Instead, he’d bailed her out by prompting her with his name. And in just a few minutes, he told himself as the two of them set off down the sun-dappled path between the pines, followed at a respectable distance by their escorts, he’d find out whether fate had brought him a potential ally, or merely a momentary distraction.
Until they achieved a little more separation from the trailing psych techs, though, Max confined himself to vintage Lyssy-babble. “It’s pretty here in the morning, hunh? Everything’s so fresh and new. Of course, it’s always pretty, even when it’s raining. That’s the neat thing about the arboretum, how it’s different at different times of the day. My favorite is around sunset, when the sky and everything lights up like the pictures in this Maxfield Parrish book my art therapy tutor gave me. The violet hour, she called it. Only it’s not always easy getting an escort that time of day, so…. “
They reached a point where the gravel path, bordered on the right by a seven-foot hedge, looped tightly around on itself like a paper clip. Max glanced over his shoulder—the escorts had dropped back out of sight. “Wanna play a trick on them?”
“Sure, I guess.”
He took the girl’s hand—how warm and alive it felt, like a small soft animal—and ducked lopsidedly through a gap in the hedge, good leg first, bad leg dragging. They rejoined the path on the other side. Still clutching one of her hands in one of his, Max held the forefinger of his free hand to his lips as the psych techs strolled by on the other side of the hedge, uniforms flashing white through the dark green leaves, then tugged the girl back through the hedge as the psych techs disappeared around a sharp bend.
“They think they’re behind us, but now we’re behind them,” he whispered, his glance sliding downward to the swell of her breasts under a brown T-shirt the same color as her hair.
“Hey! Anybody ever tell you it was rude to stare?”
“I wasn’t…I mean, I didn’t mean to…“stammered Max, as Lyssy; if he could have forced a blush, he would have.
“Just messing with you,” said the girl. “You like?”
“What’s…what’s not to like?”
“You want?” Taking his hand in both of hers, she pressed his scarred palm between her breasts, against her heart, which was thumping a mile a minute. Gone was the little girl whisper; the alter’s true voice was low-pitched, with a husky, thrilling catch in it.
Staring directly into her eyes now, he cupped his palm under her right breast, stroked the stiffening nipple with his thumb. “I wouldn’t throw you out of bed for eating potato chips,” he whispered, using his own voice, the one that sounded like acid eating through glass, for the first time that day.
“Okay then,” she said. “But there’s something you have to do for me first.” Her breath was moist and sweet, her eyes so dark there was no border between pupil and iris.
“What’s that?”
“Get me out of this fucking loony bin.”
4
For three hours, Irene perched uncomfortably on a hard stool under hot lights, talking about things she’d just as soon have forgotten. She was disappointed to learn that Sandy Wells, the show’s host, would not be present—she’d pictured him sitting across from her wearing one of his trademark leather jackets, his eyes narrowed like a gunslinger’s and his bulldog jaw out-thrust, with not a hair of his gray, razor-cut head out of place.
Instead, questions and prompts were tossed at her, flat-voiced, by one of Wells’s flunkies, Marti Reynolds, from a canvas-backed director’s chair. Minutes into the taping, Irene realized that she and Ms. Reynolds had conflicting agendas. Irene would have preferred to discuss her kidnapping and subsequent ordeal from a psychiatrist’s point of view—it was fascinating stuff, as far as she was concerned: a close, extended, and unprecedented look at dissociative identity disorder, with a side trip into psychopathy—and to remain emotionally detached while doing so.
But what Wells, Reynolds, and presumably the television audience, wanted to hear about was how it felt to be kidnapped, held hostage during an extended killing spree, and threatened with rape and murder—in short, what was it like being a victim? Within that context, of course, Irene was expected to present herself in a courageous light—Wells and his audience liked their victims spunky—although a few reluctant tears wouldn’t have been unwelcome.
