Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

“Yes, she did.”

  “It’s a good thing they didn’t know about your fall off the wagon,” Debbie said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be in your shoes.”

  “Well, somebody did knock me out and tie me to a pier when the tide was coming in, Deb,” I said. “I didn’t exactly get away unscathed.”

  Debbie looked at me. I couldn’t see her face clearly, but she had stopped pacing. “Look, I’m sorry, but I did that. Or part of that.”

  Here we go. I waited for the car horn to sound from the road. Wasn’t it taking an awfully long time?

  “Okay,” I said. My voice was so calm and even. I amazed myself. “But why?”

  “If Mary hadn’t freaked out, none of it would have happened. But Pamela said she heard Mary tell you to run. Things weren’t finished yet.” She looked down at her feet, and for a minute, she looked like a kid who knows she’s done something wrong. “What else could I do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Not knocked me out and tied me to a pier to drown?” I had been convinced I was going to die. And this woman had put me there. I felt it again, for the first time in a while, the rage that seemed to take me over, seemed to get rid of any fear I ever felt.

  “Danny, I had just been getting to know my father, and my grandmother, and my uncle. I wasn’t in on all this at the beginning. I mean, trust me, I heard about Dickie Doyle early on, as soon as I met my dad. Des blamed Dickie for Mom’s death.” Mom. Des was Des, but Rose was Mom. “She would have been fine, everybody would have been fine if he hadn’t brought her back here and thrown all these memories in everybody’s faces.”

  “I thought she got addicted to pain pills after a riding accident,” I said. I was trying to keep my voice steady. I didn’t want her to feel the change in me.

  “There was no riding accident. She was just depressed, and became an addict.”

  That could happen. I was walking proof. But right now, I didn’t care.

  “So Pamela was the one who knocked me out?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was with your brother, remember?” Right. Debbie had taken Laurence to get his clothes from Rose’s Place, to get groceries. “I didn’t get there until later.”

  “Then were you the one with the brilliant idea to drown me slowly? And I mean, torture me until I drowned. I was unconscious; if you had wanted me dead you could have just tied me up and thrown me in the water.”

  “I really didn’t want to do that, Danny. But Pamela was so keen on having her way, and really, we didn’t have a boat, so anything else would have been too much trouble.”

  Too much trouble. “I see,” I said.

  “For what it’s worth, I hated that,” she said. “But Des said it was also stupid for me to have given you the key to my gun safe, that if you told anybody I would lose my job. I love my job.”

  “Your job,” I said. “Your job?”

  Keep it together, Danny. Help is on the way. Keep her talking.

  “Des and Pamela – well, neither of them had anything against you. And, God knows, I didn’t. If you hadn’t come to Geoffrey’s house that day, everything would have been fine. But things had gotten a bit out of control. Des was really worried about me. He never wanted all of that to happen.”

  “He stopped my friends from helping me when I was in that hole,” I said. “He was going to let me die down there. And he’s confessed to things that you did, I assume.”

  “Well, he did want to put the fear of God into Dickie,” she said, “ruin the reputation of Rose’s Place, and scare Dickie into leaving.” She was pacing again. “But Pamela – well, she was a force of nature.” She sounded proud. Proud of her batshit crazy grandmother.

  “He sounds like a good dad,” I said gently. “It wasn’t his fault that you were put up for adoption.”

  “He is a good man,” she said. “When I was cutting the R tattoo off Dickie, Des walked in and saw, and he actually had to go throw up.” She stopped pacing, and I could see her smile in the last of the light coming through the windows. “Pamela blindfolded him first, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to kill him or whatever, and she didn’t want him to know about me. Anyway, I was doing it, and Pamela had put a sock in Dickie’s mouth to stop him screaming too much. I mean, my God, Pamela was the least squeamish person I’ve ever met – next to me – but Des? I can’t believe he’s been a policeman for this long.”

  I tried to smile a bit. “What about Sarah? Was that Pamela, or…?” Or you, I wanted to say, but Debbie answered quickly.

