The Sarah Roberts Series Vol. 7-9 Read online

  THE SARAH ROBERTS SERIES

  VOL. 7-9

  Three Novels in One

  by

  Jonas Saul

  The Vigilante

  by

  Jonas Saul

  Chapter 1

  Friday, February 29, 2008 …

  Death is the ultimate reset.

  The cycle had continued day after day, year after year. Birth, then death, resetting everything but never fixing anything. Healing the errors could only happen with a reset. Nothing could be gained, nothing allowed to move forward without the reset, which would make things right.

  The lessons in the healing were what made it all possible for him. It was why he did it. What he offered his mannequins was something no one ever offered them before. No one was willing to offer it after either.

  Silence. Absolute. A quieting of the soul. Then the reset.

  He gathered his tools, placed them in the black medical bag, then folded up the thick plastic sheet they had lain on and stuffed it inside a separate duffel bag. He took one last look around to make sure he had removed any proof that he had ever been there. It wouldn’t do to be found out. He wouldn’t be able to offer new dolls a reset if light was shed on his practices. And there were so many more dolls to offer silence to.

  Both mannequins in the basement of the abandoned farm, thirty miles from the northern tip of Toronto, lay on the dirty floor as if the cold didn’t bother their exposed skin. A winter storm had blown in overnight, covering his tracks from the previous evening. By the time he finished his work and departed for good, the storm that still dropped a wrath of snow from the dark morning sky would obliterate any new tracks within an hour.

  “My little pretty ones,” he whispered, not wanting to wake either mannequin. “The lessons I teach are for the enlightened. And now you are. No longer will I pay the price. Nor will you, because now you’re both exalted.”

  He zipped the medical bag and slung it over his shoulder. After grabbing the duffel bag, he walked away.

  At the large wooden doors, he unhooked the chains that bound them and fastened the locks to the handles. Even these tools would come with him. No one could ever see this farm as anything but an abandoned plot of land with broken buildings and the spirit of the landowner extinguished long ago.

  When he pulled the doors open, a blast of cold wind and snow assaulted him. His eyes half closed, he pushed into the snow and popped the trunk of his vehicle with the key fob. After dropping his bags in, he slammed it shut and struggled through the knee-deep snow to the car door.

  The thought of being stuck out here, his Range Rover unable to forge a path to the main highway, caused him concern. Instead, he focused on his destiny and how every four years on the leap year, he had fulfilled it without mistake or discovery. This was what he was meant to do. If that wasn’t true, then why had success been his for the taking?

  The mannequins needed the reset in their lives. There was no other way.

  There simply wasn’t.

  Maybe next time, he would help more than just two.

  After warming up the vehicle, he returned to the inside of the barn where he found respite from the bitter wind. A shudder coursed through him. He brushed the fresh snow off his shoulders and stomped his feet near the door’s edge, then scuffed the shoe prints.

  After making his way back through the barn, careful to step around the snow piled under holes in the broken wooden roof, he descended the stairs into the basement where cattle were once milked and slaughtered. The back door looked out onto a large green field now covered in a white blanket.

  His mannequins hadn’t moved. They were nestled together, limbs appearing disjointed, as if an angry child had tried to break the arms off her oversized Barbie Doll. They lay inside his homemade prison cell, built in the basement of his home and welded together here before his mannequins arrived. He needed to be certain that upon his exit, neither mannequin would walk, or crawl, away. The small metal prison assured that.

  After removing their clothes, he had laid them on their stomachs on the cold earthen floor, bits of straw caught under their light weight, their skin gone to pale in the chill.

  “Why are you mannequins so thin?” he asked out loud. “How could the women of today ever match this glorious size?”

  But he knew why. They hadn’t eaten in a week. When they had arrived, he’d removed their tongues so neither mannequin could talk, which meant they couldn’t protest, ask for anything, or scream for help.

  It was all about the reset. Putting things right by putting them in their proper place. In the end, he had done the right thing. He knew it and could live with that. These two represented six mannequins so far that he’d helped reset in the previous eight years.

  To date, none of his mannequins had ever been discovered. At least not as far as he knew.

  But now it was time to leave.

  “Goodbye,” he whispered in the ear of the blonde mannequin. He thought he detected movement behind her eyes, but dismissed it as imagination.

  He moved to the brunette doll, knelt over her shoulder and whispered in her ear, “It has been a pleasure allowing you to see the error of your ways. Sleep well my beauties. Goodbye.”

  This doll’s eyes moved.

  He got to his feet fast and stepped back.

  How?

  One eye opened and searched for him. Without the strength needed to manipulate her neck muscles, she struggled to find him.

