At the estate, Kat and baby Canan's new governess Sasha, prepped him for bed. The thunder roared outside the nursery window and made everyone but the baby nervous.
"He's not unnerved by the storm outside, is he?" Sasha remarked.
"It's Maine, if it's not raining, it's foggy, so he's used to it by now." Kat smiled as she put the baby in his crib. She was dressed for along night at the prescient as she was back to work. "So tell me more about yourself?" Kat asked.
"Oh there's not really that much to tell, really. Small family, just out of college. You know, nothing major." Sasha said as she folded Canan's tiny clothes.
"What are were studying before you cam here?" Kat asked curiously prodding.
Sasha thought for a second which to Kat, seemed to last hours.
"You know, just the regular stuff. I really just tried to dabble in everything. I think it's really important to find yourself and learn about everything you can learn." Sasha said stammering.
"But you had to have been interested in one thing to be in school right? What was your major?" Kat continued to ask, her detective instincts starting to feel there was something more going on than Sasha was telling.
"Literature. I studied literature." Sasha responded with satisfied with a satisfied tone.
Kat smiled politely as she could tell Sasha was starting to feel awkward. The Collinsport detective decide to drop the subject...for now.
"Great." Kat answered equally as awkward. "Aanyway, I should get going. Don't want to be late for my first night back, right? Take good care of my boy." Kat said smiling as she kissed her baby good bye to a relived Sasha.
Sasha crept over to the nursery door and opened it slightly to make sure the coast was clear. The hall way in the easy wing was empty. Nothing but old paintings of Collins family members hanging in the dimmed hall and house plants that cast shadows on the luxurious carpet that lined the hall. She closed the door again behind her and walked over to the cooing baby in his crib.
She smiled at him and tickled his nose with a soft plush toy bunny. The baby laughed. He had just met Sasha and was already incredibly comfortable with him, as if he knew her already, as if Sasha had known the baby already.
"You're just as I remembered, little one. You're just as I remembered." Sasha said in a whisper.
*****
"On your way out?" David said from inside the drawing the faced the foyer.
"Oh! Yes! First day back, I hope I don't drive everyone crazy showing them photos of the baby." Kat said in her proud mother voice.
"Go on, show off that gorgeous Collins baby. Make them jealous." David, the proud grandfather, told his daughter-in-law as he walked into the foyer.
Kat grinned and opened the front door and to her shock standing in the rain with three suitcases was Dr. Kimberly Collins. David's ex-wife who had left town earlier that year for London with her son Christopher and Carolyn's daughter Alexandra.
"Kim!" Kat said in total shock.
"What are you doing here?" David asked, his face, stone cold as he walked in from the drawing room.
"Well, that's a surprising welcome; shock and awe!" Kim joked. "I needed to come back. I needed to be here. I missed my home." Kim said rushing through the front door and past Kat.
"This is really a surprise, I mean, welcome back!" Kat said giving a nervous laugh knowing Kim and David's past history and also knowing that David had moved on from her. "I'd love to catch up later, but I gotta get going. Work calls." Kat said after their hug. Her escape was awkward, the reunion between David and Kim would be just as strange.
Once Kat crept away and closed the front door behind her, a lightening flash lit the room. There was silence between the former lovers that felt like it lasted for hours.
"David? Say something." Kim said putting her soggy suitcases down.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to say. You should have told us you were coming back. You should have ....... I'm just surprised, is all." David answered, his words tripping out of his mouth.
"Well, I was hoping you'd be happy. I was in London this whole time and you never once called or wrote. Even in my conversations with Caleb, he seemed to be hiding something when the topic turned to you. I began to worry something was going on, but here you are, handsome as ever." Kim said with a bright grin.
"It's just that, look Kimberly, a lot has happened since you left. A lot." David said.
"You don't have to explain. I've lived in Collinsport for long enough to know that nothing ever stays the same, but at the same time not much ever really changes." she replied as someone came in from the other side of the foyer.
"I was wondering what you wanted for dinner, I asked cook and she.....oh...." Siobhan, David's new fiancee said entering the foyer from the kitchen. "Hello." she continued cordially.
Kimberly looked at David confused, who was this? She had not heard of this new resident at the mansion.
"Kim, this is Siobhan, Siobhan this is Kimberly, Caleb's mother." David answered awkwardly as the two women shook hands never breaking each other's gaze. His past and present colliding like two thunder clouds smashing into each other.
