Grace Anne - By Kathi S. Barton Page 0,12

but getting to it and everything else would be something she’d have to take time to do and she didn’t think she had a great deal of it. She looked at the figures for what she had in cash. She’d been planning for this for a very long time and now that it was time to move she found herself reluctant to do so.

There was enough money hidden around the building for her to never have to work again. She looked at the glossy pictures hanging on the walls. There were the covers to her catalogues along with every magazine cover she’d ever been on or even in. And there were a great many of them. She would simply have to leave everything behind. Including the new bed, which there was no way to cancel the order for.

She wanted to call her sister. She wanted to call Jazzie and tell her…everything. But she couldn’t. She hadn’t been able to tell them when she’d been down on her luck and homeless, nor had she been able to tell them when she’d made it big. They’d known, of course. There was no way not to when they knew who she was, but this person who’d called… Grace knew things too. Things that were scary. Things that she still had trouble believing. She knew more about her mom than a child should ever know.

Grace shuddered when she thought of the woman who’d given birth to them all. The woman who, on occasion, would do things that not only seemed out of character for the whipped woman, but bordered on insanity. She knew exactly what her mother was and she also knew most of the players involved.

Her mother had split personality disorder, or sometimes known as disambiguation. She knew that there was at least three other “people” that her mother lived with. Ginny was one and the most prominent. Then there was Verrie, one who only showed herself when things were too tense for the other two to cope, and Guinnie. Verrie was by and far the most violent and she would just as soon kill you as to look at you.

Guinnie was the one that seemed the most childlike. She rarely came out, Grace was sure, and the only times that Grace had seen her was when one of Guinevere’s children were hurt or ill. She was the one who’d told Grace about the others.

Guinevere Waite was insane. Not only that, but Grace was afraid she was also a killer. Grace had seen things, heard things, that made her run. Even after the rape when she was seventeen she’d not been as afraid as she’d been when she heard the screams coming from her parents’ room. Screams that still, to this day, made the hair on her arms rise and the back of her neck feel like something was dancing there.

It had been the night before her graduation. She’d been in her room daydreaming about the day she’d be able to leave home for good. Her sister Jazzie was asleep and the other two, Sin and Lilliane, were watching television in the bathroom so they wouldn’t get caught. At first she thought it was coming from the bathroom, but when she got up to tell them to turn it down the noise got quieter. She went into the hallway and listened.

The moaning made her think her parents were having sex and she nearly turned back to her room and then the bath to throw up, but then she remembered her father was in jail again. Grace, knowing that she would regret it, tiptoed down the hall to the shut bedroom door.

The moaning was so low she had to press her ear to the door to hear it. Now, even after all these years, she wondered why she didn’t just think her mom was having an affair and leave it at that. But she didn’t. Couldn’t, if the truth be told. She was still listening at the door when she heard the pop.

Standing stock still Grace knew that it was a gun shot. And when the second, then the third pop sounded, she heard her mother laughing hysterically. It took her several seconds, too many for her to get back to her room, before she realized that someone was turning the knob on the door. She’d just had time to press back against the wall when the door opened.

There she stood. Her mother was naked and covered in…Grace had always hoped she’d imagined the