Mary Ellen Smith, dressed in simple linen skirt and cotton blouse, stepped out into the moonlit garden. Her loosely knit cotton sweater had deep pockets and she reached into them now. One hand tightening around a slip of paper and the other the locket she swore she would leave behind.

            She did not even glance back at the small cape-style home where her three young children slept. Her thoughts were not spared on the man to whom she had been married these twelve years hence. It was as if, in her mind, she was stepping from a world that was never really hers and into the one she was meant to find. She hastened out the back gate, carefully oiled by her industrious husband only last week, and so made no sound as she stepped clear of the property line her husband could claim. As she did so, a shiver ran through her. She was well and truly clear of him now.

            Mary ran hands, shaking with anticipation, through her long copper hair to smooth it. She had left it down, unbound, as instructed. Taking a deep breath of the air so tinted with the smell of fall leaves, Mary thought of new beginnings. As she walked the mile or so through the woods, she did not think of anything in particular. Her feet were moving with a sureness that a magnet might move toward steel, for she was just the same. She was pulled inexorably forward. The river lay glittering in the faint moonlight up ahead. Each step made the view clearer. A low boat drifted into view and one shape, a man’s large form, was all it took to fill her head with images and sights and sounds. It was like she had come awake suddenly.

Her step did not falter, her grace was clear as the man watched his woman approach the edge of the river. He sensed her excitement from one hundred feet away. Her nearness only increased the sensation and throbbed through the air, buffeting him as the waves might. He did not make a move, but he controlled the boat effortlessly. The skiff touched land. She knew to leap from the small dock there and did not seem to hesitate as many would do in such near dark.

He clasped her hand in his own as she alighted and then pulled her next to him in the close bench. Their faces were turned toward each other and could not seem to pull away. He laid a possessive kiss on her small nose and then she laid her head against his shoulder as they turned the boat back out into the current. Some time later, as the boat glided along, that same small smile was still on Mary’s pallid face as her blood leaked out of the gape in her throat. She was alone in the boat, with no trace of another.

Chapter One: Sight

Michaela came awake with a gasp. Goddamnit. That dream again. On a curse that would shock her grandmother, she sat up and threw off the quilt, now tangled around her limbs. What the hell made her dream of that woman so often? She did not know her, to be sure, since her mother had left when she and her sisters were still so very young.

Triplet girls, her identical sisters were always the source of such curiosity and fascination at every party. Josephina and Antonia seemed to love the attention, both of them paid special attention to their dresses and how they were perceived. Michaela did the best she could to keep up with her sisters, but rarely did she feel genuine. Eventually, the sisters were able to go their own ways and begin their lives. Of course Josie and Tonya didn’t go far. They went to schools in state, to be nearer to their father and grandparents and then settled back in town, sharing the same room in their childhood home and starting work.

Josie was a middle school teacher and was married quickly to her childhood sweetheart, Jack Parker. Tonya and Tony, were engaged, again, and scandalizing the town most nights. Tony’s family owned the local eatery and watering hole. In their small town it was the place to get dinner and a glass of wine or local ale. Still, Tonya and Tony played out their tumultuous affair throughout the establishment like it was their stage, much like they had played the leads in “Taming of the Shrew” their sophomore year of high school. Michaela had gone off to school in San Francisco, far from the small Maine town. She found it to be familiar in so many ways- weather, friendly people, but far different in the people. The anonymity was comforting. She could be herself. Still, after school she returned to New England and chose to live only a few hours away in Boston.

Michaela chose to pursue criminal justice and adolescent psychology. Her hope was that she could counsel young victims, even as she knew she and her sisters had not been. Her father, Ed was a kind man. He had done the best he could. His parents had moved in and helped him with the triplets until they were old enough to only need occasional care. Then they bought the house behind Ed’s so they shared a large outdoor yard for the girls to roam free. The tall, cedar fence had been as much protection as it was a deterrent from leaving. The gate nearest the river was padlocked, permanently.

