“The whole thing is just wrong,” I said.
Heath glanced over at the doctor. “Agreed. The guy’s a kook—and, I don’t know, maybe he even had something to do with this whole . . . Glenys situation—but either way, we need to let the police handle it.”
He was right. I knew he was, but the last thing I wanted to do was go back to that house.
“Don’t worry.” Heath touched my face. “I may have a bum knee, but he’s old. If he tries anything . . . if he tries to hurt you, I’ll beat the ever-loving shit out of him.”
Heath gestured at Cerny to get his attention. “It’s going to take the police a good half hour to get up here,” he yelled. “We’ll go back to the house and wait there with you. It’s getting cold. And dark.”
“We can’t leave her. There are animals . . .” Cerny’s voice trailed off.
Oh my God.
Heath snapped at the doctor. “Cover her with your jacket, if you want.”
Cerny shucked off his tweed jacket and Heath hobbled through the leaves and draped it over the upper half of Glenys’s body. A makeshift shroud. Would that really keep the animals off her? I didn’t know how these things worked—these very basic, human events of life and death and nature. Other than Chantal in her nest of white satin, I’d never seen a dead person.
“Go get your car. Wait for us up at the road,” Heath said to Cerny, who nodded like an obedient child and lumbered away. I pulled open the door of the Nissan, scooped the knife out of the door pocket, and held it up.
“Okay,” Heath said dubiously.
“Just in case.” I slid the blade between my wool sock and boot, then pulled my jeans over the handle. I offered him an arm. “One of us should have a weapon.”
Cerny drove us back up to the house, disappeared into his office for several minutes, then rejoined us in the front hall. “Dunfree police are on the way.” He raked a hand through his wet hair.
I glanced at Heath. “Maybe we should call too.”
Cerny handed his phone to Heath, who limped into the library to make the call.
“I’m sorry for running out in the road,” Cerny said. “For behaving so . . . erratically. I was distraught. Not thinking straight.” He shook his head. “I didn’t expect to find her in that state.”
The image of Glenys flashed into my brain. Her body covered by Cerny’s tweed jacket, anointed by the freezing rain, slowly stiffening, cold under the low white clouds, the dampness soaking to her skin. The temperature would probably plunge tonight—the first drop of the fall—but it would be okay, the police would get to her before then. They would zip her up in one of those black bags, and she would be protected from the cold and wet.
I wanted to ask him who she really was and why she’d lied to me, but that would have to wait for when the police arrived. For now, I just wanted to make sure Heath was comfortable and keep this maniac as calm as possible.
The doctor sighed and scrubbed at his eyes. “I could use a drink. Join me?”
“Yeah, no,” I said with a twist of my lips. “No drink for me.”
Cerny scuttled back to his office, and I went into the library. Heath was leaning against the mantel, just hanging up the phone.
“Are they coming?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Do you think Luca got out? Maybe he’s called the police too.”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t count on any help from him. Ten to one, he’s illegal.”
“What if Cerny killed him too?”
“Daphne, come on. We don’t know for sure that he killed Glenys—or whatever her name is. He said she hanged herself with the chain.”
“He also said this was a couples’ retreat, introduced us to a fake couple called the McAdams and told us they were staying in an empty room upstairs.” I was on a roll. “Glenys was in her sixties, and that branch was at least seven or eight feet off the ground. Tell me how a woman that age, or any age, for that matter, could”—I swallowed—“loop a heavy metal chain around her neck, throw it up over a tree, and attach it all by herself? Not to mention I didn’t see a clip or a lock or anything that would’ve held it fast. The whole thing defies the laws of physics.”
Heath shook his head wearily. “I don’t know, Daphne. Maybe we overlooked whatever Glenys used on the chain. I mean, it could’ve fallen in the leaves, right? And look, obviously, the guy’s a nut. But I don’t think he’s dangerous. If he did kill her, wouldn’t he be long gone by now?”
