Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  “The school has its own church?” asked Hardwick.

  “No. Not a church anymore. Deconsecrated a long time ago. Too bad, in a sense,” he added, with a touch of that disconnection the guard had described.

  “How so?” asked Hardwick.

  Lazarus answered slowly. “Churches are about good and evil. About guilt and punishment.” He shrugged, pulling up in front of the chapel and switching off the ignition. “But church or no church, we all pay for our sins one way or another, don’t we?”

  “Where is everyone?” asked Hardwick.

  “Inside.”

  Gurney looked up at the imposing edifice, its stone face the color of dark shadows.

  “Is Dr. Ashton in there?” Gurney pointed at the arched chapel door.

  “I’ll show you.” Lazarus got out of the van.

  They followed him up the granite steps and through the door into a wide, dimly lit vestibule that smelled to Gurney like the parish church of his Bronx childhood: a combination of masonry, old wood, the age-old soot of burned candle wicks. It was a scent with a strangely dislocating power, making him feel a need to whisper, to step quietly. From beyond a pair of heavy oak doors that would lead presumably into the main space of the chapel came the low murmur of many voices.

  Above the doors, carved boldly into a wide stone lintel, were the words GATE OF HEAVEN.

  Gurney gestured toward the doors. “Dr. Ashton is in there?”

  “No. The girls are in there. Settling down. All a bit volatile today—shaken up by the news about the Liston girl. Dr. Ashton’s in the organ loft.”

  “Organ loft?”

  “That’s what it used to be. Converted now, of course. Converted into an office.” He pointed to a narrow doorway at the far end of the vestibule, leading to the foot of a dark staircase. “It’s the door at the top of those stairs.”

  Gurney felt a chill. He wasn’t sure whether it was the natural temperature of the granite or something in Lazarus’s eyes, which he was sure were fixed on them as they climbed the shadowy stone steps.

  Chapter 74

  Beyond all reason

  At the top of the cramped stairwell was a small landing, weirdly illuminated by one of the building’s narrow scarlet windows. Gurney knocked on the landing’s only door. Like the doors off the vestibule, it looked heavy, gloomy, uninviting.

  “Come in.” Ashton’s mellifluous voice was strained.

  Despite its weight and promise of creakiness, the door swung open fluidly, silently, into a comfortably proportioned room that might have passed for a bishop’s private study. Chestnut brown bookcases lined two of the windowless walls. There was a small fireplace of sooty fieldstone with old brass andirons. An ancient Persian rug covered the floor, except for a satin-polished border of cherrywood two feet wide all the way around the room. A few large lamps, set atop occasional tables, gave the dark, woody tones of the room an amber glow.

  Scott Ashton sat wearing a troubled frown at an ornate black-oak desk, placed at a ninety-degree angle to the door. Behind him, on an oak sideboard with carved lion-head legs, was the room’s major concession to the current century—a large flat-screen computer monitor. He motioned Gurney and Hardwick vaguely to a pair of red velvet high-backed chairs across from him—the sort of chairs one might find in the sacristy of a cathedral.

  “It just keeps getting worse and worse,” Ashton said.

  Gurney assumed he was referring to the murder the previous evening of Savannah Liston and was about to offer some vague words of agreement and condolence.

  “Frankly,” Ashton went on, turning away, “I find this organized-crime angle almost incomprehensible.” At that point the sight of his Bluetooth earpiece, along with the oddness of his comments, told Gurney that the man was in fact in the middle of a phone call. “Yes, I understand … I understand … My point is simply that every step forward makes the case more bizarre … Yes, Lieutenant. Tomorrow morning … Yes … Yes, I understand. Thank you for letting me know.”

  Ashton turned toward his guests but seemed for a moment to be lost in contemplation of the conversation just ended.

  “News?” asked Gurney.

  “Are you aware of this … criminal-conspiracy theory? This … grand scheme that may involve Sardinian gangsters?” Ashton’s expression seemed strained by a combination of anxiety and disbelief.

  “I’ve heard it discussed,” said Gurney.

  “Do you think there’s any chance of it being true?”

  “A chance, yes.”

  Ashton shook his head, stared confusedly at his desk, then back up at the two detectives. “May I ask why you’re here?”

  “Just a gut feeling,” said Hardwick.

  “Gut feeling? What do you mean?”

  “In every case there’s some common point where everything converges. So the place itself becomes a key. It could be a big help for us just to take a walk around, see what we can see.”

  “I’m not sure that I—”

  “Everything that’s happened seems to have some link back to Mapleshade. Would you agree with that?”

  “I suppose. Perhaps. I don’t know.”

  “You telling me you haven’t thought about it?” There was an edge in Hardwick’s voice.

  “Of course I’ve thought about it.” Ashton looked perplexed. “I just can’t … see it that clearly. Maybe I’m too close to everything.”

  “Does the name Skard mean anything to you?” asked Gurney.

  “The detective on the phone just asked me the same question—something about some horrible Sardinian gang family. The answer is no.”

  “You’re sure Jillian never mentioned it?”

  “Jillian? No. Why would she?”

