Crazy Lady

by James Hawkins

  “So why would he have risked it?”

  “Money,” suggests Daphne.

  “There you go,” says Trina with a hint of triumph. “Everyone has their price.”

  Janet Thurgood is paying the price for her escape from the nightmare of Beautiful as she lies, bound and gagged, on an old mattress in the back of a broken-down Ford van in Craddock’s garage. The taste of the duct tape across her mouth makes her retch, and her bony wrists ache from being immobilized, but she is no stranger to isolation.

  I don’t deserve this, she tells herself, and then admits that she probably does; for the past forty years, judgment day has always been just around the corner. But hasn’t she been punished enough? Four decades in a prison administered by a lunatic; forty years of beatings and sexual slavery; forty years of pseudo love — love used as a weapon to be withheld or given on a whim: one word out of place, one wrong move, and a week’s isolation.

  “Our Lord Saviour must be obeyed,” Browning would declare. “You will only find salvation with God through me. I am punishing you for your own good. You must change your ways Daena… change your ways to please your master.”

  “Yes, Our Lord Saviour.”

  “You must change before I will speak to you again.” One week, two weeks — the agony of rejection, the withdrawal of affection, even the twisted affection of a control freak.

  “Chastise me. Tell me I must change to please you. Tell me what a terrible person I am. Tell me anything. Brand me, mark me, just don’t ignore more. Please don’t abandon me, I need you.”

  And then, eventually, when he is ready and not before, “See, I’ve forgiven you, Daena. Our Lord Saviour is pleased with you. You can rejoin the fold.”

  “Thank you, Our Lord Saviour. Thank you.”

  chapter eleven

  The Truth Behind the Mask by David Anthony Bliss, writes Bliss on a clean pad of paper as he prepares to start his novel for the third time. But now he has a mission; now he knows the conclusion and knows the direction he must take; now he knows the passion felt by Louis XIV’s most notorious prisoner as he endured eleven years in the island fortress across the bay from the fishing village of St-Juan-sur-Mer in the late 1600s; now he knows of the heartbreak of a man whose stolen love took him to the edge of sanity; now he knows that he will do all in his power to reclaim Yolanda.

  It is the month of May, sixteen hundred and eighty-seven, Bliss continues writing, his pen flowing easily across the virgin page.Orange blossoms, jasmines, and mimosas scent the air of Provence, but only the stink of hot coals and sweat pervades the forge in the Fort Royal on the Isle Ste. Marguerite. In a hell’s kitchen of fires and furnaces, legion-naires wrestle to hold screaming men down as blacksmiths forge shackles around their ankles and wrists. However, in one corner, two flambouyantly attired Musketeers anchor a man whose head is being sheathed in an iron mask. Unlike the shackled prisoners in the their rags, this man holds himself aloof, and as the final rivet is hammered in place, he has a smile on his face as he is helped to his feet; though no one sees it. Indeed, no one will see his face again — ever — should his great plan fail.

  Mark Benson turns up trumps with the documents. “Good news, ladies,” he says with a smirk of satisfaction as he welcomes Trina and Daphne back into his office.

  “Hold on a minute,” wheezes Daphne. “Those stairs…”

  “Here,” he says, offering a chair, then he carries on. “I would say that there is a ninety-nine-percent chance that the second and third documents — those pertaining to Giuseppe and Johannes Creston — were written by the same person, despite the fact that they purport to have different signatures.”

  “Really. How can you be so sure?” Daphne wants to know, though Trina is beaming as she silently pumps the air with a fist.

  “Similar characteristics,” he explains, then he pulls up a greatly enlarged computer image from a comparison microscope. “Fortunately these were written when most pens still had nibs,” the expert carries on as he indicates consistencies between the two magnified samples that sit side by side on the screen. “Also,” he adds, “judging by the wear pattern on the nib I would say that the all the entries relating to the third child — Johannes — seem to have been made at roughly the same time, even though it was supposedly written over a six-month period, from birth to death.”

