Adermoor Cove: Atonement - 1. Chapter 1

I don’t want you here.

Those were the last words Nora Hardy’s son had said to her - and they stung like hell. She understood why he’d said them for she had more than earned them. But when your child spurned you, whether you brought them into this world yourself or you’d adopted them, for a mother there was no greater sense of shame.

She’d spent the last ten minutes sitting in her chair, either looking at the phone sitting on top of her desk or out at Indianapolis’s skyline. When she’d moved her business from a one-story brick building on Washington Street to this much bigger building, she’d perfectly picked the office with the best view. Such were the perks of being the owner of your own business, in this case, Hardy Behavioral Health Services. She’d started the company after becoming disgusted with places like Centerstone and Adult and Child, particularly because of how they treated their clientele and staff. It had taken blood, sweat, and tears to make it all happen.

She loved to look out at the sky and see all the buildings around her, and the people and cars far below. It gave her a sense of elevation, not just literally but metaphorically; a reminder of how far she’d come in her life. She could look out the window and forget about the horror of Lane’s early childhood or Craig’s death but sometimes, at unexpected moments, like now for instance, the memories she strove so hard to ignore crept up on her. When she was eating lunch; when she was taking a shower; when she was swimming her daily laps at the YMCA. When Lane called to tell her what state he was in for the moment after months of not hearing from him. Wondering if he’d been arrested, or worse, killed.

But not now. The view was ruined for her.

Because now he knew the truth about everything she’d done, the thing she’d kept from him. The night Charlie had caught her in the cabin had been a big blow but Lane, in his desperate need to stay in contact with her, had let it go. But now he was in Adermoor Cove, the place where he was from and the nightmare had started, and he’d met his aunt who was now dead.

I have to go there, she thought. There’s so much he doesn’t know, so much I’ve tried to protect him from.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a familiar knock at the door. She took a deep breath. "Come in." She already knew who it was.

Julian Redmore came into the room, closing the door behind him. He had a sheaf of paper in his hands, neatly stacked and held together by a paper clip. He closed the door behind him. "Hey, it's almost six o'clock. Are you about ready to go?"

She'd forgotten they were supposed to have dinner together. She forced a smile. "Just let me grab my coat."

                              …

Nora looked around the room with its sultry lighting and red-and-white checkered tablecloths draped over the tops of the table of Buca di Peppo. She hadn't been here since Craig was alive; she remembered Lane had just been a toddler, young enough that he had to sit in a high chair.

She remembered how his little toddler head, with its fine full head of black hair, had swivelled about, watching the people with bright eyed curiosity. She remembered how Craig and she had expressed their amusement (and the worry all parents possess with their first child) that Lane could be so quiet and attentive.

Perhaps it was a special kind of punishment, a knife twist to the heart, that Julian had picked this place. Knowing him, he'd picked it to be relaxing. Being here after Lane's phone call had her stomach twisted in knots. This was the perfect example of being haunted by ghosts of the past; but she didn't say anything because you had to confront those ghosts in order to move on with your life. I'm in my late forties. In three years I will be in my fifties. I need to move the fuck on.

"You okay?" Julian asked. His hazel eyes looked at her with concern from behind his glasses. "You haven't spoken ten words since we left your office."

Rising to the surface from the murky depths of the thoughts and memories which haunted her, Nora looked at him fully. He was a kind man, tall and broad shouldered, with big hands. With his brown hair now mostly peppered with grey, and matching goatee, which he always kept neatly trimmed, he looked like a scholar. But she could also see him - and even fantasized about him - as an adventurous archeologist like Indiana Jones. Only she found Julian to be more attractive and far more endearing than Harrison Ford, who Nora had never been a big fan of.

Julian was neither a scholar nor an adventurist though he had been on some adventures she was sure - he had served five years in Afghanistan in the '90s. He was, in fact, a therapist, who worked with traumatized women; many of these women had been traumatized, and were dealing with PTSD, after having been abused by men. This put Julian in a difficult spot because many of these women were initially distrustful of men - but he used it as a tactic to show that not all men were barbarians. Some of them could be compassionate and understanding. Julian was one of them, a personality trait that attracted Nora to him. The fact he was sensitive enough to be able to relate to women without sacrificing any of his masculinity only made him more attractive. Craig, who had been a carpenter, had been the same way.

Nora thought about lying: I'm just tired; it's been a busy day. But she wouldn't be able to pull it off convincingly for various reasons, the sole reason being that Julian and she knew one another far too well. They'd been friends since Nora had started her own business and Julian had come to work for her over a decade ago. For much of that time they had slept together, on and off - something that started off as a guilty pleasure for Nora and a distraction after the death of her first and only husband; now she was just too old for secret rendezvous so they were just friends.

In the end she decided, while far more painful, it was just easier to tell the truth. "My son called me about an hour ago."

"Lane?"

Nora nodded.

"How is he?" Julian had met Lane a few times when Nora's son was just a boy. For the most part she'd done her best to keep the two of them separated.

