and that brought mixed emotions. Her cabin in the woods, the place she’d lived before she met Baldwin—that was good. But ruined by the events that forced her to move out. No, neither of those would work.
Unbidden, a memory rose to the surface. She was eight, gangly and awkward, with slightly buck teeth and freckles, her long hair wrestled into submission in a single braid down her back. She was at camp, a whole summer away from home, and while the other campers were sad and lonely for their parents, she felt a kind of freedom she didn’t fully understand. She rode horses for the first time, and fished in the lake. Attended bonfires and had a mad crush on a boy much older, thirteen, from the neighboring cabin. Scandalous. Just thinking about it suffused her with joy, and she felt the corners of her lips rise.
Willig nodded. “Excellent, I see you have it. Let it fill you. Let yourself remember the happiness. Focus on how good that feels, to be happy, and safe. Now, we’re going to go back to the moment you entered the room and saw Sam tied to the chair. Think about what you saw, how you felt. I want you to rate your emotions on a scale of one to ten. Give a numerical valuation to how you feel right now, thinking about it.”
Taylor’s mind was shoved back to reality, to the vision of her best friend handcuffed to a chair, tears streaming down her face as blood ran over her stomach and dripped onto her legs. She held up four fingers on each hand. Eight. High enough to reveal her fear, not enough to feel too far out of control.
The pulsing started in her palms.
“What did you feel when you saw her, Taylor?”
Fury. Anger. Hurt. Fear. No, no, no, no. Something else under all that.
She let the emotions wash over her, felt her throat constrict. Willig kept up a soothing instructional flow, having Taylor watch her finger as it moved in front of her face, back and forth. She guided Taylor’s thoughts through the attic room, to the chair, looking down on Sam from above, to the actions that allowed her to be freed. As Sam, intact and liberated, left the imaginary room, she glanced back with imploring eyes. Taylor tensed, and Willig told her to shut her eyes and think about her happy place.
The intensity of the ponging increased, wiping out all other noise, and her hands began to tingle. She thought about camp, about that horse she learned to ride on named Tonto, about how ridiculous she thought the name was, but couldn’t help herself, his velvety nose was so sweet and he loved carrots….
“Okay, Taylor. Come on back to me now.”
Taylor opened her eyes. She was exhausted, and slightly relieved.
“How do you feel? Rate the emotions again, on the one to ten scale,” Willig said.
She thought about it. Maybe a six?
“Mmm…mokay.” Taylor said. Wow, was her voice working? She tried a few more words, but nothing came. Damn it.
“It’s okay, Taylor. You did great. We’re already seeing progress. EMDR is a wonder tool, and you’re responding to it well. We’ll go deeper tomorrow. But think about Sam now. Think about that moment in the attic. Does it hurt as much?”
She thought about it in astonishment. It was still there, the searing, awful pain of her friend’s hurt, but the sharp edges that tried to control her were muddled a little bit. Wow. She had to admit, that was impressive. She smiled at Willig, who smiled back.
“We’ll go through every step of that afternoon, and I promise you, we’ll get you back to normal in no time.”
Taylor hoped so. She stood and shook Willig’s hand. She couldn’t get over the sensation in her palms, and her ears were ringing. She pointed to her left ear and Willig smiled.
“Yeah, it might ring a bit for an hour or so. Just promise me this: if you have flashbacks of the day you were shot, revert yourself to the happy place. Don’t go trying to sort things out on your own. I’ll help you get through this, Lieutenant.”
Willig sounded so earnest Taylor couldn’t help but smile. She wrote How long? on her notepad, and Willig said, “Give me four sessions, then we’ll revisit. We can meet three times a week. Can you come back tomorrow? I like to overload you the first few times. Next visit we’ll jump in faster, and go deeper. Okay?”
Taylor grabbed her notebook.
Can anyone provide this kind of treatment?
Willig knit her brows for a moment. “Any qualified therapist who’s been trained. It’s not as uncommon a therapy as it was several years ago. Why, you thinking about cheating on me already?”
Might be going away for a bit. Just checking.
“Okay. See you tomorrow.”
Taylor nodded, and mouthed, “Thank you.”
“My pleasure, Lieutenant. This is what I do best.”
Taylor left Willig smiling in the middle of her office and went to meet Baldwin at the CJC’s entrance. All in all, she felt good about her chances of making it back. The EMDR had helped a bit.
She wondered, though, how much Willig would be willing to help if she found out the whole truth about that day.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sam pulled herself together and finished the afternoon’s work. She needed to talk to someone. She didn’t have many friends; it was hard to keep folks on her side when they found out she cut up dead people for a living. No matter how politely they tried to incorporate it into conversation, they eventually came to see her as a ghoul. She was used to it now. She tended to have people around who understood why she’d chosen to become a pathologist.
She and Taylor came from the same world: wealth and privilege. But unlike Taylor’s incendiary home life, Sam’s parents had loved her to the point of smothering. They were gone now, both dead much too soon, her father of liver cancer, her mother, Sam was fully convinced, of a broken heart, less than four months later. She missed them—their enthusiastic encouragement, their grounding force.
Her father had been an inventor, with an engineering degree under his belt and multiple patents, though he rarely would discuss what they were. He’d had something to do with the modern electrical plug and some little gadget Sam barely understood. Her mother used to have a glass of wine at parties and intimate that his inventions were in every house in the world. It had made him millions on top of his already hefty trust fund.
He’d been a quirky man, lively in a way Sam rarely saw from scientists. Jovial. Outgoing. Her mother had adored him. Sam’s mom liked to joke she was at Vanderbilt getting her MRS degree when she met Stan Owens.
Despite her parents’ social conditioning of their only daughter, Sam always felt apart. An outsider, distant from those around her. She was a quiet girl, fascinated with science, biology and genetics, and determined to be a doctor. She’d decided on her course when she was five. Right around the time she met Taylor.
Sam was a better debutante than Taylor, more interested in the niceties, the responsibilities that came with affluence. But where Taylor was tall and elegant and heedless of her own beauty, Sam had to work on hers, learning how to do makeup to enhance her looks, forever fighting her too-limp hair, carefully managing her diet and exercise regimen. She envied Taylor her effortlessness, wished she could go out without makeup and her hair tossed in a lazy ponytail. Oh, she probably could, but her mother’s face popped up just as she was walking out the door in her moments of cultural defiance—honey, just a little lipstick, maybe some blush. And why don’t you let your hair down? You look like a skinned rabbit with it pulled back so tight.
She was better off with people who couldn’t talk back. There were no awkward moments with the lifeless. No worry about how they perceived her.
Sam loved Nashville, and she loved Taylor. She looked at their relationship as a partnership on several levels—best friends, sisters and responsible for the city’s people. Taylor protected the living inhabitants of Nashville; Sam uncovered the secrets of its dead.
Right