Dreams in the Key of Blue

by John Philpin

  “Motor Vehicles has nothing on her. If she has a phone anywhere in the state, it’s unlisted. We may have to get a subpoena for that.”

  “She talked to Jasper this morning.”

  “Jasper ain’t been around. If Squires told you that, she’s pulling your chain.”

  “There’s a connection between Martin and Squires. Ben Loudermilk sold Martin the scrimshaw letter opener two years ago. She arrived in a limo. Loudermilk’s description of her sounds like the woman in the painting. He also told me the story of the Lily D. That’s what’s depicted on the scrimshaw.”

  “I ain’t following all this, but that’s nothing new,” Jaworski said. “Did you see Katrina Martin?”

  “It’s worse than I thought.”

  “She the one you knew?”

  “For a couple of weeks one summer, thirty years ago,” I said. “Herb, Dorman abused his daughter. Lily told her mother that she didn’t want him for a father, that she wanted someone different. Katrina told her that I was her father. Lily grew up believing that I would come for her. She thinks that I should have rescued her and cured her mother.”

  “Jesus. That’s more than enough reason to hate you. I’ve run into craziness over the years, but nothing like this.”

  “I don’t understand why she’s playing games. She could have killed me. She’s had plenty of opportunity.”

  “You said there’s a logic to murders like these,” Jaworski said. “Killing Dorman makes sense. What about the others?”

  “I had time for Jaycie Waylon. I didn’t have time for Lily. I don’t know. All the connections are tenuous. I feel like I need a playbill.”

  “Lucas, when are you coming back?”

  “Feds all over the place?”

  “They are, but it ain’t that. I had a call from a detective in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They found Stanley Markham.”

  “That’s the first good news I’ve heard in days,” I said, feeling relief wash through me. “Maybe they’ll keep him locked up this time.”

  “No need,” Jaworski said, breathing heavily into the phone. “He’s dead. One shot through the forehead from the twenty-two I’ve got sitting here on my desk.”

  “What the hell?”

  Seven dead from the same gun, and one of them the killer, Stanley Markham.

  “Jasper and her friends from Washington want you to get your ass back up here.”

  “No,” I said, as I struggled to understand what Jaworski was saying.

  Lily Dorman went after Markham, found him, and blew him away.

  “Herb, come to Portland tonight. Stay at the Holiday Inn by the highway. I’ll get there when I can.”

  “Lucas, that limb we’re on is cracking. Jasper had her talk with Saymes. The board is meeting tomorrow night.”

  “What the hell is she thinking?”

  “You pegged Markham the last time. You could have sent invitations to his arrest. Jasper figures you found him again. You had the gun. She knows you don’t play by the rules.”

  “I found him and capped him. Sure, I could have. I didn’t. We don’t have time to waste on this shit, Herb. You got a phone book there that covers Maine Central Mental Hospital?”

  “You planning a vacation?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. I need the number to make my reservation.”

  As soon as I hung up, I called the hospital and asked for Dr. Westlake. After a pause, the receptionist said, “We don’t have a Dr. Westlake.”

  “She or he was a psychiatrist or psychologist there seventeen or eighteen years ago.”

  “God. I was five then. Hang on.”

  While I waited, too many violins ruined Beatles tunes.

  “The woman who runs the gift shop remembered,” she said. “She’s been here forever. Dr. Julia Westlake is the one you want. She has an office in Portland.”

  I thanked her and checked the Yellow Pages. Julia Westlake, M.D., maintained an office in the heart of the business district. I called, explained to Westlake’s secretary that I was a psychiatrist who needed to consult with the doctor about one of her former patients. I assured her that it was an urgent matter, and she penciled me in for five-thirty that afternoon, when Westlake would have finished seeing patients for the day.

  I returned to Big Mama’s counter and to my reading.

  I sat on the dike and talked to my snakes. Lilith insisted that there be no laws. She promised to learn about my world, but said she would draw her own conclusions and decide whether the rule of one eye for one eye applied.

