The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  “Thank you, Angel,” he says. He’s good at masking his disappointment, seems to sense that Angel is fragile. “You’ve been really helpful.”

  “Are you going there?” she asks. “Are you going to find him?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m going to keep looking until I find him.”

  She nods, uncertain. Her eyes dart between me and the detective, watching our faces, our expressions. I keep mine encouraging, soft, head nodding. Jen offers a hand to Angel, who allows herself to be hoisted from the couch. The older woman wraps an arm around Angel, walks her upstairs, motioning that she’ll be right back.

  “Who are these boys?”

  “Billy Martin,” he says. “And two other open missing cases on my desk. Three boys missing over the last two years. All runaways, troubled. All passed through the same bus station.”

  I sit across from him, surprised to notice that he is very young. With the height and the glasses, the dark of his skin, he presents as older somehow. It’s in the eyes, the softness of his face, the complete absence of any lines or wear and tear. There is too much weariness in his shoulders.

  “It doesn’t mean she didn’t see him,” I say. “They all have a similar look.”

  “They fit a profile, certainly,” he says. “And that bus stop? It’s right across the street from where Tom Walters works.”

  “Maybe she saw more than she’s telling us,” I suggest.

  “I’ve been out there twice,” he says. “They cooperated, let me look around. They’re—weird. I don’t know. Creepy people. But that’s not a crime and I didn’t see any evidence of wrongdoing.”

  He goes on. “I went to the city and checked the property survey. There’s no record of that cellar she mentioned.”

  He shakes his head, and I can feel his disappointment, the frustration of not quite being able to do his job. “I can’t go out there again without a warrant.”

  But I can.

  I wait until late. I hacked into your home cameras, by the way. And the baby monitor. I can watch from any of my devices. How, you might wonder? Ah, the labyrinth of the dark web, with all its dim passages into the lives of the unsuspecting. Devices that capture IP addresses, spyware that turns your phone into a camera, an eye always watching you, devices that easily decode logins and passwords.

  If normal people only knew what was out there—what kind of people, what kind of instruction for those looking to indulge their derelictions, abnormalities, fetishes, fantasies. All the cracks and crevices that allow the wraiths to slither into your life. All you need is the box with the serial number, which you so diligently recycled in your bin down at the curb.

  Greg is asleep on the couch in front of the television. He looks wrecked. Hard day? Lily is in her crib. But where are you, Rain Winter?

  “Stalker,” says Tess. It’s not a new accusation. “You’re a stalker.”

  I’d try to deny it, but, how can I?

  “I’m protecting her.” Lame.

  Tess guffaws at that one. Remember “the snorter,” that laugh of hers. Normally all you could get out of her was a polite smile, sometimes a giggle. But every once in a while, she really let it rip, snorting like a wild boar in the brush. You and I, we’d die, that sound so much funnier than whatever had amused us in the first place. She’d get mad at first, then she’d just laugh harder. I haven’t laughed like that since then. The relief of it, how the waves wash through your body. Laughter is the same release as crying, that rush of emotion roiling through, leaving you clean in its wake.

  Tonight, she’s stunning. Long hair like her mother’s, a flowy peasant blouse, clinging soft jeans. She lounges on the couch in my home office, on her belly, up on her elbows, legs kicking.

  “She’s called twice, hasn’t she?”

  “Beth?”

  She called once. I called her back. She hasn’t returned that call yet. I have found myself thinking about her—her smoky voice, the way the silk of her blouse just carelessly revealed the lacy edge of her bra, the cream of her skin. Her sapphire-blue, almond-shaped eyes, the thoughtful way she listened. She wasn’t just waiting for her turn to talk, to give her opinion or share a story. There was a pleasant fleshiness to her body. She wasn’t one of those women—starving themselves, hours at the gym, their bodies taking on that pulled-taut strain, that tension of trying too hard, fighting time and age, gravity and flab. Every morsel measured, agonized over. She had a plate of food, ate with gusto, drank two glasses of wine.

  “I think this is another one of those places,” Tess says. “Another fork in the road.”

  “Oh?”

  Greg groans in his sleep, turns over, putting his back to the camera. Where are you, Rain?

  “As I see it, you could move on from here. Move forward in a new direction.”

  “As opposed to?”

  “As opposed to staying on the path the keeps looping you back into misery.”

  I see that doorway, the bright yellow sunlight, the electric green of the grass, all of it so bright against the darkness it hurts my eyes. I could have walked through that door, and I don’t know where I’d be, but not here, I think. But then—would I have become a doctor? Would I have helped all the young people I think I have helped? Among other things?

  Trauma victims spend a lot of time looking back, trying to unstitch the fabric of the past. All the ways the thing might not have happened, everything they could have done differently.

  “And suppose I take this other fork,” I ask Tess. “Toward what? Normal life, I guess. I call up Beth, we go to dinner, maybe we fall in love, get married. Have children.”

  “Is that so far from the realm of possibility?” she asks. “You’re not getting any younger. Could happen pretty quickly if it’s right. People get married fast at your age. Why wait?”

