>>>>>>
TUESDAY JUNE 19, 1:00 p.m.
A MAZE OF SECRETS
We followed the ambulances to Hidden Lake Hospital. Wooly said he had no idea about nothing—not Nickie, not the Grand Cherokee. He didn’t know, he couldn’t think. He couldn’t get past what he called that fucktuous prediction, the blood streaming over the tattoo of the earth.
Hidden Lake Hospital was a tiny red brick contraption in the older, poorer part of town. What it was basically was a glorified ER. I don’t think they had more than 12 permanent beds in the building. It was the kind of place where they’d just give you the basics before shipping you off to a bigger facility.
They let Wooly in to see Nickie—he identified himself as her employer. I sat in the waiting room and did some searching. It wasn’t easy. Castillo wasn’t exactly an uncommon name. The first cycles produced nothing. Plus I kept thinking about what she said to me that first night together, when I asked about the scars under her eye. Don’t ask. Don’t ever ask.
Finally I got a hit, from years back. From deep in the Newsday archives. One story. The headline: Teen Acquitted In Mother’s Death.
This fucking town and its maze of secrets. The hidden stories these people kept were as twisted together as a tangled thicket of bushes out in the Paumanok. I was starting to think some invisible boundary had been drawn out there in the woods, some border I didn’t know about, and somehow, by reading this story, I’d be crossing the line.
>>>>>>
TUESDAY JUNE 19, 2:45 p.m.
EVERYTHING WAS CONNECTED
Funny thing about silence. In a cinder block cell inside an upstate prison, it can be a depressing thing. In a guest bedroom in Wooly’s house, with a significantly upset woman staring at you from the other side of the space, it can be even worse.
She was sitting stiffly on the edge of an armchair—stiff because of the stitches in her leg, stiff because she was refusing to relax. She was a lightning rod mounted on upholstery.
“Don’t bring it up to me,” she said. “I’m warning you. Don’t go there. You’ll never get back.”
“Hey, they brought it up, Roy and Alex.”
“And you had to ask. You had to go looking.”
“I’m gonna ignore it?”
“What’s the matter with you? Why do you have to make everything so complicated?”
Déjà vu all over again. That’s exactly what my ex used to tell me. In fact, this whole thing felt like a flashback to old fights at home.
Nickie was glaring at me, mouth quivering. But then her body seemed to slump a little, just a little.
“You ever want to shut something out of your life?” she said. “Just close it off, shut the door on it and lock it away forever?”
“I know what it’s like.” I took one of the other chairs. “You know what I’m talking about.”
She turned her eyes away from me and fixed them on the floor, slowly nodding to herself. Three seconds—count ‘em—went by. “You really want to know about my mother?”
“I’d like to hear your side of it, yeah.”
She eased back in the chair just a bit, but still staying rigid. There was nothing soft about her sitting.
“You know what it’s like to realize you’re the most normal person in your house? You know how scary that is?” She paused for a moment but she wasn’t waiting for an answer. “I don’t know what she was like before I was born, but after? I mean just after? I was a big baby, a 10 pounder. I just shot right out of there. She broke her pelvic bone during the delivery, and I think she carried the resentment with her after that. It was like she’d written drive daughter crazy on her To Do list. Drive daughter as crazy as you are.”
“How crazy was she?”
“Very, clinically. She was bipolar, manic depressive, whatever. She was crazy and she kept going off her meds. I spent my life looking for the signs that she was going off. My whole growing-up time I spent trying to read her, trying to spot the signals. I spent my life taking care of her.”
“Just the two of you?”
“Just us.”
“Your father?”
“I never got a clear explanation.”
“How bad did she get?”
“She was insane. One day, I was like 15, I bought a mirror and hung it in the living room. She said what did you do that for? I said it makes the place look bigger. She said why would anyone want that? Who wants it bigger? It’s just more to clean.”
“She was serious?”
“It got worse. About a week later I came home from school, she had mirrors everywhere. Living room, hallway, all over the house. She said she was using the mirrors to put herself back together. She said she was using all the different reflections to take herself apart and put herself back again the way she should be.”
Nickie was still looking at the floor. There was nothing there except beige carpet, but that’s where her eyes stayed.
“It would’ve gone on like that for who knows…” she said.
“But something happened.”
She nodded. “I was going out with this…guy. I was 16. One night, we were in the woods, he tried to attack me. Or I guess he did attack me. He had a knife. I fought him off but he swiped me a few times, going for my eye. I got away. I ran away, took myself to emergency. Sat there in the hospital all night, all by myself.”
Her hand moved. I thought she was going to touch the grooved flesh on the side of her face, but she went higher, pushed her hair back. I could see the gloss of tears in her eyes.
“I got home that morning. My mother looked at my eye and started screaming. What the hell is that? What happened to you? I told her it was just an accident but she wasn’t buying it. I think you’re whoring around, she kept saying. I think you’re whoring around.
