Chapter Forty-Five
“Nothing,” said Dr. Amanda Garr to the topless woman whose breasts she’d just given up poking and prodding. “No lumps.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Melinda Dillon imitated the doctor’s stroking motion on her own body. “There. What’s that?” she demanded, redirecting her doctor’s efforts.
Amanda Garr, still youngish and attractive but for a second chin in early development, gazed into space for another half minute while her trained hands explored the region. Finally, she shook her head. “Nope. It’s literally nothing, Melinda. I don’t feel a thing because there’s nothing to feel.”
“Well, I feel it,” Melinda said. “I think I ought to be X-rayed.”
Amanda hopped up on the examination table next to her patient—and friend—their companionable closeness making Melinda feel suddenly embarrassed at her partial nudity. The tiny examination room already felt too homey with its gauzy curtain, woven rug and wooden cabinets. She could have used a little of the stark, stainless-steel medical professionalism everyone else complained about.
“You had a mammogram six months ago,” Amanda said. “Just as you’ve had once a year ever since your mother died.”
“Six months ago I didn’t have any discomfort, and six months ago I didn’t have a lump.”
Melinda could feel her doctor’s scrutiny as she got back into her bra and blouse. She knew what Amanda was thinking, her doctor friend working her mother’s death into the conversation as she had. She headed it off with, “And I’m not obsessing on account of my mother having died of it.”
It being as close to identifying the disease as she was willing to go.
Dark images played in Melinda’s head. She saw an emaciated form under summer covers, tubes poking out of her and machines beeping and gurgling, the room smelling like sanitized death. Mom, dark-eyed and radiation-bald and foul odored.
“I never said you were obsessing,” said Amanda in the subdued tones of a therapist. Melinda recognized those tones, having spent a fair amount of time with a psychiatrist some four years ago. “Given the hereditary nature of the disease, you’re wise to self-examine and schedule annual mammograms. I just think…”
Here it comes, Melinda thought.
“…that you’re particularly sensitive to the threat of breast cancer because of the experience you went through with your mother.”
It sounded so rehearsed, the comforting murmurs of a medical practitioner more adept at providing confidence than treatment. Melinda silently fumed at the time she was wasting by listening rather than acting.
All she’d thought about at work the previous night was what she’d seen—or thought she’d seen—at Windmore Hills. Obviously her mind had been playing tricks on her, but it was her subconscious sending her a very real warning—see a doctor, or else.
“What you went through four years ago,” Amanda continued softly, “was obviously upsetting. It took you a good long while to get over it, but we never really forget anything. We simply file it away, and occasionally the file cabinet opens.”
God, she’d heard variations on that gibberish before. The psychiatrist had been a referral of Amanda’s in response to, first, her mom’s long and torturous death featuring every indignity a slow cancer can heap on body and soul. Then the bills, only partially covered by insurance, stacking up and awaiting the attention of lawyers, accountants and her mother’s only child. And finally, there’d been Kevin. Good old understanding Kevin, the husband who left Melinda when he could take no more of the moodiness and panic attacks.
Her turnaround had taken time, but it had been accomplished without the shrink she’d never totally come to trust. She was more or less whole now. Despite what her friend and OB might think.
Melinda buttoned the last button of her blouse and stood.
“I’m sorry,” Amanda said gently. “You know I’d tell you if there was anything to say.”
Would she? Or would Amanda fear the emotional impact that full disclosure might have?
Melinda still felt something in her right breast, but it was now little more than a vague ache, the sort of nagging sensation that could have been caused by all of her kneading of the affected tissue. “Maybe all I needed was to hear that I’m all right,” she said doubtfully.
“It’s all any of us ever need. How’s work going? You look tired.”
Melinda felt something tighten inside like armor over her emotions. Are you working too hard? Shouldn’t you take time off? That’s what her doctor really wanted to know.
“I’m fine,” Melinda said brightly.
“Well I hope you can catch yourself some rest.”
