The Girls He Adored elp-1

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “I don't care who he was screwing, and I'm not going to debate this with you, Pender. You're off the investigation, starting now. Come home and turn in your badge or kiss your pension goodbye.”

  “Has McDougal even spoken to Thom Davies? Does he know what I'm onto here?”

  “You mean your printout of forty-three career criminals, one of whom who may or may not have known the subject briefly a dozen years ago? Yeah, we're all just thrilled to death, Ed-that'll break the case wide open for sure. Now get your sorry behind back to Washington on the next flight out. And consider yourself suspended from active duty in the meantime-from this point on, if you so much as ask somebody the time of day in an official capacity, I'll pull your credentials so fast your underwear'll fall down.”

  “Whoops,” said Pender. “Couldn't hear you. Sounds like we have a bad connec-”

  He made a crackling noise and hung up the phone, counted to ten, then took it off the receiver and went back into the bathroom. He removed the shower cap and bent his head to inspect his scalp. It had been torn in three places by the rounded edge of the handcuffs. Two of the wounds had required six stitches, the other had taken eight. He could see where the last stitch on the longest cut had worked loose. The butterfly bandage Anh Tranh had applied was still in place, and that Chinese salve she'd given him must have been the real deal-the ragged edges of the wound had already knitted together.

  Pender took the tin of salve, a box of gauze pads, and a roll of adhesive tape from his toilet bag, cut four long strips of tape and laid them sticky side up on the chrome shelf under the mirror, then overlapped four pads on top of those, the way Annie had done. After smearing the salve directly on the cuts with his forefinger, he slipped his hands under the tape and gauze arrangement, lifted it in the air like a priest serving mass, flipped it over onto his head, and pressed the tape down firmly.

  Then he brought his hat into the bathroom and set it atop the bandage, intending to trim the tape so it wouldn't be visible. But the hat was too small. It was also bloodstained and irreparably crumpled at the crown. Pender took it off and turned it in his hands.

  “Hat, you've been a good old rounder and a good old pal,” he declared. “For almost ten years now, through thick and thin- mostly thin-you stuck with me. And now that you've been used up in the service, I'd like to give you the official FBI send-off. Tum te tum, tum te tum…”

  As the last note of Taps died away, Pender dropped the hat into the wastebasket under the sink, then flushed the toilet for the sound effect.

  “And one more thing,” he called to the hat on his way out of the bathroom. “If I were you, I wouldn't count on that pension.”

  62

  There was no shortage of toiletries or hair care products in the guest bathroom adjoining Irene's bedroom. She had her choice of three toothbrushes. In her old life it would have been an agonizing decision-Irene had never used another person's toothbrush, not even Frank's. But by her third morning in captivity, her second on Scorned Ridge, she found herself scrubbing away with the first toothbrush that came to hand, not obsessing at all over the probability that it had been owned and used by a dead woman.

  Her mind was clear and focused. Last night before falling asleep, she'd worked out what she needed to do. When the alters had finished up their collective history, she would need to work with Max alone. If any fusion of identities was going to take place, Max was the alter who would be in charge.

  But before she would facilitate a fusion, she'd have to know a little more about him. Ulysses, the old host alter, thought Max was a demon. Was it possible, despite his denials, that Max also thought of himself as a devil? He didn't present as a paranoid schizophrenic, but he might well be a Cluster B sociopath with narcissistic tendencies.

  In which case, it would be wrong, morally and professionally, as well as dangerous for Irene personally, to further empower Max. What her options might then be, she wasn't sure-maybe try to strengthen one of the other alters. Christopher seemed pretty well established. But she didn't need to decide any of that until she had a better understanding of Max's makeup.

  After showering, Irene donned a rose-colored Versace T-shirt that had cost some woman thirty or forty bucks new, and a pair of white Bermuda shorts from the Gap. When she opened the bedroom door, the aroma of fresh coffee filled the staircase, drawing her down to the kitchen.

