Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  Sonny perked up. “So there can be more than one?”

  “I’ve read about cases with more than a hundred alters. That’s the exception, but it happens.”

  Sonny’s sudden deep breath was hard to interpret. Frus­tration? Relief? “She went out sometimes, to bars, the nights my father was away. She’d leave my brother and me with Mrs. Sadowski down the street and go off for a few hours to party. Sometimes she’d bring guys back to the house. Never inside, but right to the doorstep. In summer, when the windows were open, we’d hear them fucking on the porch from three houses away. Everybody knew.”

  Christensen imagined the commotion that would make along a street as tightly packed and nosy as Jancey. “Maybe it was another alter,” he said. “The part of your mom that wanted to humiliate your dad the way he humiliated her. What did he do when he found out?”

  Sonny smiled. “Nobody ever told him. He wasn’t the most popular guy around here. Everybody knew he would have killed her.”

  A thought passed quickly, and Christensen kept it to himself: If one of Sandra Corbett’s alters couldn’t humiliate Ron Corbett by boffing strangers on their front porch, if the neighbors didn’t play the tattletale role she wanted them to play, maybe she created Rachel to take it to the next level. Another thought: “Do you think the name is significant?”

  “Rachel?”

  “Why Rachel?”

  Sonny rewrapped his hand, slowly, methodically. “It’s from the Bible, which makes sense, because of my grandfather. He died when I was five, but I know my mom hated him, hated everything he preached. Only thing I ever saw her get passionate about.”

  “Rachel sure knew her Scripture.”

  Sonny was silent and intense, like he was replaying some long-ago conversation. “All I remember about the Bible Rachel was she was married to the same guy as her sister.”

  Love those Bible stories, Christensen thought. “An aunt to her sister’s children,” he said. “Interesting. See, all that stuff was in your mom’s head, probably drilled into her as a kid, but she apparently had no use for it. So she gave it to Rachel, who I’m guessing interpreted it pretty broadly.”

  Sonny nodded. “Talked a lot about Revelations.”

  “The Apocalypse,” Christensen said.

  “About the angel Michael, too. That’s who I’m named after.”

  Against all odds, Christensen dredged a biblical biogra­phy from somewhere deep in his parochial-school past. Michael, leader of the righteous angels in the battle for Heaven; Michael, star of the Renaissance painting where he’s casting Satan into the pit. Rachel probably kept the picture in her wallet.

  “How you feeling, Sonny?”

  “Like shit. Wrung out.”

  “The hand?”

  “Hurts like hell.”

  “There’s safer ways to have done this, you know. That’s why I didn’t want you to come back here. You’d probably have remembered everything eventually, but a little at a time, not in a flood. Would that have been so bad?”

  Sonny ran his good hand through his hair and closed his eyes. “If I’d lived that long.”

  “Meaning?”

  Sonny’s eyes drifted around the room, eventually settling on the steel ribs of an ancient radiator. “I had a dream I never told you about. A water dream. Must have had it a dozen times in the last couple years.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “It’s different than the drowning ones at the sink. Not something that ever really happened, I’m sure. Just a dream.”

  Christensen moved across the room and sat cross-legged on the floor beside Sonny on the hardwood floor. “What happens?”

  “I’m swimming in open water, a channel or something. It’s night. I’m alone, swimming hard. But there’s something behind me, something fast, much faster than me. I swim harder, but it’s still coming. I can’t get away from it, and it’s scary. Really scary. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sure I can’t outswim it.”

  “It’s chasing you?”

  “It’s going to kill me.”

  Christensen put a hand on Sonny’s knee. “But it doesn’t, does it?”

  “I always wake up. But it was getting closer each time.”

  Across the room, a dark shape the size of a golf ball moved along the baseboard beneath the stairs. A mouse.

  “We should go, Sonny. I still think we need to call Grady Downing.”

  “Another minute.” Sonny fished into his daypack and rooted around, pulling out a dripping navel orange that had apparently been crushed when Sonny stumbled over the pack a few minutes earlier. “Wondered why my pack was soaked.”