  “When was it written?” asks Daphne as she critically eyes both the screen and the original medical record.

  “That’s another interesting thing,” says Benson becoming more animated as a second digital picture from the microscope pops onto the screen. “I’ve enhanced this area,” he says as he points to a corner where a faint impression of “August 17^th, 1963” can be seen like a spectre in the paper.

  “But Johannes died on August 15,” Daphne reminds herself as she picks Amelia Drinkwater’s newspaper clipping from her bag and shows it to Benson.

  “What does that mean?” asks Trina, peering inquisitively over his shoulder.

  “It means that when this document was written, the previous one on the pad was dated two days later,” says the examiner sagely over the top of his bifocals. “It appears that someone rewrote these records after the child’s death.”

  “Wow,” says Trina, then her cellphone interrupts. “Rick?” she asks, hearing her husband’s voice. “What time is it there?”

  “About nine. Look, your office called in a panic about one of your patients, a Mr. Sampson.”

  Clive Sampson is nursing a smashed face and a bruised ego as he sits by the phone, refusing to go with the paramedics until he’s spoken with Trina.

  “They took her,” he shrieks as soon as Trina gets through.

  The angered woman spits, “I bet it’s Browning and his freaks,” as soon as she’s heard his tale. Then she spins around to include Daphne in her plans. “OK. We’ve got everything we need here. We’re on our way back.”

  “We?” questions Daphne jauntily.

  “Of course,” says Trina, lacing her arm through her partner’s and leading her out of Benson’s office. “If anyone knows the truth it’s Janet.”

  “And Doc Symmonds,” adds Daphne.

  “Yes. Well he ain’t talking to us is he?”

  “But…” protests Daphne, so Trina puts on a frown.

  “You don’t want another trip to Vancouver?”

  Daphne bends. “I’ll have to get someone to look after Missie Rouge.”

  “It’s a deal, then,” laughs Trina, and she whips her baseball cap back to front to signify success.

  Coppersmiths beat the final pieces of sheathing into place atop the Château Roger while beneath them a legion of workers decorate the expansive rooms with Chinese silks, Persian tapestries, and Venetian chandeliers from the island of Murano, writes Bliss as he views the now decrepit building from his balcony and imagines the original owner taking a similar view.

  “My great testament to my lost love nears completion,” said the lovelorn man, watching from his cell across the bay as the edifice’s state rooms were filled with the most sumptuous furnishings from around the world: opulent gold and silver ormolu furniture, emulating the style set by Louis himself in Versailles; the finest porcelain and silverware from the king’s own factories in Gobelins; beds made of the softest Norwegian down. Servants by the score, all decked out in uniforms of finest Egyptian cotton, walked the halls…

  “Thirty pages,” muses Bliss with satisfaction as he sits back and puts down his pen at the end of his first day’s serious writing. It’s amazingly easy when you know the whole story, he thinks, although he knows that is not true; while he wants a happy ending to his story he has a huge stumbling block in his path — historical fact. No matter how he contorts his plot he cannot alter the authenticated records of the day that show Louis XIV’s unnamed and unknown prisoner was destined to die miserably in the Bastille in 1703. However, Bliss tells himself, would I get onto a plane if I knew it was going to crash? So, knowing that somehow he will find a way to avert d
isaster, he falls onto his bed, exhausted, eager to start early tomorrow and the next day, and next, ad infinitum, until his script is complete and, just like his rejected predecessor, he can wrest his true love from another and begin the remainder of his days in her arms.

  Maybe I really am a reincarnation of the Man in The Iron Mask, he considers as he falls asleep no more than a couple of leagues from the place where the famed prisoner slept three hundred years before.

  Clive Sampson, septuagenarian widower, a man trapped inside his front door since the death of his wife five years ago, has forced himself out and anxiously paces the arrivals concourse of Vancouver airport the following afternoon. “I’m so sorry, Trina,” he cries, rushing up to the homecare nurse as she emerges with Daphne in tow. “He just broke down the door and grabbed her.”

