Who Killed My Daughter?

by Lois Duncan

  When I was offered the job, I’d accepted enthusiastically, delighted by the idea of a week on the coast. I grew up on the Florida beaches, and as fond as I was of New Mexico, I was never as happy anywhere as I was by the water. Now, however, I dreaded the thought of leaving Albuquerque. I couldn’t imagine going anywhere without Don, and the effort involved in teaching a class was overwhelming to me.

  Still, I had made the commitment, and I felt I had to honor it.

  The day before I left, a psychologist friend brought over a paperback.

  “I think this might interest you,” she said. “The author, Dr. Brian Weiss, is chairman of psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. It took a lot of courage for him to write this. He’s really putting his professional reputation on the line.”

  I thanked her for the book and, having no time to read it right then, absentmindedly stuck it in my purse.

  My plane arrived at the Hyannis Airport in the late afternoon, and I rented a car to drive the short distance to Craigville. Even when I’m on top of things, I have no sense of direction, and since few of the charming, winding little roads had street signs, I soon became hopelessly lost.

  As evening came on, the fog rolled in to intensify my problems, and by the time I finally stumbled upon the conference center I was so worn out and disgusted with myself that I was totally disoriented. I signed in at the office, drove to the inn where I was to stay, dumped my suitcase in my room, and went out to get dinner. When I got back I discovered that I’d lost my room key.

  By then the office was closed, and I was stuck for the night. Registration wasn’t due to start until the following day, and the inn was virtually unoccupied. I wandered about the vacant lobby in search of a place to lie down but nothing looked promising. Eventually, I ended up in a chair on a porch overlooking the marshes. Beyond this ocean of grass the real ocean sighed and sucked at the sand of the Craigville Beach, and the sound of the waves took me back to my childhood in Florida. Insects buzzed and hurled hard, small bodies against the screen, and crickets chirped in the brush, and frogs emitted shrill mating cries from the ponds. Although there was no sound of traffic or of human voices, I had never experienced a more disquieting night.

  At first I attempted to sleep, but the chair was uncomfortable, and I couldn’t stretch out in it. Finally, I turned on the light and, remembering the book in my purse, took it out and opened it to the preface.

  Despite my exhaustion I read straight through the night.

  Many Lives, Many Masters was the true account of how Dr. Weiss, at that time a traditional psychotherapist, placed a woman named Catherine under hypnosis to regress her back to childhood in an attempt to discover the cause of her recurring anxiety attacks. The book was based upon audiotapes of Catherine’s therapy sessions. Dr. Weiss regressed his patient farther than he had intended, and when she began to recall the traumas that had produced her phobias, she described them as having taken place in a previous lifetime. Not only was she able to describe in detail an entire sequence of former lives, she channeled messages from “the space between lives,” more traditionally known as “heaven,” that contained intimate information about Weiss’s deceased father and infant son.

  Under hypnosis Catherine described seven planes of spiritual existence, one of which sounded like the plane Betty Muench had described to Robin. According to Catherine souls on that interim plane can use their psychic abilities to make contact with people who are still in their physical bodies. She said that souls are permitted access to that plane if their lives ended so abruptly that agreements were left unfulfilled and mysteries unsolved. It was not a plane on which anyone stayed indefinitely.

  By the time I had finished the book, the sky was growing light in the east, and the first pale strips of pink were beginning to appear over the dark stretches of marshland. I got up from my chair and stretched, sore and stiff from sitting so long in a cramped position. Then I left the inn and walked down the access road to the beach. At this time of morning it was deserted and offered the same sense of peace and solitude I had known as a child when I had walked alone, mile after mile along the water’s edge, planning my life. I had never had the slightest doubt about what direction it would take. I had always known I was going to be a writer. By the age of seven I was filling notebooks with poetry, and by thirteen I was selling fiction to national magazines.

  The other thing I was sure about was the number of children I would have. Even when I was a child myself, I felt them tugging at my heart, trying to get my attention and make sure I was aware of them. After graduating from high school I entered Duke University, but at the end of my freshman year I dropped out to get married. It seemed like a waste of time to spend four years writing term papers when I could be bringing those five children into the world.

  The marriage wasn’t a good one, and after nine years my husband and I were divorced. Twenty-eight and the mother of three, I had no college degree or job experience, and the only way I could support the children and myself was by writing. I started grinding out stories for the women’s magazines, and by the time I met and married Don four years later, I was earning a pretty good living at it.

  The fact that we married was a surprise to everyone who knew us, and the fact that our marriage was successful was even more of one. Don was an electrical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, a major Department of Energy laboratory for weapons research and development. A bachelor in his mid-thirties, he appeared to have nothing in common with a divorcée with three children, and his friends predicted that my rattling typewriter, haphazard housekeeping, and rambunctious, strong-willed youngsters would drive him up the walls. My own friends, on the other hand, were certain that I would soon be bored stiff by a quiet, self-contained scientist who weighed each sentence before he spoke and whose IQ and education so outdistanced mine that we would probably have nothing to talk about except the weather.

