If he hadn’t been black he probably would have blushed and we laughed at him as he started sputtering and apologizing.
“It’s okay, Robert,” I said. “We don’t take offence. I’d like to stay a few days in this paradise though. What about you, Delilah?’
She was shaking her head, “It ain’t over, no ma’am, n o way, no how. You’ll need me and I’m staying.”
We all stared at her. I put my hand on her arm, “What are you saying, Delilah?”
“You think just because you got his body locked up, we safe? You folks don’t know what this one is capable of. Bars mean nothing to him. He is without boundaries.”
Simon looked amused, “What are you trying to say, Delilah?” I noticed he was looking with admiration at her like he really found her attractive.
“I don’t know,” she said “That’s all I have right now,” and I noticed the attraction was mutual. I wished that she had left her hair down.
CHAPTER 15
We decided to stay just a few more days and nothing happened. Sarah ran her shop on the beach and wasn’t having any more visions in the mirror or any more dream invasions. None of us were.
We called our loved ones and I had to do some fast talking to persuade Tracy to let me stay. Julia and “Walt Baby” were flying in for the week-end, after I told Julia what a paradise Monroe Beach was. Wade wanted to come for the weekend and I agreed with the understanding that he got a separate room.
I learned from Mimi that she and Dr. Anna were having a blast, shopping and cooking together.
Dr Anna got on the phone and said, “Judith, I found my son, Kenneth. He has straightened his life out. He lives in Tyler, Texas. He has been trying to find me. He said that he was in therapy for many years and has gotten through all the anger he had toward me.
“I had hired a private detective and he only took one day to find him. We’ve talked over the phone and he’s coming soon. He has two children and three grandchildren so I’m a grandma and a great grandma. What do you think about that?”
I laughed. “That’s wonderful, Dr. Anna. I’m so happy for you.”
“How are things there,” she asked.
“Since they caught the killer, we’re just enjoying this paradise.”
Brad had adopted Dr. Anna as his other grandma. Dr. Anna was talking about retiring for real this time and hiring a manager for Ocean Sands. I would believe it when I saw it.
Delilah and I walked the beach and shopped in Sarah’s shop. We bought some beachwear from the Sarah James collection. Sarah and I finally talked Delilah into losing the scarf and wearing her hair down. She had dinner with Simon once. He wanted to take her dancing but she held back and I didn’t know why.
The prisoner was to be taken to Atlanta the following Monday to be tried in Federal court. He refused to make a deal and only laughed when offered it. He claimed his name was Randy Zandy. His fingerprints weren’t on any database, which only meant he didn’t have a record. But then neither did Ted Bundy when he was caught.
The Thursday before our big week-end we had planned, we three women decided to see if Robert and Simon would let us visit Randy Zandy in the county jail. Robert was totally against it, but I was surprised when Simon said he thought it would be a good idea. Robert finally relented.
We slept late that day and Sarah closed her shop at noon. Delilah and I had lunch in our room at the Mulberry Inn and Sarah joined us. The weather was perfect and we had on shorts, tee shirts, and sandals.
# # #
He was so tiny he looked like a little boy. His hair was very white and his eyes were pink and sort of bulged out of the socket. Robert told us that they had to give him a small woman’s jump suit and it was loose on him.
When we approached the cell door, he stood and walked over. Robert had escorted us and told us not to stand too close. Randy’s snake-like tongue kept darting in and out of his mouth and I noticed that his teeth were sharp pointed like he had filed them.
He had fine white hair growing all over his hands, face and neck. I looked down at his feet and he was wearing flip flops. Baby fine hair was growing all over his feet.
He grinned as he approached us and that tongue kept darting in and out of his mouth.
When he spoke, his voice was high pitched like a woman’s, “Nice to meet you at last, Judith McCain. I was hoping they would bring you here. I saw your old nightmare the other night. Kidnapped at age three, huh?”
There was no way I was going to allow him to pull me into his games, like I had allowed Jupiter to do when I first started visiting her in jail, when I was a green psychologist and thought I could help her. So, I just shrugged.
He giggled and looked at Delilah, “Oh, yeah, my beautiful black friend. You haven’t told them about the dream we shared have you? Wasn’t it exciting? You were so caring and giving. I wish my mother could be more like you.”
Delilah stared straight ahead, looking at nothing.
I looked at her and remembered that everyone else had talked about their dreams he had been in except Delilah. “You is one evil white boy, you is,” she said and I realized that she spoke differently when she was under stress.
He then turned to Sarah, “In a way, we are one of a kind aren’t we, Elizabeth?”
She gasped and I wondered how he knew about her MPD and that one of her personalities was Elizabeth, the evil woman who had helped Twoon with his murders.
“I’ll see all of you in your dreams tonight,” he said and then walked back to his bunk, sat down and started humming.
# # #
“Well, that was a waste of time,” I said as we were walking down to the diner for some dinner.
Simon laughed, “What were you hoping to accomplish, Judith?”
“I don’t know really. I would like to know how he does it though.”
No one said anything until we had our food. We had all ordered hamburgers and they were delicious. Suddenly Delilah put her burger down, looked out the window and then looked at each of us. She asked Simon to let her out of the booth and she walked outside.
