”Honestly, I don’t have a clue. Sometimes I wake up in a strange place and find myself dressed in women’s clothing but don’t know what happened.”
“You’ve got absolutely no recollection as to what you could have done while dressed in strange clothing?”
“None whatsoever.”
“I know of a way to make you remember.”
“How?”
“I could hypnotize you.”
“Oh, no, that’s where I draw the line.”
“It’s the only way I know of. I learned about Darcy by putting Travis under a trance.”
Edgar frowned. “I’m not so sure I want to learn more about myself under those conditions.”
“But you said that you were looking for your father to get information about yourself. You’ve come this far. Why would you stop short of your goal?”
Edgar thought about the doctor’s proposal for a long while and then reluctantly agreed to be hypnotized. He followed the doctor’s instructions and sank back in the recliner. Edgar appeared sleepy anyway and drained of energy. He kept his gaze focused on the pencil that Dr. Foster waved from side to side until Edgar fell into a deep trance.
“Now, let’s start with Brandon’s murder in Ohio. If you will recall, Brandon was Catherine’s youngest child. You know, Catherine, don’t you? Why, yes, of course, you know her,” the doctor said.
Silence.
“Who are you,” the doctor asked.
Edgar’s eyes opened wide, and then he lifted his head up and started to laugh in a high, shrill tone, like that of a woman.
“Who are you?” Dr. Foster repeated, raising his voice.
“Why do you want to know?” asked the voice.
“I’m your doctor. I have a right to know the name of my own patient.” Dr. Foster pulled his chair up closer to the recliner.
“Shelly. My name’s Shelly,” came the shrill voice.
“Shelly, let’s start at the beginning. Do you remember going to Catherine Singleton’s house in Ohio decades ago?”
“Catherine was a stubborn woman,” Shelly said, narrowing her eyes and frowning. “Of course I remember. I recall the incident that occurred in Ohio quite well, if that’s where this conversation is heading.”
“Why do you call Catherine a stubborn woman?”
“We had to follow her around all the way to Ohio. She thought she could hide from us, but we found her. We always find her.”
“Who are we?”
“You’re asking too many questions.”
Dr. Foster cleared his throat. “I apologize. I did not mean to intrude. Shelly, you don’t have to tell me who we are, but can you tell me what happened in Ohio the day Brandon was killed? I heard you were there at Catherine’s house peeping through the window when it happened.”
“What do you want to know about it?” asked the high-pitched voice.
“Well, let’s start with how old you were back then.”
“Over twenty.”
“Let’s get right to the point then. I am going to be quite blunt in my question, but I think it’s important to get to the heart of the matter. Catherine had a young boy named Brandon. Shelly, when you followed Catherine to Ohio, did you kill Brandon?”
“No,” Shelly snapped, forming her hands into fists. “How dare you accuse me of murder. I did not kill him. I did not, I tell you.”
“But you were there the night he was killed?”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing there?”
Shelly hesitated and shifted her gaze toward the floor. “What do you want from me? I said I did not do it.”
“Then help me find out who did it,” Dr. Foster pleaded. “Exonerate yourself by telling me who did it.”
Shelly pouted and looked away.
“I know it’s painful for you to remember, but you’ve got to try. It’s very important. Close your eyes, relax, and think back to that day.”
Shelly put her hand over her eyes and started breathing hard.
“Now think back. Imagine yourself there in Ohio. What do you see, Shelly. Tell me everything you see.”
Instinctively, Shelly made a motion with her hands as she held them straight in front of her and moved them along an imaginary surface like a mime. She appeared to be searching for something.
“I see them through the window,” Shelly whispered.
“Who do you see?”
“Catherine’s two children in the kitchen. Brandon and Peter. They are putting together a puzzle on the table. But hush or they will hear us.” Shelly put her index finger to her mouth and repeated, “Hush. Don’t make any noise, or they will know we’re here.”
“Where is Catherine? Do you see her?”