  I lived the life, but I held no power.

  Others arrived then. They were not particularly smart, but they were responsible. They did errands, cleaned up after Lilith’s messes, and helped Mom.

  Lilith learned how to make headaches go away. Whenever she could arrange events so that Harper suffered inconvenience or pain, the throbbing faded. Those who knew of the headaches loved her for that magical ability. She controlled one agony.

  Whenever we most needed Lilith, she reminded us that she would not stay unless she had her own way about things. We always agreed. She also told us that she was not happy with our father, Lucas Frank. He failed us, she said. Some of us grumbled about that, but we were afraid to make a serious fuss.

  What each of us knows is fragmentary, bits and pieces of the whole story. No one knows the complete life.

  In my twenty-five years of practice, I encountered one case of multiple personality disorder. Now, sitting at Big Mama’s counter with Lily’s diary, I had trouble breathing, my hands trembled. MPD is rare. It is also difficult to treat, devastating to endure.

  Many years ago, a colleague referred Chastity Bancroft to me for assessment. On the half dozen occasions that I saw her, if she became frustrated in her attempt to express herself, she curled into fetal position in her chair and went mute. I considered her histrionic.

  When I described Bancroft’s behavior to my mentor, Dr. Herman, he asked if I had considered MPD. “It is rare,” he said, “but certainly possible.”

  Using the primitive techniques suggested by the literature then, I began an exploration of Bancroft’s sense of time, her memory for remote and recent events, the ways in which she handled the unpleasantness in her life. When it was apparent to me that Bancroft spontaneously dissociated, I inquired about her treatment sessions with her regular therapist.

  “She asks to talk to parts of me,” Bancroft said. “The angry part. The sad part. The part that has the nickname Chas. She says that one’s a boy.”

  I concluded that Bancroft suffered from depression, that she was indeed dissociative, and that she adjusted her illness to accommodate her therapist’s expectations. Bancroft’s depression was a disabling illness; her MPD was iatrogenic, or therapist-induced.

  When I submitted my report, a gender war engulfed me. The MPD epidemic was in its early stages, but already boasted an advance guard of vocal and politically connected advocates. The women’s movement embraced this mutation of hysteria as evidence of man’s oppression and abuse. Experts stridently informed the public that sexual diddling and sadism by adult males against female children ran rampant in the land. Any attempt at objective analysis of this pastiche of disease and folk myth was akin to treason.

  “The furor will pass,” I told Dr. Herman.

  Twenty years later, the debate raged. MPD had spawned post-traumatic stress disorder, repressedmemory syndrome, and claims of satanic ritual abuse. Daytime TV offered victims who switched personality or told tales of subversive alters and sacrificial altars, abreacting in agonizing throes for the audience.

  A cottage industry was built on a foundation of anecdotes. No one found evidence to support the true believers’ extravagant claims.

  The nineties saw MPD downgraded to dissociative identity disorder (DID) in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic bible. The few real casualties of shattered personality suffered in silence.

  I continued to read Lily Dorman’s diary, convinced that what the spiral-bound note
book contained was genuine.

  I’m pretty sure that there are eleven of us, but I have not met everyone. Lilith is scary.

  One night, I watched as Lilith stood beside our mother in the kitchen. Mom promised to make french fries and was heating the corn oil.

  Harper was drunk, curled on the couch, his breathing a ragged rumbling.

  Lilith waited until Mom was distracted with another task, then grabbed the pot of hot oil, walked to the back of the sofa, and dumped it on Harper. Then she laughed.

  Harper screamed that he was blind. Mom was hysterical, barely able to give directions over the phone. I wondered who she called, but with the arrival of the ambulance and the police, I understood.

  Paramedics took Harper to the emergency room. Then Mom and the police and Lilith were supposed to talk. Lilith refused. As far as she was concerned, everything was over, and she wanted to go to bed. Then I saw the two men in starched white pants walk through the door.

