Kevin was usually the winner, and the winner, they’d agreed, should receive a reward. There were different kinds of rewards. Usually, these consisted of her giving the winner additional satisfaction with her mouth. She didn’t mind that. In fact, she kind of liked rewarding victorious Kevin in front of defeated Jack, because it made Jack jealous.
Things progressed. Would she like to try having sex? It would be good practice for all three of them. She’d be experienced when she started dating, and the boys she went out with would appreciate that.
It took considerable persuasion to convince her. They both kept asking, very nicely too, and finally she thought she owed it to herself to find out what it felt like. The first few times it hurt. When she’d told them so, they stopped and kissed her and said how sorry they were, how they never meant to hurt her, but sometimes they got so excited they couldn’t help themselves. They hoped she understood.
Things changed after a while. One night they both came into her room and after Jack went into her, Kevin turned her over and thrust his thing into her rear. She didn’t like that at all. She screamed and told him to stop. Kevin giggled and kept going. ‘Sorry, too late, can’t stop now,’ he hissed into her ear. ‘Gotta see it through.’
Kevin was so much bigger and stronger that she had no choice but to submit. Afterwards she showed them her anger. She told them both to get out of her room and not to come back because she wasn’t going to let them touch her anymore.
Still, she admitted to Dr Ted, there was something interesting and intense about feeling so helpless, conquered and used. After a while she began to miss their attentions, and so agreed to resume the game. But with new rules. No hurting. No calling her names as Kevin liked to do when he went inside her – names like ‘bitch’ and ‘whore.’ They said OK, no more of that. They promised to make it sweet, like it was at the beginning, make it lovely for all three of them. And wasn’t it fun, Jack asked her, that they were doing this, playing like this, and no one else in the whole wide world knew, and never would? This was their secret, their compact, their private game.
Jack always tried to make it fun. Kevin didn’t bother. She gathered he didn’t care if it was enjoyable for her as long as it was for him. At times he could be pretty nasty. He’d always had a mean streak. One time when the boys were lying on either side of her after sex, he asked Jack which of her holes Jack liked the best. Jack said he preferred her pussy. Kevin said it was more fun for him to fuck her in the ass because of the way that made her squeal. And, of course, they equally enjoyed thrusting themselves into her mouth. They agreed in future to divide her body up. Jack would insert his thing into her front and Kevin would stick his into her butt. Then they turned to her. What about her needs? What did she like best? She had no answer. ‘I don’t really like any of it,’ she finally said. They laughed.
She was sixteen when she first tried to tell her mother.
Her mom cut her off, waved her hands in front of her face. ‘Nonsense! I don’t want to hear it. Your brothers are wonderful boys.’ Her dad got really mad at her. ‘Keep spouting that kind of filth and I’ll send you away. Want to go to the insane asylum, Court?’ She told him she didn’t. ‘Then stop your damn whining,’ he said.
They must have confronted the boys because that night they came into her room, angry. ‘This is our private business,’ Jack said. ‘It’s just between the three of us. So stop tattling and keep your trap shut.’ Then they forced her to suck them both off.
They fucked her in all three places. A few times they fucked her at the same time. She tried to enjoy it. They said that’s what she should do. ‘It’s supposed to be fun,’ Jack insisted. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a game.’ Kevin told Jack he didn’t give a shit whether she liked it or not. He was going to do what he wanted and he promised she’d be sorry if she ever tattled on them again.
This went on for a year, until Jack graduated from Richmond and went away to boarding school. The year alone with Kevin was the worst. He took to deliberately hurting her, pinching, slapping, squeezing her neck with his hands until she was on the verge of passing out. He explained that this was a new variation on their game, a variation he’d heard about and wanted to try. He told her he liked making her cry and liked it too when she tried not to. He liked seeing how long she could hold out, how far he could go before she broke down and wept. Always in the end, he promised her, ‘You will cry because I won’t stop until you do.’