  “And so, I’m at the movies,” I say. “Or on a tropical getaway with my new girlfriend. And what if there’s a boy trapped in a cellar on the isolated property of Tom and Wendy Walters? What if there is more than one?”

  “What if there isn’t anyone?” she says. “And what if you don’t have to, can’t, save everyone. And what if you could have the life that you deserve?”

  She speaks with uncommon passion.

  “What if this is the life I deserve?”

  When I glance over at her, she’s not there.

  The victims of trauma—they want it back. The time. The person they would have been if the worst thing hadn’t happened. But they don’t get it. The world is fractured; the mirror casts back a different reflection. And we just have to accept it. We are who we are now because of what happened then.

  After a while longer, I leave my house, get in the car and drive to the parking garage. There I switch vehicles.

  I am about halfway to the Walters property, armed with the new information given by Angel today, when I realize that someone’s following me.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “Where are you?” Gillian asked, her voice echoing from the speaker. “It sounds like you’re driving.”

  Rain didn’t answer. Instead, she told Gillian about her visit to Greta. Told her about the stuffed birds, how they stared, lifeless, frozen. It didn’t sound funny, as she hoped it would.

  “That’s creepy,” said Gillian absently, probably on Tinder or whatever the dating app of the moment was. Swipe left, swipe right. That was the low to which the modern world had reduced love, the magic of human connection.

  Then Rain went on to what happened in the house with the homeless man, the cat, the kittens.

  “Oh, my god. Honey.” Gillian snapped back to attention. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” said Rain. She probably should have gone to the emergency room, gotten herself checked out.

  “Why would you go there alone?” she asked. “Rain, you’re smarter than that.”

  “I just wanted
the pictures,” she said. Gillian made a sound like she understood.

  “Two people there that night,” Gillian said after a moment. “That’s new.”

  No, it wasn’t new, not to Rain. She hadn’t forgotten as much as she’d pushed it deep, locked in that box her father had taught her about. She’d put that part of herself away.

  That box. What her father hadn’t told her, and to be fair maybe he didn’t even realize it himself, is that if you lock something in a box and bury it deep inside you, it stays, rattling around in there, forever.

  “Rain?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” It was her friend talking, not her partner. “I mean. Maybe it’s all too hard. Maybe it’s taking you places you don’t need to go.”

  “Maybe it’s taking me places I do need to go.”

  She was opening the lid now, setting it all free, so that she could watch it fly away, a winged figure across the moon.

  That night, she and Hank took the ride mostly in silence. She tried to shift as far away from him as the passenger seat would allow. Greg wasn’t speaking to her, so she hadn’t had to worry about an excuse for where she’d be all night. But she had one at the ready; she was going to visit her father, spend the night in her old room and do some laundry. It was something she did fairly frequently, and it would track.

  But Greg hadn’t called or returned her calls. And she was pretty sure that she’d lost him. It was stone in her heart; that she’d pushed away someone so good. What a cliché to say she didn’t even realize how much she loved him until she’d screwed it all up. Her past had bubbled up like a noxious gas and poisoned her present.

  The Henry Hudson was thick with traffic, the city disappearing in the rearview mirror. Hank was a hulking presence. When he’d tossed his pack in the truck, it had clanked heavily, and she could only imagine what was inside. Was he really going to do this? Were they really going to do this?

  And yet, wasn’t there also a giddy anticipation? The terrible thrill of imagined revenge tingled through her nerve endings. The idea of facing someone who terrorized you as a child and making him pay, there was a kind of comic-book justice to that. It was a Technicolor idea, bright with reds, oranges, yellows and blues, one that recast everything that came before it. It turned her from a black-and-white figure, cowering in fear, into someone powerful, ready to make things right.

  She hadn’t talked about her rage much. Maybe with Dr. Cooper, early on. The size and scope of her anger; it was nothing she’d ever experienced, and it didn’t even feel like it fit in her body. But when she thought about Tess, about Kreskey, about how they shouldn’t have even been where they were, about how a million little things went wrong—Tess’s mom called into work, the tire flat on Tess’s bike. The injustice of it swelled, filled her—there was a scream of rage bigger than the world lodged in her center. If she let it loose, it might shatter everything with its terrible pitch and volume.

  She’d swallowed it, held it inside. Like the box.

  They drove and drove. When they entered The Hollows city limits, she sensed a change in him—even though they hadn’t exchanged a word in miles. He sat up straighter, the rhythm of his breath shifted.

  “Hank.”

  He turned to look at her, then back at the road. She’d done a little research on this, what might be wrong with Hank, talked to a psych student she knew.

  “I mean, split personality disorder—like a Sybil kind of a thing where there are different personalities, characters so to speak—it’s rare. Like so rare that many doctors don’t think it exists,” he told her over a falafel in the park. She’d dated Steve briefly in her freshman year, but the chemistry was more friendship than anything, and the few kisses they’d shared were forgettable.

  “On the other hand, childhood trauma is very tricky. In extreme cases, the psyche will split. It’s a survival mechanism, really. But it’s more like two sides of the same coin—a stronger self emerges to protect the child self. There might be some dissociation, fugue states where one part of the self is more in control. This might lead to blackouts, foggy memories, blank spots in recall.”

