Dear Irene,

by Jan Burke

  He must have been very young when he wrote it, but O’Connor had owned a moving style of writing from the day he first walked on the job. He painted Pauline Grant as a young woman to whom fate had been overly harsh. “Somewhere a young boy has been praying for the day when his mother will come back home to him. Who will explain to him what has become of her? As he grows to manhood, what faith will he have in justice and mercy?”

  O’Connor, I thought to myself, you were the real Cassandra. You saw this coming, and no one paid heed. I handed the clipping back over my shoulder. I set aside the kind of aching longing I could so easily feel for O’Connor; I set aside a fleeting sense of hopelessness.

  But as if he knew what I was feeling, he said, “Ah, you do miss him still. I understand. Time doesn’t heal every wound. Not the loss of a mother to a son or a father to a daughter.”

  His daughter. I was chosen for Cassandra because Jimmy Grant thought of me as Irene O’Connor. “I happen to be proud of the man who gave me the Kelly name,” I said. “But what’s in a name?”

  Saying it made me realize what had nagged at me about the conversation with Steven’s parents. Margaret-Maggie. Margaret-Peggy. I had heard the same names from the women at Fielding’s Nursing Home.

  Margaret Robinson—Peggy Davis. Margaret Robinson whose profile at Mercury didn’t quite match the others. Who lost a child and then took another as a repayment. And whose journey to the River Lethe had, perhaps, allowed her adopted son to begin his long-awaited revenge.

  “Did I tell you my father was a war hero?” the voice behind me was saying. He was speaking louder now; I was sure I already knew who he was. “I want you to understand. My mother loved my father. He was killed at Pearl Harbor. He was trapped in the hold of one of those ships, but he helped other men escape before he died. My mother was only nineteen when I was born, and she was widowed by the time I was five. But she was the best mother in the world.”

  We heard sounds out in the hallway. “It’s time to go,” he said. “Look at me.”

  I kept my gaze straight ahead. “Aren’t you afraid to take Cassandra from a sanctuary?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, come now. You read your mythology. A man by the name of Ajax dragged Cassandra from Athena’s temple—a sacred place—and killed her. But the gods punished Ajax for his irreverence.”

  “This is my game, Miss Kelly. You don’t make the rules. I do. Now turn around and look at me.”

  “I know who you are. I don’t care to look at your face.”

  I felt the cold, sharp tip of a knife laid up beneath my chin. I swallowed. “All right.”

  He laughed and moved the knife. I slowly turned around and looked into the face I knew would be there.

  “Is this better, Justin?”

  “Don’t ever call me that again,” he said angrily. He grabbed my right arm and yanked me out into the aisle between the pews. I struggled to free myself but he knocked me to the floor. He sat on my back and pulled my right arm up behind me. He laid the knife against my face.

  Since someone had yanked that same arm out of its socket not three months before, I own up to being something of a wimp about my arm being pulled up behind my back in that particular manner. The pain of the first injury was by no means a distant memory. I felt queasy. Nothing less than pure, unadulterated fear coursed through me.

  “We’re going to go outside now,” he said. “We’re going to walk out to the parking lot as if we were lovers. I have this knife, but I also have a gun. And if you cause trouble, I’ll empty the gun into as many bystanders as I can shoot. And I’m an excellent shot. You’ll watch them die before I stab you in the heart. You’ll die knowing that you caused their deaths. Do we understand one another?”

  I nodded.

  He pressed the knife into my cheek.

  “Yes, I understand!”

  “Good.” He pulled me to my feet. “Take your jacket off and put it over your shoulders. Keep your arms out of the sleeves.”

  I did as he asked. He grabbed my arm again, but hidden beneath my jacket, it would look as if he had an arm around me in an affectionate manner. He moved to my left side. “The gun is here in my jacket. In case your busy little mind should wonder, it will not be a problem for me to fire a gun with my left hand.”