“Is she all right?” Sarah asked as she watched Delilah pacing up and down the sidewalk outside.
We continued to eat in silence as we watched her and she finally came back in. “You have to kill him,” she said as she stood over us.
Robert put his sandwich down on his plate and wiped his mouth. “Delilah, we have to wait for due process. The DA will ask for the death penalty and I’m sure he’ll be convicted.”
“You don’t understand. He ain’t like other men. In fact he ain’t a man at all. He is nothing but pure evil. He has to be destroyed. If you keep him locked up, he will get others to do his evil by entering their dreams. And, don’t ask me to explain it but he has a master that he’s obeying, who is more powerful than him. So you have to get him to tell you who he obeys before you kill him.”
What she was saying scared me more than if I had confronted him face to face and I wondered what had happened in her dream with him.
“No one is killing anyone, Delilah,” Robert said as he studied her face.
CHAPTER 16
That night when we got back to our room, and were comfortably propped up in bed, I asked her. She got tears in her eyes and that surprised me because I had never seen her cry.
“It were a sexual dream, Judith, and it makes me ashamed because I enjoyed it. And that’s why he has to be destroyed. I’m afraid he will cause me to do something awful. I don’t know why, but every time he has invaded my dream, it’s been sexual. In real life, I would never be attracted to him. I don’t understand it, me.”
“Don’t you think you’ll be all right if we all keep an eye on each other?”
“I don’t know, Judith, I just don’t know, me.”
# # #
I didn’t know what had woken me, but I sat upright in the bed out of a deep sleep. I looked over at Delilah’s bed and it was empty. Looking toward the bathroom door, which was open, the light was on, but she wasn
’t there either.
I looked at the clock, two thirty seven a.m. I threw on my jeans, kept on my pajama top, and didn’t bother with shoes. I called Robert from my cell phone as I ran down on the beach. I was frantic as I looked up and down the beach. Feeling a sense of doom, Running from one end of the beach to the other, I had just gotten even with the hotel when I saw Robert’s car come to a stop in front of the hotel and I ran to them.
“Look,” Robert said and pointed over my shoulder. Delilah was coming up from the water. She was wearing her nightgown and she was dripping wet. I heard Sarah scream and saw her running from the opposite end of the beach.
Robert intercepted her, “Where did you come from, Sarah? And what are you doing out here? I left you at home, asleep.”
Sarah fainted. Robert caught her and picked her up. Simon picked Delilah up, when she got to us, as she fainted too.
We all ended up in mine and Delilah’s hotel room. Evidently, Delilah and Sarah had had nightmares but I had been sleeping like a baby. We didn’t understand why.
“You’re going to have to keep him awake until he goes to trial,” Delilah said. “He’s going to make us do things we don’t want to do, and what’s so scary is that someone else is involved, but I don’t know how.”
She looked around and saw us staring at her and continued, “During the dream state, when you travel, his body is in the cell but his dream self is out there traveling.” She stopped again and looked around at each of us. “What, y’all didn’t know that?”
Robert looked at me, “What do you know about dreams, Judith?”
“Oh, my goodness, I don’t know where to begin. There have been so many books written about dream and so much research. Freud believed that one of the main parts of psychoanalysis was the interpretation of dreams. The main goal was to explore dreams in an attempt to make the unconscious, conscious in order to resolve neurosis. He believed that the unconscious was the seat of neurosis.
“Later, Carl Jung believed that the subconscious was where the healthy part of our psyche dwelled. Then he talked about what he called the collective subconscious. Oh, shucks, I’m getting bogged down here. Let’s just say that there have been many theories about dreams.
“There was a woman who did a thirty year study. I wish I could remember her name. She had set up a dream lab inside a cave and studied dream patterns. Her conclusions were that we each have six to seven dreams a night and they last from a few seconds to around an hour.”
Simon interrupted me. I was glad, because I felt bogged down with information and couldn’t get focused.
“Judith, May I interrupt you here and ask about your experiences in working with people and their dreams.”
“Thanks, Simon for coming to my rescue. Maybe you can help keep me focused. I’ve worked with kids who were having nightmares. I use what I call directive dreaming. I’ve found that you can actually be the director of your dreams. It takes some practice but it can be done.
“Actually, I have mixed feelings about this technique because I think dreams are important to work through issues at the subconscious level. Also, you can learn a lot about the issue of inner conflicts from someone’s dreams.
“My repeating dreams I had all of my childhood, and into my teen years, were really memories of being kidnapped at age three and my sister Julia had the same repeating dream because we were kidnapped at the same time. She had the same memories.”
Robert cleared his throat, “Judith, bottom line, do you think it’s possible to enter someone else’s dreams?”
“I really can’t say. I’ve never run across it in all the dream work I’ve done with patients.”
Delilah had been sitting quietly, listening to me and she finally spoke up.
“I know I ain’t got your education, me. But I’ve seen some things and I have run across this here before and I ain’t lying. I’m goin to tell you something I witnessed with my own eyes.