  Gurney shrugged. “It’s possible that Skard may be Hector Flores’s real name.”

  “Skard? How would Jillian know that?”

  “I don’t know, but she apparently did an Internet search to find out more about it.”

  Ashton shook his head again, the gesture resembling an involuntary shudder. “How awful does this have to get before it ends?” It was more a wail of protest than a question.

  “You said something on the phone just now about tomorrow morning?”

  “What? Oh, yes. Another twist. Your lieutenant feels that this conspiracy angle makes everything more urgent, so he’s pushing up the schedule for interviewing our students to tomorrow morning.”

  “So where are they all?”

  “What?”

  “Your students. Where are they?”

  “Oh. Forgive my distractedness, but that’s part of the reason for it. They’re downstairs in the main area of the chapel. It’s a calming environment. It’s been a wild day. Officially, Mapleshade students have no communication with the outside world. No TV, radio, computers, iPods, cell phones, nothing. But there are always leaks, always someone who’s managed to sneak in some device or other, and so of course they’ve heard about Savannah’s death, and … well, you can imagine. So we went into what a sterner facility might call ‘lockdown mode.’ Of course, we don’t call it that. Everything here is designed to have a softer edge.”

  “Except for the razor wire,” said Hardwick.

  “The fence is aimed at keeping problems out, not people in.”

  “We were wondering about that.”

  “I can assure you it’s for security, not captivity.”

  “So right now they’re all downstairs in the chapel?” asked Hardwick.

  “Correct. As I said, they find it calming.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought they’d be religious,” said Gurney.

  “Religious?” Ashton smiled humorlessly. “Hardly. There’s just something about stone churches, Gothic windows, the muted light. They calm the soul in a way that has nothing to do with theology.”

  “The students don’t feel like they’re being punished?” asked Hardwick. “What about the ones who weren’t acting out?”

  “The agitated ones settle down, feel better. The ones who
were okay to begin with are given to understand that they are the main source of peace for the others. Bottom line, the agitated don’t feel singled out and the calm feel valuable.”

  Gurney smiled. “You must have put a lot of thought and effort into engineering that view of the experience.”

  “That’s part of my job.”

  “You give them a framework for understanding what’s happening?”

  “You could put it like that.”

  “Like what a magician does,” said Gurney. “Or a politician.”

  “Or any competent preacher or teacher or doctor,” said Ashton mildly.

  “Incidentally,” said Gurney, deciding to test the effect of a hairpin turn in the conversation, “was Jillian injured in any way in the days leading up to the wedding—anything that would have caused bleeding?”

  “Bleeding? Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

  “There’s a question about how the blood got on the bloody machete.”

  “Question? How could that be a question? What do you mean?”

  “I mean the machete might not have been the murder weapon after all.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It might have been placed in the woods prior to your wife’s murder, not after it.”

  “But … I was told … her blood …”

  “Some conclusions could have been premature. But here’s the thing: If the machete was put in the woods before the murder, then the blood on it must have come from Jillian before the murder. The question is, do you have any idea how that could have happened?”

  Ashton looked stunned. His mouth opened. He seemed about to speak, didn’t, then finally did. “Well … yes, I do … at least theoretically. As you may know, Jillian was being treated for a bipolar disorder. She took a medication that required periodic blood tests to assure that it remained within the therapeutic range. Her blood was drawn once a month.”

  “Who drew the blood?”

  “A local phlebotomist. I believe she worked for a medical-services provider out of Cooperstown.”

  “And what did she do with the blood sample?”

  “She transported it to the lab where the lithium-level test was performed and the report was generated.”

  “She transported it immediately?”

  “I imagine she made a number of stops, her assigned client route, whatever that might be, and at the end of each day she’d deliver her samples to the lab.”

  “You have her name and the names of the provider and the lab?”

  “Yes, I do. I review—reviewed, I should say—a copy of the lab report every month.”

  “Would you have a record of when the last blood sample was drawn?”

  “No specific record, but it was always the second Friday of the month.”

  Gurney thought for a moment. “That would have been two days before Jillian was killed.”

  “You’re thinking that Flores somehow intervened at some point in that process and got hold of her blood? But why? I’m afraid I’m not really understanding what you’re saying about the machete. What would be the point of it?”

  “I’m not sure, Doctor. But I have a feeling that the answer to that question is the missing piece at the center of the case.”

  Ashton raised his eyebrows in a way that looked more baffled than skeptical. His eyes seemed to be moving across the disturbing points of some inner landscape. Eventually he closed them and sat back in his tall chair, his hands clasped over the ends of the elaborately carved armrests, his breathing deep and deliberate, as though he might be engaged in some tranquilizing mental exercise. But when he opened them again, he only looked worse.

  “What a nightmare,” he said. He cleared his throat, but it sounded more like a whimper than a cough. “Tell me something, gentlemen. Have you ever felt like a complete failure? That’s how I feel right now. Every new horror … every death … every discovery about Flores or Skard or whatever his name is … every bizarre revelation about what’s really been happening here at the school—everything proves my total failure. What a brainless idiot I’ve been!” He shook his head—or rather moved it back and forth in slow motion, as if it were caught in some oscillating underwater current. “Such foolish, fatal pride. To think that I could cure a plague of such incredible, primitive power.”

