Truth and Consequences

by Sarah Madison

  “You told me who Zimmerman was, back in the hospital room.”

  His statement was completely unnecessary, and it annoyed the snot out of me. Okay, maybe I hadn’t remembered who Zimmerman was when John had first mentioned him, but of course I remembered my neighbor, Amy. Blonde, blowsy, a bit too fond of pink, and with a little Chihuahua that she liked to dress up. No, wait. John had something to do with making her treat Spike like a dog and not a doll. The information hovered just out of reach, as though my fingertips could brush it but not take hold.

  It also felt as though John was manipulating me ever so slightly, and I resented that too. As though I were a suspect in a case and was being set up to react in a manner of John’s choosing. Hey, I might have forgotten a few things, but I knew how to keep a suspect off balance.

  John gave a gusty little sigh without looking at me. What was that all about?

  “My neurologist wants to write a paper on me, so not exactly an impartial opinion there. He’s never had anyone with an eidetic memory before. Every time he runs tests on me, he practically wets his pants.”

  John snorted. “That doesn’t make him a bad doctor. In fact, it means he has a vested interest in your case. Win-win for everyone.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t feel like I’ve won the lottery here,” I snapped.

  We were heading out of the city and into the suburbs, on wide, four-lane highways traveling through what used to be farmland and horse country. The region was flat, and the early spring heat waved off the asphalt ahead of the car. Already it was warmer than expected. The Tidewater area was several weeks ahead of the rest of the region when it came to summer. A dirty thumbprint of smog marred the horizon, and the air was thick and heavy as a wet blanket. I found myself missing the blue smudge of mountains on the skyline. This time of year, they should be carpeted with newly leafed-out trees, speckled with late-blooming dogwood and redbud, as though someone had dropped a colorful, hand-woven quilt over the landscape. Supposedly, I had an apartment in San Francisco. So why was I missing the Appalachians? Amnesia sucked.

  “How much do you remember?” John asked suddenly.

  I had to think about that one. “It’s hard to say. I’ve spent a lot of time refamiliarizing myself with our cases. When I think about them now, sometimes I can’t tell if I really remember them, or just remember reading about them. The problem is, if I’ve forgotten something, I’m usually unaware of it until I remember it again, which is of negative value in terms of quantifying my current memory status. I’m remembering more and more, though. Mostly random facts and childhood memories.”

  Half the time it didn’t feel real. Like I was reading about something that happened to someone else.

  I clearly remembered the day I’d been ordered to pick up Flynn from the airport. He’d returned to town to question a new witness in the “Grimm Fairy Tale Killer” case, and I’d been assigned to assist him. Just thinking about the case made images of the bizarre murders flood my mind. In each of the GFT killings, the body of a young woman had been found lying in a funeral position with an item associated with one of the famous fairy tales. The method of murder had been different from victim to victim, but the hallmarks of the attack and subsequent posing had strongly suggested that the UNSUB (or “unknown subject”) was the same in every case.

  When I’d been assigned to work with Flynn, I sat down to acquaint myself with the details of the case. I must have steered clear of certain cases when I wasn’t actively working on them. Given what I know of my memory now, I can see why. If I close my eyes, I can picture every last horrific detail of any crime scene I’ve studied, so it only makes sense that I don’t add to my nightmares when I don’t have to. Flynn—that is, John—had flown into town to question a nervous witness who would only speak to him. I guess because he’d worked on the GFT case originally. But after that, I don’t remember much of anything that happened to me until the day I woke up in the hospital.

  My therapist told me that, according to my history, I’d had another incident of head trauma during the initial two weeks when I’d met John and we’d begun working on the case. Turns out that our lead had been false, but then the witness was murdered and staged to look like she was a victim of the GFT. That’s the difference between posing and staging, by the way. The former has personal meaning to the killer, but the latter is an attempt to divert attention. Posing a body is not as common as staging. Posing is an expression of something the killer feels compelled to do. Every time a murderer poses a body, he tells us a bit about himself.

