Verna
Legacy Name: Verna

new york. 1945.

I graduated Harvard Medical School with possibly three-quarters of my life in front of me. The prestigious name on my resume secured me multiple enticing job offers; the one which I accepted in early July was a psychiatric post in a small town in the very north of New York State.

The pay was good, especially for a town in the middle of nowhere, and I was able to further my studies in peace. The house I purchased with the money from my father's estate was an old Victorian that came with its fair share of tales of woe, kindly supplied to me by the realtor.

My father, who died of cirrhosis of the liver two months prior to my graduation, never left a will and so his estate passed to me, his only living relative.

My family came from old English money, and my father was a stupendously wealthy, selfish alcoholic who delighted in telling my cousin Iris and I tales of his bravery and brutality in the Great War. He encouraged us to pursue activities such as embroidery and piano, simply because encouraging young people to take an interest in the arts made him seem like a well-rounded and intellectual person.

My parents were an arranged marriage, and I'm quite certain he never came to love my mother. I don't think she ever noticed his lack of love for her. I don't think she noticed much of anything. She was the kind of person around whom a general aura of despair lingers, and the aura only grew over time until it almost seemed to take on its own shape separate from that of my mother. I tried to never look either of my parents in the eye, for different reasons.

There is one memory of her that I will never forget. I was about five or six years old. It was very late summer, for I had not yet begun school, but the nights were markedly colder than before. Slipping downstairs in my embroidered nightgown for a glass of water, I avoided the creaky stairs. The soft padding of my feet on the wooden floors was the only sound until I reached the kitchen. I avoided turning on the lamp and instead filled my glass in the dark. As I drank I gazed out the large round window above the sink, half-awake, and was surprised to see a figure stumbling around our garden.

Setting down the glass, I opened the heavy back door with much effort and approached my mother. She was all in white with a dark shawl wrapped around her thin shoulders, the ends of her hair blending in with the material. I called to her; she turned very quickly. I was close enough to see the dark purplish circles underneath her eyes and the dried blood covering her hands. I stopped in the tall grass, waiting for her to come to me, but she didn't; she ran towards the woods behind our main house.

Briefly I considered following her, but she was a frightening stranger and I a child.

My mother lost what remained of her mind when I was seven and slit her throat in the middle of the woods on midsummer's day. I was the one who found her. I knelt next to her and trailed my bony white fingers over the drying bloodstains covering the front of her nightgown before running back to the main house and telling my father that mother was dead in the woods.

Although my father never loved my mother, he used her death as an excuse to spend even more of his time in a haze of whiskey, and my cousin and I became wild children, unschooled and uncared for by any adult. I spent what time I could in my father's library. He was well-read for an ignorant man, and most of his collection centred on logic, medicine, mathematics, and chemistry.

The rest of my time was taken up with Iris. My cousin was a delicate creature; she bruised easily and had platinum blonde hair and nearly translucent skin. Iris's mother was a simple country whore who died giving birth to her, and her father was my mother's brother. He spent his part of the fortune on racehorses and shot himself in the head with my grandfather's Civil War rifle when he went bankrupt, and so Iris came to live with us.

Iris was three years younger than me, and absolutely devoted to me. She would do anything I asked of her, no matter the consequence or possibility of moral wrongness. I was never questioned. If anyone else tried to get her to do anything, she would scratch and bite and run back to me. I bathed her, I taught her, and we were the only two people in the world.

I was fourteen when I discovered that I could hurt her. She tripped on a twisted root in the woods behind the main house where we spent most of our time, and I was delighted when a purplish-grey bruise sprung up on her shin. I wondered if bruises would look as beautiful on other areas of her. We were picking wild raspberries in a thicket near the woods after a spring rain when I shoved her to the muddy ground and started beating my thin fists against her delicate body. She was surprised but made no noise, accepting the pain with closed eyes and a few tears.

My father never asked why Iris was bruised, if he even noticed. I made sure she wore sleeveless dresses and no stockings during summers so I could see my handiwork bloom into beautiful grey and purple roses dotted with red.

The summer I turned seventeen, everything changed. It was late July and the hottest day we'd had so far. The air was hot and thick and moving felt like wading through gelatin. My cousin and I were laying out on the sun-bleached wooden dock of the lake a mile away from our house. Our neighbour's two red bikes lay on their sides in the dry dirt, stolen and then put aside.

Iris lay on her back, her legs pulled up, her dress forming a pale pink tent around them. Her pale hair fell over the boards of the deck like daytime moonbeams, and she was barefoot. The thin dress was sticking to her skin, the fabric slightly darkened in patches from the sweat.

I rolled onto my stomach lazily, pressing one side of my face into the sun-warmed wood. I could feel the hard rounded edges of each board against the flesh of my stomach through my thin dress.

'Thom says he likes this dress on me.' The sound of Iris's soft voice raked through the silence and I opened my eyes to look at her. She looked at me, making sure she had my attention and approval

All I had heard about for months was this boy. Iris had taken to loitering around the baker's shop, a mile or so down the road, until the baker's son Thomas appeared and the two would go off into the woods together to touch each other. I'm sure she thought she was very sly, but of course I knew.

- verna sophia temple, MD

- thirty-four, 17 november, scorpio. english and irish blood, american born. psychiatrist.

- after her cousin dies in an accident, her father decides he has had enough of it and sends his child to a boarding school.

- while you cannot change someone's nature, sociopathic verna is improved by this experience. after school she gets a job as a secretary for a psychiatrist, a relatively new field. they work with a lot of wwi and ii veterans. she spends her free time studying medicine and sociology. he dies and leaves his practice to her. it takes a long time for anyone to come to her, as she is a woman, but she proves herself and often helps her neighbours. (she even has a degree)

- the case of her cousin's accidental drowning comes to light again somehow and the seed of doubt is spread.

- thomas, her cousin's known lover, is also murdered at the same time as iris, his face slashed up.

- she is eventually cleared as a suspect by the police

-she did have a hand in iris's death, she didn't try to save her. she did not kill thomas

appearance » very pale, thin, flat chested. not very strong. five-foot-six. black eyes, black hair to just below her shoulder blades.

CLOTHING & STYLE » the rhythm of fashion was disrupted by the war, and the paris fashion houses didn't reopen until 1947 (which is when the new look style was introduced and took over). wartime clothes were modelled after uniforms/utility clothing. square shoulders, narrow hips, and tailored suits.

verna herself likes to wear a lot of jewelry (gold + silver, often together), dark colours, natural fibres, and orangey red lipstick.

PERSONALITY » sadistic but tries her best to curtail it. quick temper but her schooling and strong will has taught her to (mostly) control it. curious, impulsive. blunt, can come off guarded and/or reserved. intelligent, organized. not physically affectionate.

- neutral evil.