Kimberly, who had left Collinsport with her son Christopher and Carolyn's daughter Alexandra on a trip to London months ago, had hoped her return would spark a romantic twinge in David again. They had parted ways on good terms after years of an unhappy marriage. Kimberly, after all, was the one who had David committed to Windcliff for close to 2 decades under false pretenses. Their marriage suffered long before that even, with her infidelity with the now dead Victor Reed.
Now that David had moved on with Siobhan, Kimberly was in a peculiar place. Where would she fit in? And would she even be welcome back into the fold of the Collins family.
"I've heard so much about you." Siobhan said.
"I wish I could say the same." Kimberly answered looking directly into David's eyes.
"Would you mind if we had a talk, really quickly." David asked his Siobhan as she nodded politely and moved into a different room leaving the two exes alone.
"So you've moved on." Kim said, her lips pressed tightly together.
"What was I supposed to do? I couldn't just sit here and wait, and what would I be waiting for? You and I have been over for years, or did you forget what you did to me and why we split up all together?" David answered.
"We've moved past that, at least I thought we had. We're in such a different place now, we're both grandparents and ...and....David you should have told me. Maybe I would have never come back at all." Kimberly said angrily.
Kimberly felt humiliated. She calmly patted the side of her hair that had been tussled but the storm outside and grabbed her things and motioned that she was about to leave.
"Now, wait a minute, Kimberly. Come on now." David said grabbing her arm that had grabbed her suitcase.
"No, no listen, I really don't thinks its appropriate now, I mean first of all this is incredibly embarrassing." Kim answered.
"Stop, listen, Caleb will be getting back from the office any minute now and would love to see you. The house is obviously big enough for everyone. We're all adults here. There's no reason why you can't stay." David replied.
Kimberly's heart felt like it was in a engulfed in flames. She had such high hopes that after all the time that had passed that perhaps, somehow, David would have felt the same she had. Now, things were different and Kim was back on the outside of the Collins circle looking in.
David grabbed Kim's things and helped her into one of the cozy rooms in the east wing hoping that everything would work out. As reality started to set in that she would not be settling into the room she once shared with David again, it was apparent, that these changes were going to be permanent.
Kimberly's mistakes in her life, the betrayals in her past were gone and done. And now she had returned to piece together her family again. Once and for all, but again there were going to be hurdles.
Kim was now alone in her room that David had set her up in. She carefully unpacked her things and memories of her past filled her mind: her wedding to David, their romantic and passionate wedding night, Caleb's birth and first words. This was her family, and no new girlfriend was going to take it away from her, not now, not ever.
Over her dead body.
*****
The storm was blasting a cold and vicious rain down on Collinsport. It was the first of the many that would swirl in from the icy north this autumn and a prelude to the winter to come.
Carolyn sat in her room in a comfy chaise, plush with pillows and a dimmed over head light that brightened the pages of the book she was reading that was interrupted by the tapping of the strong rain on her window. Frustrated with the pesky noise of rain, Carolyn got up from the comfort of her chaise and went to her large window to pull the drapes as to muffle the sound of the rain.
As she did, her view of the large gardens below that separated the main Collinwood mansion from the old house became illuminated with a bright flash from the stormy sky. In that split second of brightness she saw a man dressed in all black standing in the rain.
"What the devil?" Carolyn said to herself as the fire in her fireplace crackled and burned.
There was another thunderous clap, again she saw the man in the rain, his short black woolen jacket must have weighed 100 pounds now with all the water pouring down on him. To Carolyn, in her mind's eye, this could be only one man, he who walked the night. He who prowled in the storms as if nothing bothered him.
"It's him. He's come back again." She to herself, her voice too shaky to speak his name.
Carolyn quickly grabbed a rain coat and tied it's sash around her waste. She tied her hair up in a small tight bun and put on a veil to guard her from the pouring rain then dashed down the stairs to find the cousin she believed was gone forever.
David and Siobhan were in the drawing room, Carolyn's quick rush down the main staircase startled them.
"Carolyn? Are you ok?" Siobhan asked, quickly going to the door of the drawing room to meet Carolyn who was too fast for her.
Siobhan walked over to the front door that was left open and David followed. His face was plastered with concern for his beloved cousin Carolyn. They both peeked out past the doorway to see if they could see where Carolyn had run off to in such a hurry.
"What is she doing?" Siobhan asked warming her arms with her hands as the rain fell down.
"I have no idea." David said cautious to even let his mind go where it would inevitably go.
David began putting on his coat to go after her.
"I'm going after her." David said.
"David, be careful." Siobhan said worried.
Carolyn rushed through the gardens that were now starting to slightly overflow with excess water from the storm. Her mind raced. If it was who she believed it was hiding in the dark and rain, she wanted to be the first to find him.
