by Alan Russell
Available, she thought, but willing? She still wasn’t certain. “I’ll be here,” she said.
RACHEL AND CHEEVER kept their eyes directed to her tape recorder while listening to that morning’s session with Helen. It was easier than having to look at one another. Figuring out which of them was more uncomfortable would have been difficult. Listening to the tape, Cheever thought, was like having to witness someone possessed by demons. The unexplainable always bothered him, though he was sure he had managed to keep a poker face.
Rachel saw through his pose. “It was worse in person,” she said.
“It usually is.”
“I debated on the ethics of letting you listen. I know Helen gave me carte blanche to share with you, but it still goes against my training. I thought her being attacked, however, necessitated your hearing.”
I let you listen, she thought, at the risk of exposing me to your ridicule. You heard Eris’s jibes directed my way and listened as she imagined my masturbation and described my mutilation. Her own exposure made Rachel feel terribly uneasy.
“May I see the pictures you took?”
She silently assented, handing him her phone. Cheever looked at the pictures carefully. Or was that pruriently? she wondered. Did he like the way Eris was flashing for the camera?
“You have any idea,” he asked, “how long it takes for a scab like this to form?”
“Not really. Why your curiosity?”
“I’m wondering when the cut could have been administered.”
“You mean self-administered, don’t you?”
“That’s one possibility.”
“And isn’t another possibility that this slasher tried to kill Helen where and when she said?”
“Yes.” He rubbed his jaw, and she listened to the sandpaper sounds. They were oddly lulling. “I guess both of us are trained to look beyond what’s offered,” he said.
Rachel recognized that what he said wasn’t exactly a compliment. “What reason would Helen have for hurting herself?”
“By making herself a victim, she becomes a less obvious suspect in Bonnie Gill’s murder.”
“And did she then go out and murder that homeless man to further confuse the issue?”
Cheever didn’t reply.
“My intention is not to belittle you, Detective. In four years of therapy I’ve found Helen’s actions to be labyrinthian, but not Machiavellian. I have patients who would cut themselves and derive pleasure from that. My practice has brought me clients who want to be punished and abused. Helen isn’t like that. She wants to be well more than anything else.”
“Even if that’s true,” Cheever said, “it doesn’t tell me much. Why is it that Helen can talk about this attack? Isn’t this the kind of thing Pandora insists on being mute about?”
“I am still trying to understand what makes Pandora silent.”
Her voice sounded strained. It must be tough trying to be professional all the time, he thought. It wasn’t an attitude to which he aspired. Cheever remembered Lachesis’s words. He could almost imagine the doctor letting her hair down. Rapunzel and Rachel, names that started and finished the same way. He realized he had been staring at her longer than he should have and looked away.
Still, he decided to let down a little hair of his own. “Pandora came out this afternoon when I was questioning Caitlin. We were talking about scars.”
“Scars?”
“I was asking Caitlin to describe herself to me. We’d gone through hair and eyes and I wanted to know if she had any scars.”
“Why scars?”
“I figured she was too young to have tattoos.”
Rachel offered a very small, very fleeting smile. It was enough for Cheever to continue. “I was curious as to how she saw herself.”
“And did she have any identifying marks?”
“Freckles,” he said.
Rachel nodded as if she had seen them herself. “In Helen’s file I have a physical description chart of the different personalities as described by each of them. As you might imagine, none of the personalities look alike.”
“What about their ages?”
“How do you put a chronology on the gods? Helen and Holly are the same age, twenty-five, and Caitlin is the perpetual child of five. The rest consider themselves ageless, although Cronos is the oldest.”
“I wonder if you could get me a copy of their physical descriptions.”
“Yes,” she said, “but why?”
“It always helps to know how people see themselves.” He hesitated before saying anything more. “I also found it interesting that both Bonnie Gill and Caitlin have red hair and freckles.”
“Caitlin described herself as having those physical characteristics long before Bonnie Gill was murdered.”
“I know,” said Cheever. “But I’m still curious.”
She nodded, made a note on a pad of paper for her administrative assistant to do a printout of the physical descriptions of Helen’s personalities.
“Do the Fates,” Cheever asked, “usually speak in rhymes?”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When they do their rhyming, I often suspect that their speech has been rehearsed.” That, or they were the voices of the Fates, but she didn’t tell him that. She barely admitted it to herself.
“You offered some revelations about yourself yesterday,” Cheever said. “You said you didn’t know how Helen divined your mastectomy. Somehow she seems to have picked up on my past as well. A long time ago I had a five-year-old daughter who died of leukemia.”
Cheever had practiced those words thousands of times, though he had rarely uttered them. He wanted the statement to sound firm and final, like something that belonged in the distant past. But the Fates were right. It was a cave he didn’t look into, that he did his best to avoid.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you have any other children?”
“No.”
End of subject, he thought. Bringing up Diane always made him afraid, made him feel like he might lose it. Cheever was determined not to get off track again, to be only the detective.
He lifted up a bag, physically changed the subject. “I brought your books back,” he said. “Thank you for loaning them to me.”
