Every Single Secret

by Emily Carpenter

  “And they did,” I said. “Look at you. We’re getting married. You have a good job, friends.”

  The doctor finally spoke. “No one really knows what exactly flips that switch that transforms a basic psychopath from someone who merely cheats on his taxes to someone who commits more serious crimes. We believed, with careful conditioning, we could discover the mechanism in order to dismantle it. So we asked Heath’s mother to let him come live with us.”

  My head swiveled back to face Heath. “She signed away her parental rights?”

  “She needed the money,” Heath said simply. “And they gave her a lot of it. They brought me here, up the mountain, to live with them in this house. I stayed upstairs, never leaving the grounds, under their constant surveillance. Cecelia became my mother.” He hesitated. “The doctor, my father. I believed Cecelia and the doctor were married, that they were my actual parents, and we were a real family. The doctor and Cecelia weren’t abusive, physically or in any other overt way. They simply withheld certain natural human interactions that might corrupt the research.”

  “But I thought they wanted to help you.”

  “We were helping him,” Cerny said. “By gathering information. Collecting data that would be used in all future research on psychopathy. We had to be very careful, very deliberate in our methods.”

  Heath let out a long exhale.

  “What does that mean?” I asked Cerny. “What did you do to him?”

  “No one was allowed to touch me,” Heath said. “No hugs, no kisses, no gesture that could be considered affectionate in any way. My conditioning was to be strictly reward based. B. F. Skinner, all the way. Anything outside the parameters could skew the results.”

  I interrupted. “And you were going to publish a paper—”

  “A book,” Cerny said. “A groundbreaking work that would change the course of psychology forever.”

  I couldn’t stifle my laughter. “And you actually thought the scientific community was going to accept a book like that with no objections? That they would look the other way and let you get away with what was clearly a breach of ethics and guidelines and God knows what else?”

  “Scientists understand that the greatest minds must bend the rules to achieve their ends.” He pushed up his sleeves. “I was a well-regarded psychologist with my past practice. And I continued to see a few patients down in Dunfree, in order to maintain my license. I knew, though, when the mental-health community saw what Cecelia and I had accomplished, when they read about our findings with Sam, I would be named among the greats like Freud, Piaget, Pavlov.”

  “But you didn’t write the book. You ended up leading couples’ retreats. What happened?”

  His eyes clouded and he glanced at Heath. “A scientist can’t draw a conclusion without analyzing all the data.”

  “And your data ran away before you could do that.” I turned to my fiancé. “So that’s why we came? So he could finish his book? Somehow I don’t believe that. There’s more, isn’t there? There has to be more. What about the nightmares?”

  Cerny chuckled softly. “Oh, Daphne. What a perfect match you are for our boy. Tell her, Sam. Tell her the real reason you brought her to Baskens.”

  Heath regarded him coolly. “She needs to see the tapes first.”

  “Tapes?” I said.

  “I don’t think that’s—” Cerny said.

  “I want her to see,” he said. “I want her to understand everything.” He turned to me. “You’re right, Daphne. That’s part of the reason why I came back to Baskens, because the doctor wanted to find out how his experiment turned out. But also because of the nightmares. That’s why we set it up the way we did—as a couples’ retreat. I had to get you up here with me, and there didn’t seem to be any other way.”

  “So what else do you need to tell me, Heath?” I asked. “What is the truth?”

  “It’s on the tapes,” he replied simply.

  Cerny cut in. “The tapes Cecelia and I made of him when he was a boy. Our research. When he lived here with us at Baskens. He brought you here because he wanted you to understand what he is. Why he is.”

  My gut twisted. I could still taste a trace of the vomit in my mouth from earlier. Cerny reached for his iPad from a nearby table. Held it out to me. I didn’t move.

  “I don’t want to watch them,” I said. My voice was shaking, and I realized I was afraid. Afraid in a way I’d never been before.

  “Heath wants you to know who he is,” the doctor said. “He needs it.”

  I took the iPad, swiped the screen, and the keypad came up. I met Cerny’s gaze.

