The Soul Hunter

by Melanie Wells

  Christine dropped the phone and Liz picked it up, shouting at the boys to get the goldfish out of the toilet. I wondered if it was a real goldfish or the Pepperidge Farm kind.

  “Never have children,” Liz said. “Save yourself while you still can.”

  Conversations with Liz always involve shouted instructions to the children, in mid-sentence, so that I have to concentrate on what she means when she says, “Andy and I went to a charity event right now Tommy get your brother off the kitchen table at the Four Seasons and saw Christine hand me the glass and I’ll get you some milk.”

  But somehow their family life always grounds me. If I could, I’d live with them, just to know what it feels like to have that much chaos and unaffected goodwill swirling around me. I’m convinced I’d repair some of my fractured mental health in such an environment.

  I felt better by the time I got off the phone—downright loved, in fact, instead of my usual lost state of abject loneliness and vulnerability.

  My cell phone rang then. I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Dylan Foster,” I said.

  “Dr. Foster, this is Maria Chavez. I had a message to call you.”

  “Dr. Chavez, thanks so much for calling me back.”

  “What can I do for you, Dr. Foster? Do we have a mutual patient?”

  “Actually, no,” I said, feeling suddenly awkward. “It’s a personal matter.” I took a breath. There was no good way to say it. “Involving Gordon Pryne.”

  She didn’t respond. I thought maybe she’d hung up.

  “Dr. Chavez?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m sorry to intrude.”

  “How do you know Gordon Pryne?”

  “I don’t. Not personally.”

  “Dr. Foster, what is this about?”

  “Gordon Pryne is a suspect in a murder.”

  “Drew Sturdivant,” she said. “The police have already talked to me. Are you with the police department? Or was she a patient of yours?”

  “Neither. I teach at SMU.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Drew Sturdivant was murdered with an ax. The ax that was used to kill her was left on my front porch the night she died.”

  “I see,” she said slowly. “Do you know him?”

  “No. And I don’t know why he picked me.”

  “It’s not the sort of question you always get an answer to,” she said, her voice softening.

  “Could we meet to talk?”

  “I’m on my way home. The sitter leaves at seven. Why don’t you just meet me there?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’d like to get this over with,” she said. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  She gave me the address. We lived in the same neighborhood.

  We agreed to meet at seven thirty, which was forty-five minutes from now.

  I wasn’t sure why I wanted so badly to talk to her. But something was tugging at me. I knew she was an important link.

  I made myself a quick supper and got dressed to meet Maria Chavez.

  13

  Maria Chavez lived in a duplex in my funky little neighborhood, not four blocks from my house. Her yard was winter brown and her Christmas lights were still strung on her porch, a luminous little greeting committee. The flower beds on her half of the yard were neatly mulched and held climbing rosebushes, all trimmed and trussed for the winter. The beds on the other side were empty, tufts of Bermuda grass growing in the snaggle-toothed sneer of crooked liner rocks.

  I stepped around a red tricycle and knocked on the door.

  She answered quickly. She was a tiny woman, almost child size. And beautiful, even in her hospital scrubs, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, her face free of makeup, her eyes tired. She shook my hand and invited me in.

  The house was pleasant, decorated in warm browns and reds. There was a stack of books by the couch and a magazine open on the dining room table beside an empty plate. Under the dining room table was a little array of toys. A dump truck, a rubber snake, and three plastic dinosaurs.

  “Can I offer you anything?” she asked. “I was just about to have a glass of wine.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  I took the opportunity to spy a little while she was in the kitchen. My initial glance around the room had suggested that Dr. Chavez was a tidy woman and, like me, a tad bit obsessive. The room had a comfortable, lived-in feel without seeming cluttered or chaotic at all. I didn’t know how old her kid was, but he was either old enough to corral his own toys or someone did a heroic job of wrangling the kid-gear so that it didn’t take over the house.

  I didn’t see a television anywhere. She was atypical in that sense. I don’t have one either, and know very few other abstainers. She did have a good stereo, though. I thought I recognized the piano music that was playing softly as Chopin, but I wasn’t sure.

  I’ve always thought you could learn a lot about people by studying their bookshelves, so I walked over to Maria Chavez’s bookcase and indulged my nosiness. Stuck between Gray’s Anatomy and a two-year-old Physician’s Desk Reference was a copy of Horton Hears a Who. Other children’s books, some in English, some in Spanish, were poking out from the cracks between the grown-up books.

  She owned several Spanish textbooks, as well as a formidable collection of fiction written in both English and Spanish; some authors I recognized and some I didn’t. She leaned toward weighty fiction. No suspense novels or anything like that. Many of the authors had Hispanic surnames. There was some poetry, several books on Cuba, and five or six books, in the top right-hand corner, on criminal psychology. I recognized several authors and titles. Most of the books were about the etiology of criminal behavior. Nature vs. nurture.

  I made it back to my spot by the door before she returned. She gestured for me to sit on the couch. She sat in the chair opposite me, her feet together, her elbows on her knees, and her wine glass in both hands in front of her. She kept her head down for a minute, almost like she was praying. Or trying to gather herself. I waited until she looked up at me.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” I said. “And so quickly. I know this must be hard for you.”