In the end, the only thing that made the interview tolerable for Irene was the advice Pender had given her: if you don’t like a question, ignore it—answer the question that should have been asked instead. So when Reynolds wanted to know how Irene had felt when she came within a whisker of being murdered by the homocidal alter known as Kinch, she responded with, “Kinch? Oh, Kinch was a real piece of work. Pure id, pure rage. All the anger Lyssy felt at his years of abuse, but was unable to express for fear of retaliation, seemed to have been concentrated in the persona of Kinch. When the alter known as Max killed, it was for necessity, convenience, or sheer enjoyment; when Kinch killed, it was because he couldn’t do otherwise. He was more of a weapon than a viable personality. Kinch, I’ve been told, means blade in Gaelic, and in a very real way, Kinch was little more than the continuation of the knife in his hand.”
They broke for lunch at noon—Irene was invited to fill a plate from the backstage buffet known for some reason as the crafts table. After eating, she took her cell phone outside and tried calling Lily again. The room phone rang and rang, then kicked back to the switchboard. Irene left yet another message, then asked to speak to the director, reached his secretary instead, and left a message with her.
By this time her disaster-movie screenwriter—you don’t have to be a multiple to have one—was hard at work coming up with various explanations for the communications failure. Lily had switched alters; escaped; turned catatonic or autistic; was trying to reach Irene but being held incommunicado to prevent her from revealing Corder’s methods; and so on.
Then Irene’s scenarist turned to her other current project. What Happened Last Night? was the working title. Please don’t let me have made a fool of myself again, she thought as she selected Pender’s cell number in her own phone’s address-book file, then pushed Call.
“Hello?”
“Pen?”
“Oh, hi, Irene. How’s the interview going?”
“Not bad—as long as I don’t pay any attention to the questions, of course.”
Pender laughed. “As my sister Ida would have said, ‘Truer words were never.’” Then: “Any particular reason you called, Irene?”
“Nothing important. I was just wondering…?”
“Unh-hunh?”
“About last night…?”
“Unh-hunh?”
“Did, did I…? did we…? I mean, did anything…?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold it right there,” Pender interrupted her. “We’re two consenting adults, you don’t have anything to apologize for. I admit, I thought it was a bad idea when you invited the maid and the room service kid to take off their clothes and join us, but I have to confess, I really enjoyed it.”
A few seconds ticked by. Irene’s sandwich turned to mucilage in her mouth. Then the light dawned. “Damn it, Pender, you really had me going there for a minute.”
Pender chuckled. “You passed out about halfway through Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and three-quarters through your fourth shot of Jim Beam. Your last words, as I recall, were something like, ‘This stuff kinda grows on you.’”
Irene shook her head ruefully. “You’re a bad influence, Pen.”
“And proud of it. Have fun this afternoon.”
“You too,” replied Irene. She pressed the End Call button, then returned to the address-book screen and tried to reach Lily one more time.
5
The girl was waiting with Patty Benoit at the same table as before, her back to the roomful of loonies and staff and her creamy dark hair all tumbled down over her shoulders.
As Max limped toward them carrying his lunch tray, his features arranged into Lyssy’
s chuckleheaded grin, suddenly it struck him, with a sense of irony about as subtle as a bowling ball, that he had no idea whether this was Lily, the simpering original personality, or Lilith, the alter he’d met a few hours ago. And when she looked up and met his eyes, he realized—here came that bowling ball again—that she must be wondering the same thing about him.
“We probably should have worked out a password,” he whispered, a good deal more casually than he felt, as soon as they were alone—Patty had joined Wally at a nearby table to give them their privacy.
Whoosh. The tension left her body like air rushing out of a punctured balloon. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
“Did you hear? Corder gave the okay for you to come to my party tonight.”
“I heard. The bad news is, Mullet Woman there is coming with me.”
“You think you can handle her?”
“If I could handle Swervin’ Mervin, I can handle her. But we won’t have much time for pin the tail on the donkey. According to Patty, we’re only gonna be there two hours, tops, and the way I figure, we’re gonna need most of that for a head start.” Lilith glanced over to the psych techs’ table to see how closely they were being watched, then took a big, two-handed bite out of her juicy-rare cheeseburger. “What’s the matter? You look disappointed,” she said with her mouth full.
