Trinity's Legacy

by P A Vasey

  “Work was all consuming, long shifts, long hours studying. I’d seen less and less of my dad since the divorce, and he never visited. My mom and I became very close.” My voice caught in my throat and my mouth became dry. I hugged myself tightly. “Without her, I could never have brought up my daughter.”

  Adam said nothing but his eyes had never left mine. My face started to crumple. “When she died, it was just me and Kelly.”

  He closed his eyes and my mind was instantly flooded with images from my life, a waterfall of people and places in glorious Technicolor. Then the images coalesced into recognisable narratives. Chicago. The one night stands, usually at the end of a particularly difficult and depressing shift, and always ending with a guilt-ridden departure in the mornings or sometimes in the early hours. Nightly drinking alone in my apartment and falling asleep in front of the TV dressed in the day’s bloodstained scrubs. The torrid and intense affair with one of the senior surgeons in a Chicago hospital; a relationship predicated on his moods and whims and when he could sneak away from his wife. The vow to leave him there and then, but the shifts continuing, the work intensifying, and the stresses of trying to be the ‘other woman’ becoming overwhelming. The morning I sat on the toilet after a bout of vomiting, staring in shock and horror at the faint blue line on the plastic pen, a simple and clinical way of telling me that my whole life was going to change. The confrontation with the surgeon, his anger when I said I wanted to keep the baby. His insulting offers to ‘pay for the abortion’ or to pay for me to leave Chicago.

  And then a flash-forward to the ER. Me screaming hysterically as the emergency response team tried and failed to save the lives of the only family I had left.

  “Two months later you moved here,” said Adam. “The town where you were brought up, but had never returned.”

  I drank the last of the wine and shakily put the glass down on the edge of the table. “Well that brings us up to date then. No more deep, dark, dirty secrets left.”

  But as I said it there was a nagging feeling, a sensation that I was missing something. I chewed at the inside of my cheek. “There’s something you’ve not told me. Something you’ve kept from me isn’t there. About my past. My past … here, in Indian Springs?”

  Would you like me to open those memories to you?

  His unspoken words floated and swirled inside my head, teasing and tormenting. I closed my eyes and scrunched up my face, rubbing my fists into the sockets.

  I can do it. Would you like me to?

  Would I?

  I looked up. “Yes.”

  He nodded imperceptibly, closed his eyes for a second and then looked straight at me, and then right through me. I felt light-headed and intoxicated and took in a huge shuddering breath as my mind filled with long forgotten images of people and places. It was as if I had suddenly acquired the master key to a memory palace with multiple hidden and locked rooms. The images were alive and I could smell and taste and live the memories like they were happening in real time.

  I saw my father and mother laughing and playing with me in a park just outside the airbase. I was on a swing and they were both pushing me. My father looked handsome in his air force uniform, his dark hair and moustache trimmed and tidy. My mother, blonde hair tied up in a bow, was smoking a cigarette. The sky was deep blue and I could see wispy contrails interlocking in the stratosphere.

  I was then sitting on my father’s knee in the cockpit of a military jet as he pointed out various switches and dials and I gurgled nonsense and tried to lick the side of his face.

  I was then sitting on the floor of a playgroup with four other children, watching a black and white TV while making figures out of play-doh.

  I was then in my bedroom locked in a cot and screaming at the top of my little lungs while I watched my father beat my mother to a bloody pulp.

  “I am sorry,” I heard Adam say.

  I closed my eyes and the tears came again, but this time they were welcome. They spilled down my face, salty drops falling from my chin and drenching my shirt. I was trembling and couldn’t stop. Sobs punched through, ripping through my muscles and bones as the walls came tumbling down. I became aware of a hand on my shoulder as Adam silently moved over and sat next to me. I sobbed into his chest and felt him holding me, rocking me slowly as my tears soaked his chest. I pulled away, my lashes heavy with water, howls of misery coming in waves, broken apart by short pauses for recovering breaths.