  Surprisingly, though, we turned out to be a good balance for each other. I added color to Don’s life, and he stabilized mine. He put up with my idiosyncrasies with quiet good humor, and after my previous marriage to a silver-tongued philanderer, I was very happy to have a responsible, trustworthy husband who expressed his love by actions rather than words. Don encouraged me to go back to school to earn a college degree, to accept a part-time teaching position with the journalism department, and to make trips out of state to give lectures and do book signings. Unlike the husbands of some of my friends, who felt threatened when their wives’ careers started to accelerate, he was unconditionally supportive of all my endeavors and seemed prouder of my accomplishments than he was of his own.

  Don adopted my first three children, and we had Donnie and Kait as soon as we could. It was while I was pregnant with Kait that I wrote A Gift of Magic, a book about a twelve-year-old girl with extrasensory perception. This was a major milestone in my career, because it was the first of my books to involve psychic phenomena, a subject teenage readers embraced with delight. That book was so successful, I followed it with others. It wasn’t that I believed in the subjects I was writing about—telepathy, precognition, astral projection—but they provided good story material for exciting novels, and a little dose of fantasy never hurt anybody.

  Morning fell upon Craigville Beach like a benediction. The breeze was fresh in my face, and the seagulls screamed with thin, sharp voices, and the sun burst into the sky like a globe of gold. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot along the waterline, unable to tear my mind from the book I had just read. I’d never given much thought to the subject of reincarnation. The concept was strange, but I didn’t find it unacceptable. If in our Father’s house there were “many mansions,” it was conceivable that one of the lesser of those might be our planet and that some of us might be required to reside there more than once before we became worthy of better accommodations. But I had a problem with the idea of any sort of afterlife. I wanted to believe in one, but it strained credibility. How could a mind exist apart from a brain
, and what good was a soul if it didn’t come equipped with a mind? New Testament references to eternal life were encouraging, but I’d done enough reading to know that the Bible had been revised and reinterpreted over many centuries and by now had become as much the word of man as the word of God. The fact that physical matter was continually being recycled made it logical to assume that mental energy was also, but it seemed reasonable that this energy would flow into some huge, universal melting pot in which individual personalities were lost.

  Photo of Lois walking the beach

  Yet, Weiss’s patient appeared to have retained her personality when she spoke from the “realm between lifetimes.” And Betty Muench had presented Kait as we knew her. Her description of her “in an agitated state and very angry” had been so powerful and so in keeping with what Kait’s reaction would be if tricked or betrayed that it had sent us barreling down to the hospital in a frenzy. And the rest of the reading had been just as strong and convincing. I had even started lighting white candles to “bring light to Kait’s spirit,” a ritual totally foreign to my upbringing.

  Did Kait still exist? And, if so, was she able to communicate? I stared up at the sky, now clear and blue with the morning mists burned out of it, and impulsively shouted, “It’s Mother! Can you hear me?”

  The only response was from the gulls who had been circling overhead and now came swooping down expecting a handout. I didn’t hear the sound of Kait’s voice in the wind, and God didn’t send me an angel with words on a tablet. None of the patches of sea grass burst into flame.

  “Are you all right, lady?” somebody asked nervously.

  I turned to find a gray-haired woman in Bermuda shorts, clutching a basket of seashells and regarding me as if afraid I would start frothing at the mouth.

  “I was rehearsing for a play,” I improvised hastily.

  Feeling as ridiculous as I knew I must look, I hurriedly made my way back to the conference center and got into my car to go get breakfast. On the floor mat next to the accelerator I discovered my room key. Since I now had access to my room, I decided I would be doing my colleagues a favor if I took a shower and changed clothes before heading for the dining hall.

  The office was now open, and as I passed it, the manager called out to me, “Ms. Duncan, you have a message! Your son Donnie called and wants you to call back. He said it’s not an emergency, but it’s very important.”

  The hands of my watch showed eight-thirty, and it was two hours earlier in Albuquerque. Donnie didn’t have to be at work until eight A.M., and I couldn’t imagine why he was up so early.

  I went to the phone in the lobby and dialed his number.

  He answered on the first ring.

  “I just saw Kait!” His voice was shaking with excitement. “I was just waking up, and I had this thing like a dream, but it wasn’t a dream, it was real! We were having a party like the wake with hundreds of friends there. I was standing in the entrance hall, greeting people as they came in, when all of a sudden I turned and saw Kait standing next to me. Her hair was back to one length, and she looked just wonderful! I said, ‘You can’t be here, Kait, because you’re dead!’ That didn’t seem to bother her. She just smiled and said, ‘Everything’s cool. Let’s party and have fun.’ ”

  “What a wonderful dream!” I exclaimed.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” Donnie said impatiently. “Kait was there! She was real! I could even smell her! I thought you’d want to know that she’s doing much better now.”

  He rode on that wave of elation for a very long time. To the rest of the family he seemed to be standing in a pool of ethereal light that prevented him from suffering in the same way we did.

  I’m ashamed to say there were times when we very much resented this.

