by Nancy Bush
“At the risk of being redundant, why don’t you contact the police? Do you have some deep dark secret? Some lawlessness that’s caught up to you? Some crime you don’t want discovered?”
“The police have done me no favors,” she mumbled, wishing he would just go back to sleep.
“They catch you shoplifting? Pick you up for a DUI? Give you a speeding ticket?”
“My mother hanged herself when I was six and I found her body, and they treated me like I was stupid and a liar and they treated my brother the same way.”
Silence.
That, finally, had the power to shut him up.
And then she remembered what Hague had said about the doctor.
The doctor.
We both know him . . . from when we were kids . . .
The stalker. The zombie. The doctor.
We both know him.
She sat up straighter.
“What?”
“I went to see my brother tonight. Hague. He said it was the doctor.”
“It?” he repeated.
“The bogeyman.” She abruptly got to her feet, thinking hard.
“Which doctor? Your Dr. . . . Yancy?”
“Another doctor. But he was there. He came to Hathaway House and he stalked! ” She paced toward the kitchen, felt for a light switch on the wall, changed her mind at the last minute and left the room illuminated by only faint moonlight. “Can’t remember his name. He was a visiting doctor, and I saw him a time or two. I’m sure of it. Almost sure of it . . . He must’ve had contact with Hague, too. Who is he? Could he have known who we were, even then?”
“Not following,” Auggie said.
She pressed her hands to her head, dragging at memories long buried, ones she’d hidden from herself maybe. “The man in the photo,” she said to herself with conviction. Then, “The doctor in the photo. Maybe . . .”
She tried to force herself to think back to Hathaway House, when she’d lived there, but the memories scorched her and she shied away from them. Was he the man in the photo? The one stalking angrily toward the camera? Was he the visiting doctor at Hathaway House? Was he?
And does this have anything to do with the murders at Zuma?
“Any chance this revelation is going to send you to the authorities?” he asked.
She looked back at him, blinking several times. “No. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” he repeated. “Progress.”
“I need—to be alone. To sort some things out.” Seeing him unfettered, she asked lamely, “Would you mind just going to bed?”
“I can help you,” he said.
She couldn’t stand it. She needed to think. And having him right there wasn’t helping.
The gun was under the couch where she’d tucked it. Momentarily she thought of pulling it out, but she was past threatening him with it.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
He seemed to want to argue. He stood there for a long, long time.
“Please,” she rasped.
She had no idea what he was thinking, but in the end he made a sound of frustration, headed for the bathroom, and then back to his bedroom. If he changed his mind and decided to walk out the door in the middle of the night there wasn’t anything she would do about it.
She made a trip to the bathroom herself, then lay back down on the couch, certain she would never fall asleep, and then promptly did.
The medical examiner’s office was located in a squat brick building on the grounds that held the Winslow County Sheriff’s Department and other government offices. J.J. was a busy man at the best of times, and today was closer to the worst. He was brusque and had tired lines around his eyes and Jo Cardwick’s histrionics were starting to get on his nerves.
Upon having the drape pulled from Trask Martin’s bloodless face, Jo had collapsed into keening wails and swaying motion. September had pulled her away upon seeing Journey’s tightened lips and obvious displeasure. Now they were in an anteroom just outside, and Jo was collapsed in an orange plastic chair, her head between her knees, sobbing and shaking.
September walked to the water cooler, grabbed a small paper cup and poured Jo a drink. The girl could really use a stiff one, she thought, but plying alcohol was not accepted protocol. “Here,” she said kindly, holding out the cup.
Jo tried to stem the flow. She truly did. She lifted her head and looked at September through glazed eyes. “He’s dead. He’s really dead.” She took the cup but didn’t drink from it, just held it out straight as if it were poison.
September nodded. “I’d like to ask you a question or two, if you’re up for it.”
“She killed him. She must’ve.” Jo hiccupped, looked at the paper cup as if seeing it for the first time, then brought it to her lips. She drank it all.