  The room was almost dark. The smell of ripe citrus filled Christensen’s head, cutting through the mildew and dust of the abandoned house. It smelled good, familiar, comforting. But there was something else, another smell. He took the smashed orange from Sonny and split it, sniffing again more analytically.

  “What?” Sonny said when the two halves fell.

  “Something’s not right. Where’d you get this?”

  The wavering halves stopped on the floor between them. Sonny’s face became a mask in the fading light, vacant and emotionless. Christensen answered his own question: “From your mother.”

  Sonny flinched, staring at the orange. “She loaded me up with food the last time I was out,” he said.

  Christensen picked up both halves and shoved them into the daypack. Sandra Corbett may have given Sonny the fruit, but Rachel worked on it first. Still trying to take Sonny to God. He grabbed Sonny by both shoulders, forcing him to look into his eyes. “Let’s go. I need to call Downing. Now.”

  “In a minute.”

  “We need to go.”

  Sonny looked away. “I’ll wait here.”

  “I think you should come with me.”

  “I’m okay. Really.”

  Christensen checked his watch. Maybe he could borrow somebody’s phone. “Five minutes,” he said, and bolted out the front door. He’d tell Downing what happened—about Sandra Corbett’s dissociation into Rachel, about the cyanide in the basement and Sonny’s breakthrough that finally brought the Primenyl killer’s face into focus, about Rachel’s willingness to kill even Sonny as he closed in on the truth. He’d turn the whole hellish nightmare over to people who knew what to do now. He wanted Sandra Corbett in custody, but mostly he wanted out.

  He was standing in a suspicious neighbor’s foyer, snow melting off his shoes, when, from the corner of his eye, he saw it through the front-door window. A flash of forest green accelerating down Jancey Street toward Braxton Avenue.

  The Explorer.

  “Oh Jesus,” he said just as Downing’s phone clicked into voice mail.

  Chapter 38

  Christensen flailed his arms at the Yellow Cab rounding the corner onto Jancey. The neighbor, a suspi­cious crone, watched his anxious dance from her front window and shook her head again. She’d remembered the Corbetts, all right. Hadn’t seemed surprised that someone who knew them would appear at her door close to panic ten years later and ask to use her phone. Hadn’t been particu­larly startled when he dropped the handset and charged into the street, chasing a fleeing sport-utility. She’d watched him rush back in and furiously dial Downing’s office number, then Downing’s home and beeper, then a cab, never saying a word.

  The wait had been torture. All his efforts to reach Downing had ended in voice mail, and there was no telling when he’d return the page. The cab company was deluged by calls as the snow piled up. Nothing for at least half an hour, the dispatcher had said. So he’d made small talk with the crone, Mrs. Torisky, suppressing his desperation, wait­ing in the swirling butter-onion smell of frying pierogies for her ancient black telephone to ring.

  When Downing had finally called from West Virginia, Mrs. Torisky hadn’t eve
n pretended to give him privacy. She’d listened as he spun the story at full volume: Sonny’s sudden urge to visit the house; the dangerous flood of tormented memories; the cyanide they found deep in a basement wall; Aunt Rachel as a figment of Sandra Corbett’s tortured psyche. “She’s the one, Grady, not Ron!” he’d blurted. “She made her goddamned kids drop the Primenyl!”

  All Mrs. Torisky ever said, in her heavy Slovak accent, was, “Crazy people.” She was holding a rosary as he climbed into the taxi and waved.

  “Ridgeville,” Christensen barked, checking his watch. He was at least forty minutes behind Sonny, but he had no doubt where the young man was headed. He repeated the apartment name Downing gave him. “Lakeview Pointe Estates.”

  The driver turned around. “In this shit?” Serious kielbasa breath.

  “How fast can you get there?”

  Big laugh, yellow teeth. Mr. Kielbasa adjusted his porkpie hat. “Where youn’s been, Skip? Parkway’s a fuckin’ mess. Take us a fuckin’ hour just to get through the Fort Pitt Tunnel. I’ll get you there if you gotta go, but you better have plenty of cash.”