  “What can I do for you, Dr. Foster?”

  “Please call me Dylan.”

  She nodded and waited for me to answer her question.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” I admitted. “I’m trying to put a puzzle together, only I don’t know what the picture is supposed to look like. And I don’t know how the pieces are shaped. Or even where the edges are.”

  “And Gordon Pryne is one of the pieces,” she said.

  “I think so.”

  “And you think my story might fit in as well?”

  “I do.”

  She didn’t react at all. A cool customer, this woman. “What would you like to know?”

  Of course, I had no idea what I would like to know. I just knew I was supposed to be sitting here talking to her, that she was somehow important. That I needed to hear what she had to say.

  “I guess it might help if I explained what’s happened so far,” I began. “I was at home, getting ready for a date. I live just a few blocks from here, by the way.”

  “Really?” Her eyebrows went up. “Here in Oak Lawn? Which street?”

  We talked for a minute about what a great neighborhood it is and how much we loved living there. A much-needed bonding moment and a distraction from the gravity of our other common ground, our connection to Gordon Pryne.

  “So I’m at home,” I continued. “This was last Saturday night. And I hear something at the door, and I go to answer it. And an ax falls into my doorway. Someone had leaned it up against the door. I didn’t realize it until after I’d picked it up, but it was covered in blood. Drew Sturdivant’s blood, it turns out. It was the ax that was used to kill her.”

  “And you just found it on your porch.”

  I nodded.

  “Bizarre.”

  “Yea
h. At least. I didn’t find out her name until the next day, and by then I was in this weird situation where the police were suspicious of me, thinking I had something to do with the murder.”

  “Which you didn’t.”

  It was a statement. Not a question or a guess. She knew, as I knew about her, that we were victims, not participants in Gordon Pryne’s sick games.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t. And once they were over that, they told me the name of the suspect.” I hesitated. “Gordon Pryne.” I nodded toward her, hoping to show sensitivity and respect for what she’d been through.

  “And how did you put his name together with mine?” she asked. “No one really knows…I mean, I don’t talk about…”

  I wanted to spare her the trouble of explaining herself. As if it were anyone’s business.

  “I’m a psychologist, Dr. Chavez.”

  “Maria,” she said.

  “Maria. Thank you. My point is, I realize I may have no more than an academic understanding of what you’ve been through. It’s never happened to me. I feel awkward even bringing it up and I’m so grateful for your willingness to talk to me. I know this is the sort of thing you may not have talked about with anyone. Ever.”

  “Except the police.”

  “Right. The police.”

  “Did they give you my name?”

  She didn’t seem upset, though she would have been entitled. She had a right to take her secret to her grave, if she chose.

  “They didn’t tell me about you at all,” I said. “I found out about your…about your connection to Pryne in a very roundabout way. The police had told me that Pryne had a child whose mother worked at Parkland. So I went on a fishing expedition looking for her, thinking maybe there was a woman named Pryne on the staff. I guess I thought she could tell me something about him, maybe what he might do next or…something. I’m not sure.

  “And that led nowhere. But in the course of trying to find her, I found out more about him and about his record, and I stumbled across his rape conviction, and found the Morning News story about the rape of a Parkland doctor. It was a rabbit trail, really, but it led me to you.”

  “So you never found the mother?”

  “No. Only doctors’ names are listed on the website. And she and Pryne may never have married. And if they did, she very well could’ve changed her name by now. I would have. From Pryne. Anything but that.” I looked up. I hadn’t thought to ask her until now. “You don’t know her, do you?”

  She took a sip of wine and sat back into her chair.

  “It’s a huge hospital system, Parkland,” she said.

  “I heard it has its own zip code. Anyway, I put you together with the incident six years ago through a process of elimination, really. Your name wasn’t mentioned anywhere.”

  “You must be a good researcher,” she said, smiling for the first time. “No one has ever… Not that I know of anyway.”

  “I think mainly I’m persistent.” I smiled and made a little pinching gesture with my fingers. “And a teeny tiny bit obsessive.”

  “Both qualities I suspect we share.” She raised her glass.

  I liked this woman immensely. She was careful without being suspicious, poised without being cold, and seemed wonderfully wise and intelligent.

  “Gordon Pryne,” she began, “broke into my apartment—this was when I was living closer to the hospital. Over off Harry Hines. I knew it wasn’t a safe neighborhood, but I didn’t have a car and the bus ride was short from there.”

  She said this without a trace of regret in her voice.

  “My apartment was on the second floor, so I thought I was safe from something like that, a break-in, but he climbed a wall at the end of the parking lot, and then jumped from one balcony to another until he got to my place. He broke the sliding glass door. Shattered it. In the middle of the day. It was a Saturday.” She looked down and traced the rim of her glass as she spoke.

  “I was in the kitchen making tortillas. My parents were coming in from El Paso and my father won’t eat store-bought tortillas. So I was standing there and heard this enormous shattering of glass behind me.”