She felt another sharp twinge in her breast on her way out, and could barely stop herself from rubbing the spot where she just knew something was festering.
Chapter Forty-Six
It rang three times before someone picked up, and he almost hung up when Lisa answered. But she’d have his number. After a pause he said, “Hi, doll girl. It’s Dad. How are you?”
He hoped the tone was right—relaxed, but not forcefully cheerful, which she’d see right through.
“Hi, Dad,” she said after a pause of her own. Her tone mimicked his—pleasant, steady, nonconfrontational.
“I was just…is your mom around?” Delivered, Vincent realized, the way divorced men refer to their exes. Not Mom, but your mom.
“Hold on, let me see.”
He heard background murmuring, a lot more than mom and daughter would need to relay a simple “Dad’s on the phone”.
Come on, Sandy, take the call, he telepathically urged. I’m a changed man.
More muffled bumping and banging as the phone exchanged hands. For a second he thought his wife would cradle it, but then she said, “Vincent?” Said it like you’d address an old boyfriend met again on the street, with a mixture of surprise, suspicion, tension and tentative welcome.
“Sandy, let’s talk.” The fact that she didn’t cut in encouraged him. “I’m sorry I ran off yesterday. It was wrong of me to react the way I did, and wrong to create additional concerns by staying out all night.”
There.
The static in his ear turned cold. When it seemed as though there were only icicles on the other end, she said, “Vincent, you don’t know what you’ve put us through this last week or so.”
“I’m trying to apologize.”
“I don’t know if it’s that easy. You keep accusing and apologizing. Vincent, it’s driving us crazy. There was no one in my car with me yesterday evening but Jason. Do you really think that your own son would be aiding and abetting me in adultery? Or that I’d ask him to?”
Aiding and abetting. Still and always the practicing attorney, his wife. He nearly chuckled, but didn’t want her to take it wrong.
“I know how feeble it sounds, okay? That’s why I want to apologize. To the entire family.”
Her heavy sigh sounded like a treacherous wind in his ear. “I just don’t know, Vincent.” She lowered her voice. “You came closer to violence last night than I’ve ever seen you. I don’t mind saying that we were all relieved when you finally stormed off.”
“And that’s exactly why it’s so important that I see you all together. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
A regular little windstorm of breath came through the line as she considered. “Where are you, anyway?” she asked, obviously stalling.
“In the car. I spent the night at a cheap motel, then just had breakfast and drove around.”
The windstorm kicked into high gear as she mulled a decision. “Well, I guess we can all be home together this afternoon if you get here before Jason goes to baseball practice at three.”
“Make him wait, will you do that for me? If he cancels, I’ll make it up to everyone. Please. For all of us.” He was surprised at how readily she’d agreed. “You won’t be sorry,” he promised.
By the time he ended the call his purchase was ready. He’d passed the background check and wait
ing period with flying colors. The sales clerk had added a box of shells, as requested, and accepted his credit card.
“It holds fifteen to the mag and one in the chamber,” the salesman said, as proud as if he’d designed the weapon himself.
No, of course there was no one in the car with you and my loyal son, Jason. Yes dear, I must simply be imagining things.
Vincent hefted it one more time before it went into the box. The 9mm P89 semiauto weighed two pounds and was less than eight inches long, just a four-and-a-half-inch barrel. One just like it had, years ago, wiped out a commuter train full of people in suburban New York, earning it the title of commuter gun. Cute. All in all, it was well worth the wait and hefty price tag.
Credit card purchase, he thought, smiling. Like he’d have to worry about the bill.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Tim hid his surprise at the sight of Melinda Dillon stepping out of her car and dragging herself up her flagstone walk. Her hair was unkempt, eyes dark, face pale. It looked like she hadn’t slept for a week.
Her mouth dropped open when she saw him waiting for her on the single chair on her small front porch. “How’d you find me here?”