  “Oh look at your poor face,” says Trina as she puts an arm around the distraught man’s shoulders, but Sampson isn’t bothered about the scars on his nose or his black eye.

  “They took her, Trina.”

  “I know.”

  “But I love her.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she admits as she uses a Kleenex to gently wipe his swollen eyes. “Never mind,” she adds. “I’ve got contacts. I’ll get her back for you.”

  “I want her back, Trina,” he snivels and Daphne steps up to sandwich him.

  “Don’t worry, Clive,” the visitor says kindly. “Trina knows what to do.”

  Trina has no idea where Janet is or how to release her. Neither has Mike Phillips an hour later when he pays an official visit.

  “I’m very cross with you,” says the RCMP inspector, putting on his police voice and a stern face as he corners Trina in her kitchen. “You were hiding her.”

  “Mike,” coos Trina with a warm smile as she straightens his tie. “Remember when everyone thought your wife had murdered her first husband?”

  “Of course.”

  “Who believed in her? Who said she didn’t do it?”

  “You did.”

  “Right. So if I say Janet didn’t kill your cop friend —”

  “I know,” he butts in. “We don’t think she did either.”

  “Good,” says Trina. “Although,” she adds sotto voce, “she might have killed her kids.”

  Janet Thurgood accepts that she killed her children; accepts the forty-year sentence her husband imposed on her; accepts that she is an evil woman who deserves the punishment meted out to her; accepts that, even now, after a lifetime of prayer and supplication, she may still fry in the fires of hell. And she lies quietly on the dirty mattress in the back of the old truck reliving the time before her transgressions.

  Amelia Sawbridge, as the curmudgeonly magistrate was in those far-off days before she latched onto Cecil Drinkwater, occupied a private family box at the front of the nave in St. Stephen’s in the Vale, while Janet and her relatives were forced to shoulder their way into the hard wooden pews with everyone else. Joseph Creston in his choirboy’s cassock and surplice, an angelic figure with straight white teeth and soft blonde curls, looked over Amelia’s head to find the one he truly lusted after. Amelia spun around to glower. Money might land you a front row seat in life but sometimes the view is better from the back, Janet recalls thinking as she relives the scene and smiles discreetly at her young admirer.

  And afterwards, amongst the bluebells in the churchyard, Amelia in her Sunday best satin draped herself over Joseph while all the time his eyes never left the one he really wanted beside him.

  Amelia’s parents — financially and socially secure, although nowhere near the same stratum as the Crestons — attempted to catapult themselves into the aristocracy on their daughter’s back. “Our Amelia’s pretty soft on your boy, J.C.,” her father said as he offered a Churchillian-sized cigar from a monogrammed silver case, but Joseph Creston Sr. shrugged it off.

  “They’re only children. Joseph needs a few years in the city before he’s ready for that.”

  But Joseph Creston Jr. was ready “for that,” though Amelia wasn’t. “It’s a sin. We’ll both die,” she insisted when he finally got down to her underwear on the back seat of one of his father’s Jaguars after a church youth group meeting.

  Janet was more accommodating — much more accommodating. “I love you,” she whispered in his ear the very first time they consummated their relationship, and he loved her back instantly. But he already knew he loved her. He knew he loved her the very first time their eyes met, and he continued loving her despite the knowledge that another man’s fetus was growing inside her.

  Janet wasn’t the only one escaping when she eloped with Joseph; she wasn’t the only one rebelling against an overpowering and over-religious father. But once the knot was tied over the Bible, neither they nor their families were willing to risk the vengeance of God by untying it.

  “Janet,” a voice calls softly as the back door of the old van creaks open. Inwardly, she wants to yell, “It’s Daena XV,” but knows that time has passed; she has finally moved on.

  “I’ve brought you something to eat,” says Craddock as he carefully removes the tape.

  “Thank you,” she mutters, though she is aware that the words are blurred by the numbness of her lips.

  “Drink this,” he says, putting a straw into her mouth, and she does as she is commanded, as she has been programmed to do all her life.