  Miss Miller was at the stove, her back to the room, the picture of domesticity in slippers and a silk housecoat over one of her green dresses. The only jarring note was the strawberry blond hair: instead of being shoulder-length, straight, and sleek, as it had been the last time Irene saw her, it was thick and full and curly, cascading halfway down her back.

  Act normal, Irene told herself. Normal, normal, what is normal? “Good morning, Julia.”

  Miss Miller turned toward Irene. “Good morning, Dr. Cogan.”

  The hand-sewn green silk surgical mask puffed out when she spoke. In the daylight Irene could see that the eyelids above it were skin grafts, clumsy reconstructions. “Did you sleep well?”

  “I never sleep well.”

  “I'm sorry to hear that. Perhaps I could prescribe something for you.”

  “I don't like to sleep. I see myself in dreams, the way I used to be.”

  “I understand.”

  “I doubt that very much.”

  The back door opened. Maxwell entered the kitchen wearing a Hawaiian shirt over baggy shorts, carrying a wicker basket.

  Beneath the stiff bodice of the green dress, Miss Miller's bony chest began to rise and fall rapidly, Irene observed. Love or fear?

  “Morning, Irene-feel these.” He brought the basket over to the table. It was lined with excelsior and filled with fresh eggs.

  She touched one. “It's still warm.”

  “Fuckin-A,” said Maxwell.

  “Language!” warned Miss Miller, turning back to the stove.

  “I didn't hear any complaints last night.” Maxwell slapped her playfully on the rump.

  “Ulysses!” A pleased, simpering tone. Irene wondered if she were blushing under the mask-if she could blush.

  Morning session. Max handed Irene the contract he'd drawn up. It was letter-perfect; after formally inquiring again whether any of the alters, known or unknown, had any objections to the contract, and receiving no demurs, she slipped the piece of paper into her notebook.

  “Would you like to take up where we left off last session, or is there anything that's come up since then that you'd like to discuss?”

  “I can't even remember where we left off,” said Max with a selfdeprecating grin.

  “Coming from anyone else, I might be able to believe that.”

  “Okay, then.” Max's eyes rolled up, the lids fluttered, and he began to speak in a monotone:

  “Do you still feel the guilt. Only every fucking day of my life. And the woman I met this morning-the woman with those terrible scars. That was Miss Miller. What a world, what a world. Sounds like a good place to start our next session. You're the doctor.”

  Irene started to ask this new alter his name, then remembered Max's warning. Quickly she thumbed back through her notebook until she found it. “Hello, Mose. I'm Dr. Cogan.”

  “Irene Cogan, M.D. Derealization Disorders in Post-Adolescent Males, Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Speaking in Tongues: Dissociative Trance Disorder and Pentecostal Christianity, Psychology Today. Dissociative Identity Disorder, Real or Feigned? Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases.”

  “How do you feel about what's going on?”

  “What's Going On. Marvin Gaye. U.S. number one R amp;B top forty-five, week ending March twenty-seventh, nineteen seventyone through week ending April twenty-fourth, nineteen seventyone.”

  Irene jotted down the words savant and autism? next to his name. “Thank you, Mose. May I speak with Max again?”

  An effortless switch. “Real ball of fire, that Mose,” said Max.

  “Rights and dignity of all alters,” Irene cautioned
him.

  “Sorry. Okay-the fire. I spent a couple months in the hospital, they performed three separate skin grafts, then-”

  “Excuse me, Max. I understand burns are terribly painful. Is there an analgesic alter in the system?”

  “Unhappily, no. Morphine helped. So did rapid switching. And when all else failed, Lyssy the Sissy.”

  “May I speak with Lyssy?”

  “I don't think he's available at the moment. He had rather a bad fright that night we were hiding out in the old jail-I haven't heard from him since.”

  “Perhaps another time.”

  “Perhapssss.” Irene's lisp. Max continued in his own voice. “Okay-fire, pain, operations. A few months in the hospital, then almost a year in the Umpqua County Juvenile Facility awaiting trial on charges of murder, arson, and attempted murder. No bail- there was nowhere for me to go anyway.

  “The ranch wasn't bad-that's where I learned to raise chickens. After lights out, the boys would stage fights. Call-outs, they called them. No holds barred-anybody could call out anybody else. And if you didn't fight, everybody got a free crack at you.