“You ever notice how the Cleveland phone directory’s like three inches thick, yet people are always shocked when you find them that way?”
She fumbled with the front door’s lock and when it opened she didn’t invite him in. But she didn’t close the door after her, either. He could hear the insistent beeping of an alarm system. By the time the nagging sound ended, he’d installed himself just inside the airy living room.
“Iced tea?” she said.
He nodded. The house was a tall red-brick Georgian colonial on a street crammed full of them, shade trees in front. Inside, a mishmash of styles and colors. Tim directed himself to an uncomfortable but expensive-looking wingback chair. The couch looked like a family hand-me-down, a macrame blanket slung over it. There was an authentic-looking grandfather clock in one corner and a large, unframed mirror over a cluttered marble mantel.
From elsewhere, Melinda shouted, “Naturally I’m a bit surprised to see you.”
He heard tap water running, ice tinkling. She returned with a tray holding two tall glasses and spoons, a sugar bowl and glass pitcher. He took one glass, thanked her and found a coaster on a coffee table. Tim always felt formal and uncomfortable when sipping tea, even the iced variety.
“So,” she said, her smile a prod.
“It’s going to sound weird.”
His next words proved the point. He inexplicably led with Griffin’s blonde phantom, seen by a stranger. Then he backtracked into Patty’s bizarre shoot-’em-up story, featuring Melinda Dillon herself, and finally admitted to the unsettling events at the Davenport party. And while he hadn’t even thought to mention it, the kid’s birthday party got him thinking about the earlier creepiness at the Sturvinski-Koontz wedding reception. He relayed Griffin’s theories and all the thoughts that had come to him while sacked out the previous night on the uncomfortable sleeper sofa in the tiny office. And finally, he related it all back—as well as he could—to Germaine Marberry and the suicide of Travis Kendall and maybe even the murder of the young woman nights before.
In short, he told her everything. He finished up with, “I think at this point we have to admit there’s something very wrong here. We’re not all cracking up in different ways.”
She studied him while creaking back and forth in a rustic rocking chair. “So you spent the night alone in a haunted video store with your blonde ghost?” she said.
Was she making fun of him? Hard to tell.
“She’s not mine, the ghost. The blonde behind the curtain, she’s Griffin’s.” Not sure how much sense that made.
“But this other man—”
“Donovan something. Yeah, he saw her too. But from what I gather, this guy’s worse than Griffin. Much more shy and creepy around women. Let’s just say that both men share similar—not identical—chinks in their emotional armor. Therefore, they can be exploited in the same way.”
“Exploited by whom?”
There was the rub. “I can’t say this any way that makes sense, but the church on Utica Lane is responsible. Or involved somehow.”
“That’s not good enough,” she told him. “You can’t arrest a church. Are you saying that Vincent Applegate—the church’s minister—is behind this?”
“I don’t know if it’s any one person,” he said, mentally wincing at how weak that sounded.
“So it’s built on an old Indian burial ground? Something along those lines?”
The sarcasm couldn’t be missed this time.
“Maybe it is Vincent,” he said, shrugging. “I have no idea what he’s actually doing, but he’s the guy who reopened the building and kick-started this whole thing, so to speak.”
“No. Things have been happening there longer than he’s been around.” She broke off whatever else she started to say and took to carefully examining the ice cubes clinking in her glass.
“All right, tell me everything,” he snapped. Then he recalled the story he’d dumped in her lap days ago, and his eyes lit. “The minister who wiped out his family or whatever…you looked into that, didn’t you?”
First she refilled from the icy pitcher. “Melvin Frost. He severely beat his wife and killed his daughter seven years ago. I interviewed him two days ago.” She sipped through a mouth set so grimly it seemed barely able to accommodate the sip. “He wasn’t much help. I don’t get the feeling that even now he knows why he did it, except for the vague notion that his little girl was getting too worldly. What’s most frightening is that, in some ways, the Reverend Frost seems rather normal.”
“He blames the church, doesn’t he?”
