Relentless (Elisabeth Reinhardt Book 1)

by Nancy Alexander

  No, she told Jake, when he asked, she ain’t heard nothing from Reggie Lee and, no, she had no idea where she’d gotten to. She didn’t think she was dead though. Then she re-told the usual story, the same one that she told him every time he asked. Old Miss Whitten who owned ‘Cheryl’s Hair Do’ said she’d heard from Miss Grace, whose daughter lived near Watauga North Carolina, that she saw a girl looked just like Reggie Lee when she was shopping in Asheville. The girl was the spittin’ image of Reggie Lee, Miss Grace’s daughter had said. So, Hattie decided that Reggie Lee had a secret boyfriend, someone with a car or something, and they had run off together. Yes that was probably it, she thought. Reggie Lee had run off and got herself married. What else could have happened to her? Of course that had been years ago and there had not been word of another sighting since then. Hattie repeated this whole story to Jake again, like she did every time he asked. That’s all she knew, she said with a shrug.

  As they pulled out of the Raines Farm driveway, Jake said. “We’re heading on back down there, boys, to look for Reggie Lee. Sniff around,” as Jake liked to say, “See if we can pick up her scent.” To say that Jake was obsessed with her would be a vast understatement. In truth, she was all he could think about. He had been obsessed with her since the day he met her, gutsy little 5 year old with eyes the color of cornflowers and pale blonde corkscrews that curled around her face creating a halo effect. Little ‘Halo.’ He didn’t love her, he knew that. He didn’t love anyone. But he was fascinated by her. Loved tormenting her! Loved scaring her and overpowering her! Loved seeing the look on her face, the panic in those pretty blue eyes! The passage of time had done nothing to diminish his all-consuming mission – find, torture and kill Reggie Lee Raines. He would find her if it was the last thing he did. Reflectively, his hand reached up to touch his scraggly beard and the nasty red zigzag scar that ran from his left eyebrow to his jawline. The knife that cut him had narrowly missed his eye and cut deeply across his sneering lips. Leaving deep trough lines where the stitches had been. He sneered again as he imagined how it would feel to cut her face just the way she had cut his. He chuckled and his scared lip curled at the thought.

  CHAPTER 15

  RETRIEVAL

  It was getting dark outside. The streetlights and city lights popped out all over the surrounding buildings. People wandered in and out of the Starbucks carrying coffee cups and small brown bags of treats. Gina and Dr. Reinhardt were focused on what was about to take place in the session. “I’m glad you told me about your family; it will help me keep things on track. So let’s get down to the issues we need to work on today.” They began to re-construct the memories that had come up starting with the O.R. “Okay,” said Dr. Reinhardt after she was sure her patient was grounded in the present. ”I want you to relax and take a few deep breathes. Without telling me any details of the memory, we’re going to create a broad overview.” Gina did that. The overview included a chicken coop, being carried away, tied up in an old cabin, 3 teenage boys, being hurt, lots of blood and screaming, running away and being chased. There it ended.

  They went back through the overview again quickly and without much detail or emotion, just getting the breadth of the events. Dr. Reinhardt tracked her degree of dissociation and checked in many times asking how she was feeling and what she was experiencing. Then she asked, “How old does it seem like you are in the memory?”

  Gina remembered being in the chicken coop and said she was about 14 years old.

  “Okay, why do you think you are that age?”

  “I see myself as being pretty tall, bending over to get into the coop.” She said frowning, “Also my sister, who usually collected the eggs, got Rheumatic fever when she was 12 and so I had to go out and get them. That would have made me 14.’’

  Dr. Reinhardt nodded and said, “Alright, take a deep breath and in your mind go to the beginning of the memory and let me know when you are there.”

  “I’m there,” Gina said.

  “Now, using the third person, like saying ‘the girl’ instead of ‘me’, I want you to go through the memory silently in your mind from beginning to end and make eye contact with me when you’re done, when you have reviewed the complete memory, I’ll want you to tell me what you remembered, OK?” Dr. Reinhardt asked.

  Gina did as directed. She remembered being in the chicken coop, the sounds and smells, she remembered what she was doing: the basket, the eggs, trying not to let any of the chickens get out and she remembered bright sunshine blinding her as she bent over to leave the coop. She remembered a scream, perhaps her own, dropping the egg basket and the feeling of warm breaking eggs on her feet. She was grabbed from behind, a rough hand clasped over her mouth and she was wrestled to the ground. The next thing she remembered was being half-carried half-dragged up the mountain through thick forests. She was wrapped up somehow because she couldn’t move. Her mouth was covered so she could not yell. There was a blindfold over her eyes. She remembered hands on her, voices around her, being jostled as the people carrying her stumbled over tree limbs and underbrush. She heard them swearing and arguing with each other. She couldn’t see faces. She thought she knew the voices, but was so scared she couldn’t think straight. She did not know where they were taking her, but she knew what they would do to her … and then they were going to kill her.

