“Your father and uncle know, and I’m aware of it as well. I apologize – I didn’t realize you didn’t know.”
“But ... but you have to tell me, Dr. Beringer. I have to know.”
He let out a breath and relaxed again, folding his hands over the file as he observed me, before continuing on in his calm fashion.
“Why do you have to know? What would it change?”
“Everything.”
He looked at me as he waited for a better explanation, but I was afraid that I didn’t have one. My father’s persistence that I see a psychiatrist to fix whatever odd behaviors I was exhibiting and Karl’s concern that I was acting far too much like my mother would take on a new meaning if she had suffered from something besides for depression.
“What are you concerned about, Enim? Can you tell me?”
The music that I would never admit to came to the forefront of my mind, and I shook my head quickly.
“No, I just ... I mean, if it’s something bad ...”
“If it’s something bad, then what? What will it change?”
“It’s just ... it’s just, sometimes I wonder why you come here, Dr. Beringer.”
“What do you mean by that? We’ve discussed that before.”
“I know, it’s just ...”
As I trailed off, I found myself wondering who Beringer was outside of the makeshift office: I tried to imagine him in his proper one off of the island, or amongst friends, or at home heating his dinner up on the stove, but the images wouldn’t come. It was unsettling to think that someone I felt so comfortable with was also someone I knew nothing about.
“It just seems like such a waste,” I said. “Coming all the way out here if I’m ... when I’m ...”
“If you’re what?”
“If I won’t get better.”
The correlations drawn between me and my mother seemed all too apparent, and yet I had never felt more distant from her. I wanted Beringer to tell me that I wasn’t like her, and that I wouldn’t become her, and to negate every insinuation that Karl and my father had made over the past few months altogether, but I was afraid that if he did so it would also break the last bit of trust that I had for him or anyone else.
“I don’t think that you need to get better, Enim,” Beringer said quietly. “I think that you have something that you need to move through. But you, as a person, are whole and intact. I don’t think there’s anything that needs fixing or changing.”
“But what if that’s not true? What if I’m like her?”
“Why would you think that you’re like her?”
“Because,” I said. “I’m just not like anyone else is.”
“Just because you’re not like others doesn’t make you like her.”
“No, I know, but ...”
Even without mentioning the haunting music or the sleepless nights, or the way that the water waved up at me from on high, it would be impossible to explain the closeness that I felt with my mother. There was something in the way that she understood things about me that even I didn’t understand about myself and the way that she knew what I was feeling before I even expressed it that couldn’t be put into words coherent in the office air.
“...but I don’t feel like anyone else, and she never did either, so ...”
“I see,” Beringer said. He stared at me for a long moment, searching for something unspoken in the reflection of my eyes, before adding, “But I don’t know that you’re as different as you think, Enim. I see quite a bit of myself in you.”
“No you don’t.”
I spoke without thinking, and didn’t quite realize the discourtesy of the statement until it had touched the air.
“Sorry, Dr. Beringer – I didn’t mean ... I just meant that you’re ... you’re ...”
“I’m what?”
“Normal.”
He smiled as though I had told him a joke, and his eyes lit up even though he was leaning out of range of the lamp.
“I’m glad that you think so, Enim. But, quite honestly, I find myself wondering if we’re not very much the same. And that, more than anything, is why I come here.”
Though not convinced, I didn’t dispute his claim. When the meeting was over and I had paused at the door to the Health Center to lean my head against the glass, my reflection flickered back at me in an outline in the black. As it wavered beneath the artificial lights, it seemed ridiculous to think that Beringer’s statement was true, but it seemed more so to believe that he would lie to me.
I was halfway through the Center Garden when I heard a noise behind me. Wrapping my fingers around the straps of my bag, I slowed to a halt as the sound of footsteps crunching in the snow feet from where I stood became audible.
“Who’s there?”
I turned around and addressed the darkness in as firm a voice as I could muster, but it shook from the cold regardless. The branches of a low shrub rustled and the footsteps crunched loudly again.
“I know you’re there,” I called. “Come out.”
The sound stopped and for a moment I thought that it had just been a large animal. Then, however, the shrub rustled again and a large shape appeared from behind it. It was barely visible in the darkness, only a huge outline of something three times my size. I stumbled backwards over the ice as it emerged and slipped on the frozen path and fell to the ground. My shoulder broke my fall painfully.
“Hi, Enim,” came a familiarly unwelcome voice.
Clutching my arm, I looked up at the other student and narrowed my eyes.
“Thomas? What are you doing?”
The larger boy shrugged in a noncommittal answer. I swore and stumbled to my feet, slipping again under the weight of my bag, and finally managed to stand. My clothes were covered in snow.
“What are you doing?” I repeated. I tried gingerly to move my shoulder back into its usual position only to find that I was unable to. I clenched my teeth in pain and irritation. “Why were you hiding in the bushes? Were you following me?”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Most people wait out in the open.”