He knew he’d asked the right question when Melinda looked away. Warming to the subject, Tim said, “He’s a conservative kind of guy, a fundamentalist preacher, right? And his little girl was growing up too fast, kissing boys and whatnot. He’s got these mental pictures of her wrestling in backseats, pregnancy, abortion, condoms and all that. But here’s the question. Who—or what—was feeding him those images?”
Tim moved to the edge of his chair and fixed her with his gaze.
Melinda crossed her arms over her chest in a textbook gesture of denial. “If it’s this…I don’t know, satanic force emanating from the church, finding and exploiting human weaknesses, what did it find in you, Tim? What you told me about the birthday party doesn’t stick to script unless you hate kids. Do you?”
Now it was her turn to stare him down. He tried reaching for an answer that seemed beyond him. She gave him plenty of time to think about it.
He took a breath and said, “I like loud music and fast cars and beer and girls. I’m loud and obnoxious and selfish. In other words, I’m a thirty-one-year-old teenager.”
He set aside his tea, no longer even pretending to drink it. “When you think about it, there are worse fates than being stuck in a time warp of sex, drugs and rock and roll, right?”
“Unless the woman you’re with wants you to grow up, get a real job and start a family,” Melinda said quietly.
Tim let slip a sad smile. “Ergo, fear of kids. Fear of midnight feedings and mortgage payments. No wonder Patty threw me out.”
After a moment Melinda said, “So the suggestion to harm children could be triggered by your resentment of Patty’s pressuring you to assume more responsibility and take on this new phase of your life. As, potentially, a father.”
He laughed and Melinda asked him what was so funny.
“Believe me, nothing,” he said. “It just hit me how calmly we’re discussing possession by child-hating manifestation. And that’s after we’ve explored the topics of phantom seductresses, demonic rapists and an evil doppelganger of you chasing my girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—around the house with a gun. How much of this do we actually believe?”
Melinda set her glass down. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.” She walked out without another
word, but returned a moment later jingling a set of car keys. “I’ll drive.”
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t get an answer because she’d left the house by then, again leaving the front door open in an invitation to join her. Tim caught up at the Dodge Charger, sensing that she would have left him standing stupidly at the curb if he’d waited around for an explanation.
She roared down the driveway and seemed to take the first turn on two wheels. Tim watched her distractedly driving with one hand and pressing the other against one breast, a move that would have been erotic in other settings. Here and now, it looked a little strange.
She said, “If there’s any truth to what we’re saying, then the church’s victims might be empowered by knowing that their minds are being manipulated. That what they’re seeing and feeling isn’t real. Does that make sense?”
Tim thought about how strong Patty felt after “defeating,” or at least surviving, whatever it was that she thought she’d been up against. “I suppose so,” he said, a little doubtfully.
“Then I know someone who needs to hear what we have to say.”
“Who?”
“Germaine Marberry. By double-teaming her, we just might convince her that she’s not losing her mind or facing some unbeatable foe. But we have no time to lose.”
Tim found his foot stomping an imaginary brake as they careened around corners and swerved through traffic in her muscle car. “We couldn’t have called first?” he asked.
“She wouldn’t have picked up. She doesn’t have a cell phone and I don’t think her landline’s even plugged in anymore.”
“Let’s get there alive,” Tim muttered.
She picked up her BlackBerry and started scrolling through it.
“Please tell me you’re not into texting and driving,” Tim said.
“One of my errands this morning,” she said, “was to start making phone calls from a list that Melvin Frost put together prior to my visit.”
“What kind of list?”
“The former members of his congregation. I rounded up addresses and phone numbers wherever possible. Some had died and others had moved out of state.” She dropped the phone as she hauled on the steering wheel and fought it into a turn that shook the car and rattled the contents of Tim’s stomach. Tim groped for the phone and gave it back to her before she tried to do the same. “Anyway, I made eight or nine phone calls and actually spoke with four former congregants.”
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