  That was all she remembered about the chicken coop kidnapping. They then reviewed the flashback she had in the O.R. when she had flash images of running through the woods and lots of blood. She didn’t know whose blood it was. That’s all she could remember. It filled her with fear. Gina’s biggest fear about the memory that had flashed through her mind was the fear that she had killed someone. She didn’t know why she felt that way or who she might have killed. “What if I killed someone,” she asked. “I must have done something horrible. Why else can’t I remember this stuff?”

  “There are many reasons why people don’t remember their traumas,” the therapist said, “Let’s not jump to conclusions let’s just work with what you remember, Okay?”

  They repeated this review several times. Until no new information emerged. Then they worked with the memory in detail, trying to put events in the order of occurrence. Finally they oriented her to the present time and ‘put the memories away’ inside her mind.

  There were things about her early life that Gina remembered and other things she could not remember at all. Sometimes she had flashes of memories that erupted like a dream fragment bright and clear, but those only lasted a few moments. As soon as she tried to put the flash into words or tried to keep ahold of it, it would evaporate. She remembered little of her life before Jake moved in with them. She knew he was her tormentor, but could only recall bits and pieces of the things that he did to her. Mostly she remembered hiding and running away from him. She knew no one believed her about him and that she could not count on help from anyone. She remembered school perfectly, she loved it there and loved studying and learning. She always wanted to go even if she was sick. Staying at home was risky. Often she wondered about her relationship with her family. She wondered why she didn’t feel close to them or feel that they loved her. She got along best with her sisters, but they had each other and they had their mother. Gina didn’t understand her mother. She thought Hattie Raines was basically a kind person, but she was simple and had no interest in complex issues. She was overworked and tired most of the time. And Hattie didn’t want to hear about problems. She just didn’t want to know about unpleasant things. It seemed odd to Gina but her mother seemed to have ‘an uncurious mind.’ It was like she was determined not to think much or question anything. “Just work it out between yourselves,” she’d say dismissively and go back to her housework. Right! Like a five year old could work something out with an abusive 9 year old. It was ludicrous, but that was what she said and that’s all she would say.

  Her father, Earl was another story. He had a rigid set of values that didn’t fit in this world. He was in a time warp. His ideas and belief
s were like those his great, great, great-grandfather had. He didn’t make sense to those around him and they didn’t make sense to him. A family member talking to a neighbor would infuriate him, but bad behavior in school didn’t matter in the least. Farm work mattered, how people felt or how they treated one another did not matter. There were certain schedules for doing things that mattered, farm chores for example. How those schedules affected others didn’t matter. Earl had a bad temper and could lash-out with no warning. He drove his family with an iron will and a cast iron set of beliefs. He never explained what he did or why he did it. He figured people around him should just know or just listen whether they understood or not. Gina guessed that when he was a kid there’d been lots of other people like him around and that it made sense to be the way he was if you had lived that way. She remembered her brothers really never wanted to help on the farm and how mad he’d get when they didn’t do their chores. Farm chores were important. You couldn’t skip them for any reason. The cattle and chickens had to be fed. The crops needed care and had to be planted or picked when the time was right. Her father worked from morning till night and when he came home for supper, he was dead tired. You could see it in his step. She always thought he probably exploded because he was exhausted. If the boys hadn’t done their work, he exploded. If supper wasn’t ready on time, he exploded. If anyone got in his way, he exploded. People learned pretty fast to do things his way. Alcott Earl Raines Jr. was not a man to be crossed.

  Gina remembered that she and her father had gotten along pretty well, because she liked being out on the farm and helped him with tasks whenever she could. He never hit her and rarely yelled at her. He rarely hit the women in the family, unless he’d been drinking. Sometimes he pushed them into walls or knocked them down on the floor. When he’d been drinking, all bets were off. He and Hattie would yell and fight with each other. Sometimes the boys had to get in between them to break things up. There had been some horrible and frightening times and Reggie Lee remembered trying to help her brothers when they’d been hurt. Sometimes Earl’s elderly aunts would come over to stop the fighting. They lived a few hundred feet from the great house and believed family matters fell under their purview. Earl would stop dead in his tracks when he heard the aunts knocking on the door. Earl held a deeply ingrained respect for the elderly and granted them a respect he granted to no one else. A single scowl or frown from those wrinkled faces and angry words disappeared under the façade of genial host.

  When she was a bit older and more capable, Reggie would rush out the kitchen door and fetch the Aunts at the first sign of trouble, but when she was small, Reggie just ran and hid. She had many hiding places that no one knew about. She stocked her hiding places with food and blankets so she could stay hidden for hours at a time. As she listened to the yelling and fighting, she prayed for the aunts to come and stop them. It broke her heart to hear the anger and the tears. She didn’t know what started these family dramas but she knew that she couldn’t stop them. So she kept her hiding places well stocked and at the first sign of trouble she ran for safety. Tucked away in an opening under a staircase or under some loose floorboards in a closet, she curled up and tried to imagine living a different life, living with a different family, one that acted nice and didn’t fight. Sometimes she would fall asleep in her hiding place and not come out till the following morning. She always thought it was odd that no one ever came looking for her. No one called her name and no one asked her about it the following day. It was as if they never noticed she was gone or if they did notice they didn’t care. Most nights after those fights, her mother would stop in to talk to her daughters. She’d sit on their beds and tell them everything would be OK, it’s just that Papa was mad about something or it’s just that Papa was worried about the crops or animals. She often sat there talking and making excuses for her husband and trying to reassure them that things on the Raines Family Farm were just fine. It was odd but Hattie Raines never seemed to notice that one of her three daughters wasn’t in her bed. The little girl was just gone and Hattie seemed to have no interest in where she was.