  “That must have been terrifying.”

  She nodded. “I turned around, and there he was with that knife. He looked…crazed. And angry. I remember that so vividly. My first thought wasn’t ‘why has this man broken into my house and what is he going to do to me?’ It was ‘why is he so angry?’ Like it somehow had something to do with me. That anger. I couldn’t think why he’d be so angry. At me. It seemed so personal.”

  She took a sip of wine and looked at me.

  “Do you feel that way? That his leaving the ax on your porch was… personal?”

  I thought about the note he’d sent me. It was personal. To him, anyway. But he was not a personal being. He was thoroughly impersonal. He had to be to do the things he did.

  “It’s hard not to. But I guess it isn’t, is it?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s anything but that. He’s an angry man, and it’s an anger that is…I don’t know, comprehensive. Global. Universal.”

  “A general, all-purpose rage.”

  She smiled. “Something like that. Anyway, he just sort of ran from the spot where I first saw him and tackled me. He threw me against the wall in the kitchen, and knocked the wind out of me. Stunned me just enough to get me under control. I had a hot cast-iron skillet in my hand and I hit him with it. I hit him in the face. And I remember this—he didn’t even flinch. He had this almost superhuman strength and that rage. He twisted the skillet out of my hand—he broke my wrist—and he dragged me by my hair into the living room, put a knife to my throat, and raped me. Right there on all those broken shards of glass. They took a hundred and fourteen stitches in my back.” She looked down at her glass again. “I bet the whole thing lasted less than five minutes.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “And then he left. The same way he came in. He walked through the empty doorframe, hopped off my balcony to the next one, and jumped from one balcony to another. Then he scaled the wall and disappeared.” She looked up at me. “Five minutes. And my life has never been the same.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I called the police. The ambulance came. I was losing a lot of blood, but I asked them to take me to Baylor instead of Parkland. They did, which was kind of them. They didn’t have to do that. They stitched me up, set my wrist, did the rape kit, photographed my wounds, the whole thing. I’ve done it a thousand times myself. Most crime victims are brought to Parkland, you know.”

  I imagined her performing these duties for rape victims, dragging this heavy secret around with her as she worked.

  “I bet you take good care of them,” I said.

  “I do.” She smiled again. “Do you like poetry, Dylan?”

  “I’m more of a magazine girl.”

  “You don’t know John Donne, then? English poet. Wrote a series of sonnets.”

  “Holy Sonnets,” I said, the fog clearing from distant memories of high school English class. “Sixteenth century?”

  “Seventeenth. ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God,’” she quoted. “‘For You as yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend…Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new…’ Holy Sonnet 14. The image is of a metalworker, hammering and heating and hammering some more and polishing until he creates something beautiful, something that is his workmanship. And then at the end, there’s this rape imagery. ‘For I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.’ I’ve read that poem every night. For six years.”

  “Mommy?” A child’s voice called from the other room.

  “Yes, Doodlebug, what is it?” she answered.

  “Can I have a glass of water?”

  “Sure, honey. Why don’t you come in and give Mommy a kiss and I’ll get it for you. There’s a nice lady here that I want you to meet.”

  I waited until a little boy appeared, wearing Superman paj
amas and dragging a worn baby blanket. He was maybe four or five years old.

  He crawled into her lap and sucked his thumb. She kissed him tenderly on the forehead.

  “Nicholas, this is Miss Dylan.” Her eyes met mine. “Dylan, this is my son, Nicholas.”

  She was looking at me expectantly. I wasn’t sure what she was waiting for.

  And then I took a closer look at Nicholas, the sweet little boy in her lap.

  His eyes were blue, his hair curly and wild. This little boy didn’t look like his mother. He looked like his father.

  He looked just like Gordon Pryne.

  14

  He’s beautiful,” was all I could think of to say. He was, too. I studied his face. He had Gordon Pryne’s wild features—crazy curly hair, bright blue eyes, and a sort of animal energy, which seemed to be in hibernation at the moment, all sweet and small and slumbery. But he looked like the kind of kid who could be hell on wheels after a good dose of sugar and no nap.

  She smiled at him and kissed him again on the forehead. “Yes, he is.” Then to him, “Let’s get you a drink of water, and then straight back to bed. Okay? Doodlebugs need lots of sleep.”

  She left with him in her arms, his blanket trailing behind them. He sucked his thumb and watched me over her shoulder as she carried him away. I heard her in the kitchen, and then she walked back through the den to his bedroom and tucked him back in bed.

  “You sure you don’t want a glass of wine?” she said. “You look like you could use one.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  She sat down and waited.

  “You kept the baby,” I said, almost to make myself believe it. “You got pregnant, and then you kept the baby.”

  “I did.”

  “When did you…? I mean, how did you…?”

  “Which question do you want me to answer?” she said.

  I shrugged. “Pick one.”

  “I didn’t realize I was pregnant until I was four and a half months along.”

  “Surely there must have been symptoms. And aren’t you a…?”

  Pretty soon I was going to regain my ability to finish a sentence. I could feel it coming back to me.