Michaela, of course, had found loose boards and loosened them further and then snuck out when she was only nine years old. She wandered down to the river, it was as if she was drawn to it. When her father found her, Michaela was about to climb into an old row boat. The sound her father made was somewhere near a cry of rage and one of heartbreak. It startled the young girl so much she pitched forward, smacking her chin on the bench. The blood barely spilled onto the old, stained wood before her father pressed his wadded up sweatshirt to the wound and then sped back to the house. She still had a scar. Twelve stitches, but no one ever spoke of the cause.

Michaela, at first, had tried to apologize to her father, but he wouldn’t, couldn’t hear her.

“Michaela, just promise me something,” he implored as he drove their station wagon at frantic speed to the local hospital, “Promise me, stay away from that cursed river. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Daddy.” Her eyes filled with tears as she held her head still, wanting to nod in agreement, but unable to with her father’s sweatshirt held tight as it was.

“I don’t want you to mention this to Josie and Tonya, okay? You fell and split your chin on the garden box by Gran and Gramps. You were never by that river, do you understand? You disobeyed me and so I am asking you this much.” He fell silent; the sound of the road and the murmur of the radio’s low level the only sound for several moments. Just before her father pulled to a stop in the Emergency Parking lot, Michaela had forced the word, “Okay” from her lips. She barely squeezed the sound past the lump in her throat.

            When the doctor was sewing her up finally, she allowed tears to silently course down her cheeks. Her father was sitting outside the curtain, as instructed, and the doctor pressed an old-fashioned handkerchief to her hand once he finished. Michaela had taken it, wiped her face and at the doctor’s kind gesture, folded it into her pocket. That handkerchief was like her talisman, her strength. To this day, when she let herself have a good cry- not too often and only if necessary, she felt comforted by that small cotton square.

            Still, that was not the only time Michaela had done something against her father’s wishes. It didn’t harm him if he didn’t know, Michaela felt. So she snuck out to go to parties, smoked a few times and may have kissed Michael Tucker under the bleachers and in his car and anywhere else private she could find. Once high school ended though, Michael, a year older, had gone off to college and left Michaela behind without much of a second thought, it seemed. Michaela and Michael, names didn’t go together anyway without sounding like a Broadway musical about transvestites. She moved on and her sisters still didn’t bring his name up, six years later. Some things were best left alone.

            Michaela had never been much good at leaving things alone though. If she were being honest with herself, she would admit that she thought of Michael more often than she would like. She had dreamed of him as well. He would come to her, dressed in a soft grey t-shirt and his favorite battered jeans, the last outfit she had seen him wearing, and he would apologize to her over and over. Michael’s strong hands would cup her face gently and he would stare into her eyes.

“Michaela, my love, I am so sorry… Please forgive me.” He moved closer to kiss her. She could feel his breath on her fluttering eyelids.

Then she would wake up. Goddamnit. Michaela didn’t know if she was so livid because she woke up before kissing him or just pissed because her subconscious was betraying her. She prided herself on her self-control in all matters. Her dreams, however, seemed to be elusive and as rebellious as she, herself, was.

Michaela glanced at the clock, finally realizing she was not going back to sleep. 4:15am. Well, it wasn’t 6:00am, but if she was up, she was up. After straightening the covers and throwing on her old grey hoodie to defend her icy limbs from the morning chill, Michaela headed directly to the coffee pot. No good deed ever happened before coffee, that was her motto. Starting the strong brew gave her a few moments to stand idle. She used that time to pop toast in the toaster and look out her apartment window.

Michaela was renting the second floor in-law apartment from a sweet elderly lady, Mrs Quince. Mrs Q, as she preferred to be addressed, was a widow. Her husband had died some twenty years prior, just after their 50th wedding anniversary. That must have made Mrs. Q about… Michaela never could figure. A hundred? Yet, Mrs Q moved with a feline grace. She was always dressed and looking cheery. Her kitchen was spotless and she always had water for tea handy, with cookies on standby in her battered old tin container. Michaela found herself downstairs often enough, usually as she had just come in to get the mail in the front hall and Mrs. Q would ask her in. Raised so close to her own grandparents, Michaela could hardly refuse. And so, no matter how much paperwork or cleaning or whatever else that needed to be done, Michaela would sit with Mrs. Q and have “tea time”, as the elder lady called it.

