the corner of Washington and Clark Streets. Driving down Lake Shore Drive behind the wheel of a compact car. Pushing a cart in the neighborhood supermarket before vanishing around the next aisle. Ascending the up escalator in a department store when Kendra was going down.

She saw her twin in mirrors. In windows. In silhouettes on the pavement. In the presence of her breath. In her dreams. She did the only thing she could do. She began the search for Kayla.

One afternoon Emily found her rummaging in the attic. What are you doing? she said, switching on the overhead light.

When Kendra twisted around, she tried to appear calm and collected, not frenzied or harried. Looking, was all she replied.

Emily sensed her disquiet. She was keen that way. Since everything inside her mother was turned off, intuition predominated. She stepped closer. Looking for what?

Old photos. Old clothes. Memories.

Emily gazed at her daughter with a prudent eye before nodding once. Memories?

I’ve been thinking about my childhood.

Did you have a childhood?

Is that a rhetorical question?

Rhetorical? This woman who earned a master’s degree and once taught school possessed a vocabulary that had no bounds. The words still lingered in a secret compartment and occasionally came out unbidden. The brain was still intact. But the mind and the spirit of Emily McSweeney had become sublimated in the quicksand of a destroyed personality.

My childhood wasn’t ... Kendra searched for a word. Ideal. I seem to have forgotten much of it. Ever since Danny went away.

Your brother.

"When he died, everything that happened before was wiped out, as if my life started from that point forward. Like he never existed. Or I never existed. Does that make sense?"

Emily was slow to respond. She made a motion, as if wanting to approach her daughter, to hug her, to soothe her, to wipe away her tears. As always, she held back, wringing her hands. You must look back. You must remember. It’s all there is. The present is but a dream. The future does not exist. Only the past is real.

I never had a childhood. Not a real one. Something was always missing. It’s missing still.

Her words had touched a nerve. Kendra could see it in the way Emily’s expression changed. She was carefully considering those words, running them over in her mind, digesting them. Eventually she looked at her daughter with a glint in her eye, as if saying she completely understood. Deftly she changed the subject. Where is your father? I haven’t seen him all day.

Yes, I know, Mom. He’s gone.

Your father would never leave without saying goodbye.

He’s gone, Mom.

Emily honked. Oh no. He’s not gone. He lives on.

Where?

In Heaven of course. Waiting for me. She turned her head like a bird eyeing a worm. Memories. You said you were looking for memories. Where could those memories be? Where did you expect to find them?

In photos. From when I was a little girl. Before Danny left.

I threw everything away. Almost everything. Kept a few pictures. Didn’t want to be reminded. I told Mac what I wanted to do. He agreed. Neither of us wanted to look back. The pain went on anyway. We could never get past it. There were always missing pieces, the most important pieces. We didn’t plan it that way, sweetheart. We only wanted the best for you. But you took the brunt, didn’t you? After Danny died, you lost your mother and your father, too. Don’t think we didn’t notice. We did. But what could we do? The past is in the past, and it will never come back.

If the pictures are gone, how can we remember?

Oh, child. There’s nothing to it. Everything is here. Inside in my heart. Inside my brain. I don’t need photographs. Pooh on photographs. They’re only images on paper. It’s all here, she said, pointing to her skull. You. Your sister. Your brother. My husband. On the last word, her voice trailed off. A peculiar look entered her eyes, a far-off look, as if she were in another place and another time.

Are there pictures? Of my sister?

Sister?

Kayla. You called her Kayla.

Ah yes, Kayla. I don’t need photos of Kayla, either. I only have to look at you.

There must have been differences between us.

Oh, there were, there were. Kayla was happy. You were never happy.

What happened to her mom? Where did she go?

I wish I knew. I do wish I knew. She considered her daughter with flickering eyes. I’ll show you where the photographs are, what there are of them.

She rummaged in the shelves at back, found what she wanted, and took down a box. After blowing away the accumulated dust, she passed it like a delicate china cup to her daughter. Kendra lifted the top away, slowly, fearfully, afraid of seeing what lay inside. Soon she was scrabbling through the contents, shuffling the stacks of snapshots like a deck of cards, searching for the image of a lost girl who would have looked exactly like her. The only way to certainty was of finding two little girls standing side by side, mirror images of each other. Disappointingly no such photos existed.

Emily saw the frustration on her daughter’s face. She held up an expectant finger and went off. From a long-forgotten shelf, she lugged down two photo albums. Like the box, they too were covered in decades of dust and neglect. Unlike the others, these photographs had been lovingly mounted on reinforced pages protected by plasticine. Most of the pictures were of Mac and Emily in their younger years, when they first fell in love. There was only one early photo of Kendra as a child. She was four or five, standing by herself on a summer’s day, a lake rippling in the background, her elbows athwart, the focus fuzzy. A frowning child. A shy child. A child whose hair was lighter than it was now, almost blonde. A child who chose not to smile into the camera. She dug deeper. There were no other photos of her until school. The usual group kindergarten photo. Class pictures throughout elementary school. Portraits from high school. Other photos of the family. Four members counting her brother. Later on, only three of them since by then Danny was gone. He was eighteen. He had hanged himself in the garage, a good-looking boy with everything ahead of him, but a boy who could not see a future. There were photos of her father, looking older than his age. Photos of her mother, whose dazzling smile diminished through the years until there was no hint of a smile, only frowns of discontent, detachment, sorrow, and madness.