“Finished already?”
He nodded and then took a last look through the pictures Rachel had taken of Holly before handing back her phone.
“Strange how she keeps bleeding from the same spot,” said Rachel.
“What do you mean?” Cheever asked.
“Well, if not the same spot, very close.”
Cheever’s face and hands still indicated he didn’t understand.
“The other night,” she said. “Her chest wound.”
“There were two wounds,” Cheever said. “One along the throat, the other in the back.”
“Multiple wounds,” said the doctor. “There was a stigma on her chest. The largest wound of them all. I thought you knew.”
“You took pictures of it?”
She nodded.
“Show me,” he said, reaching out an insistent hand.
At another time she might have taken umbrage at his demanding manner, but his intentness transcended etiquette. Rachel opened a drawer and pulled out photos she had printed out the day before. Rachel supposed she had been protecting Helen’s privacy. Or had she withheld the frontal nudity shots because of her own insecurities?
Cheever stared at the photos for a long time. The third stigma was atop Helen’s left breast, in much the same location as where she had been cut. It was a wound just above her heart.
Bonnie Gill hadn’t been knifed there. So why had the empath picked up on such a wound? For whom was she bleeding?
“What the hell is going on?” Cheever asked.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Helen Troy pulled up to a stoplight. She looked into the Bug’s rearview mirror and could see a woman clearly reflected in the red glow of her brake lights. The woman stood out because she was carry
ing on a vehement conversation with herself. Her head moved while she talked, bobbing up and down and side to side. She wasn’t singing along to music or speaking into a cellular phone. She was having an internal dialogue, and an angry one by the looks of it. When the woman noticed Helen’s scrutiny, she immediately shut her mouth and acted as if she had been caught doing something wrong. After the light changed she switched lanes to get away from the vantage point of Helen’s rearview mirror. Maybe she was anxious to get back to her interrupted conversation.
Helen knew that soliloquies were acceptable on stage but not in public. Outlandish behavior was frowned upon also. She was often embarrassed to hear what she had said and done. Though Dr. Stern tried to ease Helen’s self-consciousness about her condition, that didn’t stop her from constantly feeling ashamed. It was her body that was on display doing crazy things even if she wasn’t the one acting up. If only her public performances were limited to doing monologues. But no, she had roles enough for a full cast, and what made it worse was that she was rarely sure of her lines or the scene she was playing. They were hidden from her. Like right now. She didn’t know why she was out driving, and she didn’t have any idea where she was going. She had succumbed to a compulsion to get out and get on the road.
Helen had known better than to try and fight the urge. Had she done that, another more amenable personality would have just taken over. This way she was aware of what was occurring—or would be for a time, at least. In the past she had found herself in strange places with no recollection of how she’d arrived there. Helen remembered the time she had awakened in Las Vegas sitting at a pai-gow poker table. She didn’t even know how to pronounce the game, let alone play it. So how could she explain the huge pile of chips in front of her, chips she cashed in for almost two thousand dollars? Another time she had been in a fugue state for three days in Mexico, had emerged in a suite in Puerto Vallarta surrounded by a hundred red roses and a man named Carlos who said he loved her. She didn’t even know the her he loved. It was scary losing time. Sometimes it was even more frightening regaining it.
Helen’s head dropped and then raised itself almost instantaneously. One by one the Greek chorus emerged.
“They’re trying to kill us,” Eris said.
“They’re trying to help us,” said Eurydice.
Pandora was driving and saying nothing. She opened the window and the wind blew inside. The Maenads imitated the blustery sounds.
“We’ve got a good thing going,” Eris said. “Better than the best of both worlds. We travel between Olympus and Earth. What could be better than that?”
“We’re divided,” said Eurydice. “We’re confused.”
The faces continued to change with the characters. Eris looked disdainful. “That’s Helen’s problem, but she’s just one. We are many. Integration is another name for serial murder.”
A frown appeared, and another voice emerged, higher than the others, but somehow more menacing. “The future is the future,” Nemesis said. “Why are you getting so excited about tomorrow when we’re not even certain about yesterday?”
“You can’t change what is past,” Eris said. “And besides, what’s the point of looking back?”
“To be avenged,” said Nemesis, in a voice that declared that should have been obvious to everyone. “She knows all that has gone on, yet she withholds it from us.”
Eurydice rose to Pandora’s defense. “She’s explained why. Pandora holds memories like a dam holds water. She saves us from being washed away.”
“Damn her dam,” Nemesis said.
“We don’t need her,” Eris said. “There are other ways.”
“What ways?” Nemesis asked.
“Strike at our enemies,” Eris said. “Attack them first.”
“Who?” asked Nemesis. She sounded eager.
“Does it matter? They’re all against us. If the doctor succeeds, we die. And if the detective finds our missing pieces, we face an unknown we might not be able to control.”
Nemesis’s face contorted. “I am the goddess of retributive justice. My revenge is not random. It is just.”
“And what if that revenge is against us?” argued Eris.
“So be it.”
A new voice: “How do you know Nemesis hasn’t already struck at us?”