  Christensen pulled his wallet from an inside jacket pocket and fanned four twenties, a ten, and two ones, every cent he had with him. He dropped his bills over the back of the front seat.

  “That’ll spend,” the driver said. Big wink. Then he began to whistle “Winter Wonderland” as a back tire whirred and the cab started to move. Please God, don’t let this guy be a talker, Christensen prayed. There was too much to think about.

  The puzzle was coming together, but the picture was no less baffling. Had Sandra’s dissociation revealed itself during her years of therapy? Were her doctors aware she’d developed an alter aggressive enough to kill? She should never have left Borman. Probably one of the Reagan era’s deinstitutionalized mentally ill, he reasoned.

  Christensen thought about Sonny’s grandfather. If her original perp was dead, maybe Sandra had focused her alter’s rage on the tormentor she married, the only one upon whom she could inflict revenge. Maybe that single focus intensified the rage, made it combustible. But why wasn’t it enough just to kill him? Why this elaborate and deadly plan to show the world his evil?

  As improbable as it seemed, the Primenyl case had taken on an even more sinister meaning: Killing didn’t simply fill some sociopath’s twisted need. The random poisoning and their attendant agony were nothing more than a means to an end, one necessary strand in a spider’s intricate web. He imagined Sandra at its center, surrounded by the sons she’d inadvertently snared. David’s body spun into a silken sarcophagus; Sonny fighting for his life; the intended prey, her husband, lucky enough to have avoided capture and smart enough to have removed himself from her life.

  Christensen recounted the circumstantial evidence Down­ing was sure pointed to Ron Corbett: the abusive past, the pharmacy training, the typewritten list of licensed cyanide distributors found inside Corbett’s home. How flimsy it all seemed now, and how neatly it meshed with Sonny’s retrieved memories. Corbett’s sudden flight in 1986 and lack of contact since—what Downing interpreted as callous belligerence—probably was the frantic response of a man who knew what his wife had done but felt he couldn’t come forward. If he had, who would have believed him? Down­ing?

  The cab crept through Oakland’s slushy streets, then onto the Parkway East high above a gentle curve in the Mon River. He could see the water clearly now that the old J&L steel plant was gone. Ice clung to the riverbanks, and he found himself trying to make sense of Sonny’s swimming. Why did he force himself into a river’s excruciating winter embrace four times a week? Was it self-destructive, a victim’s subconscious punishment? That’s what he’d first thought, but now he wondered if maybe it was something far different—an extreme expression of self-preservation by someone who couldn’t forget a near-drowning in a basement laundry sink.

  Traffic slowed as they neared the Fort Pitt Bridge, but the snarl wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Five lanes of cars knitted themselves into two strands that snaked across and disappeared into the tunnel on the other side. Green Tree Hill beyond the tunnel was bound to be a slip-and-slide, but for some reason traffic was moving.

  “Youn’s must be praying back there or something.” Two laughing eyes in the rearview mirror. “This is light even for a Saturday. The snow’s keeping people home.”

  Christensen leaned forward. “How much longer do you figure?’

  “Don’t get all bunched up. Another twenty minutes, Skip, at least.” The driver tossed a crumpled paper lunch bag into the backseat. It bounced off Christensen’s knee. “Pickle?”

  Chapter 39

  Sonny paced at the base of the stairs, turning the snow into gray slush. He hesitated again at the apartment door and stared at the window and its tightly drawn curtains, dreading the moment when she’d peek out, avoiding the woman he pitied more than loved.

  That she tried to kill him—in a basement laundry sink then, and now with a poisoned orange—left him mostly numb. He knew by Jim Christensen’s reaction what was in that orange. When it had really sunk in, he was alone in the house on Jancey, alone with remembered horrors in the place where he’d lived them. He shouldn’t have ditched Christensen, just like he shouldn’t have jammed the Ex­plorer into four-wheel drive with his good hand and roared across town, past the snow-stranded drivers on Green Tree Hill. He shouldn’t have bumped down an unpaved hillside and into a vacant lot when a semi skidded sideways and blocked the Ridgeville exit. But he needed to get off.