  During the investigation at the museum, the copycat GFT killer whanged me over the head, stuffed me in the trunk of my car, and left me for dead. I’m kind of glad I don’t remember that. But that previous concussion, followed by the more recent head bashing by one of John’s old high school classmates, was the reason I had this persistent gap in my memory. My therapist would have me believe I was refusing to remember that entire period of time because I was afraid.

  I didn’t buy it, myself. But hey, that’s what the therapist told me. She also told me to keep a journal of my thoughts and the fragments of memories as they returned to me. I’d argued with her that, once my memories returned, I wouldn’t be able to ditch them, even if I wanted to. It wasn’t necessary to log them.

  “Humor me.” She’d been as dry as California in a drought season. Since I needed her to sign off on my eventual return to work, I’d started keeping a journal.

  I have to admit, it’s been handy, in a negative sense. Like the way the absence of blood spatter tells you an object in the crime scene is missing. In the course of mapping out my life, I found that I had a Flynn-shaped gap in my memory.

  Yeah, because the biggest memory gap was the same period in which I’d known, and apparently had been sleeping with, John Flynn. You can see why not remembering sex of that degree of hotness would be frustrating. That makes me sound incredibly shallow, but come on. The man is sex on two legs. I had been sleeping with him. And I couldn’t remember it at all.

  John drove in silence, one index finger tapping lightly on the steering wheel. I wondered if he was even listening to me.

  Chapter Two

  WHEN WE drove into the quiet neighborhood, I experienced some serious déjà vu. The street looked like something off Happy Days, but that wasn’t it. I had the strange feeling that I’d been there, that I’d driven past that house with the barking Labrador, I’d pulled up in the same driveway, and that I’d been to this same home before.

  For all I knew, I had. Probably in the past couple of weeks. John and I had probably driven out to meet his mother for dinner or something. It got me thinking. “So, um, is there anything I should know before we meet your mother again? Any taboo subjects, things I shouldn’t say?”

  John turned off the ignition but sat with his hands on the wheel. His brow furrowed as he seemed to be thinking how best to answer, gazing out the windshield at the front door of the house. After a curious hesitation, he spoke. “This is the first time you’ve met.”

  “Really?” That was weird. “I could have sworn I’d seen this neighborhood before.”

  “It looks like hundreds of other neighborhoods in the suburbs. You’re probably just confusing it with someplace else. Anyway, the big elephant in the room is that my younger sister was murdered when I was thirteen.”

  “Jesus.”

  My exclamation finally made him look at me. Whatever he saw made him sit back in the seat and release his terminal grip on the defenseless steering wheel. “See, it’s like this. The night you were attacked? We’d just figured out who killed her.”

  “That night? We? You and me?” I flicked my index finger back and forth between the two of us.

  John rushed his next sentence like an inexperienced horse faced with a scary-looking jump. “Yeah, but here’s the thing. We have no proof. Our case is all guesswork. I know we’re right, but we don’t have anything we can take to court. And to be honest, with you ending up in the hospital in a com
a….”

  “Not Cunningham?” John’s old high school buddy, the man who’d tried to kill me, had reason enough to prevent John and me from turning him in. I’d read the police report. Cunningham had been sexually abusing the kids on his football team. But if he’d also been the murderer of John’s little sister…. Well, that explained a lot.

  John shook his head. “No. Someone else. But we have no way of proving it, and the man in question is dead. Opening up that can of worms would be bad for everyone and wouldn’t make a difference in the end.”

  “You haven’t told her.” I glanced at the house. The front door opened, and a woman looking very much like Jackie O stood in the doorway waiting for us to get out of the car.

  “No.” John ran his hand through his already tumbled hair, a gesture I’d learned meant he was uncomfortable. “Look, we can talk about this later. But for now, just don’t mention it. Okay? My mom’s a recently recovered alcoholic. I don’t want to punch holes in a leaky boat.”