I twisted my neck and managed to wriggle my arm out of the strap of my backpack to ease the pressure on my shoulder, but it still throbbed painfully beneath my cold fingers.
“I wouldn’t have had to wait out here if Jack wasn’t always around,” Thomas said. “It’s hard to talk to you when he’s there.”
“And you thought it would be easier to talk in the middle of the garden in the dark? You can’t just go sneaking up on people.”
“I wasn’t sneaking …”
“You were certainly doing a good job pretending, then.”
He mumbled something unintelligible and scraped the ground with his toe. The snow parted to show the frozen soil beneath it.
“I can’t hear you, Thomas.”
“I just wanted to remind you that there’s a math test next week,” he said.
“I know. I didn’t forget – you’ll get the answers, just like last semester.”
“Well, I – I was just going to say ... if you didn’t want to write the answers down, you don’t have to.”
I looked at him warily.
“What’s the catch?”
“There’s no catch,” he said unconvincingly. “I mean, I was just thinking that you could help me study instead.”
The strap was cutting into my hand as I did my best to hold it off of my shoulder. The throbbing pain had spread to both my back and my head, and it was only growing worse in the cold. Looking at Thomas, I had never felt quite so weary.
“Help you study?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Right,” I said. “Well, no thanks. Copying the answers down is actually a lot easier.”
Turning from him, I made my way out of the garden and crossed to my residence building. I heaved myself up the stairs before struggling to get the door open. Still clutching my shoulder, I finally undid the lock and stumbled over the threshold into the room. Jack looked
up from a mountain of newspaper clippings as I did so.
“What happened to you?” he asked, his words barely coherent due to the top of a highlighter that was clutched in his teeth.
“Thomas.”
“What?”
“Porter.”
“Porker? What’d he do, beat you up? I knew I should have come to look for you when you didn’t show up a half-hour ago …”
“He was just lurking outside of Beringer’s,” I said. “I fell on the ice.”
“You should really get better shoes.”
“I know.”
“What’d he want, anyhow? Permission to sit in on your sessions with Beringer? Get a psychiatrist’s advice on why he doesn’t have any friends?”
“No, he just wanted to remind me that there’s a Calculus test next week.”
“Oh, how kind of him.”
I sighed and dropped down to my bed, carefully pulling my coat off and freeing my hurt arm, and frowned at the already-forming bruise beneath my shirt and sweater. It certainly wasn’t broken, but as it was my dominant arm it would make writing my assignments all the more arduous. I looked at my backpack distastefully and tried to think of a way out of doing the assignments piled within it.
“Wish we could just get rid of him,” Jack said, flopping back down on his own bed and staring up at the ceiling. The papers swooshed around him and a few floated to the floor.
“I’m open to ideas.”
“Short of throwing his body in the ocean, I’ve got nothing – sorry.”
I paused midway through picking up a textbook to finish my homework. The meeting with Beringer had left me with the same unpleasant suspicion that Karl was keeping something vital from me about my mother, and I no longer felt any obligation to adhere to his strict rules.
“What are you up to?” I asked Jack, dropping the book back down.
“Nothing much ... Just looking things over.”
I knew that he had undoubtedly spent hours going through the papers in the hopes of finding something more incriminating that would point directly to Barker. In the week that we had been back, I had not been very helpful in his search given the amount of homework I had received. His excitement from discovering the meaning behind the list of girls’ names was quickly petering out as the answer to what it all meant came no closer.
“Well, we’ll find something,” I said. “Barker can’t be that intelligent.”
I slid off of my bed and went over to his; Dictionary inched over to make a place for me. As I sat down, Jack glanced over at me.
“What – now?” he asked. “Don’t you have homework?”
“Does it matter?”
“What about Karl’s hyper-vigilance?”
I picked up one of the newspaper clippings and turned it sideways to decipher a note that Jack had scribbled there.
“Well, he did say that I should have more hobbies.”
“Somehow I don’t think that this was what he meant.”
“True. He thinks I spend too much time in my room. You know, with you.”
“I bet he does,” Jack returned wickedly. “I hope you fill his mind with all sorts of ideas of what goes on in here.”
“I do my best to keep him in the dark – I figure he can use his imagination.”
Jack cackled.
“So what hobbies does he hope you’ll pick up?” he asked, leaning back against the window and fishing in his pocket for a cigarette. He stuck it in his teeth and lit it. The light from the flame warmed his face in an orange glow. “Racket ball?”
“Undoubtedly something masculine.”
“You should tell him you want to learn ballroom dancing,” Jack said delightedly. “Or figure-skating. See what he says.”
“He’d have a fit.”
“Definitely.” Jack turned his head and exhaled a breath of smoke to his other side. “But really, what does he want you to do? What’s Karl’s idea of a normal hobby?”
“I don’t know. He probably wants me to join the Science Club or something. Make some new friends. Talk about girls.”
“We talk about girls,” Jack said. “Albeit, dead ones – but girls all the same.”