“We were upstairs, at the top of the stairs. She was yelling at me and I really didn’t like it. I’d just been knifed and nearly raped and I’d spent the night in a hospital. I really didn’t like the way she was yelling at me. I grabbed at her hands to shut her up. She pulled away, and as she pulled she lost her balance and down the stairs she went. Head over heels, down the stairs.
“It was a bad fall. I could see it was a bad fall. I ran down there, are you all right? She said she was. I said I’d call 911, I’d help her into bed. She kept saying she was all right. I should’ve known she was too crazy to be believed, but I decided to believe it. I had to go to school. I believed it.
“I got home that afternoon. There were police cars, EMT vehicles all over the place. My mother had stumbled out of the house and collapsed in the front yard. She’d died right there, massive internal injuries. She’d died about two minutes after the first police got to the scene, which was enough time for her to tell them I’d left her alone, I’d abandoned her after she’d fallen down the stairs.
“I got arrested. They charged me with—you should appreciate this—they charged me with manslaughter. They said I’d callously refused to help her. They said I’d just walked away and left her to die. I told the jury what happened. They let me go. But a lot of people around here weren’t convinced, not during the trial and not even after. A lot of people around here thought I should’ve done something. A lot of people around here thought I’d gotten away with murder and let my mother die.”
She stopped talking, her head in the same downward position.
“There are better ways to grow up,” I said.
A single tear slowly rolled down her cheek. It fell from the scarred eye, crawling down her face until it came to rest in the corner of her mouth.
“I can’t believe I’m crying,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m crying now. The whole time it happened, the trial, everything, I never cried. Crying was for small things, not for big ones.”
“What happened after? Did you stay around?”
“I went to live with my aunt. I was 17, I went to live with her. I wasn’t going to hang around, not with people hating me.”
“The guy who cut you—you
never filed charges?”
She wiped her face, wiped her nose. “Too embarrassed, too ashamed.”
“So nothing ever happened to him?”
“Yeah, something happened to him. He got arrested today.”
You ever have one of those conversations where the talk suddenly takes a swerve and drops you off a cliff? “Him?”
“Roy. Roy fucking Freeny.”
Connected, connected—everything around here was connected.
A wounded silence had settled over the room.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I had to ask.”
She straightened up in her chair. Her eyes were snarling at me now. “Get everything you wanted? Anything else about my life you need to know?”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“So am I. Don’t talk to me anymore. I don’t want to talk to you, don’t talk to me. We have nothing left to say. Just leave me alone.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 7
9,000 STARS IN THE SKY
>>TUESDAY JUNE 19 (2 days to go)
>>WEDNESDAY JUNE 20 (1 day to go)
TUESDAY JUNE 19, 4:10 p.m.
IN TWO SECONDS IT ALL WENT WRONG
Not a good idea, I thought, to be hanging around the house with Nickie in such a blazing mood. Time to book. She had Wooly’s broad back—I could leave with no security worries. So leave I did. Nickie and I needed some zen spacing between us. A lot of it. My plan: Get something to eat in town, then put an end to this long day in the Hidden Lake Hotel. I was paying for the room, might as well use it.
Maybe a mile away from downtown strange little warning beeps began popping out of my phone. GPS. My tracking device was still snuggled under Georgiana Copely’s XKE, and the car was on the move. Which meant the Jag hadn’t been used since last Friday, four days ago, when for reasons still unknown she’d visited Trident Manufacturing.
Georgiana—what a huge question mark she still was. Everything she’d called had seemed to come true. Seemed. But what part was she really playing in the Wooly Cornell death saga? Maybe it was time to go back to school on her. I felt like I’d taken a few steps inside her dim-lit study, but I could only go so far. Some barrier I couldn’t see was holding me back. There was something about her I didn’t know, but maybe I needed to know it.
I picked the car up on Woodland Avenue, staying about 10 seconds behind. Her assistant Marco was driving. She was riding shotgun, white straw tumbling down to her shoulders, wearing shades, just like she’d been before.
The Jag turned on Prospect Street and went to Pine Road, going in the exact same southeastern direction it had taken the first time I’d tracked it. Pine to Harrison to Northwoods. Minutes later we were driving into town, sliding past the Hidden Lake Hotel.
Marco stopped at a red light a few blocks way from the Executive Center. I pulled in two cars behind, just like I did four days ago. Everything the same, same, same. Everything seemed to be running on recycled memory.
I thought about something someone once said to me. I was working at the agency, and one of my old bosses said, It’s hard to spot something when you don’t know what you’re looking for.
True enough, but isn’t it harder not to look for it?
Horns blasted behind me. The light had changed seconds ago. I’d been daydreaming.
I think.
I caught up with the Jag as it was passing the Executive Center, broken bits of low sun bouncing off the building’s glass panels, shooting into my eyes like a hypnotist’s light. Marco kept going, passing Wings ‘N Things on the corner. Then he turned a block later and pulled into a parking space. The same space he’d found before. The exact same fucking space.
That’s when I knew. At that moment, the moment I saw him taking the space. That’s when I knew where they were heading.
Ever find yourself sitting in a windowless room and somehow you know there’s a storm gathering outside? You can’t see it, but you know the sky is getting dark? You just know it in the bones. Something in the air, some electromagnetic charge, tells you a storm is coming.
