Prologue

Tessa Jamison counted the time so that she might arrive at a restful place when Death’s hand reached out for her own. Each second, minute, and hour, excluding those during which she slept, admittedly few, brought her closer to her inevitable meeting with Death. Surely, she would find peace, or possibly sheer nothingness, in death. If not peace, or a white noise of sorts, if the tenets of her Christian faith were as pure and true as she’d been brought up to believe, she would be reunited with the family she had slaughtered so callously.

Since her conviction ten years ago, the quote from the San Maribel News Press had haunted every single minute of her essentially lifeless existence in Florida’s Correctional Center for Women.

Slaughtered so callously. A mantra of sorts. Slaughtered so callously. The words drummed in her head like a rapid heartbeat. Images of Joel’s mangled body, the carnage, the horror of seeing her family.

Dead.

Joel’s body was unidentifiable by visual means, the coroner had stated.

Gone in the blink of an eye.

It wasn’t until three years after her imprisonment for the murders that the memory of the aftermath of their savage deaths emerged from her safe place—the dark confines hidden deep inside the protective corner of her subconscious. For years, Tessa’s mind refused to retrieve the image of their slain bodies. Lily pads. She recalled thinking of lily pads floating in the aqua-blue pool on the fateful day when she’d discovered their bodies. Like a fine French claret, sinewy ribbons spread throughout the aquamarine water, the tomb that held the last whisper of their lives. Their last thoughts. Their last heartbeats. Their last cries. Their understanding that this was indeed the end, that the finality of life was now death.

Tessa hated this part the most. She could not bear to think of their last moments as the dark shroud of Death engulfed them. Had they struggled? Had they cried? Or had they simply taken their final breaths, accepting what was to come as their fate?

These thoughts tormented her. Day and night, images of their bodies taunted her. Broken marionettes. Their limbs and arms askew, bloated, as decomposition began to set in. Later, she would recall the coroner testifying at her trial. Joel had died defending his daughters. His fingers and arms were covered in defensive wounds, and again, the fact that Joel was visually unidentifiable.

“It’s as if the victim didn’t even have a face,” the coroner had testified.

The testimony still had the power to cause her heart to race.

Tessa struggled to keep the bitter prison coffee down as the images assaulted her. Catching her reflection in the small, steel-like mirror hanging above the built-in desk, Tessa no longer recognized the woman she’d become. Her blond hair was now streaked with thick stripes of silver, her once-bright blue eyes were now as dull as the mop-water-colored prison walls that stared back at her. Ten years living, if you could even call it that, in a seven-foot-by-ten-foot cell could do that to a person. She stared at the steel hinges that held her single bunk to the wall. Her bed was a thin, blue-and-white-striped dingy mattress atop rusted springs that creaked with every twist and turn. And the worn gray wool blanket on the bed, which she’d learned to make with military precision, was nothing more than a nighttime battleground. Underneath that blanket she fought the demons that haunted her dreams at night and tormented her days. She’d adjusted to life in prison as well as anyone could under the circumstances, but the anger that grew deep inside her with each day spent behind bars was now barely containable. Ten years of incarceration for a crime she had not committed, of complete and utter hell, had infested and darkened her soul.

The clank of metal against metal, a shrill cry, a moan from someone in the depths of prison passion, were so common now that she hardly noticed them. Each day was the same as the thousand next and the one before it.

In the beginning, she’d simply curled up at the corner of her bunk at night, fearful of what might happen if she fell asleep. Given the nature of her supposed crime, she was immediately ostracized by the other inmates. Other than former cops, baby killers received the worst treatment inside prison.

Dinnertime was the worst. The other inmates’ chanting the words baby killer, baby killer greeted her as soon as she entered the utilitarian cafeteria each day. It wasn’t unusual for a spoonful of food to fly across the cafeteria, smacking her in the face, or to have a glob of instant mashed potatoes smashed in her hair as though she were nothing but a thing to torment. As hard as it was, Tessa refused to fight back. After a few years, she blended in, just like the others. She was a number, an inmate, a convicted murderer. She would die here in Florida’s Correctional Center for Women. No one would care; there would be no memorial service to honor the person she’d been. Nothing. She would be carted out in a pine box, and from there, she would most likely be buried in the state’s cemetery, where all the other inmates who had died were laid to rest.

Stop, she told herself. Stop! It was these thoughts that would kill her. Not the other murderers and drug addicts. Not the child molesters and rapists housed in the men’s prison across the road. No, she would not die at their hand, but her own, if she continued to allow her thoughts to return to that day, now almost eleven years ago.

She had died that day because since the moment she discovered the dead bodies of her husband and twin daughters floating in their pool, bobbing, up and down, like the red-and-white bobbers used by fishermen, she’d had no life.

Nothing would change the devastation of what her family had suffered. There was no going back. To this very second, she was as traumatized as she’d been the day the words guilty of murder in the first degree filled the courtroom. Nothing would ever bring her a moment of happiness.

Nor did she deserve it. If only she’d stayed home that weekend instead of racing to the mainland to prepare for an indefinite stay with the girls.

The memory of that last day was all too clear to her now, very clear, having emerged in bits and pieces during her ten years in prison. If only she could turn back the hands of time.