“He’ll be so pleased to hear that.”
“You should call him first thing in the morning and let him know.”
“Will do.”
He grinned momentarily before looking back at his mess of papers, and his expression fell into a troubled frown.
“I wonder if he’d know how to convict someone without proper evidence,” he said. “Since Barker’s obviously got himself covered.”
“Not that kind of lawyer,” I reminded him, but when I caught his expression, added, “There has to be something that would prove Barker did it.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know – a record saying when he left the school on the nights that the girls disappeared that showed the times matched up.”
“But he could probably just forge them.”
“Maybe someone saw him leaving late at night? His secretary?”
“Staff members are almost always out of here by seven, unless there’s an activity that runs over or something.”
“Right. What about how he killed Miss Mercier? He can’t have – you know – cut her up without getting blood on himself. Maybe there’s still some on his shoes or something ...”
“I doubt it. He’d probably be smart enough to throw the clothes that he was wearing away.”
“Something in his house, then? The towel that he dried his hands on after getting home, or some blood on the shower drain, or ...”
“I doubt there’s anything in his house.”
“He must be hiding something, even if it’s not in his house. I mean, everyone’s hiding something.”
I glanced over at my bed where numerous prescription bottles were hiding beneath the mattress and thought of the knife that Jack kept in the spine of a binder and the cigarettes and whiskey he hid in a carved-out textbook. Barker undoubtedly had something to hide: it was just a matter of finding it.
“Maybe you’re right,” Jack said after a moment. He scratched the side of his face absently and continued to stare blankly ahead of him as he thought. “Even if he’s gotten rid of all the evidence, he might still have trophies.”
“Trophies?”
“Yeah, you know – trophies. Killers almost always have trophies.”
I gave him a blank look that compelled him to explain.
“Locks of hair, pieces of clothing, newspaper clippings of the victims’ deaths – that type of thing.”
I scrunched up my nose at the thought of Barker’s office wall, with its multitude of honors and framed certificates, and imagined another wall dedicated solely to framed locks of hair. My stomach squirmed.
“And you think Barker just left that sort of thing lying around in his living room?”
“Of course not – what would his wife think?”
“Barker has a wife?”
The idea had never even occurred to me. I couldn’t imagine what kind of woman had consented to live the rest of her life with the likes of him.
“Of course he does. Pigs are allowed to get married, after all. But what I’m saying is that he’s not about to leave incriminating evidence around his house in the case that she stumbles upon it and starts asking questions or if the police do decide to do their job and search his house.”
“Then where do you think he’d keep them?”
“I doubt he’d hide anything here,” Jack said. “I mean, there are a couple of locked rooms in the school, but the janitors have to check them regularly. Besides, it wouldn’t be safe to leave anything incriminating in one of them – they’re too easy to break in to.”
“What about his office, then?”
“Isn’t that too risky? His secretary’s there, and everyone comes and goes from it ...”
“Not really,” I argued. “His secretary has her own office, and no one’s ever invited into Barker’s unless they’re
in trouble – and I doubt they could snoop around while he’s yelling at them.”
Jack looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Yeah, but ... do you really think he’d hide something there?”
“Why not? That’s where he keeps all his other trophies.”
The cigarette hanging from the corner of Jack’s mouth drooped and a large piece of ash fell onto his pants. It burned through the fabric before he noticed and brushed it away.
“Right – so he might be hiding something in his office,” he said after a moment, “but where does that leave us? If there’s one place on this island we can’t break into, it’s there.”
“True.” As he slipped into a troubled silence, I added, “But you’ll think of something. You always do.”
Yet though he stayed up for a large portion of the night, he had not come up with anything by the morning or the next several days. I carved out time from my schedule to help him, but I couldn’t bring myself to constantly neglect homework assignments just to go over the same information, and by mid-February I had stopped participating in the late-night assessments of newspaper clippings altogether. While his frustration wore thin, my mind did as well: the lining of my skull seemed to be receding as it was eaten away with memories that could never be put to rest. More than once I found myself reaching beneath the mattress for the medication so that I wouldn’t have to spend the night awake and letting the pills ease me into an undisturbed sleep.
As I finished an essay on a Saturday morning, Jack returned from replenishing his supply of cigarettes. He stood in the doorway with a foul expression that I attributed to the horridly cold weather, but the shaking of his hands didn’t seem to be from the long walk to town.
“What’s wrong? Out of Parliaments?”
There would be no chance of the weekend going well if he was nicotine-deprived on top of his already inclement mood. He gritted his teeth and pulled something from his pocket to show me.
“What’s this ...?” I began to say, but the section that he had ripped from the newspaper stopped me midsentence. The article was so brief that it was just a strip of paper in my hand. I read it quickly. Seventeen-year-old Riley Waverly never returned home after school on Thursday. Her parents say that they had argued earlier that morning. Police speculate that she’s gone to a friend’s house on the mainland and will return in a few days’ time …
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 22