  7

  BY THE TIME I returned from Cape Cod the numbness had worn off, and the second stage of grief had taken over with a vengeance. The agony of my loss was so intense that there were times when I literally did not think I could survive it.

  I longed to believe that Donnie’s dream had been a visitation, but common sense told me otherwise. I knew how realistic grief dreams could be, because I’d experienced one myself after the death of my mother. Mother and I had been sitting in beach chairs in front of my parents’ cabana, watching the sun go down over the Gulf of Mexico, when I suddenly realized that what I was experiencing wasn’t possible.

  “This is a dream,” I told her. “You can’t be here! You’re dead!”

  “I’m not dead to you,” Mother said, leaning over to kiss me. “I’ll never be dead to you, dear, because I’m part of you.”

  I had never before or since experienced a dream that involved so many of the senses. I could feel the salt breeze on my face and smell the faint film of perspiration on my mother’s upper lip as she kissed me. That dream made such an impression that seventeen years later, when I wrote Locked in Time, I included a similar scene between my heroine, Nore, and her deceased mother.

  While Donnie was finding comfort in his “visitation,” I looked for Kait in the cemetery. When I was alone there with nobody else within earshot, I would stand at her grave and keen. The first time I did this I didn’t even know I was doing it. I was standing, stoic as ever, holding a chrysanthemum plant, when I became aware of an inhuman wail like the howl of an animal that has lost its cub, and when I glanced around for the source I discovered it was coming from my throat. The hideous sound continued until exhaustion overwhelmed me, and I sank down onto the grass, pressed my cheek against the grave marker, and let loose the flood of tears I’d held back for so long.

  Photo of Lois putting flowers on Kait's grave

  Then I got up, blew my nose, and drove to the grocery store.

  And so the routine of family life continued. Don went off each morning to Sandia Laboratories. Donnie, who had moved back in with us when his roommates took off for other places, spent his workdays running a printing press and his evenings out with his friends.

  I did everything I normally did except write.

  Kait’s mail was forwarded to us, and, as her bills came in, I paid them and closed out her credit accounts. One day, as I was writing a check to cover her final phone bill, I noticed that three calls to Santa Ana, California, had been made from her apartment only moments after she was pronounced brain dead. Two one-minute calls were to 714-664-1021; one two-minute call was to 714-662-3362.

  Kait’s final phone bill, hand-delivered to APD

  I sat staring at the numbers, trying to make sense out of what I was seeing. Those calls had been made when Dung was with us at the hospital and the apartment should have been unoccupied. The thought crossed my mind that he might have phoned from the hospital and had the calls charged to their home number, but then I remembered that I hadn’t been able to do that. When I phoned our out-of-state daughters and tried to bill our home number, the operator had told me that there had to be someone at our house to okay the charges, so I’d made the calls collect.

  Who had been in the apartment the night Kait died? And who in Santa Ana had been informed of her death?

  The second number seemed vaguely familiar, and when I checked our personal phone directory, I found it scribbled there in my own handwriting. When Kait had asked our permission to go with Dung to California, Don and I agreed on condition that she leave us the phone number of Dung’s sister so we could reach her in an emergency.

  The number she gave us was 714-662-3362.

  I went to the police station in person to give the bill to Gallegos.

  “The second number is Dung’s sister’s,” I told him.

  There was a moment of awkward silence while he processed that statement.

  “Dung doesn’t have a sister in California,” he said finally.

  “But Kait told us—” I started to object.

  “She put one over on you,” Gallegos said, not without sympathy. “That was before you knew they were sexually involved. Kait knew you wouldn’t let her stay in a motel with her boyfriend,
so she came up with this fictional ‘sister’ so you’d think they were staying with Dung’s relatives.”

  “But this is the sister who sent him money every month!”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Arquette, but she doesn’t exist.”

  I couldn’t believe that Kait had invented this person. It wasn’t that she was incapable of lying; like any teenager, she could be sneaky. Don and I had grounded her on several occasions when, resentful of what she considered my “over-protective mothering,” she had fabricated stories to get more freedom. But this time I didn’t believe that this was the case. She had been making casual references to this sister for well over a year before the idea of a trip to Disneyland ever came up. It seemed more likely that Dung had lied to Kait about the sister. But, in that case, who was it who kept sending him money from California? Only so many car wrecks could be lucratively faked. What had the man been living on if he wasn’t getting support checks?

  There seemed to be nothing to be gained by pressing the issue.

  “Can you find out who these numbers belong to?” I asked Gallegos.

  “No problem,” the detective assured me.

  “And what about the translations of the Vietnamese letters? They may contain information about illegal activities.”

  “Those don’t really matter now. We’re pretty sure the Vietnamese weren’t involved in Kait’s murder.”

  “But, remember, Dung said, ‘I am deciding’? You said that was as good as a confession.”

  “Dung has an alibi. He was out that night with friends, the same two guys he was with the night he tried to kill himself. They dropped him back at his place around ten P.M.”

  “Kait wasn’t shot until ten forty-five. He could have gone back out.”

  “He didn’t go back out. They dropped him off, and he stayed there.”