  “Then one summer morning my lawyer comes out to the ranch to tell me all the charges have been dropped. He said Miss Miller had changed her story, told the DA that Kronk had attacked her and I had come to her defense, that the fire was an accident. I wasn't sure how to take it-whether she was trying to protect me, to make it up to me somehow, or whether she was just afraid I'd turn her in about the sex. I'd never told anybody about that.

  “Then the lawyer told me Miss Miller wanted me to come back to live with her again, and how did I feel about that? I grabbed my gear out of my footlocker and drove away with him and never looked back. The only person I even said good-bye to was my best friend Buckley. Black guy from Compton. He and I had been inseparable. I was already good at martial arts and wrestling-or anyway, Lee was-”

  “May I…” Irene began.

  Alter switch.

  “… speak with Lee.”

  He was already there. Poised body language, somehow tense and calm at the same time. He'd puffed out his chest, and he was unconsciously pumping his fists until the veins stood out on his forearms.

  “I didn't know shit about street fighting.” Each word was weighed carefully before it emerged from between lips pressed so tightly together that the full, bowed shape of Maxwell's lips had become two thin, cruel lines. “Bucky whipped my ass good our first fight. After we buddied up, he taught me his secret. It saved my life more than once.”

  Lee paused to take a sip of water from the glass on the threelegged table. The forest animals had grown used to the therapy sessions. A squirrel scampered across the dry needles; jays quarreled in the lower branches of the firs; somewhere high overhead in the forest canopy an invisible woodpecker was noisily at work. “That's all I got to say.”

  The next time Maxwell spoke, it was as Christopher. Irene was attuned enough by now to recognize the soft, melodic voice.

  “I remember I was confused at first. Instead of heading back towards town, the lawyer drove east, into the mountains. He told me Miss Miller had bought Scorned Ridge for us to live in. I remember thinking it was a little peculiar, the way he dropped me off near these, these ruins — the place was an unholy mess, the buildings falling down, the meadow overgrown. He didn't even get out of the car. Just handed me my duffel, yelled, ‘Good luck, kid,’ and roared off back down the hill.”

  Christopher closed his eyes. Irene understood that he was back there again, standing by the side of the blacktop.

  “I pick up my duffel and head for the house. The screen door is swinging on one hinge. Skreeeek, skreeeek. Front door's boarded up. I hear her calling me from the back of the house. Her voice is so different, but still so… her. She's in the kitchen heating water for tea. Wearing an old-fashioned black dress. She turns around. Oh Jesus, oh god.”

  Irene reached out, put her hand on his shoulder. Christopher opened his eyes, looked around wildly, then relaxed visibly when he saw it was Irene. He tried to make a joke out of it.

  “Oh, mama! I don't think I can go back there twice.”

  She told him what she'd have said to any patient. “But you must, Christopher. You have to confront the past in order to realize that it is the past. You have to relive it in order to get to the place where you can hold it as a memory, and not keep reexperiencing it subconsciously as a current event.”

  “But it is a current event,” he moaned. “Everything's a current event. Mose never forgets anything.” He grabbed his head between his hands, pressing his strange smooth palms tightly against his temples.

  “It's not about forgetting, it's about forgiving,” said Irene. “Understanding and forgiving yourself. You're carrying a crushing burden of guilt around with you.”

  It was Max who looked up, his head in his hands. “Sister, you don't know the half of it,” he said sardonically.

  “Tell me.”

  “The first one's name was Mary Malloy.”

  63

  Miss Miller could have had the place renovated by professionals-her father had left her a considerable nest egg-but she didn't like having anyone else around to look at her, so Maxwell (to use the collective term) worked alone whenever possible.

  Or as alone as a multiple can ever be. Mose scanned two handyman's encyclopedias and dozens upon dozens of do-it-yourself books into his prodigious memory, and the various alters turned themselves into carpenters, plumbers, electricians, painters, as necessary, according to their talents and interests. When he did have to hire outside help, Maxwell would work alongside them-he never had to watch anybody do a job twice.