  “Well, I was the one who took her, but after that it was all Pamela. Sarah came with me. I mean, I’m a cop.”

  “But Pamela told you to do that? I heard she had a pretty strong personality.”

  Debbie nodded. “She had a list, yeah. I just wanted to get the weekend over with, to be honest. I had been hearing about nothing but the fucking Apple Blossom festival from Pamela for months. And I was really tired. I’ve got insomnia issues,” she said to me, like we were confessing intimacies to each other over a bottle of wine. “Between that dude from Halifax, the one you found at Dickie’s, and Evan, and Sarah, and Dickie – I got, like, no sleep that weekend.”

  Sleep. The poor dear.

  “And me,” I said. “That was the weekend you guys tied me to the pier, don’t forget.” I made myself sound light.

  “Right?” she said, as though I was confirming how much she’d had to do, how tired she must have been. “Anyway, I’m glad that’s over with. I miss Pamela and Geoffrey, but I’ll still be able to visit Des.”

  “He really protected you,” I said. “You were lucky.” Debbie was getting closer, inch by inch, as we talked. I had stopped fully listening to her. I was doing some math in my head. “So he painted the top of the cabin for you when you met him and told him you were gay?”

  “It’s ugly as shit, right? But that’s the kind of dad he was.”

  “He still is. He’s still protecting you, Deb.” She looked at me, and I knew she wasn’t getting closer because, oh, maybe she wanted to try to kiss me again. She was going to kill me, and she didn’t want to have to fire her gun. She would probably have to write a report about firing her weapon on duty. And she had made clear how important her job was to her.

  I steeled myself, put my hands in my pockets casually, and took a deep breath. “Listen, you crazy bitch. Your job is to uphold the law. Instead you committed some of the most heinous acts I have ever heard of, because, what, your grandmother – who never had a hand in raising you, so it wasn’t like you were brainwashed at a young age to be the fucking psychopath you are…” Debbie took a step toward me. “Your mentally ill grandmother persuaded you to start killing people horribly, innocent people, because Rose Doyle became an addict and overdosed?”

  “Danny, you should stop now.” Her voice was even, but perhaps for the first time I started to feel the presence of real crazy in the room.

  I wasn’t sure if it was coming from me or her.

  Debbie was absolutely still, arms at her sides. I could no longer see her face; she was standing in darkness. I continued.

  “You have ruined countless lives. All the families of the people you killed, everyone who loved them, just because you happen to have been born into a fucked-up gene pool with some kind of lovely combination of mental illness and psychopathy. And you’re worried about keeping your fucking job? Bitch, you belong in the ground. Not in a hospital. Not breathing air in a jail cell. You belong tied to a tree so the animals can eat you slowly. Preferably while I watch.”

  It worked. Instead of taking out her gun and shooting me, she ran at me.

  It was slow motion. I didn’t feel the pain in my leg. I didn’t feel anything but the pounding of blood in my ears and the knowledge that I was going to bring this psycho bitch down, or die trying.

  I stood perfectly still as she ran at me from fifteen feet away, her upper body forward to take me down to the ground.

  When she was in full throttle, before she could stop or change course, I put my weight
on my good leg, my left leg, and let myself fall to the ground, reaching out to the side.

  Debbie fell over my leg and my crutch, knocking me on my back. Within seconds, she had me pinned, as I knew she would, her legs straddling my thighs.

  Fast, faster than she could think, faster than she could start to lean forward to strangle me, I stabbed her with both hands. Once in the top of her inner left thigh with the knife I’d pulled out of my back pocket, and once in the top of the right thigh with the screwdriver from my other pocket. I did it hard, as hard as I could. The fabric of her uniform trousers looked thick, and I had to make sure I hit the femoral artery on at least one side.

  There was a horrible pause.

  She looked down at herself, at the sharp objects impaled in her thighs. She looked confused. I wished I could see her legs better. Then I saw the blood, which was pulsing out of her with every beat of her heart.

  In seconds, the front of her pant legs was soaked.