“Do you mean Olivia Dugan, in apartment 20?”
She nodded, gulping.
“Why do you think that?”
“’Cuz she’s the only thing different. Everybody loves Trask. Everybody. And she was always so shut down. And then he was over there and saw some pictures and she was kinda crazy about them, he said.”
“Crazy about the pictures?”
“That’s what he said.”
“What were the pictures of?” September pressed.
“I don’t know. Old pictures of people, I think.” She suddenly looked angry. “She had a few drinks with us, but she was cold. Really cold.”
“When was this?”
A pause. Fresh tears welled. “Last night!” she cried, as if she’d just remembered.
“And that’s when Trask saw the pictures?”
She shook her head. “Sometime before. I told you. He saw ’em at her place. And I don’t care anyway!” Then, “Are you going to arrest her? Throw her ass in jail! DO SOMETHING?”
“Yes. I’m going to do something,” September assured her.
She was going to get through to her brother if it was the last thing she did.
Chapter 10
Liv watched dawn creep across the horizon. She was at the living room window, peering out through a gap in the curtains. Pink streaks ran across the sky and a golden arc was forming to the east.
Her thoughts had turned to Hathaway House. She’d been there less than a year. The dreams had started before that; “repressed memories,” Dr. Yancy told her later, but her father and Lorinda just wanted her “fixed.” They didn’t care whether Hathaway House was the right choice. They just sent her there and she could envision Lorinda dusting her hands of Albert’s crazy adopted daughter. Somehow Lorinda had then convinced Albert that Hague was as messed up as Liv and away he’d gone to Grandview Hospital, which actually had a reputation for treating more serious mental patients. Should she feel grateful that they hadn’t assumed her problems were as bad as Hague’s, and that’s why they’d sent her to Hathaway House instead? Or, was it a money issue: Hathaway House was mostly funded by donations whereas Grandview was a private mental hospital. Maybe it was just simply that Hague, being Albert’s own flesh and blood, was more a son to him than she was a daughter—an idea undoubtedly fostered by Lorinda’s disinterest in both of them.
Whatever the case, when she was a girl the dreams of her mother’s hanging form . . . mixed in with some kind of bogeyman chasing her down . . . and sometimes dead bodies rising from graves outside, from the fields, and stalking toward her house, zombie-like . . . intensified over the years until finally Liv had woken up screaming nearly every night. That’s when she was sent to Hathaway House and assigned to a room with three other female patients, all of them teenagers.
She was regimented from the start and there were household chores. Before breakfast: room cleaning. Breakfast. Group therapy. Lunch. Rest time. One-on-one with Dr. Yancy. Dinner. Quiet time in your room or in the main hall with its soothing blue chairs and empty shelves, save for books. Lights out at nine.
Dr. Yancy . . . She was in her fifties with gray hair and deep brown eyes and a quiet way about her that was the first thing Liv a
lways noticed. They had sessions four days out of five. On Thursday, Liv was given the option of an hour of television in one of the rooms upstairs, where an employee (guard) watched over her and the other inmates, or she could take a walk around the fenced yard. No, it did not have razor wire across its wall, but there was a watchtower.
“Very medieval,” Liv had told Dr. Yancy after the first time she chose the walking yard. “Like a rotting prison.”
“A rotting prison?” Dr. Yancy asked.
“The wall looks like it’s from some castle. I can half-believe there’s a moat on the opposite side.”
The doctor half-smiled. “There’s a creek on the north end. Otherwise, it’s a fir-lined cliff down to the highway below. We’re not that far out of the city limits.”
Liv knew where Hathaway House was: on the west side of Portland, not all that far from Laurelton. She’d lived in Rock Springs until they’d sent her to Hathaway House, and after her incarceration ended, she’d returned to her family only briefly; she wasn’t part of it any longer. Albert and Lorinda had moved to east Portland, nearly Gresham, and she’d made a stab at finishing her senior year, getting her GED in the end. As soon as she could, she got a job at a restaurant and moved into low-cost student housing next to the nearest campus of Portland Community College, where she took business classes.