“You’re not welcome here, Pandora,” Eris hissed. “Go back to your box.”
“It is too dark in there,” she said. “I have come out to whisper the word hope.”
“Is that all you have to say to us?” Eris asked.
“Yes. That and I sense we approach the make-or-break time.”
“Make,” said some of the Maenads. “Break,” said others. There was more discordance than rhyme in their voices.
“I don’t have the gift of prophecy,” Pandora said, “but in the darkness I offer a little light. Storms have swept through our body and left nothing aright. Our head has been displaced and our heart hidden. We have been twisted inside so as to not resemble anything human. But now we must be brave and come to terms with ourselves. Ourself.”
“You forget the dangers,” Eris said. “Someone’s trying to kill us. Isn’t that right?”
“Half right,” Pandora said. “We straddle the fence between sacrifice and victim. We are old enough to make choices now.”
Eris raised her voice. “We can flee! All of us can escape! Go to a new city and start over. Leave the dangers, and the past, behind.”
“You’re afraid, Eris, that if we stay you won’t survive either way.”
“I’m not afraid only for me. What about the child?”
“Yes,” Pandora said. “What about the child?”
The Greek chorus died away. As the voices receded, Helen found herself driving the Bug up Lamont. The car strained to take the hill. Helen wished, not for the first time, that she took better care of the car. For too long it had endured neglect, performing better and more bravely than it should have.
The area was familiar to Helen. She had lived in Pacific Beach when she was young, her family renting a small house on Chalcedony Street less than a mile from Kate Sessions Memorial Park. Dusk was giving way to darkness when she pulled into the almost deserted park. The mothers had taken their children home, and the lovers had not yet arrived. There were a few dogs and dog owners, and Helen thought about Cerberus and how she wished she had brought him along. I would have, she thought, if only I had known where I was going.
She stepped out of the Bug and began her stroll. Graffiti marred the rest area, the wall covered with Old English script and the square lettering of some tagger’s signature. Helen never thought she would be nostalgic for “Fuck You,” but at least that meaning was clear enough. There were several colorful but obscure drawings on the wall that looked like a series of rising suns, or perhaps they were blinking eyes.
Helen walked along the hillside, pausing to take in the San Diego skyline. It was a clear night, the lights of the city revealing familiar landmarks. Gradually her vision shortened, the shadows and contours of the park interesting her more than the distant glitter. Spread out beneath her was a grassy expanse. As a child, she had enjoyed rolling down the hill with her friends Jack-and-Jill style. Helen suddenly felt cold. She huddled her shoulders and grasped both of her arms close to her chest. Time to walk, she decided, time to warm up.
It was a cloudless night, and the warmth of the day was quickly dissipating into the open firmament. Helen moved away from the lights, headed north until the grass gave way to chaparral. She made her way along a canyon escarpment, following a wall of mostly chamise. The chaparral brush was thick and unwelcoming. Helen had walked the periphery of the canyon in the daylight before and had seen a few dog paths that led into its interior, but even those didn’t penetrate very far.
The canyon’s many unlit acres looked like a blackout area in a war. Finding a truly dark place in most parts of San Diego wasn’t easy, with street lights and humanity having filled the dark corners. Is that what attracted her to th
is place, she wondered. The darkness? The chaparral wasn’t John Muir’s wilderness, was just a vestige of what once was, a few acres of undisturbed land. Still, it held an unreasonable fear for her. There were no large predators in the canyon except for a coyote or two that lived off of rabbits, mice, and an occasional neighborhood pet. So why was it that she felt something deadly was out there? Helen stopped walking and listened. There wasn’t much to be heard, just enough to tempt her to take a few steps into the shrubbery for a better sampling of sounds. Helen had found herself on the rim of the canyon before, but that was always as far as she went. She couldn’t understand her trepidation to breach the canyon. It wasn’t as if there was much of a drop down, just a gradual decline, but it was still a descent she was afraid of.
Maybe it wasn’t that she liked the darkness, Helen thought, but that she was scared of it and needed to confront her fears. She put her foot forward as if to test the waters.
Cold, she thought, so cold, and walked away.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
“Think on that third wound any harder,” she warned, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if your own stigma formed.”
Cheever and Rachel had occupied a booth at the City Delicatessen on University Avenue for two hours. The food wasn’t the only thing that had kept them there. Cheever couldn’t let the third stigma go. He could almost accept that Helen, or Hygeia, had taken Bonnie Gill’s wounds onto her own person, but where had that third wound come from? It was like a wild card suddenly showing itself. Cheever kept playing with different possibilities, an old dog working at his bone.
He absentmindedly tapped at the black-and-white checkerboard tile on the wall. A lapsed Catholic, Cheever quoted St. Paul, “The invisible must be understood by the visible.” Then he added his own muse, “And what’s visible must be understood in terms of the invisible.”
Rachel didn’t know the source of his references, but did know he was talking about Helen. “The actions of her personalities make sense,” she said, “even if we can’t fathom their reasons. Helen is telling us things. The meanings are coming out in her dreams, in her art—”