“You’re assuming he’s in his right mind.”
“Anyway, when the police get here, we’ll tell them everything. Let them handle it. I’m going to sit down.”
“I’ll get you some ice.”
“No.” He put his hand on my arm. “We stay together until the police come.”
He eased himself down on the dusty, threadbare sofa and leaned his head against the back. His dark hair and jacket were still damp, but he made no move to dry off. He seemed too focused on the pain. Cerny—or Luca—had lit the gas fire and it was crackling in the grate, animating the fiend behind it.
I moved closer to the fire, rolled my stiff shoulders, and closed my eyes. I pictured Jerry and Donna McAdam the way I’d seen them when we first arrived at Baskens, standing by the bay window, wineglasses in hand. It was hard to believe they were nothing but actors in a play, random people who Cerny had convinced or paid to come up here and lie to us.
Jesus. It was all so preposterous.
Shortly, Dr. Cerny returned with our phones and a tray with two crystal tumblers of brown liquor. He’d already partaken back in his office—I could smell it in a cloud around him, bourbon or scotch, I couldn’t tell the difference.
“Did you drug it again?” I asked Cerny. Across the room, I could feel Heath stiffening, wanting to intervene, but I didn’t care. I was through holding my tongue.
Cerny met my gaze. “I’m sorry about before. I thought it was for your own good.”
“Have a seat, Dr. Cerny,” Heath said. “I think it’s time we all had a talk.”
“I’m not—” Cerny said at the same time, but at the look on Heath’s face, he shut his mouth. I suddenly felt inexplicably gripped with fear.
“I don’t want to talk,” I said.
“I know you don’t, my dear,” Heath said. And, for some reason, I wanted to say something nasty in return. Heath had never called me that—my dear. I hated the way it sounded coming from his mouth. But I was just on edge.
“The police will be here soon,” I said.
“Yes, they will,” Heath said. “But we have a while before that time comes. Can you listen?”
I nodded wordlessly.
“You must already realize this by now,” he went on. “That I brought you here under false pretenses. It was my idea, the story about participating in a couples’ retreat.”
Suddenly, I felt excruciatingly hot, my entire body bathed in a fine layer of sweat. My heart slammed in my chest, and I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Not that I expected the doctor to take the ruse to such elaborate extremes,” he continued. “But then again, he’s always been a bit on the theatrical side.”
Something very bad was about to happen in this room. I understood that now. And there was no way I could stop it.
“We’re going to talk,” Heath said. “The three of us, right now.”
My head had begun to feel buzzy, and I couldn’t shut out the images of Glenys’s dead, bloated face. A rusty chain slung over a branch. An empty three-room apartment. A lawn strewn with dead birds. I breathed deeply, willing my body to settle.
Heath sighed. “I needed you here with me, Daphne. I was scared if you knew what was really going on, you would refuse to come. So, the doctor arranged the week. He arranged the McAdams and Dr. Teague. The economy up here has been squeezed for years. With the promise of cash, it wasn’t that hard to convince a few locals to help us out.”
He shifted, easily. Too easily. His knee didn’t look like it was bothering him any lon
ger, as a matter of fact.
“I wanted us, the four of us—you, me, Cerny, and Cecelia—to come together so the truth could finally come out. I’ve never told you the truth about myself, but I would like to tell you now, if you want. Would you like to hear the truth, Daphne?”
“Of course,” I said. I was trembling, and he saw it and smiled.
Strange, what a relief it was to finally say those words, even though I had spent our entire relationship avoiding both his truth and mine. Yes, I did want to know the truth—even though I was certain that, when Heath was finished telling me, the world would look like an entirely different place.
Friday, October 19
Night
“I’m supposed to just start talking?”
“That’s the way it’s always worked, Heath. Or have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t forgotten anything. And it feels strange for you to call me that.”
“Would you prefer Sam?”
“Either way.”
“All right, then. Sam. Why don’t you start at the point when you left us? What was it like for you during those years on your own?”