But that was later . . . after her sessions with Dr. Yancy, who’d offered up the repressed-memories theory about a month into their therapy. “You saw something about the time of your mother’s death,” she told Liv on that rainy Monday afternoon. “Something else. You don’t want to look at it, so it’s coming to you in your dreams.”
“I saw my mother,” Liv stated carefully. She didn’t like treading this road.
Dr. Yancy nodded and tilted her head, considering her. “And something else, too.”
“No.”
“Until you look at it, it will keep coming back.”
Liv shut her mind down. She would rather keep the dreams than go back down that hall and see her mother’s body. She knew the zombies were from Hague’s description. She suspected the women from the fields were the strangulation victims from the serial killer that had terrorized the area before disappearing; she’d read about his actions later, going through old newspaper accounts, but it hadn’t sparked any repressed memories, either.
And as far as a bogeyman chasing her. She still believed that was real.
Dr. Yancy had kept trying to break through Liv’s resolve, but fear, and a large dose of stubborness, had kept Liv from responding.
Now, however, thinking of the doctor—the zombie, stalking doctor who might be the man in the photo—she felt a flutter of awareness. Until you look at it, it will keep coming back.
Dropping the curtain, she walked back to the kitchen and sat at the table. Screwing up her courage, she closed her eyes and envisioned those moments when she’d found her mother hanging in the kitchen.
I’m done.... She’d seen her mother’s vision say those words, but now, holding herself tightly, her eyes squeezed shut, she believed they were meant for her father. Her mother was done with the marriage. There was nothing more sinister than that in their meaning.
But there was something else . . . some intent . . . something. Carefully, Liv allowed her inner vision to move past her mother’s hanging form, toward the back door and out into the moonlit field beyond . . . something was there. Someone was there . . . watching . . .
“Liv?”
Her eyes flew open at her name. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. Then she saw a man’s form.
A man.
Her mouth opened on a silent scream and then Auggie bent down in front of her and gazed into her eyes.
Letting Liv know who he was had to happen, Auggie had concluded, but he needed the right moment to spring it on her. Looking at her horror-struck face, he determined this wasn’t the time.
He was good that way.
And he just hadn’t expected to care about her as much as he already did. It was a conundrum to be sure. But it wasn’t the first time.
He was a sucker for women, that was the problem. Not in the long run, he supposed; not when it really counted. But in the short run he was definitely a sucker. A modern-day knight in shining—maybe tarnished—armor who couldn’t help himself whenever some damsel in distress crossed his path. And as path-crossing went, Liv Dugan was a doozy.
He definitely was a sucker for her. Those soulful hazel eyes filled with a raft of emotions: anxiety, mistrust, worry and fear. Though sometimes she seemed to look at him with longing, too. Not sexual longing, although he’d certainly felt faint glimmers running along his own nerves. No, she was longing for friendship, and understanding, and maybe the truth of cold, hard reality.
The fact was, he wanted to help her.
But if he told her he was the police, how would that go?
Not well, he suspected.
She was coming back to herself with an effort. The gun was on the table beside her right hand. He wondered how advisable that was, given the fact it looked as if she’d put herself in a trance.
“You all right?” he asked.
She shook her head and looked away from him. He followed her gaze. His cell phone was on the counter.
For reasons more personal than smart, he suspected, he was going to keep up the charade and see what he could learn. Luckily, his cell phone was out of battery. If at any time she’d seen fit to take it from him and check him out, it might not have been pretty. But Liv Dugan was living in her own hellish world inside her head. She was fighting paranoia and wasn’t paying attention to the details in the real world. She didn’t trust anybody, but she wanted to, even though she might not know it. She’d spent too many years of her life not trusting anyone and didn’t know how to.