  The park had bustled around them, but Rain was back in the tree hollow. Steve had watched her carefully, put a hand on her shoulder as if intuiting her bad memories. He was wiry, with a few days of dark stubble, big soulful eyes.

  “Jung called them splinter-psyches,” he said. “One part of the ego regresses. Another part basically grows up too fast in response to trauma. A kind of false self emerges. May reemerge in times of great stress later.”

  “Does one self remember the actions of the other self?” Rain asked.

  Steve shrugged. “Possibly yes. Maybe not. It might be like the memories we have of our dreams—disjointed, nonsensical. Our dream self is effectively another self. It’s probably best likened to that.”

  She remembered Hank’s face, how confused he’d seemed. It was as if he’d awoken from a dream.

  “Hank?” she said again.

  He didn’t even answer her.

  “Rain?” Gillian still on the phone. “Are you there? Girlfriend. What’s eating you?”

  She parked outside the gate to Hank’s property.

  What in the hell did she think she was going to do? Ring his buzzer. Yeah. Yes. She was going to ring his buzzer and tell him what she was thinking, what she was remembering, what she suspected him of doing. But then what? She’d be destroying him. Ruining his life. Again.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Rain.”

  “Gil,” she said. “I have to go. Hey, don’t call the house, okay? Greg thinks I’m with you.”

  She ended the call before Gillian could say anything else.

  She nearly jumped out of her skin as the gate swung open and Hank pulled out; she saw his bulky shadow in the driver’s seat.

  Sometimes when we think we don’t deserve what we have, we subconsciously set fire to our lives. I think that’s what I did with your mother. Her father’s true confessions yesterday—was it just yesterday? I was so broken inside from abuse, I don’t think I knew how to handle your mother’s brand of love—giving, unconditional, nourishing. I’m sure I didn’t deserve her.

  Maybe he’d hoped she would argue the point. But, meanly, she didn’t. Lilian, her mother, was good, through and through—a loving spirit, a sensitive soul, a beautiful writer—and he was not good enough. He didn’t deserve her. The way she didn’t deserve Greg.

  Beware of self-destructive impulses, Laraine. They are shadows in the psyche. We often aren’t even aware of them until they’ve burned our lives to the ground.

  In her history with Hank—both sides of him—he’d done all the chasing, all the watching. He’d come after her in the woods that day, risked his life and sacrificed his sanity to save her. He’d stayed close to her, even when she’d made it clear she didn’t want him. But tonight, it was her turn to chase. She wasn’t even sure why.

  She gave Hank a bit of a head start, then she followed.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  But no. I’m paranoid. Or at least when I come to an abrupt stop and pull over, the car behind me keeps going fast. The night is velvety, and I’m a bit off my game. I have to admit that my conversation with Tess (or myself, depending on what I think she is) has me a bit rattled. So, I don’t get the plate, or the make and model of the vehicle. But it’s not Agent Brower’s black sedan. So that’s good, at least. Our conversations have been increasingly tense.

  She came by the office when I was out with Angel. “I just have a few more questions,” she scribbled on a note that she left with my assistant. Her handwriting is tight and precise.

  A message on my voice mail: I just have a few more questions, Dr. Reams. Something in her voice has shifted a little, less deferential, more hard edges.

  I asked my assistant to make an appointment wi
th her for tomorrow.

  She asked about dates, Brenda told me after they’d talked.

  What dates? As if I have to ask.

  September 7. She asked if you’d been in Boston or the surrounding area on June 5 of last year? I told her I’d have to check your calendar.

  I’ll take care of it.

  Dr. Reams, is everything all right?

  Of course. Not to worry, Brenda. I’ll turn over my calendar to her tomorrow when I see her. Tell her that.

  Just one more night, just one more wrong to right, if I can. And then, and maybe, maybe I will call Beth. Maybe I will try to take back the time I’ve lost.

  It’s not too late to have a life. Is it?

  And what about me?

  He rattles around in his cage, pacing, wanting things that—to be honest—I don’t want to give as much anymore.

  What about you? You integrate.

  Good luck with that.

  This is what it’s come to, Rain. My only friends are a ghost and the other side of my own fucked-up psyche. Sad, right? More than sad. Unsettling. Kreskey did kill me that afternoon, all the best of me.

  I pull the car deeper off the road tonight. There’s a path by the shoulder right on the edge of the Walters property. I check my pack, shoulder it and head into the night, air sparkling with cold.

  I think they’ve abandoned this property. The house is dark again, the yard and shrubbery overgrown. There’s never a car in the drive.

  I’ve been inside; it’s nicer than I expected, with tattered antiques, an orderly kitchen. The rooms upstairs are simple and clean, with quilted bedspreads, old pictures along the hallway wall.

  I’ve seen the room Angel says she stayed in—the oak tree right outside, branches that scraped the window at night. It doesn’t look like the kind of place where awful things have happened. Tom and Wendy Walters, slim, innocuous in the smattering of photos on display, are unremarkable if a bit rumpled and dull about the eyes. They don’t look like the kind of people who torture children.