She was kidnapped. Emily was flipping through the pages of one of the albums when she said this singular statement.

Something inside Kendra told her this was it, Emily’s moment of sharpened clarity. Who was kidnapped? she said gently.

Why, your sister of course. Your sister Kayla.

What happened?

We never knew. We were living on Kenmore Street then. In a courtyard building on the second floor. There were stairs, a porch, it was summer. Almost summer. May. Unseasonably hot. A man must have climbed through one of the windows. A ransom note was left in the crib. Scribbled in pencil. We didn’t have much money back then and borrowed from your grandfather. Your father left the package on a dark road in the country. No one came for it. We never saw her again. Danny didn’t hear anything. He was sleeping in the next bedroom. He was inconsolable. He blamed himself. Now where did I put those photos of her? Ah yes, I burned them. Burned them all. I didn’t want to be reminded of the pain. If I could burn the pictures, I could forget she ever existed. It was too painful. Too much to deal with. She nodded her head like a marionette, as if her explanation made all the sense in the world. And she doesn’t, does she? ... exist ... and never did.

Emily was eternal springtime. Time stopped when she was in her thirties. Though gray laced her Nordic-blonde hair and creases lined her porcelain skin, she was ageless. Her slim figure. Her toned muscles. Her youthful sense of style. Her lively step. The constant brilliance of her nutmeg eyes. The way she moved. Her mischievous grins. Her exuberant step. She was a sixteen-year-old living inside the body of a sixty-year-old.

Kendra flipped back through the album on her lap and noticed blank spaces where photos must have been mounted but had since been ripped out. She peered at Emily for an explanation. Her mother’s eyes were gazing up at the rafters, seeing ... what? ... Kendra could only guess. She asked, Even the photos when the twins were together?

Even those. They would have proven Kayla existed once. Now she doesn’t exist. It’s all so very simple. Simple to fool yourself. She glanced down at the photos in her hand. Black-and-white photos of relatives whose names were long forgotten. Simple to fool others.

Twin sisters. Butterflies born from the same chrysalis.

Kendra put everything away. Easy to close a photo album. Easy to replace a lid on a box. Easy to wipe memories away like so much dust. Except of course, it wasn’t quite so easy.

She smacked her hands together and brushed away the dust. When she turned around, Emily was standing quite close. She smoothed a hand along her daughter’s face. Are you happy? Happy with your husband? With Joel? Is that his name? Do I have it right? Joel?

Kendra nodded. We’re doing okay.

Emily paused. Considered. Twitched her head like a bird. I hear something in your voice. Tell me I don’t hear something in your voice. Her expression wandered away, eyes searching, constantly searching. I’m sure he’s looking forward to the baby.

Baby? Kendra asked innocently.

You can’t fool me, dear. You can’t fool your mother. Emily cupped the burgeoning baby bump with the soothing palm of her hand. Boy or a girl?

I don’t know.

If it’s a boy, you can name him after your brother. Even if it’s a girl. Daniella, she said, testing the sound. Daniella is sweet, don’t you think?

Would you like that?

I’ve never forgotten Danny. Never will. Or Kayla.

What happened to her, Mom? Whatever happened to Kayla?

She patted Kendra on the cheek. Ask your father. Or better yet, don’t. It’s just as painful for him as it is for me.

Chapter 2 

KENDRA WAS FORCED to face painful truths. Of secrets and lies and madness. She could not believe she had a sister. Or that she had been taken from the crib she shared with her sister. She was the creation of her mother’s delusions. She had to be. And yet ....

And yet a piece of Kendra was missing. Always had been missing. The other half of herself. The imaginary friend who might not be imaginary. If there had been a twin sister, why had she been relegated to the dust heap of a family’s dark history? What was so terrible that her name must never be spoken? There was only one answer. Guilt. Emily and Mac must have blamed themselves. For not locking doors and securing windows. For believing bad things happened to other people. For being awful parents. Best not to dwell on it. Best to just go on as if bad luck had not entered an open window. They had another daughter to bring up. A son, too. But when the son took his own life, nothing was left but to survive from day to day. The memories must have been so painful they could never be mentioned again, except for those rare instances of honesty from a delusional woman.

When Joel let himself into the house late that night, Kendra was sitting on the Queen Anne chair. He called out to her from below. Rather than answer, she listened to him scour the house, turning on lights as he went. Eventually he climbed upstairs.

Kendra? His silhouette was as ephemeral as a glimmer. He groped for the light switch.

She averted her eyes. Turn it off.

Why?

Just ... please.

The room plunged back into the comfort of darkness. He stayed where he was, standing immobile.

I’m not crying, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve been listening, she said, for the ghosts.

He inhaled a shallow breath and held it before feeling his way in the dark. He knelt at her feet and gazed up at her with imploring eyes.

To make what she was about to say go down easily, she bestowed a trembling smile upon him. It’s about Emily.

He waited to hear the bad news. But it was worse than he thought. Much worse.

She took a deep breath and released it with a shuddering sigh. She gave Mac foxglove.

He processed the information. Foxglove? I don’t follow.

From the garden. If done right, it induces a heart attack. And ... She took another girding breath. The words were hard to get out but even harder to hear herself say them. He ... he coached her ... he showed her how to do it.

You’re kidding, right? You’ve got to be kidding.

I wish I were. The power of his fists cut off the blood flow to her fingertips. Despite the numbness,