  “Cecelia’s birthday,” I said. “5-3-53.”

  “Clever.” His eyebrows lifted. “Like I said, a perfect match.”

  I tapped in the code with trembling fingers. I found a file labeled “Sam O’Hearn” and opened it, and the screen filled with folders. Each was labeled an age, beginning with four all the way to sixteen.

  I clicked on a folder at the top of the screen labeled Age 4. Another window opened then, this one stacked with video files. I selected one on the top row, and a video player filled the screen. A wide shot of one of the rooms in the apartment—the one on the end with the kitchenette, chalkboard, and gilt-framed mirror. Only, in the video, the room was fully furnished with a gleaming table and chairs, lamps, and scattered vases of hydrangea. A rich Persian rug covering the scratched wood, and the walls hung with paintings. The room looked elegant and lived in. It looked like a home.

  A small boy ran around the perimeter of the room under the watchful eye of a woman, seated in one of the chairs at the table. She was dressed in a light blouse and slim dark skirt, her hair gathered neatly into a twist. She held a yellow dump truck. The boy, motoring around the room like a battery-powered toy, was a blur of stocky legs and floppy black hair.

  “Sam,” the woman said. “Would you like to play with the truck in the sand?”

  He continued to run.

  “Sam, if you’ll sit down with me—quietly, for a few minutes—I’ll give you the truck and let you take it outside.”

  The boy let out a shriek as he dodged the table and chairs.

  “Sam—”

  The shriek rose to a steady scream. I paused the tape and closed the file. I was shaking, and my scalp prickled in creeping horror. What was this?

  “Open another one,” Heath said.

  I did, one labeled Age 5.

  The camera showed the sitting room—the space between the dining room and bedroom. Music played in the background, and Dr. Cerny and Cecelia danced in the center. The little boy—Sam—sat on the sofa and watched, stone faced. He looked bored. I closed it and moved on to the next file.

  The boy, slightly taller and thinner now, sat in the sitting room beside the coffee table. He and Dr. Cerny were playing cards. Cerny’s hair was a rich golden brown, with only a hint of silver, his face unlined and handsome. He dealt the cards slowly and methodically, across the table, his eye all the while on the boy. There was no music in the background, no drone of a TV, only the scrape of the cards and Cerny’s low instructions.

  The camera was positioned perfectly to capture the boy. The messy shock of black hair crowning a delicate, sallow face. A pair of wide, thickly lashed brown eyes, slender nose over full lips. A fine spray of freckles across his cheeks.

  Heath. My Heath.

  It was the strangest thing, seeing him this way. As a child. Especially since I’d never seen so much as a snapshot of him as a baby. But here he was, more than just a badly lit school photo in a scrapbook. He was a living, breathing human being—the same person I knew and loved. The man who sat before me now.

  But this wasn’t just a record of a birthday party, a picnic, a random spontaneous moment of his childhood. This was a carefully planned-out experiment. The card game was beside the point. The doctor and Cecelia had positioned Heath in front of the camera for optimum study. So every gesture he made could be catalogued. Every expression as it flickered across his f
ace. Every tone of voice.

  The psychopath’s every move was of the utmost interest.

  On the iPad there was a wail and a scraping sound as Boy Heath’s chair flew out from under him. He doubled over, his body going rigid, fingers fanning wide beside his head. He screamed at the floor, the veins in his temple popping, the cords lining his neck standing out. The sound was chilling.

  Heath upended the table, the cards spinning across the room. Dr. Cerny stepped neatly out of the way, then moved slowly in the direction of the kitchen. He stood in the doorway for a beat, erect, expressionless, then backed into the kitchen and pulled the pocket door closed behind him. In his absence, the destruction amped up. A lamp flew. A vase. A book. A spread of newspapers covered with sticky pieces of painted wood. The chair Heath had been sitting on shot across the floor.

  Heath flung himself against a wall, then ran to the door that led to the bedroom on the far side of the room. He opened and slammed it repeatedly, with all of his strength, the door bouncing back, doorknob punching a hole in the opposite wall.