“No. Wait a minute. Be quiet. I hear her. Catherine is talking with a man in the other room. She’s talking to Sylvester, her husband, Sylvester.” Shelly cupped her hand on her ear and strained to listen. “I hear them yelling in the living room.”
“What are they saying?”
“They are arguing.”
“About what?”
“Be quiet. You’re talking too loud. Oh, I can’t hear what they are saying, but I hear something breaking like a piece of glass.”
“Do you see anything through the window?”
Shelly bent forward, appeared to be running her hands over a flat surface. Then her eyes opened wide and she gasped. She began shaking her head vigorously from side to side. “No, stop, no, don’t kill him. The boy is hurting Brandon. Stop! Aaaaah!”
Chapter 43
Dr. Foster stood up. “What is it? What do you see? Who is hurting Brandon? Who is he?”
But Shelly, who was now in a fetal position on the recliner, was rocking back and forth and crying.
“What did you see? Who killed Brandon?” the doctor asked again.
Silence. Shelly whimpered and sniffled but said nothing.
Dr. Foster put his hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t touch me!” The voice that came was Edgar’s loud and harsh and hoarse voice. Shelly was gone.
“Shelly, wait,” Dr. Foster yelled, throwing up his hands.
“What do you want from me?” Edgar asked.
“Your other personality is named Shelly,” the doctor said.
“She was about to tell me who killed Brandon in Ohio, but now she’s gone.”
“What did she say?” Edgar asked.
“She said that the boy did it, but she would not tell me who the person was. So I think we can assume that he is a male. Not a female personality, but a male.”
I gasped in my hiding spot so loud that I had to muffle the noises that came from my mouth with my hand. The boy did it, I thought. The only boy in the kitchen was Peter. It must have been Peter who killed Brandon. It all didn’t make sense to me. How could a child kill another child? What would be the motive? Was Shelly mistaken?
Or wait… There was yet another plausible explanation. Edgar could have had another personality, one of a boy. If that were the case, then Edgar’s boy personality could have killed Brandon.
All sorts of thoughts whirled around in my mind, but those ideas were blurred by the inescapable feeling of foreboding that I felt at the pit of my stomach. I sensed that there was something that I should be able to conclude, but my thoughts were incoherent, hopelessly jumbled. The identity of Brandon’s killer was at the edge of my subconscious, within my grasp and yet so elusive at the same time.
The fact that Amber and Tally and Mom were missing did not help me collect my thoughts or form appropriate associations between things that I learned. I decided that I needed Mark’s help. He was concerned about me and my family, but he was also detached somewhat and more objective since he was not related to us by blood. And, of course, he had that uncanny sense of intuition. If only I could find Mark and relate to him all that I had just learned.
Edgar’s voice interrupted my thoughts.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Edgar told Dr. Foster as he gazed steadi
ly at the slightly open window behind the desk.
A flash of lightening streaked through the sky and filled the room with a sudden burst of brightness. Furious, heavy drops of rain drummed upon the window pane.
“Now you’ve got to tell me about my father to keep up your part of the promise,” Edgar said.
“Your father is dead.”
Edgar opened his eyes wide. “How and when did my father die?” he asked.
“He killed himself just yesterday. The news media has not gotten a hold of the story yet, but I’m sure it’s going to be a hot topic when they find out about it, especially with all the attention surrounding you following Amber’s disappearance. Travis’ body is at the coroner’s office waiting for an autopsy,” Dr. Foster said, as he settled in the chair next to the recliner.
“It was pretty bizarre so let me start at the beginning,” Dr. Foster said. “The Family Independence Agency took you away from your parents when you were around seven years old, just after your mother died. Her death was ruled a homicide. One day when you were at school, your father Travis was eating dinner in the kitchen. He heard your mother moaning in the bathroom, and when he went to investigate, he found her in a pool of blood. She had been stabbed several times and was bleeding profusely. He was horrified and called the police. By the time the authorities arrived to investigate, your mother had died.