  Her only escape was with Joseph, but that was short-lived. Her baby got in the way. It wasn’t his and he knew it, and when it died — and to him it was an “it” — he was happy enough to announce that the next one would be theirs.

  Giuseppe Crispin Creston was his baby, just like he had been to his father, and he doted on the blue-eyed little boy who even had his blonde curls.

  “It’s chicken,” says Craddock, feeding Janet some pieces from a KFC carton.

  “Thank you,” mumbles Janet, though her mind is still on the sickly baby who never went a night without a fit of coughing until, one night, he simply stopped.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Janet,” young Doctor Symmonds assured her as he certified the death. “It happens,” he said, as if it happened every day.

  But the loss of a child, like the loss of a true love, leaves the heart irreparably torn, and Janet’s third pregnancy brought more apprehension than joy.

  “Bathroom,” pleads Janet as Craddock prepares to leave her, and he helps her out, half carrying her to a stinky toilet at the back of the garage. Janet doesn’t retch at the ammoniacal smell. It’s no more putrid than the ones at Beautiful. The only thing missing are the religious quotations reminding users that wherever they are, whatever they are doing, God is watching.

  “Thank you,” she says again as Craddock helps her back into the van.

  The PI shakes his head, laughing. “You sure are a crazy lady.”

  “I know,” she says as he reties her wrists, reattaches the tape, and closes the door.

  In the darkness, Janet returns to her thoughts of earlier times, when she and Joseph danced around each other at a distance, kept apart by the pain of the death of her second child, their child — kept apart rather than drawn together by the loss. Then the third pregnancy, a pregnancy forced upon them by Creston Sr., who demanded that his son produce an heir.

  “It’ll help you get over the loss,” the vicar from St. Stephen’s in the Vale counselled after he was brought in by the godfather of the family. But what did the bachelor cleric know of loss? His losses in life were usually other people’s. He could always go back to the vicarage, take off his collar, and cheer himself with a few glasses of sacramental wine at the end of the day. He didn’t have to live with the pain around the clock, as Janet did.

  The third and final death — baby Johannes, nicknamed from birth as Joe-Joe — was the final straw, and Janet had no choice but to accept the blame. Joseph, her husband, was away in Zurich taking over some of the business reins, and Margaret, the nanny, was off for the weekend. Only Janet and the baby were at home in their modest thatched cot
tage in the grounds of Creston Hall.

  A few days later, once Peter Symmonds straightened everything out, the executive jet that had rushed her husband back from Zurich slipped her across the Atlantic and on to Beautiful.

  “You need treatment,” the doctor told her as he shot a sedative into her arm, and he flew with her all the way to an abandoned air strip carved out of the British Columbian forest.

  Wayne Browning, barely thirty years old at the time, was a brash white Alabaman who used and abused his Bible with as much skill as he controlled the people who sought his ministry. He absorbed his biblical knowledge from his mother as other children absorb milk. His father was a broken-down alcoholic who could barely read and rarely worked, but his mother prayed loudly night and day that things might improve. They never did, and Charlotte Browning often ended up flat on her back with a bar drunk to pay the rent. The abuse never stopped her praying or her belief that she was headed for a better world, but if she did end up in heaven it was on the end of a carving knife that Wayne’s father plunged into her heart one night when he was too far gone to know or care.

  Browning was sixteen and barely schooled when he packed his bag and headed north for a new life in a new country. But he knew all the best bits in the Bible: the really powerful bits, the bits that sensible theologians waltz around in chamois pumps. He knew Samuel: “Obedience is better than sacrifice; Defiance is a sin against God.” Leviticus: “Homosexuals shall be stoned to death.” Deuteronomy: “If a man’s son is disobedient, the elders shall destroy him at the city gates.”

  He could recite every damnation and every self-serving text, but whether he understood was another thing, and it didn’t matter to him or his flock. His words alone would control as he played good cop/bad cop with the religious texts. And women — usually with low self-esteem — were always anxious to please, anxious to do his bidding, anxious to be branded by him, anxious to go to heaven.