Tremble by Tobsha Learner Read Free Book Online

moment she feared she had imagined the whole thing.
    She reached out and felt for Stanley. Her hand hit the top of a cold and clammy thigh.
    Stanley’s body lay across the sheets. His eyes were rolled back in their sockets. White foam and spittle covered the lower half of his face. His jaw was stretched open in a hideous grimace and his lips were wrapped around a gnarled old root, most of which was plunged down into his throat. Dorothy recognized the mandrake immediately.

    “Miss Owen, you have a visitor.”
    The prison officer, a stout cheerful woman in her late fifties, waited patiently as the penitentiary’s newest inmate tidied herself up. She was a demure spinster-type, the officer had noted, polite and well spoken. Not your usual murderess. She looked more closely at the inmate: midthirties, not exactly a beauty but she had something enchanting about her. Never mind that there were rumors about her being a witch. As far as the officer was concerned, if all witches were this nice she’d trade in the rest of the nasty-minded inmates and start a coven.
    Dorothy allowed herself to be led to the visitors’ reception area. Prison food and lack of exercise had made her simultaneously both thin and flabby, yet she still carried herself with resolve. She saw herself as having surrendered to fate but not resigned to it. She found this an oddly comforting thought, but it had still been a horrific six months since Stanley’s death.
    One of her troubles had been finding a lawyer who believed her account of his death and was prepared to create a plausible defense. In the end she’d settled for a retired judge who had a fascination for the occult. His defense had been rambling and practically incomprehensible. In contrast, the prosecution had selected a glamorous female lawyer who kept using catchphrases like hysteria, sexual psychosis, and projection. The alluring prosecutor caught the imagination of the jury, the press, and the public, portraying Dorothy as an obsessive determined to both seduce and destroy a man higher in status than herself, who would most likely abandon her eventually. Obsessives had been celebrated that year in popular psychology and the media leaped on the case with ill-concealed joy. Dorothy was labeled “The Root Murderess” and all kinds of lewd hypotheses on the sexual foreplay that preceded the murder appeared in the newspapers.
    The prosecution won easily. Dorothy got a life sentence.
    “Probably end up being twenty years if you’re a good girl, then you can sell the story, get it optioned for a movie, and become a millionairess,” her lawyer told her cheerfully, slipping her the card of his publisher as he left.
    Dorothy had discovered that there was a monastic aspect to prison life that suited her. She found that by imagining she was incarcerated in some medieval castle she was able to deal with the vicious hierarchy among her fellow inmates. She even had a room with a view, a sweeping panorama of Dartmoor’s bleak landscape. It was here, sitting on the bench in her cell, that she found she had all the time in the world to contemplate her previous life.
    They arrived at the screened-off visitors’ section and the prison officer sat her down. A few minutes later a tall dark-haired woman, immaculately dressed in a tailored suit, appeared. She sat down opposite with silent poise and reached toward Dorothy, picked up her hand, and began stroking it. Dorothy was too stunned to react.
    “You don’t recognize me but I was at your great-aunt’s funeral.”
    Her accent jolted Dorothy’s memory. She had been Winifred’s one friend, the enigmatic stranger who had claimed that her great-aunt had been one of the ancient ones, a follower of Arianrhod, the goddess of time and karma. Dorothy pulled her hand away sharply. “What do you want?” It was hard to keep the resentment out of her voice.
    “The mandrake root, do you still have it?” the woman whispered conspiratorially. The prison officer,