Ted Dekker - The Bride Collector

The man followed her eyes. “I don’t see anyone. Who’s after you?”

“He is. The killer.” Panic crowded her thinking and she tried to stop it, but the voices were stampeding now.

“You can either come the easy way or we can make this difficult. But you have to come with me, young lady.” The cop stepped forward, hand extended. “Look, this is as much for your safety as anyone else’s. You almost got yourself killed crossing the road, they said. Please, don’t make this diff-”

“I can’t!” she cried, now fully fearful that she was abandoning Brad. “No, you don’t understand! I can’t, I can’t!”

His hand closed around her arm and she spun and was running before having time to think through her decision. Straight into the brush behind her. It tugged at her shirt and scratched her legs.

A hand grabbed her collar from behind and hauled her down. She cried out. She was flipped onto her back, then roughly over onto her belly.

“Stop!”

He pulled her arms behind her and slapped handcuffs over her wrists. She was yelling hysterically now and all she could think of was Brad. They’re going to kill Brad, the aliens, the killer, the demons are going to kill Brad. And the more she tried to explain, the louder and more incoherent her explanation became.

The cop was telling her to calm down, it would all be all right. He pushed her around the trees to a side street, where his partner waited in the police car. Together they muscled her into the back, slammed the door shut, and rode off.

It was the end, she thought, staring back at the park. They were all going to die. This was it. Once again her father was going to kill them all because she didn’t do what he said she had to do.

Aliens, demons, the killer, her father. It was all happening again.

The memory suffocated her. She slumped over on her side and began to moan. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

“You can’t what, Samantha,” a voice asked. “You can’t take your medication?”

“You can’t make me take medication. I can’t let him kill him!” A small inner voice suggested she tell them everything, but then the voice on the phone was in her ear demanding she tell no one, or he would kill Brad.

Paradise lay on her side and let her moan grow into a wail. She was a whore angel in a demon’s world and the aliens had finally captured her and were taking her to the hospital where her father waited with his gun to finish the job.

“Not the hospital!” she moaned. “Please, not the hospital.” They’d tied her to a bed and tried to kill her after her father had failed.

“We got a nut, not a druggie. She’s psychotic. Let’s take her to the mental health ward and let them make the determination.”

A fear deeper and more terrifying than the fear of facing the killer swept over her mind. You’re only as sick as your secrets.

In her tangled mind, going to the mental ward was like going to hell. And Paradise wasn’t ready to go to hell yet.

ALLISON RUMMAGED THROUGH the drawer with Andrea. Paradise had shed the flannel pajamas, which now lay in a heap on the floor, and put on something else before vanishing. If they could figure out what she was now wearing, the police stood a much better chance of finding her. Several major media sources had already agreed to broadcast her picture in the next news break; Temple was going live with the case.

They’d found the bottle of Xanax, a drug Paradise hated and rarely used-the only reason Allison allowed her to keep a few on hand. So what had frightened her into taking two of the five pills?

Of greater concern to Allison was the other medication Paradise would miss, a small dose of a psychotropic drug they had been calling a vitamin and slipping to Paradise for years now. Without it, Paradise would undoubtedly betray her own psychosis. Slowly, over the course of twenty-four months, they’d begun a process of trying to wean her off the medication, but without much success. Allison and the staff had operated under the agreement that no one would ever make mention of the medication-there could be no opportunity for Paradise to learn that she was on chemicals to control the symptoms of her schizophrenia.

If anyone could beat the illness, Allison thought, Paradise could, and she wanted the girl to be given every opportunity, including assumption, to do so. She was convinced that Paradise’s symptoms didn’t include hallucinations, and that her so-called ghosts were precisely that.

But trauma would likely force other psychotic symptoms to the surface, particularly given the extent to which she was unmedicated. If she was out there now, there was no telling what symptoms she might be experiencing.

“What’s missing?” she demanded.

Andrea was as nervous as a manic mouse. “I don’t know, I don’t know! Sorry. It’s my fault, it’s all my fault, Allison. She’s my friend and I let her go with that man. I tried to warn her, I tried to tell her that the only thing he wanted was to get-”

“Focus, Andrea!”

Normally she would never snap at the girl. But she’d lost her child, Paradise. Nothing about today was normal. Allison was taken aback by her own reaction to what had happened, a sense of utter loss, as if her whole world was about to crumble in on itself.

“Her yellow shirt isn’t here,” Andrea said, searching again.

Yellow shirt. Yes, of course, the pale yellow T-shirt, one of only four or five that Paradise favored!

Allison hurried over to the phone and called the laundry. “A yellow shirt, José. If there’s one down there call me back. Hurry.”

She hung up and ran to the wicker laundry basket in the corner. Opened it. Nothing. Good. Good, they might have narrowed this down.

“Ma’am.”

She spun to the door now filled with Roudy’s bow-tied frame. “What is it?”

“I would like to make an announcement.”

“What is it?” She didn’t have time for this.

“I have broken the case.”

“What do you mean? You’ve found her?”

“No. I know who the killer is.”

She let her hope fade. They really didn’t have time for this! “Please, Roudy, this isn’t the time to be…” She stopped herself. How many times had she encouraged them not to reject their gifts outright? “Never mind. Who is the killer?”

Roudy held up the drawing that Paradise had made late yesterday. Allison had given the drawing to him an hour ago when he demanded they turn the critical elements of the case over to him immediately, more to keep him occupied than with any hope he’d actually do something with it.

“It took me a while, seeing past the drawing itself to her intention. I’m quite familiar with the way police sketches are made, and once I was able to compare the-”

“Please, Roudy, get to the point.”

He looked at the drawing in his hand. “It’s none other than Quinton Gauld.”

Allison blinked. “Quinton? You mean our Quinton Gauld?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Quinton who?” Andrea asked. “Who’s Quinton?”

Roudy strutted into the room and pinned the drawing to the wall with the dramatic flair of one who’d solved world hunger. He pivoted on his heels. “One of our very own therapists, seven years ago. He left for greener pastures, as I recall.”

Allison stared at the picture. Could this be Quinton Gauld? “But Paradise was here then. She would have recognized him the moment she remembered.”

“Unless Paradise saw Quinton Gauld in her vision, but no longer remembers who he is.”

“You’re…” The thought was horrifying. “You’re suggesting she shut him out of her mind because of a bad memory connected to him.”

“It is the most natural conclusion for those with strong deductive skills.” He pointed at the picture as if this were a lecture and he the professor. “Quinton did something that terrified Paradise. Then he fled under false pretenses. Paradise has wiped the event from her mind, but now our villain is back to take his revenge and kill her once and for all.”