  I could see his point but—yeah, no. “You have to tell her.”

  “Maybe someday. But sometimes you have to do what’s best for the person you love, rather than what you want to do.” He opened the car door and raised a hand to acknowledge his mother’s little wave. She smiled and turned to speak to someone behind her in the house.

  “Bullshit.” I unbuckled the seat belt and got out of the car, still feeling every bruise. I had a feeling I was going to regret not letting the surgeon plate my radius the way he wanted to. The cast wasn’t all that heavy, but it made using my left hand awkward. I hadn’t wanted to stick around for surgery just then. Not to mention I had this somewhat irrational fear that if I underwent anesthesia again, I might lose some of the memories regained.

  As John went to the backseat to collect the cats, I picked up my laptop case and followed him. “That’s just a convenient out for you. You don’t want to have a difficult conversation, so that’s what you’re telling yourself. Trust me. She’d want to know the truth. If you really love her, you’d tell her.”

  Oliver, the big brown tabby, began yowling in earnest. Phoenix, the fluffy yellow and white cat, joined in, though her cries didn’t have quite the same buzz-saw-through-bone effect. The look of dismay on John’s face would have been almost comical, had I not suddenly felt sorry for him. Poor bastard. I wasn’t the only one dealing with the problems caused by my amnesia. I suddenly pictured him sitting beside my bed when I first woke—looking rumpled and disheveled—as though he’d been there for days. I found out later that he had.

  When I’d asked what had happened to my attacker, I’d discovered that John was under investigation by Internal Affairs and the shooting incident review team for killing Cunningham with a single shot. Cunningham was John’s former high school classmate, who’d turned out to have a homophobic streak a mile wide and hadn’t handled the fact that John and I were together very well. Hence the murderous attack on me with the baseball bat. Well, that, and the fact that we’d found out he was molesting his students. So yeah, things had been rough for John. Maybe I should cut the guy some slack.

  John’s mother came down the porch steps, followed by an older man who looked nothing like John. My guess was a stepfather. John turned his head away from them, his expression as tight as though it were shellacked on. “They don’t know I’m gay.”

  “Oh, this is just getting better and better.” I mentally repeated cut him some slack like it was my new mantra. “I hope you don’t mind them knowing that I’m gay because I’m not hiding that.”

  A small smile quirked one side of his mouth, and it wasn’t hard to imagine why I went along with his stupid plan. Seriously. That smile should be registered as an illegal drug or something.

  “John.” His mother’s voice was warm, as though she had infused it with summer sun and Coppertone in an effort to be welcoming. “I’m so glad you decided to come stay with us. This is my fiancé, Charles Webber.”

  Wait. What? John was bringing me to his mother’s house for a prolonged convalescence, and he was just meeting the fiancé now? I started to think John had been a little short in the details department here.

  John nodded at the silver-haired man, his hands too full of our luggage to shake. Not that a hand was offered. In fact, Charles eyed our belongings with a little curl of his lip. “You brought cats.”

  “Yes. Well, it’s unclear right now how long they may have to stay in the area.” John’s mother spoke brightly, like a woman used to smoothing over ruffled feathers. “I hope you don’t mind if we set them up in the basement, do you? There’s a half bath down there, and I’ve put a litter box in it. I didn’t know what kind of litter to buy, though, so I just got what the salesperson recommended.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine. We’ll have to go get some food for them anyway. Mother, this is my partner, J—Lee. Lee Parker. Lee, this is my mom.”

  “Please, call me Jean.” Her smile was tight with tension, and I could see a strong family resemblance between them. They had the same thick, dark hair and hazel eyes. At least in Jean’s case, the hair was tightly under control. I was betting Mega-Hold hairspray.

  “You flew the cats here from California? Exactly how long do you expect to be in town?” Charles stared at the carriers as though I’d smuggled in gremlins and intended to release them to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting neighborhood. With his slicked-back silver hair and his sporty windbreaker over an expensive polo shirt, he looked the perfect image of every well-off retiree I’d ever met.