Michaela tried very hard to like tea. Mrs. Q made her tea especially strong and with an old-fashioned set up that had Michaela fishing leaves from her teeth for an hour afterward. Blech! Still, her cookies were nothing short of a miracle so—you take the good cookies with the bad tea, Michaela figured.

Michaela’s apartment was not much to speak of, in a design sort of way. She had darling curtains and a little settee with her treasured books on an antique set of shelves. The décor and furnishings were all Mrs. Q. Michaela could only claim the books, her most constant companions, as her part of the space. Her efficiency kitchen was used only when food was necessary, which was known to happen. She had the tiniest stove known to man. It only had two burners one behind the other. Michaela had her inherited copper kettle on one and the other was used to heat food. She had never used the small oven below. If she wanted to bake, she suppressed that arsonist urge and just went downstairs to Mrs. Q. Her sisters had decreed her a “kitchen nightmare” and only allowed her to stir and watch while they baked. Apparently, the baking gene was missing from Michaela’s dna chain.

It was just as well. Could you see a tough detective, well a self-proclaimed one anyway, fighting crime and baking cookies? The thought made Michaela shudder as she looked out her window. The kitchen light made the glass in front of her a reflection instead and for a moment, Michaela looked at herself. Red hair a tumbled mess, eyes slightly unfocused with just a trace of shadows beneath them, Michaela could see her fatigue even as she chose to ignore it. She had been hired a year and a half ago by the Suffolk County Sherriff’s office to assist in child protection cases. In that short time, Michaela had seen enough of parenting to know she might never want to be one. Children with injuries as simple as a bruise or as heinous as burns, gunshots or worse were a constant in Michaela’s cases. The injuries Michaela worried over the most, however, were the ones no one could see.

When a child flinched from you, lashed out at you, and refused any comfort at all- that child, Michaela knew, was not just injured where you could see and heal, but held injuries under the surface. Those were the hardest to treat. These children were the hardest to see and the ones Michaela thought about long after their paperwork was filed.

She would do an intake, or record the child’s statement if they could make one, and then record all the information and a fellow counselor would photograph any visible injuries. The medical staff would then conduct a thorough exam and Michaela recorded the findings. Some were short examinations, yet others were too long for the children. It was tough to see a child shivering and alone with, sometimes, a room full of strangers. The child had been through enough, but this was the process they must do to find and hopefully convict whoever hurt the child.

            Michaela tried to explain everything and make sure the child knew no one would hurt him or her while they were conducting the exam. The staff she worked with were kind and patient and extremely well-trained. There was no way anyone would be allowed near her children, should they be otherwise. Unfortunately, the staff had seen many, many cases and was overburdened with even more each day. Michaela felt determined to do all she could.

            Coffee and toast in hand, Michaela shuffled to her one fancy Mrs. Q chosen sofa and pulled the hand-knitted Mrs. Q created throw over her long, bare legs. She had turned on the television, more to fill noise and distract the melancholy of her thoughts away, when she saw something that had her pausing in mid-bite of toast. It was a National Morning Broadcast “Where in the World Weather”. Looked like another cool and rainy day was headed to the city, but what paused Michaela was a woman in the background.

Michaela could see over the weatherperson’s shoulder a woman, speaking into her cell and looking very agitated. The camera had just caught her pacing in the background in front of the public transit doors that would take her away, somewhere. Michaela hit the mute button. She did not need to hear the woman talking about precipitation or wind speed. She needed to see that other woman, now turning away to enter the subway station, apparently not noticing she had been caught on camera, as it were.

            Michaela felt as if the air had been sucked from the room. She could not blink or look away or move any other muscle for a long moment. What the? How was this… Who else could… Should she… questions swirled in her mind and refused to complete themselves and bumped into each other mercilessly. The ringing of the phone snapped her from her muted silence. Without thinking, with nerveless fingers, Michaela answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Michaela? Did you see?”

