In part two of this episodic psychological thriller, Nicole Jeffords. convinced that healer, Victor Goodlove, who disappeared ten years earlier is buried under her studio, continues her search for him, contacting old patients all over Austin and dis...
Well, a month has passed and so much has happened that I don't know where to begin. To be honest, I seriously thought of giving up this blog. I couldn't deal with Victor's story anymore, too dark and dangerous. What had started out as a lark turned into a thrillerish action drama, replete with car chases, at least two murders and a kidnapping. I'm just a painter, too old and set in my ways to subject myself to anything riskier than duplicating a person's likeness on canvas.
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Self Portrait (Nicole Jeffords, Oil on Canvas, 20×16, 2017)
The idea that Victor, who'd disappeared without a trace in June 2006, was possibly buried beneath my studio was pure whimsy – a conceit that had lodged itself in my brain like a virus that spread through my system until I could think of nothing else. The irony was that Victor truly did lead a perilous life, and that by investigating his story I put my own life in peril.
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Dr. Victor Goodlove, Disappeared Healer (Nicole Jeffords, Oil on Canvas, 20×16, 2016)
But, as I said, I'm a coward. One look at Victor's brother Roy's swollen white body in the front seat of the Volvo, and I was done. I drove home so shaky I had to pull over a couple of times and put my head down. I would never write about Victor or his family again, I knew that as surely as I knew my own name. But life has a way of tricking us. First off, I had a responsibility to my readers. A whole year of unraveling Victor's story and then, just as things were heating up, scaredy-cat silence? I don't think so. I had to at least talk about what happened at the end there. Not leave people hanging. To my credit, I started out with the best of intentions – I would put closure on Cecily Rose's kidnapping – but almost right away things occurred that pulled me back into the story. Specifically, I overheard a conversation that got my mind going because it held clues to Victor's situation. But I'm getting ahead of myself. All I need to do right now is fill in the blanks about Roy and Cecily Rose. A story so creepy it threatened to make me sick.
