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...
I say how or when we would retrieve Cecily Rose as if I'm a member of the family, one of the players on the team that would eventually go to wherever she was and get her. Untrue of course, but in that gloomy house you were sucked into the ongoing drama the minute you stepped through the door. I had intended to drop by to see how Alicia was doing, just pay a quick visit, but the suspense pulled me in: I was there all afternoon and then all evening, and then, for reasons I'll never understand, Alicia begged me to sleep over, saying she just needed to know I was close by. I spent an uncomfortable night on the pull-out in Emil's study. In the morning, the horrible waiting game started all over again. I wandered into the kitchen, where Alicia's mother, Roberta, was making coffee. Alicia's brother, Mark, who'd flown in from New York the first day, was also there, along with his wife, a sharp-featured woman named Brenda. One of the cops had spent the night – Roberta was feeding him French toast and when he spilled a big blob of syrup on his shirt, she chided him as if he were a little boy, and wiped it off with a rag she found under the sink.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Roberta
That was about as fun as it got. Alicia positioned herself on the couch where she'd been the day before. Emil made regular circuits through the house, from the living room to the back porch to the kitchen to his study, pausing in each place, murmuring a few words to whoever was there before moving on. He was very preoccupied with the murder of Roy. So far the press had not connected the kidnapping of his daughter with a seeming suicide in a garage in South Austin. They were focused on the fact that the abducted girl's father was a well-known psychotherapist who'd been on a zillion talk shows — that's where the story lay. They knew nothing about the Bukh or about Victor, whose life and work had never been publicized. Emil, of course, was well aware that the true story lay with Roy whom he'd only met that one time, two hours before Roy was murdered, when he came to the house to deliver the thumb drive. In their brief visit, Roy had explained that the file on the thumb drive was the property of a family foundation that researched material in the Bukh and other documents like it. So that's 'the foundation,' I thought when Emil told me the story.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Emil
Immediately I wanted to know more about them. I assumed that by 'family,' they meant Victor and Roy's family, the Gottliebs, whose line could be traced back through their great grandfather, Meir, to generations of healers in Russia and Poland. Healers who'd added to, and been in possession of, the Bukh, which was what this whole damn thing was about. But before I could think too much more about it, Emil's phone rang, an unknown number that made him freeze for a second and then run to his study, with the cops on his heels.
