“You know what this means, don’t you?” Bridgette asked her sister-in-law.
Catherine nodded. “I need to let Jack handle this.”
“It wasn’t the first photograph we had found that showed Kendricks in the background,” explained Jack, “a photograph he had no business being in. We don’t exactly live in the middle of town. We are miles away. He was coming all this way just to spy on her. To catch a glimpse of the woman he loved and lost. He was completely obsessed with Catherine. He didn’t think we would see him, and to be honest, we usually didn’t. It wasn’t until the photographs were developed that we discovered his presence. That naturally put all of us on edge, but none more so than Catherine. I didn’t understand the extent of her fear until it was too late.”
“She began to isolate herself. Hiding up on the third floor, ignoring me when I called her down; guarding herself from the outside world. When she was entering her third trimester, I found her crying on the third floor. It took nearly an hour to get out of her what had upset her. She had seen him, standing outside the house. Not doing anything, just staring. It was a psychological game to him. The more she distanced herself from him, the more obsessed he became.”
Jack began tossing picture after picture with Kendricks appearing in the background on the table:
Catherine and Adam horseback riding with a man watching from the orchard.
Jack squeezing Catherine into a hug, standing by his new pickup truck, as someone with binoculars peered at them from the forest line.
The most chilling of all however, was a family snapshot in the dining room on Christmas Eve, smiles all around, children with messy faces, Catherine still wearing her apron from preparing dinner. In the background through the window, despite the ice and snow, was a faint outline of someone peering in the window.
He wouldn’t stop until he had her. “If only I had known then,” lamented Jack, “I would’ve put a stop to his madness. He took an already fragile mind and applied just enough pressure for it to break completely. Not many things frighten me. But Bernard Kendricks is a sick man, and the thought that he has your sister scares the living hell out of me.”
“Your mother went into labor on Christmas Eve 1981, in the middle of the worst snow storm Skole County had ever seen or has seen since. We had to act fast. Aunt Bridgette and I got her into my truck. It was snowing really heavily at this point. The weather guy was predicting this storm to be the worst in a century. We had to take it slow down the mountain, due to ice and wind. We were finally at the bottom, about to cross the covered bridge, when we saw it – a tractor trailer was laying overturned blocking the path to where the bridge once stood. The roof of the bridge had collapsed and underneath it lay debris, and the headlights of a car shone out. I could hear the sirens of an ambulance from beneath the rubble and the screams of a small child crying out into the night.”