  Eventually, he wound down and began to stagger around the room, finally collapsing on the bare wood floor. After several seconds, the kitchen door slid open and Cerny emerged. He calmly walked across the room—stepping over the boy’s inert body—and switched off the lamps and lowered the blinds.

  He left, shutting the hallway door quietly behind him. I didn’t know where he went—upstairs to the surveillance room to confer with Cecelia or downstairs to his office—but no one else entered the apartment. No one helped the boy lying on the floor into pajamas or guided him to brush his teeth and into bed. No one tucked him in, smoothed his hair back, or kissed his forehead. He was left to fend for himself.

  I felt a wave of sorrow rise and begin to overtake the earlier shock and horror I’d felt. I lowered my head and wept into the crook of my arm. No one said a word; then, after a minute or two, I felt Heath’s hand on my back.

  He doesn’t mean it, I thought. It’s not real.

  Nevertheless, his hand was there, radiating warmth into my skin. Even if he was doing it because in his cold, analytical brain, he knew that he was supposed to comfort me when I cried, I didn’t wish it away. It was comforting. It was what I wanted, and maybe I didn’t care why.

  Could I honestly say I’d be able to go on with a normal life after discovering who Heath really was? Was it possible to live a full, satisfying life with a man who didn’t feel emotions the way I did? I truly didn’t know the answers to those questions. What I did know was that I wasn’t ready to say no to the firm, warm, reassuring pressure of Heath’s hand on my back.

  Heath wasn’t a diagnosis. He was a flesh-and-blood person. The man I loved.

  I turned to him. He was staring at me with those same dark eyes, that same stillness. He was the same man I’d come to know. The same man I’d fallen in love with when I first saw him standing in the glare of the lights. For now, that was enough.

  I caught his hand. “I want to go back upstairs,” I said. “I want to see your home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It was surreal—standing where Heath had played and eaten and slept as a child.

  Twelve years. All spent in these three small rooms.

  He’d been isolated from other people, but he hadn’t been held prisoner, not technically. He’d been allowed to roam the grounds, hike into the forest and up the mountain to the overlook. He’d been educated in a broad range of subjects and encouraged to expand his knowledge with books. It wasn’t the confinement that was the problem—plenty of kids were raised in apartments tinier than this one in cities all over the world. It was that he’d been considered a specimen. An object to be observed rather than loved.

  If he’d started out an anomaly, a peculiarity of human DNA, at the end he became a freak. Or, at least, that must’ve been how he felt. Just standing in the dingy apartment at Baskens, even I felt like an alien.

  Heath had shown me his old bedroom—the one I had thought was the Siefferts’, that was papered in the brown roses. And then through the grass-cloth-papered sitting room. We were in the far room now, and I glanced at Cerny, standing by the chalkboard. I thought of Glenys—Cecelia—out in the rain, stiffening in the wet leaves.

  “Where are the police?” I hissed at Heath, acutely aware of the knife in my boot.

  “Don’t freak out. They’re on their way. In the meantime, just listen to what he has to say.”

  I caught my reflection in the huge mirror over the sideboard. I looked so different now than earlier. Pale and lifeless.

  I turned to Cerny. “Tell me about Cecelia.”

  “She was my assistant, for many years. We had a brief dalliance, but there was a disagreement—”

  Heath snorted. “She was in love with you. And you treated her like shit.”

  “It was a mutual decision to part ways. She moved out west. Found a position at another institute, doing research on attachment disorders. And I opened the Baskens Institute.”

  “She disappeared, like that, from both of your lives? Then showed up in time for this heartwarming family reunion?”

  “I let her know Heath was coming home,” he said. “To try to untangle the past so he could move forward with his future. She came back because she wanted closure, just like I did. Just like Heath. Cecelia was always troubled by what we did. She never got over it.” He nodded at Heath. “She never got over losing him.”

  I folded my arms. “Is that why you had to kill her? Because she loved Heath more than you?”