  He moved into her line of sight. As he did, the one eye watching him widened as far as the lids allowed.

  A low moan escaped her chest. Then a shudder passed through her body and her eye lowered, the lid remaining open, life leaving the gaze.

  “Sleep well, my mannequins.”

  He moved away, a wide smile playing across his lips. With his fingers wrapped in black leather gloves, he fastened the lock to the homemade prison door and clicked it in place, then tested its veracity. Walking backwards, he watched them, feeling a small sense of loss. He would miss his time with them. These two had been fun. It wasn’t often he got to take so much pleasure during a reset. The next reset was four years away. Maybe then he would help four mannequins ascend to their rightful place.

  He slid an old wooden door into place, shielding his caged dolls from anyone who happened upon the decrepit barn. He rubbed one hand across his bald pate as he turned to leave.

  At the exit to the barn, his Range Rover idling behind him, he held the door a moment longer.

  “Death is the ultimate reset,” he whispered.

  Then he closed the door.

  Chapter 2

  February 20, 2012 …

  Sarah Roberts tightened the scarf around her neck and dipped her face enough to shield against the sudden bitter wind.

  Torontonians talked about a January thaw that seemed to be a yearly thing, but it was already past mid-February and there had been no thaw yet—only cold and wind and more snow.

  She was on her way to the first task assigned to her in five months. Her sister Vivian had been strangely quiet before Christmas, but now numerous notes had come through—odd, seemingly unconnected messages. Normally Vivian didn’t work that way. Somehow, what Sarah was about to do had a bearing on future events, even though Vivian had told Sarah to lie to the people she was about to meet.

  The five-month break had served Sarah well. She had been given a chance to visit Parkman in Maine, and when he headed back to Santa Rosa California, she continued on to Toronto, the FBI tailing her the entire time.

  She thought it funny how when the Sophia Project men had followed her, they would sit her down, explain their purpose and even protect her from harm a few times. These FBI men stayed in the
shadows, never approaching, never wanting to talk. She had tried a few times, but they had backed away from her and left the area.

  But they were always there. At any given time, she could look over her shoulder and see her tail watching, following. When it got annoying, she would lose them. But within a day, sometimes even hours, they would show up again.

  Who funded this kind of mission? Five months of tailing one girl, two men on rotating shifts. That was convincing enough that they were seriously interested in her, but yet they hadn’t initiated contact.

  Her step faltered.

  Maybe that was why Vivian had been silent all this time.

  A quick backward glance couldn’t confirm if she was being followed as the snow caught up in the wind, swirled around the roadside trees and blew across the street, limiting her view to just over ten feet.

  The crisis center Vivian told her to go to today came up on her right.

  When she got to Toronto, she had shacked up with Aaron Stevens. He hadn’t agreed with her decision to come today. They’d argued about it. He appealed that since they were together, if there was something serious that needed handling and Vivian gave Sarah the information on how to handle it, why couldn’t Aaron do it, keeping Sarah safe and out of danger.

  Nothing pissed her off more. It was her job to answer Vivian’s messages and no one else’s. It had always been her job. That was why she had spent the last five months training with Aaron almost every day in hand-to-hand combat. She was ready to deal with whatever came up, confident, stronger, and most of all, healed. Her nose wasn’t too crooked after it had been broken in a warehouse in Las Vegas last summer, and the holes where she had been jabbed with a fork had healed up nicely. There was barely a scar.

  No one else was meant to handle Vivian’s notes but Sarah, and she forbid even the notion that she would involve Aaron.

  She stopped in front of the crisis center that was once a house. The outside bore no telltale signs of what was inside. Other than the small sign by the door, it appeared to be like any other house on any other street in the older part of downtown Toronto.

  She walked up the shoveled stone steps to the front door, where she unwrapped her scarf, stomped her boots and brushed the clumped snow off the bottom of her jeans. Then she twisted the knob and entered the foyer of the building.

  A woman stood by a large filing cabinet, rifling through papers. She turned as the door opened.

  “Cold one today, eh?” the woman asked.

  Sarah nodded, her head hung low, already in the role Vivian had instructed her to play.

  After the niceties were dispensed with, the woman had Sarah sit and wait in a comfortable blue chair by a table with magazines. She grabbed one and flipped through its pages. Some of them were missing. She grabbed another magazine and noticed missing pages from it too. Then it dawned on her. They probably remove ads or articles that could be offensive to women, or that could potentially add to the trauma women had gone through before coming to a place like this.

  The woman returned and escorted Sarah to a room down a thin hall where another woman was to join her momentarily.