  And he was extremely motivated. All the energy he used to put into martial arts, wrestling, fighting at Juvie, sex with Miss Miller, he threw into the renovation, working from dawn to dusk seven days a week. By the time that first winter rolled around, the house was habitable-he'd never been prouder of anything in his life.

  It was mid-March when Maxwell, as Christopher, stopped into the Old Umpqua Feed Barn to get some advice about chickens- he was thinking about starting a flock. Mary Malloy was behind the counter. A more objective observer might have noted that she was a younger Miss Miller-same strawberry blond hair, delicate cheekbones, milkmaid skin, slender frame. All Christopher knew was that he was a goner the minute he laid eyes on her.

  They started talking. She said she loved chickens, used to raise them when she was a little girl, down on the farm. The more they talked, the more they found they had in common. Mary was an orphan, too. After her parents died, the Jehovah's Witnesses took her in. A bunch of them lived in one of the big old turn-ofthecentury houses at the edge of town, down by the river.

  Thereafter, it was always Christopher who visited the feed barn. On his third trip he got up the courage to ask her for a date. He was eighteen, but shy and backward with girls his own age-he'd never even dated one. Mary agreed, but said they had to keep it quiet. If the other Witnesses had found out she was seeing somebody outside the faith, they'd have shunned her. Kicked her out of her apartment, turned their backs to her on the street. She'd have been a complete outcast. For her it would have been like losing her home, her family, and her friends simultaneously.

  So even after they started dating regularly, they kept a low profile. If they went to see a movie, for instance, she'd sneak out and meet him at the theater.

  At this point, their relationship was still innocent. Bearing a burden of guilt both for the abuse he'd suffered as a child (abused children always feel guilty, as if they have somehow deserved the horrors visited on them), and for the death of his parents, Maxwell was extraordinarily conflicted about sex. Alicea was terrified of it, but couldn't help behaving seductively around men. Max, as Irene had suspected, had internalized Carnivean's predilections, along with a great deal of rage. Christopher held himself responsible for the seduction of Miss Miller. And it was sexual jealousy on the part of all of them that led to Kinch's appearance, Kronk's death, and
the fire.

  As for Mary, even French kissing was a big deal for her. So they took it slow. Christopher started timing his trips into town to coincide with her day off. They'd meet at a prearranged spot and she'd return to the Ridge with him. They'd feed the chickens, swim in the creek, maybe make out a little-nothing heavy.

  The first few times Christopher brought Mary back to the Ridge, Miss Miller never left the bedroom. But he told Mary all about her. Well, not about the sex. If you left out the sex, then the agreed-upon fiction, Maxwell's heroism in saving his foster mother from a rapist and being burned himself in the process, cast him in rather a romantic light.

  So he and Mary talked it over, and decided that Miss Miller was only being shy on account of her disfigurement. Mary certainly had no reason to suspect that Chrissy's foster mother might be bitterly, insanely jealous. Neither did Christopher. After all, Miss M had ended their sexual relationship even before the fire; the idea she might want to rekindle it in her condition was utterly, literally inconceivable to him.

  Of all the alters, only the preternaturally mature Max suspected what Miss Miller was going through, and how it might end. But Max wasn't that fond of Mary in the first place, having discovered that when Christopher was in love, his personality was strong enough to threaten Max's hegemony over the system. He kept his mouth shut.

  And eventually Miss Miller seemed to warm up to Mary. Who wouldn't? — Mary was that sweet. She never even flinched the first time she saw Miss M, which suggested that she either had iron discipline or that she saw the world through the eyes of an angel.

  It was the happiest time Christopher had ever known-even better than when Miss Miller had rescued him and taken him to her bed. And as his relationship with Mary deepened, he began to experience the spontaneous remission of his dissociative disorder. Such remissions were, Irene knew, not uncommon as child multiples entered adulthood. Sometimes the remissions were permanent; more often the symptoms reappeared again as the multiple entered his or her thirties. But Christopher didn't know anything about that-all he knew was that whole days could go by without another alter seizing control of the body.