  After a time, when there was nothing left and I was spent, I crumpled back into the sofa. I sniffed loudly and wiped my nose with my sleeve. Adam handed me a paper cloth from the mess out of my handbag, and I used it to blow my nose.

  “I am very sorry,” he said again.

  I nodded, and folded the handkerchief in my palm before absent-mindedly starting to tease it apart, layer-by-layer. “My mother told me you know, when I was older, but I never believed her because I couldn’t remember it ever happening.” I took another sip of the wine then sat back, looking at him through watery eyes.

  “They are repressed memories,” he said. “A safety mechanism your brain uses, to protect you.”

  I felt my heart rate slowing and my breathing coming back to normal. The pain was still there, the emotions still raw. “That’s some trick,” I said. “How do you do that?”

  “I do not know.” He held his hands out, palms up and looked sadly at them.

  Without thinking, I took hold of one of his hands. I marvelled at the coolness of the skin, the rubbery texture, and for the first time I noticed the lack of fingerprints. I turned it over and felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. Time stopped. Pieces of the puzzle finally dropped into place. But the big picture still eluded me.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  “Cogito ergo sum,” he replied with an enigmatic smile.

  “‘I think, therefore I am’. Yes, I get that, but what are you? Are you human?” I pictured the scans, the lack of injuries. “Are you alive?”

  “I am Adam Benedict.” He tapped his head. “At least in here.”

  I took a deep breath. “But who is Adam Benedict, really?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  I nodded, unhesitatingly, if only to move things away from me, and my emotions.

  Without changing expression he reached up and brushed a lock of hair behind my ears. Immediately my mind was flooded with images, smells, and sounds. Memories so vivid that I felt I was physically present.

  His memories.

  I could detect a faint metallic smell in the air, and hear the distant sirens of police vehicles. I was standing in an expensively and stylishly furnished living room facing a huge bay window overlooking a large expanse of water. Dawn was breaking outside, and twinkling lights from ships and boats and larger islands a mile or so further out could be seen. Just visible within a bank of morning mist was a red suspension bridge.

  “San Francisco?” I said.

  He just nodded.

  The scene continued. My field of vision moved and sprays of blood came into view, obscenely splattered against a magnolia-coloured wall. Randomly upturned furniture could be seen, in addition to a cracked mirror and bottles and wine glasses littering the floor. More smears of blood tracked diagonally up the mirror from what I surmised was an arterial spray. I felt a deep sense of foreboding as I entered a bedroom dominated by a huge four-poster. Another open door lead to an ensuite and I could make out another pool of blood which had merged with a dark brown rug and spread across what had been self-coloured carpet. There was more blood on the sheets and pillows, and a few splashes on the wall by a bedside lamp leaning at an angle against the corner of the headboard. A drawer on the bedside cabinet was open, and inside I could just see the handle of a pistol.

  Lying by the bed was a semi-naked woman. Her skull had been crushed from behind and the impact had made a dent that was filled by matted hair and congealed blood. As my perspective changed I could see that the woman’s eyes, open and lifeless, were staring at
the wall. Her mangled lip and obviously broken nose were caked in dried blood, cracked and blackened. One of her hands appeared to be reaching out to the drawer, and her other arm was twisted beneath her body. There were stab wounds on her torso, but the bleeding there seemed to have stopped quickly. My medical mind worked out that the fatal wound, the blow to the head, had come fairly soon after she had been stabbed.

  The scene’s perspective changed again and I was now kneeling next to her. A hand reached out to stroke her hair and I heard a male voice sobbing, an awful groaning, guttural sound. I felt myself sit back on the bed, and in the mirror on the wall opposite I saw the image of a distraught Adam Benedict, tears rolling down his face as he contemplated the body of his murdered wife.

  “Her name was Cora,” he said quietly.

  The vision faded and Adam’s face swam into view, now back in my living room. His head dropped and I pulled his hand to my face and held it there with both of my own. I looked into his eyes, blue and wide, expecting tears but there were none to see.