  He smiled. “I’ll admit, when she returned to Baskens, I found that I . . . I still had a certain fondness for her. We had a reunion, of sorts. Those were her clothes, of course, that you found in my room.”

  Heath looked sharply at me.

  “But I assure you, Cecelia’s death was a result of her own actions. She was a troubled woman. Watch the tapes, Daphne. You’ll see.”

  I looked down at the iPad. Opened the next file.

  Heath’s boyhood unfolded before me. I watched him scream and run. Bang doors, throw lamps, books, and plates. He slammed his head against walls and floors. Toppled chairs, upended tables, urinated in every corner of every room.

  There were calm moments too—when he ate or read or did schoolwork. He built birdhouses. On a canvas drop cloth spread on the living-room floor, hammering, sanding, and painting quietly. In these interludes, he appeared focused and relatively content. It looked like he worked on the birdhouses for countless hours.

  Cerny cleared his throat. “The birdhouses were one of the primary rewards we used when Heath brushed his teeth or ate his lunch or bathed himself without oppositional behavior. Unfortunately, at some point along the way, he unearthed my old pellet gun and began to use the birds for target practice, shooting them right out of the houses. Needless to say, we had to find another reward.”

  Heath had moved closer to the mirror and was staring into it. I wanted to ask him if he’d found that pellet gun again. If—sometime when I was up on the mountain or in the house and couldn’t hear the sound of the shots—he’d taken it to the birds I’d found yesterday. I wondered if he’d gathered them up later, in the weak morning light, dew drenched and cold, and flung them somewhere in the woods. If he’d burned them.

  I turned away from him and opened the next file.

  Music was the other reward Cerny and Cecelia offered Heath. Cecelia had an old-fashioned boom box, and, in the later years, an iPod attached to a speaker. She usually played music at Heath’s solitary mealtimes, in the dining room, but sometimes she did it at night in his bedroom. As he would settle himself in bed (alone, no kiss, no tuck-in), the room would fill with the strains of Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald. And Frank Sinatra, of course. Lots and lots of the Chairman of the Board.

  “I take it you don’t appreciate fish for dinner,” Dr. Cerny’s voice suddenly rang out from the iPad, tinny but clear.

  The time stamp at the bottom of the screen showed 9:36 p.m., a
nd the brown floral walls were doused in shadow. They were gathered in the bedroom—Cerny, Cecelia, and what looked to be a young-teen Heath. Heath was sitting in bed, his knees drawn up under the covers. Cerny stood, arms folded, in one corner of the room, Cecelia in another.

  Heath didn’t answer Cerny, and Cecelia shifted her weight. There was a strange feeling in the room. Something electric and dangerous even I could feel, just viewing the tape. I glanced at Heath, remembering how strange he’d acted when Reggie Teague had told us our first meal at Baskens would be fish.

  On the tape, Heath spoke. “I warned you,” he said, his adolescent voice cracking. Goose bumps broke out on my arms.

  “You don’t warn me,” Cerny said. “I’m the adult. I set the rules. You choose to either follow them or break them. Following rules brings rewards. Breaking them results in a zero sum.”

  “I told you,” Heath said. “And I told Mom.”

  “Cecelia.”

  “Mom.” Heath’s voice was edged with an ominous tone.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Cecelia interjected. “Give him the music, Matthew. He’s tired, and he’s making an effort.”

  “I’m making an effort,” Heath parroted.

  Cerny folded his arms. “I disagree. You’re not making an effort. You’re mocking me.”

  “Matthew—” Cecelia said.

  Cerny held up his hand. “Let him advocate for himself. This is good practice. The world is full of people, Sam, and you are going to have to absorb this lesson—if not in your heart, in your head. How to negotiate with them. How to give them what they want sometimes. How to let them win. Others deserve to get what they want just as much as you do. You said you believed that. Do you?”

  Heath said nothing.

  “I didn’t ask if you felt happy about it or if you liked it. It’s called a cognitive moral conscience. You don’t have to feel things to know they are true. Do you agree, Sam, on principle, that others deserve to win occasionally?”