It got to the point that Kevin told her he didn’t enjoying fucking her unless she resisted and tried to fight him off. Her struggling, he told her, turned him on. Her resistance became a requirement.
She thought about killing herself. She would take the bus downtown, go to the Cobb Industries building, take the elevator up to her dad’s office, tell him everything in great detail, then jump out the window right in front of him.
Then he’d have to believe her. Then he’d be sorry he hadn’t listened. Then they’d all be sorry … at least for a while anyway.
She decided to try to enjoy what Kevin was doing to her. For a while that seemed to work. She admitted to Ted she sometimes liked being held down and forced. Kevin was thrilled when he discovered this. ‘Yeah!’ he said, ‘I heard you bitches like it rough. Wow! Turns out to be true!’
When Jack came back on spring break, Kevin told him what he’d found out about her. ‘Turns out little sis is a pain-lover.’ Jack said he wasn’t surprised. ‘We trained you good, didn’t we, Court?’ She refused to answer, turned away and wept.
The next year Kevin joined Jack at St Paul’s. When they both came home on Thanksgiving break, they told her how horny they were. ‘Been looking forward to getting back in the saddle all fall,’ Kevin said.
The incidents piled up. The abuse became increasingly depraved. One time, Miss Scott, the gym teacher at Ashley-Burnett, saw her dressing in the locker-room and asked her about some bruises on her thighs. Courtney turned beet-red and covered up. ‘They’re nothing,’ she said. Miss Scott told her to finish getting dressed and come to her office. There Miss Scott asked her if there was anything she wanted to talk about. She said the bruises looked like Courtney may have been abused. Courtney said she’d just been ‘messing around with a boy,’ and it was none of Coach’s business. Then she ran out.
The school called her parents. They confronted her when she got home. ‘What’s this about messing around with some boy?’ her father demanded. ‘Who’ve you been seeing?’ She told them she hadn’t been seeing anyone, that Jack and Kevin had been abusing her. They said that wasn’t possible, the boys were away at school. Before she could explain that the bruises were two weeks old, that they’d hurt her during break, they accused her of being delusional. Her dad told her that if she kept saying stuff like that, he’d send her to a hospital where they’d put her in a straitjacket and give her shock treatments, and maybe that would finally straighten out her sick, evil mind.
It was difficult for me to keep reading Ted’s notes. The narrative was disjointed. The abuse he described became monotonous. By recounting incident upon incident, it occurred to me that he’d been trying to build a case. This fit with Jase’s and my suspicions, after we talked with Dr Liz in Abiquiú, that Ted had a plan to use his knowledge of Courtney’s pain to extort money from the Cobbs.
Sometimes, Courtney told him, she reveled in what her brothers were doing to her and other times she despised it. She twice seriously considered suicide, even going so far as to stockpile pills.
She went to see her paternal grandmother with whom she’d always felt close. Grandma Flo, as they all called her, listened intently as Courtney tried to tell her what had been going on. She softened the story out of consideration for Grandma Flo, and also to spare herself embarrassment. She spoke very softly and shyly. She could barely bring herself to describe the abuse. When she was finished, Grandma Flo gazed at her lovingly. ‘You always were a troubled child,’ she finally said. ‘You were always different. And so creative! Your drawing tal
ent is just amazing. But these things you’re telling me – I just can’t believe them, dear. I know and love your brothers as much as I know and love you. I’m very sorry to tell you this, but what you’re saying just doesn’t seem possible.’
She dreaded when Jack and Kevin came home from school and from vacations. She was immensely relieved when her parents permitted her to spend the summer at Red Raven art camp. Not only did this get her out of the house, but she met someone there she really liked. Penny Dawson, she told Ted, was the best friend she’d ever had. She’d told Penny some of what had been going on, and Penny confided her own troubles at home. The best part of these exchanges was that each believed the other, and the similarity of their experiences proved to Courtney that the horrors she’d endured were not unique.