“I’ve been looking forward to my payback for years,” he replied. “There is no conceivable way I’m going to rush it, head start or no head start.”
Lilith looked him in the eye—not the easiest thing to do. “Maybe you ought to rethink your priorities.”
“Revenge is the priority,” Max whispered, leaning across the table—they were sitting catty-corner from each other—and dabbing a spot of ketchup from the corner of her mouth with his own napkin.
At the neighboring table, the burly psych techs exchanged knowing glances. “Don’t they make a cute couple?” said Wally.
Patty grinned. “Multiples in love,” she said. “Imagine the possibilities.”
6
The message-waiting button on the in-room telephone was blinking when Lilith returned to the observation suite after lunch to wait out the last few hours of her captivity—the less contact with the staff, she and Max had agreed, the slimmer the chances of their respective masquerades being uncovered.
Lilith picked up the handset, pressed the lighted button, and was informed by the switchboard operator that Dr. Cogan had called her again—twice. Lilith thanked her. Yeah, I’ll get right back to her, she thought. When hell needs a Zamboni.
She hung up the phone and lay down, looking up at the ceiling. The acoustic tiles were white and textured like the surface of the moon—Lilith discovered that if she held her breath and let her eyes drift out of focus, it felt as if, instead of lying on her back looking up, she was skimming low over that desolate moonscape, looking down at a land of barren white rocks and sharp black shadows….
Four o’clock. Another hour to kill. Max’s skin was beginning to crawl. He sat up, looked around the little blue room for something to occupy his mind. Lyssy’s books, most of them Christmas or birthday presents from Dr. Al, were chronologically arrayed on a recessed shelf, ranging left to right from the Suesses and Sendaks suitable for the three-year-old mentality with which Lyssy had arrived, through the Robert Louis Stevensons and Harry Potters of his so-called childhood, to the required high school reading—Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the rest of that aging canon.
But there was nothing Max might have chosen for himself. No Stephen King, no Thomas Harris, no true crime or graphic novels—in short, nothing to engage the interest of your average American adolescent, not to mention a thirty-one—no, thirty-two- year-old sociopathic alter.
Ditto for the pitiful collection of PG-rated videos Lyssy had accrued over the last few years. Charlotte’s Web, Old Yeller, The Princess Bride, Time Bandits. Max tried watching television for a little while, but sitting there staring at the screen was too much like being in co-consciousness. He limped over to the window. From here, he could see a sliver of the tiled roof of the director’s residence peeking through the arboretum pines.
His thoughts drifted back to the last time he and Lyssy had been over there. It had been, what, six, eight weeks ago? The girl, Alison, had taken Lyssy up to her room, ordered his attendant to wait outside. She and Lyssy sat together on her little bed while she gushed on and on about her new boyfriend, some lummox from the football team. From her point of view Lyssy might as well have been one of the cute little stuffed animals propped up against the headboard, but life-size, with a marvelous ability to nod on cue.
Things would be different tonight, though, Max promised himself. His hand found its way into his trouser pocket and he began fondling himself through the fabric, thinking about how soon all that sweet pink virginal softness would be his. And if revenge was indeed the priority, it would be doubly—no, triply sweet. Because the suffering he’d be inflicting directly on Corder, the fear, the pain, even the man’s death, would be chump change compared to the sheer delight of drinking in Dr. Al’s helplessness and humiliation as he watched his wife and daughter being raped and tortured. That, as they say in the credit card commercials, was going to be priceless.
And it would be only the beginning. Though their plan called for Lilith and Max to lie low with her biker friends until the heat died down, afterward there would be plenty of opportunity to settle old scores, and plenty of old scores to settle. Pender, for instance, the fat old G-man who’d gunned him down three years ago, costing him his leg and very nearly his life—Max would definitely be looking him up.