  He took me out into the hall. I prayed I could keep my face a mask, that no one would notice anything wrong. It was the start of evening visiting hours, and there were people everywhere. If he began shooting, he’d have no shortage of targets.

  My knees were shaking. I glanced up in the same hallway mirror I had seen Frank in; now I saw him again, in the distance, coming out of Steven’s room. I looked down, not wanting Justin Davis to see him, hoping Frank did not see me. I knew that if Davis saw Frank, he would shoot him. And Frank didn’t know that Justin Davis was Thanatos, so he wouldn’t be ready to defend himself.

  I caught my reflection in some glass along the hallway, and realized I looked anything but natural. I was too scared to carry it off.

  Suddenly, down the hall, I saw one of the last people I wanted to see at that moment. She stopped and briefly studied me, then came walking toward us, smiling.

  “Do you know her?” Davis asked, tightening his grip on my wrist.

  I nodded.

  “If you don’t want her to die, you’d better give a star performance.”

  “Hello, Sister Theresa,” I said as naturally as I could.

  “Irene! You’ve got a new haircut. And who is this?”

  “This is my friend—Jimmy.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said with a nod, and I thanked God that she hadn’t tried to get him to shake hands.

  “Well, I’ve got to rush,” she said. “So much going on here at St. Anne’s tonight—but let me see here—” She reached into her habit. I could feel the tension in my captor and watched him reach into his left-hand jacket pocket.

  Please God, no—please God, no—please.

  I was on the verge of screaming a warning when she brought her hand back out with—of all things—a holy card. I stared at it dumbly and she pushed it into my left hand. A holy card of St. Jude. I wanted to break into hysterics.

  “Thank you, Sister,” I croaked out.

  “You do know your saints, don’t you, Irene?”

  “Yes, Sister.” She nodded and went on down the hall.

  SEVEN PEOPLE KILLED BECAUSE OF HOLY CARD. What a headline that would make. HOLY CARD BLAMED IN HOSPITAL MASSACRE. ST. JUDE SHOOTING SPREE.

  I had to inwardly shout at myself to get myself to pull it back together.

  We walked outside and through the cold, heavy rain as if it were not falling. He opened the passenger door to a blue van. He pulled the gun out and said, “Get in.”

  He climbed in behind me, poking me in the ribs with the gun. “You drive.”

  As I crawled into the driver’s seat, I noticed something like a backpack in the back of the van. There was only one.

  “Get going. Head out to Dunleavy Road.”

  I did as he said. I started to reconsider the backpack notion. Dunleavy Road led out to a private airstrip. It was about six miles out of town, up in the hills.

  “Doing some parachuting?” I asked.

  “You’ll be dead by the time I do.”

  “Nasty weather for it.”

  “That’s merely a reprieve for you. But the storm is letting up, and by tomorrow, when we take off, the skies should be that glorious blue that only rain or a Santa Ana wind can bring to Southern California.”

  “This storm doesn’t look like it’s letting up.”

  “Oh, but it is. This is just the tail end of it. I’ve monitored this storm quite closely. You’ll see. Before long, it will hardly be drizzling.”

  We fell into silence as I made the series of turns that would take us out to Dunleavy. Once or twice I thought someone was following us. My hopes would soar, then be dashed at the next intersection.

  “I know your mother wa
s killed,” I said. “But why blame people who were only children? Why not go after people who were adults at the time?”

  “Ah, so your curiosity is still alive. Good, good. It will make these last hours of yours pass more pleasantly.” He didn’t say anything for a while, then answered. “They set themselves up as gods. The Olympus Center and its little gods. It was time for them to fall from Olympus.”

  “But they were children.”

  “Children are the most cruel beings on earth.”

  “They didn’t even remember the incident.”

  “Exactly. The most painful, awful time of my life. And to them? Nothing. They caused my mother’s death. They blamed her. They were wrong.”

  “She did lose her temper.”