That autumn, while taking after-school art class, they made plans to run away. Penny said she knew a place where they could go. She told Courtney about Dr Ted and the house called A Caring Place in East Calista that he and his wife ran for runaway kids. And so they ran for it. Courtney began therapy with Dr Ted, and he kept notes on everything she told him.
In a final set of typed notes Ted wrote up his diagnosis and proposed prescription for Courtney’s recovery:
Patient suffers the after effects of repeated traumatic vicious sexual abuse by her two older brothers. Patient displays certain anti-social tendencies consistent with a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome, including selective mutism, but is also a high-functioning visual artist of considerable talent. She should be encouraged to employ her talent to express her anguish and thereby work it through. This plus 2X per week psychotherapy will hopefully in time relieve much of her pain. Prognosis uncertain. Full recovery may not be possible. As adulthood is imminent, patient should be encouraged to stay as far away as possible from her family. It is a wonder, considering so much inflicted abuse, that she is able to function at all. Without her art, it is questionable whether she can have a productive happy life.
Ted further describes how he tried to coax Courtney to draw the horrific scenes she’d described to him. When she resisted, he suggested that she devise her own art project, something that could lucidly express her feelings of anguish and betrayal. That’s when she and Penny asked him to panel all four walls of the attic, including the windows, and then let them loose on the walls with brushes and paint. ‘We have a plan,’ they told him. Because he liked the gleam in their eyes when they said this, he gave their project his blessing. And thus the Locust Street Murals were born.
Noah and I didn’t talk much on the drive back to the city. We were still absorbing, each in our own way, what we’d read that afternoon. It felt strange sitting in the car beside my loving brother after reading about the terrifying brothers-on-sister abuse Courtney had endured.
Noah must have been thinking the same thing. At one point he turned to me.
‘We could never have done such things.’
‘Never in a thousand years,’ I agreed.
The sky was darkening as we neared Calista. Sirens were wailing and smoke from summer fires seeped into the car. Noah turned to me again.
‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Horrified, heartbroken, sickened, depressed. How ’bout you?’
‘Same. I know a tavern near here. I think we can both use a stiff drink.’
We went in, ordered. I peered at Noah. ‘You look angry,’ I told him. ‘What’re you thinking?’
‘So much corruption! And the things people do within families – I know I shouldn’t be surprised.’
I asked him what it was about the Cobb brothers that made him so detest them.
‘Didn’t we just read how detestable they are?’
‘I mean, before we read Ted’s notes. In your office, you told us you relished the opportunity to take them down. What’s that about?’
‘First, their politics. They’re the worst kind of right-wing hypocrites. They talk a good game about being libertarians and go heavy on free will, “ethical self-interest” and the rest of the Ayn Rand crap. At the same time, they’re major polluters. They’ve polluted the hell out of Watomi Lake, and if they had their way, they’d dump their industrial poison into the Calista River. Their smokestacks spew out noxious fumes. They’ve racked up hundreds of environmental infractions, been sued dozens of times. They fight back, counter-sue, dig up dirt on their enemies. They’ll spend whatever it takes to keep doing what they’re doing, all in the name of dynamic egoism, laissez-faire capitalism and their Darwinian economic survival-of-the-fittest beliefs. CI may be the biggest privately owned polluter in the country. If it was a public company, they’d never get away with it. Meantime, they finance academics who deny we’re in the midst of climate change. I could go on. And then there’s the personal stuff …’
‘Such as?’
‘Stuff consistent with what they did to Courtney. Rumors of sex parties with underage girls. I’ve heard tales like that for years. Then I hear people say, “How could that be possible? They’re great humanists. Look at all the money they’ve donated to the museum. They fund free summer theater and dance performances. They paid for that new wing at the Calista Institute of Music. Maybe they have a few peccadilloes, but don’t we all have our urges, our shames, our non-conforming desires? Surely such things can’t annul all the good they do.” You know the rap.’
He shook his head. ‘Nate Silver could have told me about the Schechtner deal. So why’d he suggest I contact Spencer Addams? He had to know that if I found him, I’d get the story. He may even have guessed that Spencer had copies of Ted’s notes.’