  The therapist nodded thoughtfully. Bringing her back to the present time Dr. Reinhardt said, “So tell me what happened in the hospital today.” This question brought up fears that she had blown it that day in the O.R. She no longer worried that they would fire her but she worried that she had lost their respect. It had been hard going back to the hospital after she had acted so strangely. She was overwhelmed with anxiety - fear that people could see through her pretense of normalcy. Maybe she should take some time off. Call in sick. Take a long vacation. Look for another job while she could still get good references.

  They talked about the realities of each worry, the likelihood of it occurring, reviewed her options. In the end, she decided she’d just go back to the hospital and act as she usually did. If anyone asked about it, she would tell them she needed to change her mask and apron. This flashback at work had been an anomaly and major life decisions should not be based on anomalies. ‘Nothing bad happened,’ she reasoned. She would be fine. She needed some sleep and she’d be better in the morning.

  As they were walking toward the door, Gina said there was one more thing she wanted to mention. She had a steadily growing sense of danger and was not sure if this was a symptom of her PTSD or if she had a present reason for her fear. The look of concern on her face prompted the therapist to ask, “Are you worried about someone in particular, or is it a general worry?”

  Avoiding eye contact, Gina said, “It’s specific.”

  “I see,” said the therapist, “and do you have reason to think this specific person IS indeed after you now?”

  “He’s always been after me.”

  “You’re talking about your cousin, right?” the therapist affirmed and continued, “Right at this moment in time is there any reason to think he is closer to finding you? That you are in danger now?”

  Gina paused for a long moment, “I have a feeling,” Gina said, but there was something evasive in her tone of voice. She turned and was walking through the doorway when she said, “I put in an application to buy a gun.”

  Dr. Reinhardt stopped her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I understand you are afraid and you want to be able to protect yourself, but this is a big issue you are bringing up just as you are walking out the door. I want you to be safe from yourself as well as from others but we need to talk about it before you do anything like buy a gun. I need you to hold off on buying a weapon until we can talk about it further. Can you agree to that?”

  “For how long?” Gina asked.

  “Until we see each other next,” the therapist replied.

  Gina, eyes downcast, nodded slightly. “OK, we’ll talk about it then and Dr. Reinhardt,” she said, extending her hand, “thank you so much for all your help.”

  Closing the door Dr. Reinhardt turned and walked to her desk. Sitting down she dialed a number she knew by heart and waited while it rang. ”I need to see you,” she said to the man who answered the phone. “Use the back way,” she instructed. Swiveling around in her chair, she studied her bookshelves. They were hand carved and imported from Austria. The bookshelves that spanned the entire back wall of her office had stood in her grandfather’s home in the outskirts of Salzburg for nearly 75 years. They had beauty, meaning and purpose. She treasured these bookshelves. When she decided to have them imported, she had gotten in touch with a carpenter from the old country. It had taken weeks to plan, design and install them. They were intricate, beautiful, highly detailed and infused with old world charm. Every book and art object had been arranged with care. The look of the bookshelves was important to her, but their beauty was the least of it.

  Reflecting, she reached up to her neckline and slowly extracted a long gold chain; she ran her fingers along its surface until they encountered a small key. Reaching toward her desk she located a tiny keyhole. As the nearly invisible desk drawer opened, Elisabeth Reinhardt slipped her finger inside the narrow opening a
nd pressed a metal lever; behind her a whisper of air swooshed in. She swiveled to face the bookshelves and waited...

  Elizabeth A. Reinhardt, PhD

  Great Lakes Bank Building

  Suite 315

  Chicago, Ill 60601

  CLINICAL PROGRESS REPORT

  Patient’s name: Gina R Date of Contact: 11/13/2012

  Nature of contact: Office Visit __X__ Phone Call ______ Email ______ Other__________

  Reason For Contact: Scheduled _X ____ Practical _____Update _____Emergency __ ___ Other ______________

  Presentation: Normal ___X__ Appropriate/reflective _______ Depressed/Low Energy _____ Upset/Agitated _____ Frustrated/Angry ______ Dissociated/Detached ______ Anxious/Panicky __X___ Obsessive/Worried __ _____ Overwhelmed ______ Desperate/Dependent ______ Confused ______ Guarded/Defended ______ Aloof/Distant _____

  Urgency: Suicidal _______ Self-Destructive ______ Homicidal ______ Not Urgent ___________

  Requires hospitalization: a) Yes: ____________ (if yes specify plan)____________________________________