Georgiana could’ve been going anywhere. To any of the stores in the area. To Wings ‘N Things maybe. But I knew she’d be going back to the building. She’d be going back to the fifth floor. She’d be going back to the same place she’d been before. I just knew it.
I kept driving. Circled around two blocks and came up in front of the Executive Center again. No place to park. Tough shit. I double parked right in front of the building. If I got a ticket, I’d charge it to work.
Still hot outside. It felt like the earth was on fire. I hit the lobby and took the first elevator up. Fifth floor. The plants, the paintings, the boredom. I went into the stairwell at the far end, waited with the door open a crack just like the first time.
Why would Georgiana be going back to the Trident office? What the hell was in there? Didn’t know, but I was gonna find out. Even if I had to break in there later, I was gonna find out.
Waiting, waiting. Weird moment: I thought it was raining. For a few dreamlike seconds I thought a soft summer drizzle was falling in the stairwell. It felt like I was standing in a gentle June rain.
Ding. The elevator slid open. Georgiana and Marco stepped out, started walking away from me. They passed the potted plants, the restrooms, heading to the other end of the hallway. Going the same way they must’ve gone before, like they were fated to go that way, like they were caught in some eternal replay.
Then something went wrong. In two seconds it all went wrong. They didn’t go to Trident. They went next door instead, to the suite of doctors’ offices, to the same place we’d taken Wooly.
So much for my psychic ability.
I just stood in the stairwell. It was all too much. This whole fucking town with its myths and mysteries and secrets and legends. I wasn’t losing it. I’d lost it.
I took the stairs down—needed to walk. I’d been so sure Georgiana was going back to where she’d been, back to where I’d seen her…
But wait. I stopped on the fourth floor landing. I hadn’t actually seen her go into the Trident office. I remembered it now. She’d come out of the ladies’ room and Marco had started taking her back to that end of the hall, but then a woman and a boy got off the elevator—I’d had to duck back and just listen. I was counting their steps when the boy began whining and his mother was telling him to keep quiet. Could the noise have screwed my hearing and my timing? Could I have miscalculated the number of steps they’d taken? Shit, I sure could have. Meaning Georgiana never had anything to do with Trident or Monte Slater—it was just a coincidence that Monte was suing Wooly. Was that possible?
Yeah, it was very possible.
I kept walking down. Third-floor realization: If God had ever made a bigger fool than me, I didn’t want to know about it. One consolation: My strange little premonition had been right. Georgiana had returned to the first place she’d gone.
But that left another question. Second-floor thought: Who goes to the doctor twice in four days? You don’t do that unless you’re sick, or have an unhealthy attraction to the medical profession. Was something wrong with Georgiana? Or was there something in that office she badly needed?
By the time I hit the bottom floor, I felt like I was back to where I was when I’d walked in. My original instinct, I believed, hadn’t been off. Something kept bringing Georgiana back here. Something was going in this building.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
TUESDAY JUNE 19, 5:30 p.m.
YOUR FINGER UP YOUR ASS
Wooly didn’t sound good on the phone. Lot of fractured thought going on, lot of Howard Hughes rambling. Plus he had the TV blasting. I asked why. He said the sounds of the woods outside were really getting to him, crawling in the house, throwing him off, so he’d pushed the volume all the way up.
Like I said, long day.
I told him to turn it down, we needed to talk, what was going on? Simple, he said—blood will stream across the earth. He couldn’t get
away from it. He’d tried to take a nap but he could feel Georgiana thinking inside his head.
Good opening. I told him what I’d seen, what I’d really seen, Georgiana going to one of those doctors on Friday and again today. Could he describe the office to me?
Well, sure. He answered every question I had. Where was his doctor located? How about the other doctors? Where were the exam rooms? And those charts and folders that’d been piling up on the front counter—where did they get filed? Where were the filing cabinets?
Hold on, he said. Hold on one sec. Why’re you asking?
I told him: I was breaking in there tonight. I’d checked the building before I left, found a rear door off the lobby, studied the make of the lock and the wiring on the alarm system. I also remembered something I’d seen in the waiting room—a security keypad on the wall by the door.
Wooly was dubious. You know, it’s a good thing to check your prostate. But sticking your finger up your ass is not the way to go.
“I’ve already made up my mind.”
Just seems a little reckless is all.
The pot calling the kettle black maybe should’ve been taken as a warning sign, but I passed it over.
And what if it goes south? What if you get caught?
“I’ll try not to.”
But what about ME?
“What about you?”
I don’t need you busted. I need you to be here to help protect me. And what’s with you and Nickie? How come you’re not here?
“We’re having a disagreement.”
Lovers’ quarrel?
I guess I should show some respect for her privacy. “Something like that. Just tell me more about the office.”
I already told you.
“Tell me everything you can.”
I don’t know, it’s nice enough, I guess. Only thing I don’t like about it, there’s no bathroom for the patients. It’s like primitive. You got to go out, in the hall.
“I know.”
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 11
