Fingers were on me. I opened my eyes to see Harrison Cooper’s face near mine. He was taking my pulse. He saw me looking at him before I could open my mouth.
“You’re okay,” he said simply, as if this were the most normal situation in the world. “You’re nose is broken and you’re dehydrated but you’ll live.”
My eyes scanned the room. He was alone.
“Sit up,” he added.
I did as he asked. The plastic and burlap fell to the side and I realized I was sitting in my underwear.
“My clothes were wet. She poured water on me but didn’t let me drink any.” I said as a way of explanation.
Modesty should have dictated that I cover myself but I didn’t have the energy. He was holding only a small pen light similar to the one I had used myself so I didn’t see the blanket until he covered me with it. Then he handed me a bottle of water.
“Drink it slowly,” he warned.
I didn’t listen. I pulled off the cap and chugged at the bottle. The water cascaded over my tongue and ignited a greed for more. I tipped the bottle as far as it would go. The water spilled down over my face until Harrison took it from me.
“Easy. You’ll get sick. Sip it.” He handed it back to me.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
His eyes met mine and I saw that he was weary. “I have no choice.”
“You have a choice. Let me go.”
“I can’t.”
“And you’re willing to go to jail for murder?”
A small sarcastic laugh escaped his lips. “You have no idea. Drink some water. I need to take the bottle with me.”
“No.” I held it to me. There was still a quarter of a bottle left and it was cold.
“I can’t leave it here, Mackenzie. It’ll only make things worse for all of us. If she knows I brought it to you I won’t be able to come here alone again. The blanket is one thing, but the water is something else all together.”
“How can you stand by and let her do this? What is wrong with you?”
He ran his hands through his hair. “It’s very complicated.”
“What’s she going to do with me? Kill me like she killed James? “
He looked slightly startled by my words. “She’s angry right now. I’m hoping she’ll calm down enough to listen to reason. That’s why I brought you the water. I don’t want you to die before she comes to her senses.”
“Are you listening to yourself?”
He stood up. “It’s so complicated…you see, you know too much. That’s part of it. I don’t know how to get around that.”
“But I don’t. I know that Nick had a brother that disappeared. Cora probably killed him but I don’t have any proof of that and I have no idea why she hated him. Nick probably knew but he never told me anything. I know that Cora might have planned the accident that killed my husband but I still don’t understand how. And I certainly don’t have any proof of that either. I do know that she wanted me dead long before I set foot in Philadelphia so my being here in this room has nothing to do with what I know.” I said it all in one long breath and then took a sip of water.
Harrison held the small light to the side so that it didn’t shine in my face. “It started so long ago, before you were married to Nick, before you were even born. You’re just an unfortunate casualty, but you’re right that she wanted you, lets just say, out of the way. Once she found Nick she wasn’t thinking rationally. She wanted him home and he wouldn’t come. Then she became furious and blamed you.”
“Did she think that if she hurt me that Nick would be more inclined to come back here?” I shook my head. “Wouldn’t that make him run even farther away?”
Harrison surprised me by taking a seat near me on another bag of peat. “You didn’t really know your husband, did you? If he knew that Cora was responsible for hurting you in any way he would have come running back here as fast as he could.”
“To do what? Not to embrace her. It would have been in anger and outrage. And it might have made him angry enough to start talking about things that happened in his childhood.”
Harrison’s head was moving back and forth. “Never. And all Cora wanted was for him to come back here. In anger, in love. It made no difference. Once he came through those doors, he never would’ve left.”
“And why is that?” I was incredulous.
He looked at me. “Cora and he had this bond. They were connected. Like different parts of the same person. He cut off all contact. He couldn’t talk to her because he knew it would start all over again. He knew it. And it was starting again, even with just a few letters between them. This was where he belonged. And it’s a very hard place to escape from once you’re here. I know that for a fact.”
“Is this the bullshit that Cora’s been filling your head with? You’re all insane. He may have come back here, I don’t know, but there’s no way he would’ve stayed. No way. Not unless Cora locked him in one of these rooms. And this is all empty speculation anyway. Nick is dead but I’m not. Are you going to stand by and let her kill me too?”
Harrison rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “This has been going on for so long. It’s a snowball. You may not make it out of here alive but I’ll do the best I can for you. Maybe the best I can do is convince her to keep you here. But at least you’ll be alive.”
A chill ran up my spine. “Keep me here for how long? For the rest of my life?” I looked at the small damp room. “Kill me now.” We were both silent and I expected that he would get up to leave but he didn’t. I wasn’t sure why.
“This is such a mess.” His voice was soft.
“Yes it is.” I nursed my water in tiny sips. God knew when I’d get any more.
“Such a mess.”
Maybe he needed someone to confess to, to ease his conscience. “What is this all about?” I asked. My curiosity won out.
“It started before Cora married Bradford. That’s when it started. Cora’s father was a horrible man.”
“So your sister tells me.”
He glanced up at me. “Virginia was undoubtedly kind in her assessment. But Cora was a different person then.”
“Ginny said she was always strange.”
“Her father made her strange. But she was always different with me. It sounds silly, in a way, but I understood her. I saw it all. Sometimes from a distance. And…..” His voice trailed off, “sometimes from too close…”
“So what happened?”
He looked over at me and rubbed his face with his hand. “He was the most awful man…” He made a face. “Like he would find her weakness and then Bam. Use it against her. It got worse as she got older but she learned to become more careful. More guarded.”
“And he made her marry Bradford.”