  That’s when Lilith shoved me aside.

  I have heard the stories. Men were knifed and bleeding. More men arrived. Lilith held them off and screamed that she would kill the whole fucking world. It took five men to restrain her.

  I understand that whenever I am threatened, Lilith will emerge from her cave deep inside and take control. Some of us will die then.

  When Lilith controls, her logic is simple: she kills, therefore she exists.

  I glanced at the wall clock. It was nearly five P.M., time to call on Dr. Westlake. I reluctantly closed the notebook, and promised myself that I would continue reading later.

  TWO GRANITE BANKS SANDWICHED JULIA WESTLAKE’S wood-frame building. I climbed to her top-floor office overlooking a small city park that offered the requisite benches, pigeons, and placard-bearing protesters, but no grass.

  “A concrete park,” I muttered as I turned away from the commuter hour’s traffic and human congestion.

  Westlake’s secretary was gone for the day. I stood in the empty waiting room and flipped through a copy of The Sun, a small, polished magazine published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The issue contained an excerpt from Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row, by Jarvis Jay Masters, a practicing Buddhist awaiting execution at San Quentin.

  “Sad case,” Westlake said, walking from her office and nodding at the magazine. “The street animal got humanized too late. The state will kill Masters. You mind if I smoke?”

  She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “When I get rid of that last patient at the end of the day, I have my cigarette. I used to smoke two packs a day. I was one of the lucky ones—it wasn’t that hard to quit. Except for this one. I’m Julia Westlake.”

  “Lucas Frank.”

  Westlake wore jeans and a blue wool sweater. Her graying black hair was brush-cut and served as a parking space for her eyeglasses. “The real pisser about the Masters case,” she continued, “is that three inmates were involved in killing a guard. Masters was convicted of sharpening the shank. Another inmate committed the murder. Only Masters got the death penalty. Doesn’t sound much like equal justice.”

  “‘Equal justice’ is an oxymoron,” I said. “The quality of your day in court depends on what you can afford.”

  Westlake smiled. “So, which of my former patients brings you so urgently to my door?”

  “Lily Dorman.”

  She hesitated for only a moment. “Maine Central,” she said. “That was years ago.”

  “You remember her.”

  She took a final drag on her cigarette. “I don’t want to get all formal on you,” she began, “but do you have a release?”

  “If I have to get authorization, it would not be a release,” I said gently. “It would be a court order.”

  It was a bluff. I doubted that any judge would authorize a fishing expedition into confidential records, but I did not have the time or patience to muck around in the quixotic world of professional ethics.

  “Give me some idea of just how urgent this is,” Westlake said.

  “I’m working as a consultant to the Ragged Harbor police.”

  “The three murdered students.”

  “There are seven connected murders.”

  “Jesus. You think Lily Dorman had something to do with them?”

  “Her father is one of the victims.”

  Westlake sat in her secretary’s chair. “Harper Dorman. When I read about the murder in the newspaper, I didn’t make the connection. Lily was terrified of him. She hated him. He sexually abused her for years. Lily was a disturbed kid, but when I knew her she was not nearly homicidal.”

  “Will you tell me about her?”

  “What I can remember. I don’t have her file. That would be at Maine Central, if they still have it. Lily was my first MPD case. She’d been there six months before I understood what was going on.”

  I sat on the sofa opposite Westlake and listened as she recalled her early sessions with Lily Dorman. What began as straightforward psychotherapy with an adolescent soon became the complex, demanding tasks required with an MPD patient.

  “I like to encourage journal work,” Westlake said. “Lily was young, but she was bright, and she was already writing in a notebook. At first, we talked about her adjustment to the ward, her schoolwork, other kids on her unit. I felt as if I was building trust, slowly developing a relationship with her. I saw her two or three evenings a week. I’ll never forget the session when she revealed that she was a multiple. She looked different, the way she talked changed, everything about her altered. I swear that her eyes were a different color. She told me to call her… oh, what the hell was it?”