Travis was dressed in women’s clothing, and the detectives found his finger prints on the knife that was used to commit the crime. You mother had tried to scratch your father during the assault, and skin tissue under her nails matched your father’s DNA. There were also scratches on his face.
The police questioned Travis many times, but he seemed sincere when he said he had no knowledge of what happened to your mother. He even passed three lie detector tests with flying colors. I surmise that he passed the polygraphs because he did not know what his other personality had done.
Travis was charged with murder, and the authorities took you away from him and put you up for adoption, thereby terminating Travis’ parental ties to you. A jury convicted Travis of second degree murder, but found him mentally ill. That means he had to serve his prison sentence in a mental institution. I met your father when I came to this facility, and I was the psychiatrist who treated him for the last years of his life.”
Edgar appeared pale. “That’s some story.” His voice was barely a whisper.
Dr. Foster stood up and began pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back as he told Edgar the rest of the story. At one point, he glanced at the closet, and my heart began to beat heavily in my chest. To avoid detection, I closed my eyes, shrank back against the wall, and held my breath.
Dr. Foster’s voice droned on. “Anyway, all of these years, Travis had no idea that it was he, through his other personality, who killed your mother. He felt that the police were out to get him because he was strange, and he became even more paranoid than usual.”
Edgar blinked his eyes and swallowed hard.
Dr. Foster paced impatiently, wrapped up in his own thoughts. “When I took over as Travis’ psychiatrist, I wanted to know what his other personality was like. So I hypnotized him, and during a hypnosis session Darcy appeared. As I told you, Darcy was his other personality. She was very guarded at first.”
“What do you mean by guarded?” Edgar asked.
“She refused to give me any information during my hypnosis sessions. But I continued to question Darcy for years. Finally, she became weary and put her guard down little by little. Then when she finally opened up to me, the information cascaded out of her like an avalanche.”
“What did she reveal?”
Dr. Foster stood still, glanced out the window, and shook his head. “This rain just does not want to let up, does it? It hasn’t rained this much in months.”
He settled into the chair behind his desk, leaned back, folded his arms across his chest, and tilted his head back. “Darcy admitted to me that she killed your mother because she thought she was protecting Travis. She believed that your mother was conspiring against Travis. Well, later I learned that Darcy herself, being the alter personality, actually suffered from schizophrenia. She thought everyone was bad and was conspiring against Travis. She wanted to protect him from the people around him. That’s why she killed your mother.”
Edgar rubbed his brow. “Did my father know any of this?”
“Of course not. Travis did not have a clue,” Dr. Foster said. “But then I made the mistake of telling him about Darcy. I explained to him what Darcy had done. When he finally accepted the facts that I have just conveyed to you, he became very despondent. Very reclusive. He talked of suicide often throughout the years, but never tried to kill himself. We had him under 24 hour observation for years. He was upset over having killed his wife, and he was even more distraught that the authorities took you away when you were a child. He loved you dearly.”
The doctor rose from his chair, threw his arms back, and stretched.
“Then what happened?” Edgar asked.
“Travis had always hoped that one day he would be released from this hospital and that he would find you. He talked about that at every opportunity, probably at every therapy session. Connecting with you became an obsession of his. It was only during the last five years that I began to think that he showed remarkable improvement in his outlook on life.”
Edgar gave a crooked smile. “My father loved me,” he said under his breath.
“Oh, you were the most precious thing in his life. His dreams of finding you helped him to regain some of his optimism. He kept a small photograph of you under his pillow. Of course, the photograph was one taken of you at a young age.”
“Then how did my father die?” Edgar asked.