Harrison nodded “He wanted to consolidate the money. Keep it all together. It made sense in a business sort of way and it had been the original plan from the time Cora was just a little girl. Joseph Whitfield and Cora’s father had started this business together. Her father had an uncanny business sense. He pulled all his money out of the stock market in twenty-eight and reinvested it. Whitfield died. Left his business interests to Bradford and Edward.” Harrison was staring off into space as if he were reliving all of this.
“Did Cora even like Bradford?”
He looked up at me. “That wasn’t important. She really didn’t have a choice. She tried to put off the marriage but her father gave her a deadline. She had to marry Bradford before she turned thirty. But…”
“But what?”
“She and I had a relationship.” He was silent for a few moments waiting for me to understand the full implication. “And it didn’t stop when she got married.”
“Oh.”
“It was a way for us to get back at her father for everything. He could tell her whom to marry but he couldn’t stop us from being together.”
“And he never knew?”
“No…well, probably at the end.”
“Do you think you should be telling me all of this?”
The little light played on the opposite wall. “Why not? I’ve been walking around with this for years. I could never tell anyone, but you’re different.” He shined the light in my eyes. “You’re not going anywhere.”
I could feel the corners of my eyes burning. He was my last, best hope. He had to let me go. “No. I don’t want to hear it.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re kind of a captive audience.” I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. “So we kept our relationship going. I had finished medical school and was doing my residency. It wasn’t the best of circumstances but I was busy. Every so often Cora and I would talk about running away but of course it never happened. Then Cora got pregnant.”
I sat straight up. I had one of those moments in life when all the pieces of a complex puzzle fall into place. “Nick?”
“Yes. Nick. I was upset but Cora was so happy. I didn’t want another man raising my son but to Cora it was the perfect thing to get back at her father.” He laughed. “You see, her father would never know that he wasn’t Bradford’s. And Nick would inherit all of it.” He started laughing even harder. “All of it, and he was mine. Can you think of anything funnier?” I stared at him. He was doubled over he was laughing so hard.
“And how do you know he wasn’t Bradford’s? You had blood tests done?”
The last little laughs died in his throat. “I thought of that but blood tests wouldn’t have helped. Bradford and I had the same blood type. O positive. But Cora knew. She just knew, She’d timed things carefully with Bradford. She had to have some relations with him. She couldn’t just end up pregnant but they weren’t exactly together that much. He didn’t even really live here.”
“And you’ve based your entire life on something as unpredictable as the rhythm method? And you’re a doctor?” Men amazed me.
“Nick was mine. Like I said, we were together all the time. Do you think I’m an idiot?” His voice was edged with anger. “Anyway, things were good. It wasn’t the best of circumstances but I learned to live with it. But I wasn’t prepared to live my life like that forever. So after Nick was born I asked her to leave Bradford for me for once and for all, to give all of it up, and she refused. Eventually I had no choice…” He stopped and said nothing for a few minutes.
My head was resting on the wall behind me. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. That’s why Cora kept saying Nick was a Monroe and belonged here and not with Bradford. He really had no blood ties to the Whitfield’s at all. That’s what all of this was about. Money, inheritance, family name.
“I met this woman at the hospital and I decided to make a real life for myself. I had that right. I gave Cora a chance for us to be a real family and she made her choice. I decided to cut off all contact with her and got married.”
I thought about what he was saying. Ginny told me that Cora had had a breakdown when Nick was a year and half old. When Harrison finally left her for good?
I sat up. “And how did Cora take that?”
“Not well. We moved out to Chadds Ford, to put some distance between us, not that I could ever forget Cora but I tried to put it all behind me. Cora fell apart. Virginia begged me to come back and talk to her. She wouldn’t let Nick out of her sight, she holed herself up in her room with that boy, she started talking to herself, living in her own world, but there was nothing I could do. If I went back I knew I’d never have the strength to leave. Margaret, my wife, deserved better than that. And then Cora got pregnant again.”
“James. He was Bradford’s?
“She wasn’t happy, let’s just say that. She tried to get rid of the baby but it didn’t work. That baby ruined all her plans.” He was shaking his head back and forth. “She only needed one son, and she had one. She hated her father so much and passing Nick off as Bradford’s was such sweet revenge.”
“Her father figured it out, didn’t he?”
Harrison looked over at me quickly. “Why do you say that?”
“Because he left the bulk of his assets to James. There had to be a reason.” I swilled the water around in the bottle.
“Oh, you saw the will.”
“Yes.”
“Her father wasn’t a stupid man. Cora treated them so differently he knew there had to be a reason. Her father asked her outright but, of course, she denied it and there was no way to prove it, they weren’t doing DNA testing yet, so what could he do?”
“I guess Cora was pretty upset when she saw the will.”
He ran his hands through his hair. “More than upset. She was…inconsolable. Ranting, throwing things. It took both Bradford and me to hold her down physically. She was trying to go after James.” His head dropped. “Cora lost what little control she had.”
“And then what?” Curiosity had taken over.
Harrison laughed. “Eventually she pulled herself together. It took some time but she calmed down and came to see…”
I stood up to stretch my legs. “That if James were eliminated, Nick would get all the money. Is that why she beat him and eventually killed him?”
I was standing over him. If I moved quickly I could make it to the door and through the tunnel before he could catch me. I didn’t care if I was in my underwear. I didn’t have any idea if it was day or night out but it didn’t matter. I started to subtly lean in that direction with the intention of sprinting to the door when it opened. My heart sank.