“Yes.”

“How is this possible? What is going on? Is it really…” Tonya trailed off. A moment later call waiting beeped. Michaela knew it was Jo. Somehow, all three triplets were watching the same early morning weather broadcast and all three had seen the unmistakable woman in the background. All three of them had seen her.

Their mother.

            As Michaela patched Jo into the conversation, Jo and Tonya began to talk at once, yet never completing their sentences, or rather questions.

“Did you see her-“

“Could that have been-“

“How is this even- “

“It isn’t, but she”

“Michaela? Michaela, are you there?” She had been silent during these last few seconds. Minutes? An hour? Michaela didn’t know how much time had passed. Her whole world had stopped so why did it matter if she knew the time. Time was just a foolish human obsession to mark the hours until your death, Michaela thought to herself. Snapping out of her reverie, her name being shouted in her ear by both of her sisters, was tough. Numb was better than pain, Michaela knew.

“Michaela, come over at once. We have to discuss. Come to Jo’s. Her hubby won’t mind. See you in a while. Micky, did you hear me?” It was Tonya’s use of her childhood nickname that finally broke her free from her shock.

“Okay.” She finally replied, with a voice so soft, so toneless her sisters almost did not hear her answer.

“Micky, will you be okay to drive?”

“What? Oh. Yes. I’m fine. I will see you in a minute.” Michaela responded absent-mindedly.

“Michaela! You don’t live in town anymore, remember? Hey! Can you stop acting so weird? You are freaking me out right now!”

“Calm down, Tonya. That isn’t helping anyone. I know you are scared, too. Let’s just discuss this rationally. We are three adults, after all.” Jo was ever practical of the three. Michaela was tough and a bit wild. Tonya was creative and kind, though a bit prone to drama and Jo was the level-headed of the three. She was most like their father, Ed. “Now, Micky, listen. Let’s talk about what we saw.”

“Not what. Who, Jo. Damnit! Who!” Michaela’s numbness evaporated instantaneously as her emotions exploded into anger, leaving painful shards in her heart. “It was her. It was Mom. How the hell it is possible, I can’t say, but you saw her, Tonya saw her and I saw her. Damnit, Daddy probably saw her too.”

“How the hell is this possible?” Tonya’s usual pitch elevated a notch, as if she were in a match with Michaela to see who could out-scream the other.

“Okay, listen. I know we are all freaking out right now. There has to be a reasonable explanation for this.”

“Really, how?” Tonya asked, thick with sarcasm.

“I don’t know. It… sounded like the right thing to say. I always see crazy things on Castle or …”

“Scooby-doo? Jesus, Jo. This isn’t your elementary school! This is real life and in REAL LIFE there aren’t things like on TV, ok? How could she- how is it possible to see her like that…?” Tonya’s sass began to sputter out.

“Michaela, what do you think? I mean, what are the chances that we would all be home and see something like this? It seems crazy coincidental, right?”

“Well, for the last thirty minutes I have been packing and am now… walking out the door. I will see you two at Jo’s house in a few hours.” Before either of her sisters could utter another word, Michaela, now composed and laser-focused, disconnected and pulled the door shut behind her. The lock clicking into place had a certain finality to it. Michaela walked down the stairs and couldn’t shake the feeling she would not be back to her beloved walk-up. Shaking her head, she started her little Suburu wagon and pulled out of the space and onto the street.

            The image of her mother, Mary was burned into Michaela’s brain. Even if she had not seen the woman in twenty-one years, the instant her face had appeared on the television, Michaela felt a deep recognition. It was as if she heard a bell. Though she knew it sounded ridiculous, she also felt so certain that the woman was their mother, that she was unquestioning her trip all the way up north. Over the next four hours, she called in to her boss and took a leave of absence, asked a colleague to check her mail and turned over cases. She was luckily not in the process of any new ones. It was as if the universe… again, Michaela got an eerie feeling and shook herself. No.

            Still, there was something strange at work here. She could sense it.