The Good Listener

by B. M. Hardin

  I walked around the grocery store.

  I was learning to enjoy some of the simple things that I’d once taken for granted like cooking.

  I pushed the cart, but my gut started to do something familiar.

  It was trying to tell me something.

  My gut and my sixth sense had always been reliable, so I trusted the feeling and looked behind me.

  He moved swiftly, but I saw him.

  Blake.

  He was still here.

  He was still in town.

  Why?

  For some reason, I thought about the anonymous phone call to 911 that had saved my life.

  Was it him?

  He was probably somewhere watching.

  He was crazy, so I couldn’t exactly rule out any possibilities with him.

  But since he was still there, was it possible that he had been the one to call for help?

  But that would bring up another question of course.

  How did he know?

  How would he know that I was trying to kill myself?

  Did he have a camera in our house or something?

  How did he get the front door open?

  I left the cart and headed towards the aisle over but it seemed as though I only caught his shoulder.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me,” I said trying to get to around the people with their carts and their children.

  Finally, on the last aisle, I saw the back of him as he made his way to the door.

  I called out to him, but he kept walking and by the time I made it outside, he was gone.

  He was gone.

  I looked all around me, but he was nowhere in sight.

  He was following me but why?

  He was still around but why?

  So, was there a possibility that his victim was still alive?

  Had the sessions worked?

  Whatever the reason was, I wanted to talk to him.

  “Hey, aren’t you that doctor? The therapist woman? The one that they were blaming for her husband’s mistress disappearance? Only to find that she was alive and well.”

  I didn’t respond.

  Without going back to get my groceries, I headed back to my car as others started to ask questions.

  I sped off as people started to surround my car.

  I took a deep breath as I turned down a side street.

  I looked in my rearview mirror…

  “Ahhhh!” I screamed.

  Blake.

  He’d been hiding in the back of my car the whole time.

  I turned to look at him but swerved so I turned my head back towards the street.

  I felt something touch the back of my head so I looked again into the rearview mirror.

  It was a gun.

  I hit the brakes.

  “You almost made me shoot you.”

  I looked at him through the mirror again, and he smiled.

  “Drive.”

  He gave me directions for what seemed like forever.

  We turned down a road that I had never even been down.

  One that was off of the street and just driving by it, one was sure to miss it.

  We drove down the rocky road, and we came to a small little house.

  It was abandoned and looked as though no one had lived there for years.

  Keeping the gun pointed at me, Blake got out.

  “Get out.”

  I got out of the car with my hands up.

  “Blake what are you doing?”

  He didn’t comment.

  “Blake what is this? What are you doing?”

  “Turn around.”

  With the gun pointing at me, I didn’t have a choice but to obey him, so I turned around.

  I asked him another question, but he didn’t answer that one either.

  Instead, he hit me in the back of the head with the gun.

  Lights out…

  ~***~

  I opened my eyes and looked around me.

  I was tied to a chair, and something was covering up my mouth.

  I could tell that I was inside the shack and even though it looked awful on the outside, the inside was fixed up quite nicely.

  I started to panic and tried to get my arms and legs free.

  My screams were muffled, and I tried to hop towards the door.

  “Where are you going, Hannah?”

  Blake came out of nowhere.

  He was still holding the gun.

  He approached me and I squeezed my eyes closed, but he took the cloth off of my mouth.

  “Help! Somebody, please help!”

  “No one can hear you, Hannah.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why not?”

  I started to scream, but Blake continued to talk.

  “You were her all along Hannah. You were my next victim; the woman who I wanted to kill. I told you it was a woman.”

  What?

  What kind of sick game was this?

  “What?”

  “You were her.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would you come to me to help save myself?”

  “I personally thought it was a brilliant idea. Don’t you?”

  I wanted to scream all kinds of curse words at him, but I didn’t want to provoke him to shoot me, which he was probably going to do anyway.

  “I wanted to see what you were made of. I wanted to see if you could truly convince me not to kill you. No one else would have been fit to do the job. Some days I felt like there might be hope but nope. You failed Hannah.”

  What?

  I just didn’t understand.

  “I thought you said that she chose you.”

  “You did. When you offered to help me, over all those people that were waiting to see you, you chose to help me. You made room for me because I was the biggest “project”. It was all about your ego and your reputation because deep down inside you knew that if you could fix me, you could fix anybody. So, you did choose me.”

  “But whether I did or not, whether I took you on as a patient or not, if I was your next victim you still would have killed me. Even without my time or my words, if what you’ve told me was true about you, you would have still wanted to kill me.”

  “True. But I was really hoping that you would change my mind.”

  “Why?”

  The longer I sat there, the more I realized that I wasn’t scared of death. I wasn’t even scared of him. But I was scared of his answer.

  He didn’t say anything for a while.