  She started to lean over, to try to claw at my face. She was looking at me in the eyes, as though she was confused that I had betrayed her. I could have eased her onto her back and whispered a couple of nice words to her as she lost her blood. I could, at least, have eased her way out of this world in a way that would maybe have comforted her in her last second.

  Instead, I flipped her off me, ignoring the fire in my leg. I held her hand onto the ground. “Look, Debbie,” I said. My voice was almost cheerful. “Watch.” And, with her arm pinned to the ground and her eyes on it, I removed the knife from her thigh, raised my arm high in the air, and with all my strength, brought it down on her wrist. The knife wasn’t sharp enough, or big enough. It took me three blows to separate her hand from her body, but I did it quickly.

  She died screaming.

  Good.

  “Damn straight,” I said out loud.

  “Danny,” someone said, and I looked up.

  Laurence was standing in the doorway. He had seen, and he had heard.

  But he was my brother, and he came to me and held me, no matter what I had done. Which, perhaps, is what Debbie had done with her own family.

  Laurence managed to lift me off her, and he put me down feet away and held me as I threw up. Neither of us spoke.

  Then a car horn sounded, a long, loud honk from the road.

  FORTY

  Dickie Doyle was arrested and charged for the murder of Constable Debra MacLean. He confessed freely, and instructed his counsel not to seek bail.

  When Dave and Jonas showed up at Debbie’s cottage that night, Dickie came out of the woods. He had been watching. He had been watching, he said, for a while. He didn’t believe that Rose was dead, but he did realize that at some point Debbie MacLean had hurt him badly. He didn’t say when or where. He seemed to think Pamela had cut off his tattoo, so perhaps Debbie had been responsible for one or more of his other injuries.

  He wanted to make sure, he said, that she didn’t hurt anyone else. He would never tell anyone how he had gotten from the bowling alley to the lake, what he had survived on, or who, if anyone, had helped him.

  It was Dickie I had seen from the corner of my eye the day I killed Debbie, when I was in my room and doubting my sanity. He had been sleeping in the woods, he said, during the time when Debbie and I had been in the garage. The car horn on the road woke him up, and he emerged from the trees to find Dave, Jonas, and Laurence arguing about what to do about the gory scene they’d all found in Debbie MacLean’s garage.

  I could possibly have gotten away with self-defence. And it would have been true, in fact if not in spirit, but Debbie’s severed hand might have caused some raised eyebrows.

  I sat on the floor of the garage, not really paying much attention to any of them. I had gone somewhere in my head that it would take me a while to come out of. Laurence talked to Dickie as he came out of the woods, but the situation was time-sensitive – Debbie MacLean was officially on duty, and her location could be easily traced by the RCMP. Dickie left them to it, hobbled into the garage, past me, to Debbie’s body. Before anyone could react, he gathered up the tools I had used to stab Debbie, making sure his fingerprints were on the weapons in her blood. He kneeled in the blood pooling around her, smearing it over himself.

  “Danny was afraid, and she came out to the garage to hide. Debbie came in and attacked her. Danny fought back, but Debbie overpowered her. There’s blood on the back of you, on the back of your head,” Dickie said to me. He was emotionless, and the men just stared at him. “I was watching, then I came in and we all wrestled. I killed Debbie. I cut off her hand.” He looked at me and smiled gently. “Let me do this for your brother,” he said. “So many people have died because of me. You very nearly died.”

  I couldn’t speak yet. I wouldn’t speak for another day. Laurence tried to talk him out of it, but Dickie wouldn’t listen.

  “It doesn’t matter what you say. This is what happened, and this is what I will tell the police. They will believe me. You know they’ll believe me.”

  Jonas called the police, and they all came. Everyone came. I got separated from Laurence for a time, but he found me and held my hand. I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want anyone to have to touch me.

  Dickie was right, of course. The police did believe him.

  I was hospitalized that night for observation. I was unresponsive, and they thought I was in shock, and might possibly have a brain injury.

  I didn’t. My head was as hard as always. But they decided to keep me there for another day to make sure my leg was healing after my ordeal in Debbie’s garage.