Silence fell upon the spacious room. Dr. Foster stood still for a long time, looking up at the ceiling. “I guess you could blame the news media for that. As I said, he began to improve, and so we treated him like any other patient and even let him watch television in the cafeteria with the rest of the patients. The only channel we let them watch is the Disney Channel, for obvious reasons. Our psychiatric patients are strictly forbidden from watching the news. But a patient happened to be flipping through the channels when the nurse was not paying attention, and Travis caught a glimpse of the photograph of you that the Twelve O’clock News flashed on the screen just after Amber’s abduction. He heard the report about you and that the police are looking for you as a person of interest in Amber’s disappearance. He also learned about Brandon’s death in Ohio and that you, or your other personality, has stalked Catherine all of these years. He got an immediate history lesson when he heard on the news channel that you, his own son, may have had something to do with Brandon’s death decades ago and with Amber’s disappearance. The newscast provided information about your previous arrests and detailed that you were caught wearing female clothing but had no recollection of stalking Catherine or wearing female clothing. Travis immediately started crying and shaking uncontrollably and blaming himself for Amber’s abduction and for Brandon’s death. He said that he brought you into this world and that he had no business spreading his evil genes around. Travis said that the madness had to stop. The last time I talked to him, he was rocking back and forth in his chair and saying that the madness has got to stop.”
Chapter 44
Edgar opened his mouth wide. A look of horror overtook the expression of astonishment. He would not look up at the doctor. “We have evil genes,” he finally whispered to no one in particular. “My father passed down his evil multiple personality gene to me. Oh, my!”
Edgar buried his face in his hands.
Tucked away in my hiding spot, my mind was racing, probing, yearning to understand how Amber’s abduction and Brandon’s death were tied to Edgar somehow. Was Edgar’s other personality the woman who used to peer at Amber and Tally through the window? Did Edgar’s female personality kill Brandon decades ago and then abduct Amber? But then again, Edgar’s alter per
sonality, Shelly, had said that she saw the boy kill Brandon. Was the boy Peter, my step father? The thought was disturbing since my sisters and I had lived in the same house with him while he was married to my mother.
Edgar wrapped his arms across his chest. His eyes were closed, and an anguished expression was on his face. And of course, Edgar had good reason to be appalled.
It is one thing to tell someone that he is stupid or ugly or foolish. It’s quite another to tell him he has evil genes. Genes make us who and what we are, and if we have evil genes, then I guess, in essence, we are evil. Our souls would be evil. Every inch of us would be sinister, despicable.
Dr. Foster dug his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “But Travis’ faith in you and love for you was strong. After we calmed him down, I took him into my office and we talked about the news account for a long time. Travis became very interested in learning more about Catherine and asked me to find out when you were dating Catherine. He wanted to know why she broke off the engagement with you and the exact date she broke it off. He also wanted me to determine the exact date that Catherine married Sylvester.”
“Why?” Edgar asked.
“I’m not sure.” Dr. Foster shook his head. I think Travis was trying to figure out in his own mind whether or not you committed those crimes. So I reminded him that the news account said that Catherine broke off the engagement with you just a couple of months prior to meeting and marrying Sylvester. Finally, Travis said that he was convinced that you had killed no one. He said that you were a good boy and he always knew in his heart that you would never hurt anyone. But then he said that he felt responsible for Brandon’s death and Amber’s kidnapping nonetheless. He kept repeating that the madness had to stop.”
“What does that mean? How was he sure that I had not killed Brandon?” Edgar asked.
“I have thought about his statement, but I can’t quite understand the logic he used. He said that he felt that you did not kill Brandon but that the madness had to stop. Somehow, those two statements seem to contradict each other,” Dr. Foster said. “Now I guess I will never know. Everything went downhill from there. Travis started uttering gibberish, constantly talking about evil genes and that he had no right to contaminate the world with evil genes and that he needed to put an end to all the madness by taking his evil genes out of business. Later that day I found him crying in his bed and saying that it was too late, that his genes have been unleashed upon the universe, like a horse escaping out of a barn, so to speak.”
Hand Me Down Evil (Hand Me Down Trilogy) Page 13