  “Lilith?” I prompted.

  “That’s it. Lilith was tough, angry, sort of a protector. She was sarcastic, didn’t trust anyone, but Lily convinced her that I could be trusted. She was the one who told me there were others. I was so blown away, I couldn’t believe it. Angel was one of the alters. She was younger, always needing to be hugged. Molly was older. There was a fussy one, too, kind of a caretaker. I don’t know how much help this is.”

  “Anything you remember is enormously helpful,” I told her.

  “It’s so long ago. I blamed myself when she took off. I should have known it was coming. She had only one close friend on the ward, a girl a few years younger than Lily who was a smart, tough, street kid. None of us had any success with her. She was there for in-patient evaluation because of an accumulation of the usual juvenile offenses. They used to call kids like that ‘unmanageable.’ Lily asked me if I would see the girl because she was talking about leaving the hospital. I had to say no.”

  Westlake lit another cigarette. “Maybe I’ll take up smoking again,” she said. “Lily left with her friend. We heard later that Lily showed up at her mom’s, then took off again.”

  “The incidents that led to her hospitalization confuse me,” I said. “She dumped hot oil on her father. That was an act of vengeance and rage… maybe impulsive, maybe calculated. She fought with the police, stabbed a couple of them. A few months later, you saw no potential for violence.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Westlake interrupted. “I said she wasn’t homicidal. Lily Dorman was the genuine article. Each personality was discrete. Lilith had a nasty streak. Myra was the prissy one. A year after she ran off, Lily sent me a postcard from San Francisco. I remember thinking how troubled she was, and wondering whether she could survive in a real city.”

  Westlake crushed out her cigarette. “The newspaper said the police were looking for a serial killer.”

  “Stanley Markham. He’s dead, one of the seven victims.”

  She stared at me. “Someone killed the killer. That’s poetic, if nothing else. How can you be certain that all these murders are related?”

  “The same gun was used for all seven. Julia, is there anything more that you remember about Lily?”

  “Let me get this straight. You think Lily Dorman tracked down and murdered a serial killer. Markham killed women, didn’t he? How the hell could she get near h
im?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why do you think Lily Dorman killed any of these people?”

  I outlined the case for her and described my involvement.

  “That’s why your name was familiar,” she said. “Lily insisted that Harper Dorman was not her biological father. At first, she refused to tell me who was, but then she brought a magazine article to one of our sessions. The article was about you, and how you developed personality profiles that led police to killers.”

  The Markham case had broken then, and media attention was nonstop. Only Boston’s “Strangler,” Albert DeSalvo, claimed more Boston headlines than Stanley Markham. A good friend, investigative reporter Anthony Michaels, wrote an in-depth story about my work.

  Again, the scourge of coincidence blistered my mind. Markham’s escape was too convenient.

  “She told you that I was her father.”

  Westlake nodded. “Lily said that she had your ‘fine mind.’ Does she?”

  “I’m not Lily Dorman’s father,” I said.

  HERB JAWORSKI WAS NOT REGISTERED AT THE HOLIDAY Inn. I checked in, found my room, and thumbed through Lily’s journal until I discovered the relevant entry.

  I have my father’s good mind.

  Mom told me that. She gave me an article that said Lucas Frank has an instinctive grasp of the criminal mind. The story was about how he made images of killers in his mind and helped the police catch them.

  I studied his photograph. My father had a neat beard and trimmed dark hair. He also had a serious expression, intense.

  I read the article, but I did not understand it.

  Mom said that I would understand it soon because I have my father’s good mind.

  She allowed me to keep the magazine. She liked that I stared at my father’s photograph. I reread the article dozens of times and studied the words until they made sense.

  First, I learned how the killers thought, how they reasoned about the world, and how they made decisions. A few months later, I knew how my father could retreat from his own habits of thought and make room for another person’s way of looking at life.