“Down there in the bayous in Louisiana a lot of strange things happen. You all heard about Voo Doo. Well there was this young girl who we believed was possessed. She didn’t practice Voo Doo, no. But she had been raised by two bootleg uncles and they was all three a little strange. We always suspected that they practiced incest.
“When she got into high school, some of the girls in her class started making fun of her and accusing her of having sex with her uncles. The boys all wanted to date her because they thought she was an easy lay.
“Outwardly she was very shy and seemed to tolerate all the torture, by her classmates, but all of a sudden, some of these teens started killing each other. They arrested the killers and they all claimed that they had been ordered to kill in their dreams.
“All of them claimed that this young girl had demanded that they either do these killings or die themselves. They believed it because a few weeks before this started, a sixteen year old boy died in his sleep and they never found anything wrong with him.”
We waited but she appeared to be finished with her story. Simon laid his hand on her arm and she looked into his eyes. He didn’t ask her what happened but he seemed to have the answer. “Don’t worry, honey,” He said. “I understand what you had to do.”
Neither one of them said any more. I guessed that she must have killed the girl herself. I wanted to ask some questions but I knew Simon and Robert didn’t want what happened said out loud. If they didn’t know, then they wouldn’t have to arrest her.
Sarah had been listening but hadn’t said anything until now. “I had this sudden urge tonight to go down on the beach but I didn’t know why. I kept dreaming I was on the beach and, the next thing I knew, I was on the beach. It scared me so badly and I screamed and now I’m here.”
“And I had been dreaming of swimming and I don’t even know how to swim. I never learned,” Delilah said. “Next thing I know I’m out in the water fighting the waves. I thought I was going to drown or freeze to death, me.”
Robert let out a long breath. “So, it’s a warning from Randy or whoever the hell he is. But what I can’t figure out is why you slept well yourself, Judith.”
“I was wondering the same thing and also wandering why he didn’t come into your dreams and get you to open the cell door. Wouldn’t that make more sense?”
Then I thought about Jupiter and how she played games with me and about the sociopathic personality part of her that enjoyed manipulation.
“It’s a game to him,” I said. “It’s like a cat playing with a mouse before killing it and devouring it.”
CHAPTER 17
My cell phone woke me up and I felt like I had just gone to sleep. I looked at the clock. It was 7:27 a.m. We had talked until almost four thirty a.m., but things were still unresolved when Sarah, Robert, and Simon went home.
I picked up the cell phone and went into the bathroom so I wouldn’t wake up Delilah, but I saw her stirring in the next bed. The caller ID said the call was from Julia.
“Hello,” I said as I eased the door closed.
“Judith, oh God, Judith, what’s happening to me?”
“What’s wrong, Honey?” My heart had picked up speed. Julia had been through so much and I dreaded what was coming.
“I woke up this morning with paint all over me. I went into my studio and found a painting on my easel. It was a portrait of a weird looking man, an albino looking man with pink eyes. I must have painted it in my sleep. All my brushes are ruined. Paint has already started drying in them.”
“Julia, don’t worry about your brushes. They can be replaced. Where is Walter, he’s not there with you?”
“He is at a conference in Boston. He’ll be coming in around noon and then we’ll be flying out of here to come see you around two.”
“Julia, there’s some weird things going on here and the man you painted is the serial killer they arrested yesterday. I can’t explain it but he’s capable of getting into people’s dreams and making them do things they don’t want to do. I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to co
me here right now.”
“Please, Judith. I need to be with you, and besides, it doesn’t look like it’s going to matter where I am. He’s already gotten to me here.”
“Okay, are you going to be all right until Walter gets there?”
“Yeah, as long as I know I’ll see you soon. Love you, Judith.”
When I came out of the bathroom, Delilah was sitting on the side of the bed brushing her hair. “What happened,” she said and I told her.
“I’m going to call Wade and see if he’s still coming,” I said.
When I hung up, I said, “Yep, he’s still coming. I made sure I told him I was rooming with you.”
Delilah laughed, “What, you can’t trust yourself? No one will think less of you if you decide to sleep with Wade. I know you want to.”
“Delilah!” I was so surprised.
She had never tried to intrude into my private life before. I was kind of flattered too because I felt like it meant we were getting closer. I had always admired her, from the moment I met her, when I was fifteen, and she seemed to have so much insight into what was going on with me.
Now she laughed again and I joined in. For some reason we both went into hysterics. Maybe we needed it.
CHAPTER 18
We met up with the other three for breakfast and Simon slid into the booth next to Delilah. I saw him take her hand under the table. I was thinking that maybe she wanted me to take another room so she and Simon could share our room. That made me smile to myself. Delilah looked at me and winked and I got the feeling she knew what I was thinking.
I was thinking about Wade and realized Robert was talking. “…so I thought we’d do that. What do y’all think?”
He saw my puzzled look and laughed, “Where were you just now, Judith? What I was suggesting was that we all share a house together until Randy the freak is picked up by the FBI on Monday. I have a friend who owns a big house just outside of town. It’s not on the beach but it has, I believe, about seven bedrooms.
Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 05 - Monroe Beach Page 5