  “No. They said she lost her temper, but she didn’t. You see, they were false judges. None of them saw what happened very clearly. But they took advantage of us. We were poor. My mother couldn’t afford the kind of attorney that could have saved her life.”

  “She didn’t deny hurting the boy.”

  “Don’t you see? She was trying to protect me. I shoved that miserable sonofabitch into the wall. I did! The little bastard was choking me to death. She ran over, she tried to pull him off me, but I was the one who shoved him into that wall! They were liars! They were all liars! They hated me and they lied!” He was shouting, and scaring the hell out of me. His eyes were wild and angry, and I berated myself for bringing the whole subject up.

  He grew quiet, then said, “She was the best mother in the world.”

  I looked over at him. He was crying.

  We turned onto Dunleavy. There’s about a five mile strip of it that runs along a flood control channel. As he had said it would, the rain had lightened to a drizzle, but the road was slick and muddy from rain and road construction. Bulldozers and graders sat idle on the right shoulder.

  I glanced into the side mirror and felt knots forming in my stomach. We were being followed. I was fairly sure it was Frank’s car. I realized it would be much harder for him to stay out of sight on this dark, deserted road.

  Jimmy looked into the mirror on his side.

  “What about Maggie Robinson?” I asked, trying to distract him. “She was a good mother, wasn’t she?”

  He turned to glare at me. “She was a rotten bitch who did nothing but punish me for her son’s death for years. She was a little worried at first, afraid the Social Service people would come around, check on her. Afraid they hadn’t made me disappear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know. Your detective friend was looking into it. You know what he learned. I was just so much lost paperwork. When my stepmother began to realize that she and J.D. had pulled it off, she started beating me. She used to tie me up and burn me with cigarettes. Look!” He pulled back a sleeve. There were rounded scars all along the inside of his arm. “I’d scream bloody murder, but did anyone ever help me? No. I was that poor Mrs. Davis’s problem child.”

  He was silent for a moment, brooding. “I learned from her, though. I learned how to be invisible. It was the only way to be safe. I learned how to avoid attracting attention. She needed attention—couldn’t get enough of it. I didn’t. It made me stronger than her. No one knew what I was thinking, what I was feeling.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill her?”

  “I thought about it,” he said. “Especially after my mother died. Peggy wouldn’t let me grieve for my own mother. She’d tell me over and over how glad she was that my mother was dead. ‘Now we’re even,’ she’d say. But I didn’t let her know what I felt. It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter. She was mean, she was greedy, she was selfish—but she wasn’t the one who caused the problem in the first place. The little liars caused it. Not her. Peggy Davis. Pathetic. She wasn’t any more real than I was. She made sure I wasn’t. Made me change my name. My name! My father was a war hero and I couldn’t use his name!”

  “So Margaret Robinson became Margaret Davis,” I said softly, trying to get him to lower his own voice, to calm down. “It took me awhile to make the connection between the nicknames for Margaret; she just changed from Maggie to Peggy. And you became Justin Davis.”

  He was looking in the mirror again and didn’t answer me.

  “Jimmy,” I asked, trying to get his attention away from it, “why now? Why did you wait all these years?”

  He looked back at me. “She would have told on me.”

  “Who, Edna?”

  “No, no. Peggy. I used to be afraid of her. Not now. Not now . . . but before, before I learned that she was weak, she knew how to scare me. She was in control. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Being in control. She knew about me, so she was in charge. The person in control has to know everything. That’s why I’m in control now. I know you. I’ve studied you. I know your secrets. Peggy . . . she knew all kinds of things. We had . . .” his eyes darted away from me for a moment. “We had secrets,” he said, watching me again, as if looking for some reaction. When I said nothing, he went on. “But then the funniest thing happened. She forgot! She forgot everything! I thought it was one of her tricks at first, but it wasn’t. She couldn’t tell anyone anything. Nothing at all! Isn’t that funny?”