He had come back, he had survived the terrible attack of the phoenix Laura Collins, and somehow found his way once more to the only home he's ever known. Though Laura's flames vanquished the life of Barnabas' wife Jacqueleen, he had somehow made it through, and Carolyn was not going to let him hide away.
She ran as fast as she could. The wind blowing her small body to the ground time and time again. She ran with a determined fever to find this man, this man she in her heart loved like a father, Carolyn would not give up and nothing a storm as powerful as the one that night would throw at her would stop her.
She sloshed through the mud and muck of the saturated ground and searched every shadowy corner of the wooded areas around the two Collin's family mansions with David hot on her heels.
Then suddenly, there he was again. The man standing at a distance. His silhouette in a darkened thicket of tress just standing there staring at her.
"Barnabas!!!!!" Carolyn screamed as she rushed over to where she saw him, but then like a millisecond of time clicking away he vanished.
It was as if Barnabas was playing a strange game of now you see me now you don't. One minute she would see him, the next he would be gone. Carolyn's frustration began to burn hot like fire, her mind began to wander and panic and fight itself on the prospect of this actually happening in front of her!
Then again, there he was, black coat silhouette. By a tree, then gone.
And again, same coat, same silhouette by more thickets of Collinwood trees...then gone as soon as the lightening flashed gain.
Why was he hiding from her as if he did not want to be found, or seen? Carolyn was beginning to tire, she couldn't catch up to him, the man she admired so much, the man she had come to see as a father figure in her youth, even as damaged and as dangerous as he was continued to allude her.
"Carolyn! Carolyn!!" David screamed from behind, trying to catch up to his cousin who seemed to be going mad. Carolyn did not hear him over the thunder claps and rain. She continued her search.
Over and over again, she would see the figure of the man she believed to be Barnabas in the wooded areas around the old house and over and over again he was gone. Carolyn stopped suddenly. Her head filling with images and memories. She began to feel dizzy. Her heart began to feel heavy and sad, her mind began to fill with the sounds of the crashing waves of the ocean on the rocks.
In Carolyn's frantic search of the illusive shadow figure, she had neglected to see where she was, and now, as the storm continued to pound the seaside town, she found herself literally on the edge of Widow's Hill.
Carolyn looked down at the water, it seemed to be calling her name. It seemed to be wanting her to touch it, and there laying on the rocks as the water flowed over him was the shadowy man. Was it Barnabas? What was he doing at the bottom of Widow's Hill? Why was he letting the water cover him and pull him into the sea?
"Barnabas!!!!" Carolyn screamed.
She began to take off her coat, and her shoes. She was going to jump.
"Carolyn NO!!" David said, finally reaching her and pulling her back from the edge of the cliff, the rain slapping their faces like tiny little rocks.
"It's Barnabas. He's down there David, we have to help him!!" Carolyn screamed over the sound of the ocean's crashing waves.
Still gripping on to Carolyn tightly, David looked over the edge. There was no one there.
"No, Carolyn, it's not Barnabas, there's no one down there. You didn't see him, he's gone!" David said in a sympathetic voice.
"What? No! I saw him, he was just there, David, he was there. He was here. I saw him early this evening outside the old house and I saw him from my window and I saw him in the woods. Barnabas was down there, I swear it." Carolyn explained wiping the rain water from her face.
"Look," David said holding on to Carolyn as he showed her the bottom of the ledge. "There's no one there." He finished.
"The waves must of taken him into the sea, we have to get to him, we have to help him!" Carolyn said.
"Carolyn, he's gone! Listen to me, gone. You're burning up, we have to get you back to Collinwood and into bed. Please, just come along with me, please!" David pleaded.
Carolyn, shaking and confused, nodded her head in agreement and put on her coat and shoes. David held on to her and walked her safely back to the mansion where Siobhan and Powell waited for them.
Down at the bottom of Widow's Hill, where the water crashed up against the rocks with remarkable strength, where the sea and land met in a giant thunderous pound there was a body. A person. A man in black. He was on the rocks facing up when Carolyn looked down. He was hiding in the shadows tempting Carolyn to follow him in the rain.
But when David arrived, the shadowy figure jumped up and hid up against the cliff side as to not be seen, and there he stood still, grinning evilly with an amulet that the voodoo mystic Ezrabette gave him to carry around his neck, the amulet, changed his face to protect his identity, the identity of Jason McGuire with a new face.
He was the one tricking Carolyn, he was the one trying to trick her to jump from the cliff. His first attempt failed, but there were more tricks up his sleeve. He and Ezrabette would eventually end the Collins family, once and for all.