  “Two damaged people, are we not?” he said.

  I nodded silently. I sensed that he was one blow away from breaking. I was intimately familiar with the path he was on, the road to a destination where there was no going back, no redemption.

  It was time to step up. Maybe for both of us.

  “I heard that you have a daughter?” I said, as gently as I could.

  He nodded slowly, and a rueful smile played across his lips. “Yes, but we … wait…” He stopped and stood up, his head turning to the window. “We are about to have a visitor.”

  He walked over and opened a couple of the blinds with his fingers. I could see the glimmer of car headlights playing over his face. I jumped up, straightened my shirt, and joined him at the window. “I don’t get visitors.”

  A car crawled down the street, before stopping outside my house. It was a taxi, white phone decals and an advertisement just visible on the side. It’s internal light went on as the passenger paid for his fare before opening the near side door and getting out. He reached in the back seat and pulled out a large duffle bag that he slung over his shoulder. He turned to face the house.

  I brought a hand up to my mouth. “Fuck. That’s Richard. What’s he doing here? He’s supposed to be in Berlin.”

  Adam closed the blinds and looked down at me. “Perhaps it is more than a co-incidence, given recent events?”

  I felt a mild panic rising. “What are we going to do?”

  “Nothing,” he replied. “Do not answer the door. Presumably he will then leave.”

  I shook my head. “No, no … he has a key. I gave him it before he left. I’m a fucking idiot.”

  Adam moved away from the window, closing the blinds. “He must not find me here. It would create a problem.”

  I thought fast. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. You go hide in the garage. I’ll pretend to be in bed and when he comes in I’ll get rid of him.”

  Adam raised his eyebrows.

  “I’ll get rid of him. I promise,” I said, pleading.

  He grudgingly nodded, and went back through the kitchen into the garage, closing the door behind him. I ran through into the bedroom and tore my clothes off, leaving them littered around the room. I pulled on my pyjamas and jumped into the bed just as I heard the key turning in the front door.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1355 Betty Ridge Court, Indian Springs, Nevada

  I quickly turned the bedroom light off, pulled the sheets up to my chin and closed my eyelids just enough so that I could see and maintain the appearance of sleep. I could hear him walking on the creaky floorboards in the living room, unzipping the duffle bag and then going into the kitchen and opening my fridge. There was a tinkle of glassware followed by the sound of spurting water from my leaky faucet and then the bedroom door cracked open and his face peered through. I could see him looking around the darkened room and registering my shape under the sheets. He opened the door fully and stood there framed in the light from the lounge, holding a glass of whisky. He was wearing a white T-shirt and black jeans, his sandy hair short and spiky.

  He looked good.

  I remembered when I first saw him with his shirt off for an army medical, and how he took my breath away with his sculpted, tanned body. Despite my emotional walls and professional attitude (or so I thought) he asked for my number and called the next day. The relationship was physical and intensely passionate, on my part at least. I used him and he was almost always at my beck and call, always in my bedroom. We never dated, or were seen in public, which made everything work for me as I was settling into my new home and town. However, the day he left for Berlin I discovered he’d been two-timing me with at least two other women, one of whom was a nurse at the ER.

  He tiptoed toward my side of the bed and so I waited until he was right next to me and then jerked upright and screamed. I pretended to scrabble for the sidelight, and eventually flicked it on.

  “Richard! What the fuck are you doing here?” I shouted, trying to sound both frightened and incensed at the same time.

  He sat down on the bed next to me and a wide grin split his face. His confident eyes looked me up and down, stopping at the undone buttons on the front of my pyjamas.

  I pulled the sheet up to my chest. “I thought you were in Germany?”

  “Got back tonight,” he replied with a shrug. “In to JFK, then the last flight out into McCarran. Came straight here.”

  I crinkled my nose and my mouth turned sour. “Why on earth would you do that?”

  “I missed you. I been thinking about you a lot while I been over there.”