  For what seemed like forever he just sat there and stared at me.

  He watched me swarm all over the place.

  He watched me start to sweat.

  He heard me ask him the same question over and over again but for the longest, he just sat there.

  “Why Blake? Why do you want to kill me?”

  “Think about everything that I have told you.”

  I let out a deep breath.

  “People and papers lie.”

  “Yes. What else?”

  I’d read my notes on him a thousand times so I knew almost everything that he’d ever said to me by heart.

  I started to almost quote them verbatim.

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What else Hannah?”

  I tried to think, but it was hard to do tied up, with a gun being pointed in your face.

  “What’s your favorite color, Hannah?”

  Blue.

  He knew that it was blue.

  “Why? It was you that saved me from killing myself wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?

  “You didn’t have the right to take your own life. I would have been a fool to let you beat me to it. All of my hard work would have gone to waste.”

  “How? How did you know that I would?”

  “I told you I’m better at your job than you are. I thought like the patient. I thought about what I would do if I were in your shoes. If I’d had the job
that you had. The life that you had. The reputation and the sudden cheating husband and pending conviction. It wasn’t all that hard to know that suicide would be your next move. Not to mention that I’d watch you on the news that day. It was all over your face that you were giving up. I could see death in your eyes. I could hear how desperate you were in your voice. I knew what you were planning to do and when I pulled up at your house, and saw that Joel wasn’t there I knew then that you would try to make your move.”

  I shook my head.

  “How did you get in?”

  “Come on, I’ve had a key to your house for months.”

  What?

  “I made a copy that night when I brought Joel home drunk, which I’d spiked his drink that night with something that was going to knock him out. He only had one drink I put a little something in it when he wasn’t looking. It wasn’t poison that time, I lied. He drunk the drink, started feeling woozy, I led him to my car, took his keys and went and made a copy, and then I brought him home.”

  So that’s why he tried to get close to Joel. That’s why he hired him to gain access to small, yet important, things such as getting him “drunk” or drugged up enough to get access to our house.

  “Like I told you, I am so much better at your job. Every book that you have read, so have I. Every case study that you have glanced at, so have I. Every possible article that I could find on things of the mind, treatments, causes of mental illnesses, I have read them all. I’ve devoted my life to the world of psychology and everything that surrounds it. There was nothing that you could have said to me that I didn’t already know.”

  “Then why come to get help?”

  “You were the good listener. The mind manipulator. Surely you knew something that I didn’t. Surely you could convince me, save me, and save yourself. Surely you could get through to me,” Blake said sarcastically.

  He was even crazier than I’d thought that he was.

  “You should have just killed me. Why play games? Why waste your time and mine? Session after session. Conversation after conversation. All of the back and forth was for nothing.”

  “Even with your life hanging in the balance, you still don’t listen. I wanted to see if you could change my mind. If you could change me. I wasn’t lying about that part. Sure I know everything that you know, but I figured that with both of our minds together, that was a for sure way to cure me, but here we are. So, I guess that means that you couldn’t do your job.”

  “But why? Did you see me and have the urge like you said? You obviously already seen me before you came to me so why did you want to kill me, Blake? What was it about me that gave you the urge?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I waited, but he never answered the question.

  I closed my eyes for only a second to try to think, but he spoke again.

  “I gave you everything that you have always needed. Every answer to your questions has always been there. You should have known that I was talking about you all along. All you had to do was listen, Hannah. All you had to do was do the things that I told you to do. I told you to see what wasn’t there. I told you to hear what wasn’t being said. I told you that the truth was always in between the lines, but you never heard a word that I said.”

  He was wrong.

  I listened to everything that he said.

  I always replayed our conversations and meditated on his words.

  What was he talking about?

  I was thinking.

  I was thinking hard, but nothing, nothing that was clear enough said that he had been talking about me.

  “But you saved me. You want me dead but you saved me.”

  “I told you why I did it. I wanted the pleasure of killing you myself.”

  “But how when I was going to prison?”

  “No, you weren’t. We were just having a little fun.”

  “We?”

  Just as he said the words, Summer appeared as though she had been hiding in the shadows, listening, waiting for her cue.

  She didn’t have on a wig, and she definitely wasn’t pregnant.

  She smirked at me and came over to sit beside Blake.

  “Do you really think that if we wanted you to go down for her disappearance or suspected murder that she would have come to the courthouse? She wanted you to see her. And she made sure that you did.”

  I shook my head.

  Like, what?

  I just didn’t understand.

  “She made sure that the rest of the world and the police saw her too; which is why she took off the wig and looked towards the camera.”

  “Both of you need help.”