  He smiled at me. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile for more than a few seconds. A big, gentle smile. It transformed him somehow, and oddly, for a brief moment, he wasn’t so frightening. There was a small boy there, an eight-year-old, perhaps. What kind of monster wouldn’t pity Jimmy Grant? he once asked me. There was a killer beneath his smile, yes—but I wondered who he might have become if someone as monstrous as Peggy Davis hadn’t been allowed to raise him.

  He looked over at the side mirror.

  The smile was gone.

  “You bitch! You had us followed. It’s your boyfriend, isn’t it? Step on it—go on, speed up!”

  “The road is muddy here—”

  “Goddamn it! I said speed up!”

  I stepped down on the accelerator. It was all I could do to keep the van under control.

  “Damn you! Why did you have to ruin everything! It could have been so wonderful! I would have been good to you, you know.” He rolled down his window and leaned out with the gun. “Say good-bye to Mr. Harriman. He’s about to die, Cassandra.”

  Suddenly I didn’t care what Jimmy Grant might do to me. I only knew that I wouldn’t let him kill Frank. I used the only weapon I had on hand. I jerked the steering wheel hard to the right.

  27

  FOR A FEW SECONDS, it was dreamlike; an unreal combination of motion and time that didn’t fit in the usual order of either. The van went into a spin, the mud from the construction removing all friction from beneath the wheels. We glided along at an amazing speed. With a deafening bang, we tore through a chain-link fence, then suddenly there was a sensation of moving through space. Which, of course, is exactly what we were doing.

  For an instant I saw the concrete walls of the flood control channel sailing by in the headlights. Then all too soon, a bone-jarring impact, an explosion of sound, blackness.

  I don’t know how long I was out. When I came to, I thought for a moment that I had been blinded—it was pitch black. I hurt like hell all over—but my right side was killing me. The left side of my head throbbed, and I couldn’t even figure out what I had hit it on. I could hear the roar of water rushing by me. Jimmy Grant was groaning and pleading for help. I had no idea where he was. I had no idea where I was. I had never felt such an utterly complete sense of disorientation.

  My eyes began adjusting to the darkness—no, not adjusting. The moon was coming out. But my perspective on my surroundings seemed odd to me. Gradually, I realized that the van had landed on its side in the channel, blowing out the windows and headlights with the impact. I was covered with bits of glass, suspended above the water by my seat belt, which was pressing painfully into my right hip and my chest. I felt for and found the steering wheel, gripping it to ease some of the pressure from
the belt. I straightened my legs, bracing my feet against the floorboard to help as well.

  It was then that I got my first look at Jimmy Grant. His face was a bloody mess, and it was the only part of him that was above water. A mask, eyes wide with fright. “Help me,” he said. I was still dazed, and couldn’t figure out at first what was wrong. Then I saw that he was being pressed against the seat by the force of the current, and that he had somehow tangled himself in his seat belt. The moon went behind a cloud, and I lost sight of him.

  I tried reaching down to him with my right hand. He must have somehow worked a hand free, because I felt his left hand grasp on to mine, skin chilled and wet. “Help,” he said again, as if he expected none.

  I pulled him up a little farther. The water was cold, and he had heavier clothes on than I did. They were weighing him down. Debris from the channel, sticks and old beer cans and small stones were coming in through the windshield, striking hard against him.

  “I can’t,” he said weakly. “I can’t hang on.”

  The moon came out again and I took another look at him. With horror, I saw that his right arm was almost completely severed. He had to be losing a lot of blood from it. His grip was weakening, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold him by myself. Panic filled his face. Suddenly a large dark object rocketed against him; there was a loud cracking sound as it rammed into his head with an awful force. A tree limb, I realized, as it spun back out into the current. He suddenly released his grip and fell back into the water, his head at an odd angle.

  There was a creaking sound, and I felt the van move. Every few minutes, objects from the channel would bang against it. Fearing the kind of blow I had just seen kill Jimmy Grant, I used every ounce of strength I had to pull myself back up away from the water. I had to get out.