“Different, I guess. For a lot of reasons. Mainly all the unsupervised time. The freedom. I was on my own. Homeless, essentially. Drifting around Georgia, Florida for a while. Louisiana. Working odd jobs, painting crews, ditch digging. Sleeping in alleys, on sidewalks. In cars I could break into.”
“Must have been a heady feeling. Finally being free to do what you wanted.”
“I don’t know if heady’s the word I’d use. I was free, yeah. But I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do with that freedom. Of course, I wanted to drink and smoke weed. Meet girls, and . . .”
“And what?”
(silence)
“What did you want to do with those girls?”
“You tell me, Doctor.”
“How could I possibly know that?”
“All the times we talked? All the things I told you? The birds.”
“That was a long time ago, Sam. You were a boy then.”
“Boys grow into men.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean the fantasies never went away. They never . . . lessened in their intensity. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Playing them out in my mind every day. Dreaming about them every night.”
“So when did the thoughts become actions, Heath? Tell me about that.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Friday, October 19
Afternoon
“What we did,” Dr. Cerny said. “What happened to Heath . . . it was all because of my ego. My need to be recognized—”
The doctor stopped, as if he couldn’t continue. I wondered if it was a real reaction to everything that was happening, or something put on just for effect. Bastard, I thought. He wasn’t remorseful. He had brought this all on himself—and I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t killed Glenys as well. It certainly was plausible.
Cerny had resumed talking. “From my days as a student, I’d always been fascinated by one area of psychiatry—an understudied, misunderstood, popularly maligned personality disorder. Doctors said there was no cure for it. No treatment and no hope of improvement. But there was no research to back up those claims. No hard, incontrovertible data.”
He folded his hands.
“In an absence of data, we experiment. And for experiments we need test subjects. But certainly no parents were willing to offer up their children. No fit parents, anyway.”
Heath was sitting very still.
The doctor continued. “There were studies, few and far between, MRIs that revealed anatomical differences in the subgenual cortex and the paralimbic system. Underfunctioning of the amygdala and so on. But they’ve never been adequately tested on children suspected of having the disorder.”
The doctor’s words flowed around me like a riptide. I gripped the nearby edge of the bookshelves, as if that could keep me from being swept away.
“I knew, if I found the right subject, if I was allowed to create the perfectly modulated test environment, I could conduct the research we needed to truly understand the disorder. It would involve intricate, meticulous planning. Careful monitoring and the utmost discretion, allowing a level of experimental observation and behavior modification that I’d never undertaken. I realized”—his eyes flashed—“that a study of groundbreaking significance was within reach. One that could revolutionize a formerly dark area of psychiatry.”
I glanced at Heath.
“I moved to Atlanta after receiving my degree and opened a practice there with a woman I’d met in school, Cecelia. We ran it for many years—but she knew where my interest truly lay, and eventually, together, we began the search for our first subject.”
Silence settled over the room. I looked at Heath and cleared my throat. “You still haven’t said what disorder you’re talking about.” He and Heath each shifted in their seats.
Dr. Cerny spoke. “A nonspecified disorder not officially listed in the DSM—commonly known as psychopathic disorder.”
Something changed in the room, something in the air—as if the barometric pressure had dipped dramatically and everything had to reset. After a second or two, I laughed, but it sounded hollow. Strange. “Heath’s not a psychopath,” I said.
No one contradicted me. No one said a word.
“I know him,” I went on. “He’s a good man. Kind. Considerate. And he cares about me.”
Cerny stood. “Psychopaths aren’t what you see in the movies, Daphne. They’re not sadistic killers or violent criminals. They are simply devoid of some of the human emotions we consider basic and, dare I say, essential. Emotions like empathy, shame. Remorse and fear.”
I glanced at Heath. He was looking down at his clasped hands.