  “Of course, we do. But we enjoyed watching you panic. Everyone else fell for it all so easily. They didn’t waste any time trying to put a woman of your stature away. They didn’t mind pinning something on you so fast just to show you that no matter what you may think of yourself, you’re just as disposable or replaceable as the next. A woman who had saved so many people in this city; probably even one of their family members, spouse, parent or sibling, but they didn’t care about any of that. They didn’t mind locking you up and throwing away the key. I told you, people can’t be trusted. Nobody is worthy of another person’s loyalty. I told you to remember that. We showed you just how accurate that statement was.”

  I was disgusted.

  But Blake continued.

  “We timed everything just right. Summer getting the job. Summer seducing your husband and faking the pregnancy. Me dropping the hints about the affair. I’d come with plans to reveal what I did to you that day on purpose. I set the bait, and you took it, just like I knew that you would. All we needed was for you to cause a scene which you did. We knew all of the schedules of the neighbors, so we knew someone was bound to see you try to attack her.”

  They both had been trying to set me up.

  Only to save me so that they could kill me themselves.

  “I was the one that they saw, in all black, go around your house that night. I was the one setting off your alarm most of the time; a few times it was the cats, and that one time, it really was Joel.”

  I shook my head and rocked back and forth.

  All of this time.

  He had been in the mix all of this time.

  Summer had played me for years.

  How could I have been so stupid?

  “We set the scene. She cut herself, a few times to get us a good bit of blood. She dripped the blood all over the floor and then attempted to write your name. I found a random pregnant woman, paid her for her urine and handed it off to Summer as she went inside of the doctor’s office. We had it all figured out. Once we set all of the evidence, she came to hide out here to disappear.”

  I still couldn’t understand why they would do this to me.

  And just for fun.

  It just didn’t make sense.

  “That day in your office. The day that I used your bathroom. I left my phone there on purpose. Knowing that you would look and see who it was that was calling. Especially if it was Summer. We’d set up an exact time for her to call, and when I glanced at the clock, I asked you to use your bathroom. I’d wiped it down before I came in and you didn’t notice but when I’d used the end of my blazer to put it on the couch and to it back in my pocket so that my fingerprints weren’t on it. Only yours. Summer and I switched phones that same day. She put her SIM card in it, and she put her bloody fingerprints all over it. I was the one who called you from the backyard of your house. And then I planted the phone in the bushes.”

  Both of them deserved to die.

  “Why?”

  “We weren’t going to let you rot in prison. That defeated the purpose. And Joel, well he was just something, someone that we needed to use to make the plan work. I had no plans on killing him, but the poor bastard ended up killing himself. We didn’t expect that. Isn’t it something? You’ve saved so many people, but you couldn’t even save your own husband?”

  “It’s your fault. He
felt so guilty, and all of this was just one big game to you. You don’t just plan to destroy a person’s life. You could have just killed me and gotten it all over with.”

  “Yeah, I could’ve. But like I said, I wanted to see if you could help me. And I really didn’t kill China. Whatever happened to her was truly an accident. But hell, she deserved it for being a slut.”

  He taunted me.

  “We’ve been planning this for a long time. When you gave Summer the job, we knew that we were going to be able to get away with it. You believed everything that paper said about her and everything that she told you. None of it was true. She was pretending too. For years. She got close enough, learned everything she could about you and then told me.”

  Summer never said a word.

  She just looked at me.

  I was heated.

  I felt betrayed on so many different levels.

  “So you two are dating? Do you like to kill together? Ruin people’s lives together?”

  “Dating? No silly. She’s my brother’s wife. My sister-in-law.”

  “What? Your brother’s wife? Your sister-in-law?”

  “Yes. See, you weren’t listening. I never talked about it but I gave you that one moment. That one piece of truth that you couldn’t afford to miss, but you did. I told you that I was the “oldest” of my siblings. But you never asked how many children were there. You never asked about what happened to my sibling during the foster homes and everything else. You only heard what you wanted to hear instead of truly listening to what I was giving you.”

  I was flabbergasted, and I felt as though I was going to die from a heart attack.

  He wouldn’t have to shoot me at all.

  “But to answer your question, they split us up. My brother stayed here, with one family that actually treated him as though he was their own.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Remember the patient that was “stalking” you? The one that was court ordered for you to see and ended up going to prison for a robbery, and dying in a prison brawl?”

  My eyes grew big.

  “That was my brother. That was Summer’s husband.”

  You have got to be kidding me!

  “Summer came onboard just to fill the gap and get close to you, but soon the plan became personal for her because she was jealous that her husband found you attractive and actually started pursuing you when really he was supposed to have been there playing a role just like she was. To find out more information that you wouldn’t share with Summer as an assistant, but you might share with a patient. But he got sloppy. He developed something more for you, so I had to take him out of the picture. I set him up for the robbery and even ordered for him to be killed in the prison brawl. As I said, I have a few connections.”