  I snorted, and now the indignation was real. “You missed me? After what you did? And not a single fucking call or text in three months!”

  He looked hurt, and gave a theatrical-sounding sigh. “Look, I had to go dark. Not by choice, but I was working with the Bundespolizel. I can’t really talk about it, but it involves a couple of GIs and some inappropriate governmental interactions, so to speak.”

  He looked expectantly, clearly waiting for me to ask for more details of his top-secret mission. At this moment in time I couldn’t give two fucks. I shook my head and folded my arms. “How’d you get in?”

  He attempted a sheepish look and started stroking my arm in an affectionate way, but one that now made my skin crawl. “I still got the key you gave me,” he said, giving the mega wattage smile again.

  He must have seen the dark look I was giving him, so he cracked another half smile and tried to look petulant. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Kate. You know, when I left. I just wasn’t sure where we was going. We never said anything about being exclusive, either. You acted pretty cold at times.” He shrugged, “It was hard to figure you out.”

  I pushed his hand away and shook my head vigorously. The nerve of the guy. “Bullshit, Major Jackson. You were having a great fucking time. All your buddies said so.”

  He held his hands palms out in a conciliatory gesture. “Now Kate, there may have been some talk in the mess, and I may have said a few things, but babe, it was all complimentary.”

  He leered at me and wiggled his eyebrows. I remembered that Adam was a few yards away in the garage, and no doubt listening in. I tried to slow my breathing, and figure out what I needed to do in order to get rid of him. Maybe I could just offer him a second chance, another time, and that’ll placate him. But… he did turn up on my doorstep in the middle of the night, so that spoke volumes about his intentions, didn’t it? The presumptuous asshole. As if I was that kind of girl. Wait … I had been that kind of girl when we’d met. Shit, what to do…

  “You got company?” I heard him say, interrupting my thoughts.

  He was looking over towards the window, his eyes narrowing. Peering past his shoulder, I saw the scrubs, white coat and crocs that Adam had deposited there earlier.

  Shit.

  Richard regarded me coolly and his voice dropped a semitone. “So who does all this belong to then? Those shoes ain�
�t your size.”

  I thought fast, decided to go with, “Richard, it’s really none of your fucking business now, is it?”

  He stood up and theatrically pulled the blankets off me and peered underneath. “Where’s he hiding? Not there.” He turned around, surveilling the room, “Maybe hiding under the bed?”

  I was about to reply when Adam pushed his voice into my head.

  This is not working.

  You must get him to leave or I will intervene.

  I stood up, resplendent in my pyjamas, and realised how unthreatening I must look. I hurriedly fastened up the top buttons on my top and kneeled on the bed staring at Richard. “I need you to leave. Now, please. And give me back my key.”

  He pursed his lips and continued to scope the room. He moved to the bedroom door so I jumped off the bed and pushed a finger into his chest. My heart was hammering away, and I felt a heady mixture of apprehension and anger.

  “I said, I need you to leave.”

  He looked down at me and tilted his head sideways. I glared back, daring him to argue but hoping that he wouldn’t. I didn’t fear him, but I realised that I was worried about what would happen if Adam emerged and confronted him. I knew Richard was capable of defending himself, but with a jolt I recognised that I was terrified of what Adam might or could do to him.

  You are right to be afraid.

  This will not end well.

  I nodded to myself and put a hand on Richard’s arm. “Please,” I whispered, putting a pleading note into my voice. “Just go. We can talk later. I promise I’ll call you in the morning.”

  He glanced up and watched the fan blades spinning lazily and softly overhead. I wondered what he was thinking about but then he looked down at me and shrugged. “Alright, maybe I should go.”

  My relief was palpable and I lowered my head, exhaling audibly. He turned and ambled slowly out of the bedroom into the kitchen. I followed behind, furtively looking at the door through to the garage that thankfully remained closed. Richard abruptly stopped in the centre of the room and glanced back over his shoulder. “I’ll need a lift back to Creech.”