She said, “I need to go to Hathaway House. Where I was—put—to straighten out my head.”
“Looking for ‘the doctor’?” he asked.
“Hague said we both knew him and he seems familiar. . . .”
“I’ll go with you,” he heard himself say.
She gave him an “oh, sure” look. But then she looked at him and said, “You want to go to the police.”
“I do. But, I want to follow where this leads.”
“Why?” she asked him. There was something defeated about her. She’d given up her kidnapper routine, and it had taken her backbone, too.
“I don’t completely believe you. I don’t think you’re right about Zuma, but you got the package from the lawyers and things started happening, so yeah, I want to follow along.”
It sounded lame even to his own ears. But Liv looked faintly hopeful. She wanted someone to believe her so badly, it made Auggie feel like a heel.
“I need to go to Hathaway by myself.” She worried her lower lips with her teeth in a way that focused his attention on her. “I want to talk to them.”
“I’ll drive.”
“No.” She wasn’t willing to go that far.
Thinking of his cell phone, and the charger in the glove box, he said more certainly, “Let me. I’ll stay in the car. I’ll wait outside for you.”
She gazed at him uncertainly. He could tell she was thinking it over: was it safer to leave him at the house, or take him on her expedition?
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?” He held out his palm and she stared at it. “The keys. I’m driving, right?”
“No, I . . .”
“You can hold me at gunpoint, if it makes you feel better,” he said dryly. “And is there any chance we can get breakfast on the way? Drive-thru McDonald’s sounds fantastic.”
The look on her face was priceless. “McDonald’s?” she asked.
“I’ll buy. Oh, wait . . . no wallet.”
She grabbed her backpack, zipped it open, put the gun inside and pulled out her wallet and the Jeep’s keys. “I’ll buy,” she said.
Then she dropped the keys in his palm.
Hathaway House was jus
t as Liv remembered it: respectable. The buildings were simply brick and mortar surrounded by trimmed oak trees and several stately Douglas firs and a boxwood hedge and azaleas, which were months past flowering, their green leaves gleaming dully in the heat of the sun. In Liv’s dream-mind the windows were eyes and the front door a yawning mouth. Today, it looked carefully tended, if a bit tired, as if all the scrupulous landscaping couldn’t disguise the darkness inside.
Shaking her head at her own paranoia and what it had driven her to, Liv trudged up the front steps, glancing back once to where the Jeep was parked at the curb across the street. She could see Auggie through the driver’s window, drinking from his McDonald’s to-go coffee cup. He was looking at her and she wondered if he would just drive away once she was inside. Why wouldn’t he?, she asked herself. If the situation were reversed, she would.
She just irrationally hoped he would wait for her. She’d had a helluva time getting him to stay in the car; he’d insisted on coming with her. But she’d been adamant that she was going in alone, and in the end he’d reluctantly agreed.
With a faint prayer to the powers that be, whoever or whatever they were, she pulled open one of the institution’s dark green double doors and stepped inside the administration entry hall.
The place smelled like floor wax and dust and took Liv zinging back to the time she spent here. She inhaled and exhaled slowly, as she walked toward the reception area at the end of the short hallway. The overhead lighting was dim and made pools of illumination along the polished linoleum, like a fuzzy string of pearls, which led to a more modern counter that hadn’t been there when Liv was a patient.
A woman with a grayish shag hairstyle sat behind the counter, wearing a headset. She didn’t look up at Liv’s approach. Liv surreptitiously glanced down the hallways that radiated both left and right behind the counter. Those were the same hallways she’d traversed when she’d been a resident, although there had been a wide wooden desk, mahogany maybe, that had gleamed like the floor where the counter now stood. Hathaway House had prided itself on its sense of period, circa 1940s as far as Liv could tell, but that had apparently finally given way to modern times. There was an electrical conduit running along the edge of the wall and it burrowed through a small hole in the counter to feed the computers, telephone and other electronic equipment.