"He was very upset with me when he called." She grabbed her napkin and unwrapped it carefully, lining her silverware before her; she needed something to do with her hands to keep them from clenching into fists. "Did I ever tell you he's not Craig and mine's by blood? Craig was incapable of having children so we adopted." Nora damn well knew she had never told Julian this. For so long she had buried these facts, ignored them, and now she was digging them out it was like opening a door she couldn't shut.

Julian frowned. "No."

Nora nodded. "Craig and I went on vacation almost twenty-four years ago. I'd never seen his hometown." She recalled now, Craig hadn't liked to talk about it. Whenever she'd brought it up, back when she had been young and persistent, Craig would change the subject. One night, when she couldn't stand the secrecy anymore she demanded he tell her or else there would be hell to pay. Adermoor Cove, he'd said. I'm from a place called Adermoor Cove.”

"Finally we went there. It's where Craig was born and raised and it's where we adopted Lane. I guess he got in contact with the last of his blood relatives, Vanessa Stanton, and she passed away a few days after he met her. So he's very upset and quite understandably."

"Jesus," said Julian, and Nora was glad he didn't say more.

"I have to go to him," said Nora, voicing a thought she'd been toiling with since the phone call. "I have to be there for my son."

"So you're going to this...Adermoor Cove?" Julian said the name of the place as if it was a mysterious landmass no one had ever explored before.

Nora nodded, sipping at her ice water. She was grateful Julian wasn't paying attention to her hand, which was shaking. Truth be told the idea of going to Adermoor Cove terrified her. She knew the island wasn't like anything else in the world. There was an evil in that town and it had taken the life of her husband as well as the life of Lane's lover, Charlie.

"How long will you be gone?" Julian asked.

"I don't know. As long as I need to be. I have plenty of vacation time saved up so now is the perfect time to use it."

"Let me come with you."

She smiled grimly. "Sorry, Julian, but this is a family matter."

He exhaled, looking worried. "It's just I get this sense there's a lot you're not telling me." He reached across the table to take her hand and then drew it back when he realized what he was doing.

"You're right," Nora said as the waiter was coming up to the table to take their order, "there's a lot I'm not telling you. And it's for your own good."

                            …

Nora was busy the rest of the week making preparations for the trip to Adermoor Cove. She filled Phyllis, her assistant director, in on everything that needed to be done. In the back of her mind she realized Phyllis knew what to do and would take care of things while Nora was gone, but Nora wanted to make sure.

Several times Julian tried to talk Nora into letting him come with her and she refused him every time. She sensed this was something she had to do. A sense of urgency had taken root and was growing with each passing day. She had to get to Lane as quickly as possible. She couldn't afford to have Julian slow her down or get in the way, no matter how heroic and well meaning his intentions were.

On the day she was to depart on a flight for Maine, she packed enough clothes to last her a week. She'd already booked a room for a couple of nights at The Clam's Pearl Inn. It was hard to believe the inn was still around after all these years. Craig and she had stayed there for two weeks when they'd gone to his hometown two-and-a-half decades ago. She'd paid up the next two months rent. She realized she was going a little overboard but it seemed best to be prepared should she have to stay there for a longer period.

For several minutes she stood beside her bed, looking at the duffel bag and suitcase sitting on top of the comforter and thinking about the past. She raised her eyes finally, looked around the bedroom Craig and she had once shared. It had been ten years since the day he died.

How come I never left this place?

It was time to go; the cab would be here any second. She grabbed her bag and suitcase and stepped out into the hallway. The front door was just in sight, at the end of the hallway. On her right was the door into the bathroom.

It had taken years of therapy to be able to go into the bathroom without remembering the terrible night of Craig's death. Lane, blessfully, did not remember - she had seen to it that he wouldn't remember - but she always would. It had taken her even longer to be able to go down the stairs without seeing Craig's lifeless corpse sprawled awkwardly at the bottom, his legs bunched up and his head hanging to the side.

Now the shadows within the bathroom seemed to beckon to her. She turned her head reluctantly, afraid of what she might see, afraid she might see Craig bent over the tub, his hands submerged elbow deep in the water…

"No," Nora told herself firmly out loud. The sound of her own voice jarred her from the unforgiving grip of the past and lodged her, for the moment at least, back into the present. Lane Hardy, her beautiful son who had been through so much more than she had, was at Adermoor Cove, the place where the darkness came from.

She shifted her shoulders and forced herself to stand a little straighter. With all the lights in the apartment turned out, she stepped out into the hallway. In the apartment across from her she could hear a baby wailing, the murmur of a TV in another. The hallway smelled strangely of cat litter.

She did not give herself time to think about Craig as she climbed down the stairs. The cab was, indeed waiting for her, the engine idling. It was just now seven o'clock and already close to night, the sky a dark navy blue.

She put her luggage in the trunk and told the driver to take her to the Indianapolis airport. Seconds later they were driving through the night-streets of downtown Indianapolis, past the blissfully ignorant who were unaware of the supernatural forces that existed in this world.