  I started speaking the next night, when Laurence brought Mary to my hospital room. Dickie had paid for a good independent criminal defence counsel for her, and she was out pending review of her charges. I hadn’t wanted to see Laurence the day after it happened. I was too ashamed about what he had seen, and I was still terrified at myself, at what I had done.

  It would take time, and a few good Skype chats with Dr. Singh, before I started to get back to normal. Whatever normal is for me, which I am coming to accept is not what is normal for most people. And I’m having a lot of help accepting that. Sometimes I can even embrace it.

  But seeing Mary was what I needed most, before I could start to feel human.

  She walked into my room with Laurence, and shooed him out when I started crying at seeing her. She didn’t quite look like herself, not fully. The trauma ran pretty deep with her as well. But she was wearing heels and lipstick, and that was a long way from how I had last seen her, curled up in a hole in the ground, waiting to die.

  It had only been a year, Mary told me, since Pamela and Debbie had come into her life. She and Geoffrey had been together for ten years by then, and she knew all about his history with mental health and his ongoing struggles. She filled his prescriptions for him when he couldn’t, and, as she said, she had gotten him the job as handyman at Rose’s Place long before Pamela had shown up with her burgeoning plans.

  “What did they used to say about the Nazis? They were just following orders?” Mary was clutching my hand, trying to explain. “But Geoffrey didn’t know. Not until it was too late. He really didn’t know.”

  “Why did he think he was putting hidden cameras in the residents’ rooms?” I said. “Mary, I believe that you didn’t know. I have to believe it. But what did he think he was doing?”

  Mary let go of my hand then, and I realized she had known about them as well. “We thought it was about making sure people were staying clean,” she said. “To help people. Pamela said we would be saving people’s lives. It was just to make sure people weren’t using.” She was pleading with me to believe her. “It was supposed to be helping people. Geoffrey had lost his only sister. You have to understand what that did to him.”

  I nodded. I had more than a passing knowledge of how that felt.

  “And Pamela – well, you never met her, but she was sort of bigger than life.” I didn’t tell her that I was there when Pamela had killed her son and then
herself. Maybe someday I would, but I wasn’t able to, not then. “Geoff had no family left other than me, and all of a sudden his mother shows up, and it turns out he has a niece too! He was away in hospital when Rose was – well – when Rose had Debra. He never knew.” She looked like she wanted to smoke. “Oh, Danny. And Debra was a police officer, and she was so nice, and at the beginning it was – well – it made Geoff so happy.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. I couldn’t imagine not having family, so having one show up and actually liking them would be a rush.

  “After Rose died, we didn’t see much of Dickie. He would drop by once in a while, but we could never count on it. He was Geoff’s brother-in-law, but they didn’t have anything in common, and I don’t think Dickie could stand to be around us. Around anybody that reminded him of Rose.”

  She stood up and walked around. “I feel like I’m going to go crazy without him, Danny.”

  “Mary, I have to know. I won’t tell the police, I promise. But please, what part did Geoffrey play in the – well – in the killings?”

  “None. Really, he didn’t. And once he realized that his mother was a fucking lunatic – and I don’t mean mentally ill, I mean a fucking crazy person – he wanted to go to the police. That’s when things went bad. That was during the festival weekend, when she shot Colin. That’s why, by the way. She thought I would tell Colin about the cameras, and he knew she was staying in our basement. She was sure he knew that she had killed that man whose body you found at Dickie’s cabin. And poor Evan.” She was crying now. She sat back down at the foot of my bed. “That was my fault. If the cameras hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t have known Evan was selling a little pot.”

  “So she shot at us in the dining room to make sure you didn’t talk?”

  “We didn’t even know it was her, until that day,” Mary said. “We really didn’t. We didn’t know it was Des either. We were like everybody else.”

  “She was a good shot,” I said. “Oh, fuck. I’m sorry, Mary.”

  “Colin was a good boy. A good man,” she corrected herself. She took Kleenex out of her bag and wiped her face. “And, if you can believe it, when they first started working together, he used to have a crush on Debra.” She looked at me. “He was the only one who didn’t seem to know she was gay.”