  “Plague?”

  “Not the term my profession commonly applies to incest and the damage it does, but I think it’s quite accurate. The longer I’ve worked in this field, the more I’ve come to believe that of all the crimes human beings commit against one another, the most destructive by far is the sexual abuse of a child by an adult—especially a parent.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Why? It’s simple. The two primal human relationship modes are parenting and mating. Incest destroys the distinct patterns of these two relationships by smashing them together, essentially polluting them both. I believe that there is traumatic damage to the neural structures that support the behaviors natural to each of these relationship modes and that keep them separate. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I think so,” said Gurney.

  “A bit over my head,” said Hardwick, who’d been quietly observing the exchange between Ashton and Gurney.

  Ashton shot him a glance of disbelief. “An effective therapy for that kind of trauma needs to rebuild boundaries between the parent-child repertoire of responses and the mating repertoire of responses. The tragedy is that no therapy can match in force—in sheer megatonnage of impact—the violation it seeks to repair. It’s like rebuilding with a teaspoon a wall smashed by a bulldozer.”

  “But … wasn’t that the problem you chose to focus your career on?” asked Gurney.

  “Yes. And now it’s perfectly clear that I’ve failed. Totally, miserably failed.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You mean not every graduate of Mapleshade has chosen to disappear into some sick sexual underworld? Not every one has been slaughtered for pleasure? Not every one has gone on to have children and rape them? Not every one has emerged as sick and deranged as when she entered? How can I know that? All I know at this point is that Mapleshade under my control, guided by my instincts and decisions, has turned into a magnet for horror and murder, a hunting preserve for a monster. Under my leadership Mapleshade has been utterly destroyed. That much I know.”

  “So … what now?” asked Hardwick sharply.

  “What now? Ah. The voice of a practical mind.” Ashton closed his eyes and said nothing for at least a full minute. When he spoke again, it was with a strained ordinariness. “What now? The next step? The next step for me is to go downstairs to the chapel, show my face, do what I can to calm their nerves. What your next step is … I have no idea. You say you came here because of a gut feeling. You’d better ask your gut what to do next.”

  He got up from his massive velvet chair, taking something resembling a remote garage-door opener from the desk drawer. “The downstairs lights and locks are operated electronically,” he said, explaining the device. He started to leave, got as far as the door, came back, and switched on the large computer monitor behind his desk. A picture appeared: the main interior chapel space, with a stone floor and high stone walls whose colorless austerity was broken by intermittent burgundy drapes and indecipherable tapestries. The dark wood pews were not set in the rows typical of churches but had been rearranged into half a dozen seating areas, each made up of three pews formed into a loose triangle, evidently to facilitate discussion. These areas were filled with teenage girls. From the monitor speakers came a hubbub of female voices.

  “There’s a high-definition camera and a mike down there, transmitting to this computer,” said Ashton. “Watch and listen, and you’ll get some sense of the situation.” Then he turned and left the room.

  Chapter 75

  Shut your eyes tight

  The computer screen showed Scott Ashton coming in through the chapel’s rear door behind the groupings of pews and c
losing it behind him with a heavy thump, the small remote unit still in one hand. The girls filled most of the space in the pews—some sitting normally, some sideways, some in cross-legged yoga positions, some kneeling. Some seemed lost in their own thoughts, but most were engaged in conversations, some more audible than others.

  The surprise for Gurney was the ordinariness of these girls. They looked at first glance like most self-absorbed female teenagers, hardly like the inmates of an institution ringed by razor wire. At this distance from the camera, the malignancy of the behavior that had brought them here was invisible. Gurney assumed that only face-to-face, with their expressions in sharper focus, would it become obvious that these creatures were more than ordinarily self-centered, reckless, cruel, and sex-driven. Ultimately, as it was with his murderer mug shots, the sign of danger, the ice, would be in the eyes.

  Then he noticed that the students were not alone. In each of the pew triangles, there were one or two older individuals—probably teachers or counselors or whatever Mapleshade called their providers of guidance and therapy. In a rear corner of the room, almost invisible in the shadows, stood Dr. Lazarus, his arms folded, his expression unreadable.

  Moments after Ashton entered, the girls began to notice him, and the conversational din began to diminish. One of the older-looking, more striking girls approached Ashton as he stood at the back of the center aisle. She was tall, blond, almond-eyed.

  Gurney glanced over at Hardwick, who was leaning forward in his chair, studying the screen.

  “Could you tell if he called her over?” Gurney asked.

  “He may have gestured,” he said. “Sort of a wave. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  On the super-sharp screen, the profiles of Ashton and the tall blonde were clear to the point that their lip movements were visible, but their voices were indistinct—words and phrases merging with the voices of a group of students near them.

  Gurney leaned toward the monitor. “Do you have any idea what they’re saying?”

  Hardwick focused intently on their faces, tilting his head as though that might heighten the discrimination of his hearing.