  Having done all that, why was he here?

  The Explorer’s engine was still ticking, the driver’s door open, as he started up the steps. The truck’s interior was a bubble of pale yellow in the dark parking lot. All the way here, he’d imagined this scene. Moving up the stairs. Knocking. Waiting for her to scissor open the curtains and start unlocking the door. But then it stopped. He couldn’t imagine the scene beyond that point, just as he couldn’t avoid confronting the woman on the other side, whoever she was. Everything in his past was drawing him to his mother’s doorstep, to this moment. That much he knew.

  “It’s me,” he said to the dark eyes inside. He held his breath as she worked the locks.

  The door chain caught and she peeked out the gap. A puff of warm, stale air. “Saturday already? Oh goodness, Sonny. It’s nighttime. I’m a mess. My hair. My teeth aren’t brushed. I’m not dressed. Can you come back?”

  “Just open up.”

  “It’s just that I’m—”

  “Open the goddamned thing.” He backed away two steps, then rushed forward and buried his shoulder into the door. It sprung open with a sharp wooden crack as pain shot through his fractured hand. While what was left of the chain lock swung like an off-balance pendulum, he stepped inside. All he saw was the hem of her flannel nightgown as she rounded the corner and disappeared from view. Somewhere in the warren of small rooms, a door closed. The apartment was still and dark except for the endless chatter and ghostly blue glow from her TV. On top of the TV, the silhouette of a video camera he’d never seen before.

  Sonny crossed the living room in three steps. A short hallway to his left led to the bedroom. The breakfast area was straight ahead, and a wide arch to the right opened into the kitchen. “I came to talk,” he said, turning right. He’d been sure she went that way, but the kitchen was empty. Where could she be?

  “Bad day, Sonny.” From the bedroom. Sonny whipped around, disoriented by his miscalculation.

  “I’m not leaving,” he said, “not until I say what I came to say.” What had he come to say?

  “Please come back. I can’t. Not right now.”

  Sonny turned on a light and surveyed the kitchen. It was spotless. The small table was bare, the floor gleamed, the sink was emptied of the dirty dishes that usually collected there. The only disorder was a section of the counter between the sink and the refr
igerator where she’d ready stacked the remnants of some indefinable project— transparent red cellophane like that used in gift baskets, pale straw, scissors, tape, ribbon. A bag of oranges and two grapefruit sat on the windowsill nearby.

  He felt like puking. As careless as his mother was about cleaning, there were times when she was practically obsessive about neatness. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? In the room’s weird tidiness, he felt another presence.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he called. “There’s a story I want to hear, and I want to hear it from you. You owe me that.”

  She didn’t answer, so he went to her bedroom door. The hallway was narrow and dark, its walls bare. The overhead light fixture was missing. Its wires dangled from a ragged hole in the ceiling. He tried the doorknob.

  Her voice, soft but panicked: “Please go.”

  “Unlock the door.”

  “You’re scaring me, Sonny. What do you want?”

  Then it came clear, as sharp and sudden as a needle prick. He knew why he’d come: “I want to talk to Rachel.” Sonny waited, closing his eyes and laying his forehead against the door.

  “She’s gone,” his mother said.

  “She’s here!” Sonny screamed. “She wants me dead! Open the fucking door!” He crashed against it with his shoulder, screaming from the pain, but it held. He tried again, and lightning exploded behind his eyes. When the pain subsided, he leaned back and kicked again and again with his bloody shoe until he lost his balance, then tried to kick the knob loose as he fell onto his broken hand. He felt himself plunge into a prickly fog, but struggled to stay conscious.

  Had he? He wasn’t sure. He’d somehow ended up with his knees gathered to his chest, slumped against the wall opposite his mother’s bedroom door. Why was he crying? Then it drifted back to him.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Sonny said.

  Nothing.

  He said it again, but his voice was starting to fade. Rage was draining from him in spurts, like blood from a neat arterial wound.