Then there was Dr. Irene Cogan, who’d almost become the last of the strawberry blonds to go through the processing plant. But Max, after breaking out of the Monterey County Jail, hadn’t kidnapped her and brought her up to Scorned Ridge for her hair, but rather for her professional services. He’d been having trouble controlling the other alters—that’s how he’d been captured in the first place—and figured that with the help of a good psychiatrist, he could tighten his hegemony over the system.
And like everyone he’d ever trusted, she’d turned on him. Taken his confidences and ground them into the dirt. Talk about a breach of professional ethics—just thinking about her had his free hand tightening around the hilt of an imaginary knife.
But grasping even an imaginary knife was a mistake—suddenly, in his mind’s eye, Max pictured Kinch sitting up in the darkness like a corpse rising from an open coffin, and his half-hearted erection wilted like a week-old stalk of celery….
A telephone rang. From the twilight land halfway between dreaming and waking, Lilith reached out and fumbled the receiver off the hook. “H’lo?” she murmured, cotton-mouthed from sleep.
“Lily?” A not-unfamiliar female voice jarred Lilith into full consciousness.
Oh fuck, she thought. “Dr. Cogan?”
“Yes, I—Wait a minute, who is this?”
Double fuck—Lilith realized suddenly that she’d used her own voice. She faked a cough, tried again. “Sorry, I must have had something stuck in my throat.”
She waited for a response, heard only a puzzled silence, hastened to fill it. “Listen, Dr. Cogan, I really want to tell you about everything that’s been happening, but now’s not a good time, ’cause…“She glanced at the clock-radio bolted to the nightstand: 5:15 P.M.—she’d slept the afternoon away. “’Cause I’m just getting ready for dinner. Maybe I could call you back later tonight. How’s that? Or come to think of it, tomorrow morning’d be even better. I’ll call you back first thing tomorrow morning, I promise.”
Lilith hung up without waiting for a reply. The phone began ringing again; when it stopped, she took the receiver off the hook and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face.
7
After showering, Max dried and powdered his stump. He loathed the sight of it—the way the surgeon had drawn a flap of skin underneath the femur and reattached it to the bac
k of the thigh with a sort of tucked-in curl made it look a little like a shrimp’s head.
His newest prosthetic leg was handsome, though, with a locking knee-joint and a contoured pink calf instead of a stark titanium rod. It was held on by suction, too—no more cumbersome harness. And once he was dressed (Lyssy’s favorite outfit, comfortable chinos and a dove-gray corduroy shirt, gray socks, black sneakers) there was no way anybody could tell him apart from a two-legged man—at least as long as he was standing still.
Just after five o’clock, Wally arrived. He’d changed from his hospital whites into baggy shorts and a green bowling shirt worn unbuttoned over a ribbed wife-beater undershirt. Sandals, no socks—the Big Lebowski look. “Happy birthday, dude,” he said, producing a small gift-wrapped box from behind his back. “That’s from the whole staff—we all chipped in.”
Max tore it open greedily—it was an MP3 player, with earphones and software. “Wow,” he Lyssy’d. “Wow, thanks, this is—I don’t know what to say.”
“We thought it would come in handy in—Well, you know.”
In jail, thought Max. Yeah, I know.
Patty and Lilith were waiting for them at the arboretum gate. Patty too had changed out of her whites, into a denim shirt and wide-bottomed jeans with the seat worn shiny. Lilith was wearing the tight hip-hugger jeans she’d arrived in, and a dark-brown, V-neck, cashmere sweater that showed both her figure and her glossy brown hair to best advantage.
Patty gave Lyssy a hug and wished him happy birthday. Lilith kept her eyes trained on the ground as she wished him the same. Little-girl voice, diffident posture—but was it a disguise, or had the alter switched back to her original personality since lunch? Once again, Max realized that he had no way of knowing for sure.
“We never did work out that password, did we?” he whispered out of the side of his mouth, as he and the girl walked on ahead together, trailed at a distance of ten yards or so by their escorts.
When She Was Bad: A Thriller Page 10
