Lizzie Borden by Elizabeth Engstrom

Author:Elizabeth Engstrom [Engstrom, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: lizzie borden historical thriller suspense psychological murder
Publisher: IFD Publishing
Published: 2011-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

JUNE

Emma lay in bed, head pounding, body aching. She slowly, painfully turned on her side and saw the breakfast tray that Lizzie brought still on the bedstand. The thought of food nauseated her, yet she knew she should eat. She needed the strength. She needed lots of strength just to heal.

With a thin, trembling hand, Emma grasped the side of the mattress and pulled herself into somewhat of a sitting position. Then she reached out and took a cold piece of toast that had been spread with jam. It looked awful. She took a bite, then another. It tasted as sour as her breath. She put the toast back, swallowed with difficulty, then slid back beneath the covers.

Her arms looked stringy and pale, and a large, round bruise puffed on one shoulder.

She was afraid to look into a mirror.

She’d been home from New Bedford for a week, and still she was hardly able to move. Since undressing with Lizzie’s help and getting into bed, she hadn’t been up yet, except to urinate some dark, foul smelling stuff into the slops pail. Her hair felt greasy and her scalp itched. Her teeth were furred and the bleached and sun-dried sheets rasped her sensitive skin.

“I’ll never go back there,” she said softly to herself. “This was the worst. This time I mean it. I’ll never go back.” And yet, deep in her heart, she knew that she was as likely to stop herself, once she was riding high on the fury that was her mother’s legacy, as she was likely to stop a slow-moving freight train. The lunacy was beyond her control.

She always went to New Bedford with agitated anticipation. She began to drink alone in her room and then she would suddenly “wake up” and find herself in some tavern or another, some loud, boisterous woman’s voice coming from her lips. Sometimes she would “come aware” back in her hotel room, and sometimes she would awaken again in someone else’s hotel room or house, and sometimes she would awaken and there would be many people around her. And each time she would have no knowledge of where she was nor memory of how she got there. But a little more liquor seemed to soothe the stomach-clenching fear of being out of control. And it wouldn’t be long again before she awakened somewhere else, in some further state of disrepair.

Somehow, it always came back to the same thing. Somehow, she always found someone to beat her. Always.

Maybe a trip to New Bedford wasn’t really a trip to New Bedford without being beaten silly, she thought with a wry grin that hurt her head. Or, more likely, the trip wasn’t over until she could barely walk, what with being sick half to death from a two- or three-week binge, not to mention the physical damage done to her by person or persons unknown.

This time was the worst by far. She’d awakened in her hotel room, dried blood smeared on her sheets and pillowcases. She’d dressed somehow, covering her face with her darkest veil.

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