  Virginia is a Red State, and it was no great stretch to presume Mr. Webber was a Republican. Ten-to-one we’d hear about his golf handicap before dinner was over. I’d also bet that John had just gone from being a welcome guest with a respectable job in law enforcement to being the antithesis of everything Charles Webber believed in. Just by knowing me. I bet he decided I was gay the same way I’d decided he was a homophobic, card-carrying member of the GOP—simply by looking at me.

  “You know, statistically speaking, most serial killers have a history of animal cruelty and neglect long before they start in on human victims, which is why the FBI now tracks such cases. In my personal experience, people who don’t like cats—those who actively go out of their way to harass or harm them—don’t like women either. Everything they claim to hate about cats, their independence, their ‘slyness,’ is actually a projection of what they don’t like about women, instead.” I knew better, but the words just came out of my mouth as though I weren’t in control.

  “I never said anything about hating cats.” Charles was offended. Well, good.

  “He has head trauma.” John spoke very loudly, as though we’d all gone deaf.

  Jean looked as though she’d been poleaxed for a second. Too late I realized bringing up statistics about murderers was the last thing I should do to the mother of a murder victim. I opened my mouth to apologize, but inexplicably Jean folded her lips tightly and looked at me with bright eyes.

  She was trying not to laugh.

  So I winked at her.

  “Why don’t we all go into the house?” Southern graciousness at its finest. I was certain any moment she would offer us some sweet tea. “I’m sure everyone is tired and—” Oliver interrupted with a piteous cry that I recognized.

  “Oh dear. Is he all right?” Jean bent over to look into the carrier.

  “He’s going to hurl,” I said.

  Sure enough, the agonizing howl was punctuated with guk-guk-guk sounds.

  “Clean up on aisle two,” John said. Which was weird, because I had just thought the same words.

  Jean very practically suggested we take cat and carrier straight into the downstairs bathroom for cleaning. Charles looked like he wanted to puke as well. Some people are sympathetic vomiters—even hearing someone vomit is enough to make them nauseated. I’m not one of them. Love me, love my puking cat. Accept the fact that I’m gay while you’re at it.

  We all went into the house where John grew up.

  An
d that was my introduction to my boyfriend’s family.

  DINNER, PREDICTABLY, was a fucking disaster.

  Bad enough that Charles Webber continued to be the jerk I’d guessed he’d be, with his stiff-necked attempts to engage Jean and John in conversation while avoiding acknowledgment of my existence. I would have endured the evening better if the food had been edible, but Jean was a terrible cook. She had to belong to the “if a little heat was good, a lot was better” school. Our steaks, which should have been juicy and tender, were burnt to a crisp on the outside and raw in the middle—as though they’d been seared by a dragon’s breath and set on the table still mooing. The unidentifiable mass of greens had been cooked into limp submission, and the potatoes, obviously microwaved, were hard in the middle. Ten pounds of butter would have been insufficient to make the potatoes edible, and as everyone knows, almost everything can be improved with butter.

  There wasn’t even a decent coffee to go with the meal, just your basic grocery-store instant. John and Charles ate like hungry dogs, undiscriminating because it was there. I was gratified to notice that John did poke slightly at his charred steak. Perhaps we were actually in a relationship, after all. I pushed my greens around in a circle and professed not to have much of an appetite. Headache coming on and all that.

  John’s expression as he watched me from across the table was decidedly sardonic.

  “Oh, I am sorry to hear that. Do you get them often?” Jean looked like she might reach for my hand to pat it.

  For a brief moment, the sympathy in her voice made me want to confess that yes, I had a headache most of the time, and sometimes it crept into migraine territory, complete with wavering auras and nausea. I wanted someone to take pity on me, fold me in their arms, smooth my hair, and tell me it would get better with time and that I wouldn’t have to live like that the rest of my life. If that was what I was looking at for the next forty-odd years, I wasn’t sure I could do it.