‘Maybe he was sincerely trying to help you.’
Noah shrugged. ‘Or frustrate me. I doubt a judge would allow Ted’s notes to be read in court. Ted’s dead and can’t be cross-examined. The Cobbs’ lawyers would designate them as “scurrilous hearsay.” And even if Courtney’s willing to come back and testify (a huge if), they’ll attack her as a delusional schizophrenic. After what we read this afternoon, I’d truly love to go to war against the Cobbs. But Ted’s notes aren’t enough. I’m pretty sure Nate knew that when he suggested I look up Spencer. Probably didn’t like the way I came on to him and didn’t like that I turned down his invitation to play golf. So he decided to have some fun with me.’
‘Is that really a lawyer’s idea of fun? Strikes me as pathetic.’
‘Yeah,’ Noah agreed, ‘and the worst part is that to guys like Nate something as awful as this is just a game.’
Noah was wrapped up in the legal aspects, while I was concerned by the huge emotional damage Courtney’s brothers and parents had inflicted on her. I’d always felt, and Jase did too, that there was a secret history behind the murals, an engine that drove their creation. Now I knew what that dark energy was. The murals were about cold, two-faced people who refused to listen to Courtney and were incapable of understanding her pain. They were images of the resistance she’d met when she’d tried to tell her story. I thought her dolls were about the same thing: two-faced figures, genitals swelling beneath their garments, faces ravaged by being cut up and then sewn back together, the tears and stitches marking them for their malice, moral corruption and hypocrisy. As Penny Dawson told Joan, the murals were the girls’ vision of hell.
We sat in the tavern in silence, lost in our respective thoughts.
‘So what do you think?’ Noah finally asked.
‘Don’t know. What about you?’
‘I think it’s urgent we find out what Courtney wants. Where her head is at and what, if anything, we can do for her.’
‘Maybe we should just leave it alone.’
‘I know you, Hannah. I don’t believe for a second that’s what you want.’
He was right, of course. It was too late to stop. We’d come this far. There was no turning back.
Thérèse Zellweger
I was thrilled when Hannah called me from New York and told me the plan: take Agnès on an outing for a covert meeting with her very close old friend, Penny. I went straight in
to see Dr DeJ. I found him in a bright mood.
‘Yes, my dear – what can I do for you today?’ he said, speaking in the same unctuous tone he used back when he wanted to beguile me into bed.
I proposed taking Agnès and Johnny on an excursion along the coast, adding that I thought they could both use some relief from the clinic routine. They’ve become close friends, I told him, and would enjoy going out together. I, of course, would act as chaperone so as to preclude any Gefummel.
Dr DeJ smiled at that. ‘The French call it galipettes, somersaults, but my favorite expression is the one the English use – “hanky-panky.”’
I laughed.
‘As you know,’ he said, ‘gay boys enjoy forging strong friendships with middle-aged women. And the women like it because they don’t feel threatened.’
Such a brilliant insight! And straight from the Great Psychiatrist’s mouth!
‘Rather than a motor trip, take them out on the lake. Karl can run you around in the speedboat, then dock at one of the towns where you three can stroll to a café. What do you think?’
‘Sounds excellent,’ I assured him.
I emailed Hannah that I had permission to take Agnès and Johnny out for an excursion. She emailed back with a wet kiss emoji.
I thought it best not to upset Agnès by telling her in advance she’d be meeting her old friend. But I told Johnny after swearing him to secrecy. I explained that this was a delicate situation that could cost me my job, and that I was prepared for that as there were plenty of open positions at other clinics. But if anyone got wind of the plan, Dr DeJ would certainly cancel the outing. Then he might make trouble if we tried to bring Penny into the clinic.
‘It’s best,’ I explained, ‘for them to meet outside. You’ll be there to keep her calm.’
Johnny loved the plan and said he was flattered that I asked him to be part of it.
The Murals Page 22