  Sarah entered the room and unzipped her winter jacket. The carpeted room was bright, with a main light suspended from the ceiling and two other lights affixed to the wall. Blue chairs sat in each corner, similar to the one in the foyer. She took the seat farthest from the door.

  It unsettled her to be at a crisis center under false pretenses. Since Vivian had spoken through her hand in a fit of Automatic Writing two days ago, she had struggled with the notion of lying to people who help the weak in their time of need.

  She couldn’t determine Vivian’s purpose. But in the end, it wasn’t her job to determine what Vivian was up to. As long as Sarah did her best to respond to the messages as accurately as she could, everything would work out as it always had—minus the odd broken nose and bullet holes.

  One night a few months back, Aaron and Sarah had counted each other’s wounds and scars. Sarah had more than double Aaron’s, even though he had been shot multiple times almost two years before in Greece.

  She reminisced on their relationship, considering the fact that maybe they had gotten too close. She needed to be available for Vivian. It had become her job, her life. With Vivian’s recent silence, Sarah had gotten comfortable, easing into a daily life of shopping, cooking, and tending to day-to-day tasks, a life she hadn’t had since Vivian’s first messages almost eight years ago.

  She even had a chance to finish the first draft of her memoirs. The story of her first kidnapping, Dark Visions was now written and ready for an editor. The second book in her memoirs was called The Warning, a name she chose because of Vivian’s warning to stay out of the religious commune she entered in pursuit of a horrible man named Armond Stuart.

  She’d had time to reflect, time to look inside and see what was important to her and what wasn’t. She had realized exactly who she was and how that translated in the real world.

  Nothing about who she had become bothered her, but she knew others wouldn’t like it. Most of all, it was Aaron’s opinion that mattered. She only hoped Aaron could grow to accept her for who she was and what she did without question, because every day they grew closer, more intimate. For the most part, she liked it. But getting that close presented problems, like their recent argument about Vivian’s messages and his alpha-male response to want to protect her and handle the messages himself. That was not how it worked.

  Besides, he couldn’t come to a women’s shelter and do what Sarah had to do today.

  Hopefully he would learn to trust that side of her.

  The door opened and an older woman stepped in, a concerned smile, her aura soft and gentle. She eased the door shut and quietly moved to the blue chair by the door.

  “My name is Jennifer,” the woman said as she took her seat. “But you can call me Jenny.” She paused, then lowered her voice and asked, “How are you feeling?”

  Sarah shook her head back and forth.

  “Not good, huh?”

  “No,” she whispered, looking down at the carpet between her wet boots.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Sarah waited until she thought the woman would ask another question, then said, “He hit me.”

  Jennifer waited.

  Sarah turned in her chair and stared at Jennifer.

  “Can you see my nose?”

  Jennifer nodded. “Yes. It looks like it might have been broken.”

  “It was broken.”

  “Have you notified the police?” Jennifer asked. “Did you provide them with a statement? Or is coming here your first step?”

  Sarah looked away, acting ashamed.

  “I can’t go to the police. He said he would kill me.” Her eyes watered by force of will. She met Jennifer’s gaze, widening her eyes. With her teeth together, she whispered, “And I believe him.”

  “We can help from the moment you walk through our door until the day the courts reach a verdict and beyond. I assure you, he can’t get to you now. With our help and your statement, we can have him dealt with. If you currently reside with him, we can get you into the shelter until more suitable arrangements can be made for a more permanent residence.” She paused again. “I can bring in an advisor to guide you through the justice system and the process of pressing charges. We give you a number for purposes of anonymity and one of us become your contact. Think of it like a sponsor, helping you through the tough times. Would you allow us to have a medical done? It would help to catalogue the marks and bruises. Sometimes as the bruises fade, we forget how bad it really was.”

  Sarah stood and removed her winter jacket and began unbuttoning her shirt. Without saying a word, she opened her shirt exposing her white bra and the litany of scars on her abdomen from years of answering Vivian’s messages.

  “He has shot me, stabbed me and burned me. He has connections. I’ve tried to leave before but he always finds me. Do you really think the police could stop
a man like this? Do you think a women’s shelter would protect me from him, because I don’t.”

  Jennifer’s eyes had widened slightly at Sarah’s candid display. She composed herself as she cleared her throat.

  “We can help,” Jennifer said, her voice less convincing. “No man is above the law—”

  “You haven’t met my man,” Sarah said as she buttoned her shirt back up.

  “You sound like you’re not interested in help.”

  “Oh, I’m interested.” She sat back down. “But I’m not convinced anything will help.”