“Without these emotions, they are untethered by normal connections to humanity. This enables them to pursue their own ends without being restrained by inconvenient feelings. The threat of punishment means nothing to these people. The only thing that motivates them is reward. And they’ll do anything to gain it.”
“That isn’t Heath,” I said. “That isn’t him at all.”
Once again, silence.
Then, in the calmest, most level way imaginable, Heath replied, “It is me.”
I fixed him with a defiant stare. “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s not. Fuck you. Fuck both of you.”
Heath stood and moved to me, and I slapped him, hard, once across the face. His head snapped away, then swiveled back like I hadn’t even struck him. When he looked at me, he seemed so sad. There was a bright-red spot where I’d hit him.
“Stop doing this,” I whispered. “Please.”
He spoke calmly. Quietly. “Daphne, I’ve learned over a long time how to operate on an intellectual level. I know I should have empathy, so I display a facsimile of it. I don’t feel it, but I make you think I do. I’d like to say I do it because of some altruistic seed deep within me, but that’s not true.” He shook his head. “I do it because of the reward I get.”
“No . . .”
“You.”
I slapped him again, then a third time, with all my strength. He took each one stoically, absorbing the force of my blows, then gently reached for my trembling hand.
“For example . . .” I followed his gaze down to our entwined fingers. “Right now I’m holding your hand not because some inner impulse deep within me is compelling me. I’m doing it because I know this is what a supportive boyfriend, a loving fiancé, is expected to do in a moment like this.”
I shook my head.
“I know it’s what you want,” he said. “And I want to give you what you want. Because then I get what I want. Which is you, by my side. If I do what I should according to the laws of society, I get us, together. Always us.”
My eyes swam with tears, and I pulled my hand out of his grasp. Dr. Cerny crossed the room to stand at one of the front windows. The rain was coming down hard now outside.
Heath sp
oke again. “I was born Sam O’Hearn. When I was four years old, the doctor took me from my mother. We’d been living in downtown Atlanta. A crack house, for all intents and purposes. My mother was an addict, a prostitute, and I don’t know what else. And I was a difficult child. I screamed for hours, all night sometimes. I used to bang doors, over and over, sometimes until their hinges broke. It was a wonder she could care for me, a wonder I didn’t end up in the system, but for a couple of years she was able to manage it.”
His eyes registered pain. Or they seemed to. But maybe this was just another trick of his—intellectualizing normal human emotions and passing them off as authentic.
He sighed and went on. “She came across an ad in the Personals section of the Atlanta paper. The people, a doctor and his assistant, wanted test subjects and would pay for the privilege. That was the magic word, apparently. She let them come to our apartment, where they questioned me. And her.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“Dr. Cerny and his assistant, Cecelia Beck, were looking for children who displayed early indicators of antisocial behavior. Frequent, uncontrollable tantrums. An imperviousness to punishment. They arranged for an MRI and got their confirmation, that I had less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. Abnormality in my white matter. How’m I doing, Doc?”
Cerny puffed out a breath at the window. “Just fine.”
“The assumption was that I would continue down the path my brain had set for me. I would grow up to become your run-of-the-mill psychopath. You know—the guy a couple of doors down who you’d prefer not to hang out with. You don’t know why exactly . . . just that something isn’t quite right about him. He’s charming, but he doesn’t connect on a deep level. Maybe he’s a jerk to his kids, maybe he cheats on his wife and at golf every Saturday at the club. Mostly, though, he’s the guy who just does whatever the hell he can to get whatever it is that he wants. Probably more of us walking around than you would ever think.”
Heath flicked a look at Cerny, who still hadn’t turned around. “Dr. Cerny and Cecelia believed I deserved a chance, that I could learn to override my genetics, learn to operate in a different way. They might not have been able to cure me—save me from who I was on a DNA level—but they were convinced I could be conditioned to rise above it. They believed they could prevent me from going off the rails later in life—from getting into trouble, at a criminal level or otherwise.”
Every Single Secret Page 22
