Sibs

by F. Paul Wilson

  She found her slippers and was about to slip them on when she caught a glimpse of the sole of her left foot.

  It was filthy.

  She checked the right and found the same. The bottoms of both of her feet were covered with dirt. Not house dirt, but outside dirt.

  Yard dirt.

  But she'd showered right before bed last night. Her feet had been clean, she was sure of it. This wasn't possible, unless…

  A chill stole over her. Jill's dream. What if it hadn't been a dream? What if Jill had really come looking for her and she hadn't been here? But where had she gone? Outside? Barefoot? That was crazy!

  Crazy. Dr. Gates had said to let him know if anything strange happened—blackouts and things like that. Did he mean sleepwalking, too? Kara had never done that before. At least that she knew.

  What's happening to me?

  Probably nothing. Probably just a reaction to the stresses of the past week. But if anything like this happened again, she was going to be on the phone to Dr. Gates immediately. As much as she disliked the man, he had a head start on any other shrink as far as this case was concerned.

  As Kara put her slippers on and reached for her robe, she realized that the day had suddenly changed. The morning was no longer as bright. The buoyancy she'd felt on arising had vanished, replaced by a leaden weight of uncertainty. The Apple no longer called to her. She sensed it was going to be a very long day. And an even longer night.

  ▼

  4:20 P.M.

  "You're spending an awful lot of time on this jumper, Harris."

  Rob had been expecting this. He was surprised he'd been allowed to carry it this far. But the time had come and now he was sitting across the desk from Detective Lieutenant James Mooney, chief of Midtown North's detective squad, readying an explanation. Mooney's office was a walled-off cubicle furnished with a standard issue green metal desk. He had a window, but like all the other windows in the precinct house, it was covered with steel mesh. Late afternoon sunlight strained through the mesh.

  Mooney himself was a balding, jowly, overweight bulldog who usually had half a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth. He seemed tough until he began speaking—he had a tendency to whine. But he did manage to keep the precinct's detective squad under tight control and yet remain approachable.

  Rob had pulled the weekend along with Mooney. The lieutenant liked to use his Saturdays on duty to close up all the open files that he could.

  Rob said, "There's a possibility she didn't go out that window on her own. She may have had a push."

  "Forensics doesn't think so."

  "Forensics has been wrong before."

  Mooney removed the cigar to sip from his coffee mug, the contents of which had come from the bottle in his bottom drawer. Specks of ash fell from the cigar's cold tip onto the manila folder that held the paperwork of Kelly's case.

  "I read your report, Harris. You've got one very disturbed girl here, under psychiatric care, on schnozz, who jumps naked through a twelfth floor window from a room where Forensics says there's no sign of a struggle. The M.E. says her body shows no signs of a fight, except for one love bite on her shoulder. We've got people with their heads blown off waiting for their perps to be found. Don't waste your time with this one. Close it!"

  That was precisely what Rob was trying to avoid.

  "I think we're missing something here, lieu," he said. "I've got a gut feeling that this psychiatrist is involved somehow."

  "Anything concrete?"

  "No, but—"

  "Then close it."

  "One more week, lieu. That's all I want. I'll squeeze it in between the DiGilio and Stern cases."

  Mooney's eyes narrowed as he looked at Rob.

  "You got something personal in this?"

  "Nah," Rob said, leaning back in his chair and hoping he was convincing. Mooney didn't like his cops getting into cases where they were personally involved. "It just interests me, you know? Ever have a case that got under your skin and made you itch?"

  Mooney's eyes got even narrower. His whine became more pronounced.

  "You ain't thinking of writing a book or any shit like that, are you?"

  Rob laughed. "Hey, lieu, you've read my reports! What do you think?"

  Mooney stuck the cigar back in his mouth and smiled.

  "Yeah. You've got a point there. But Christ, every other guy in the department seems to be writing a book!"

  Rob nodded. Ever since Bill Caunitz, a former detective with Mooney's rank and position, began hitting the best-seller lists and appearing on Good Morning America, a lot of guys were trying their hand at fiction, but not with much success.

  "Give me another week, lieu. If I can't prove foul play by then I'll close it myself."

  "You'd better. And don't come back next week with some sky blue theory. I want hard stuff or we close. Got it?"

  "Got it."

  Rob knew Mooney was hoping he'd find nothing. The lieutenant liked grounders—open and shut cases. If Kelly Wade's case remained a suicide it would be closed and forgotten. But if it became reclassified as a murder it stayed open until solved. Unsolved murders were never closed, and that could mean filing semiannual DD5 Supplementary Complaint Reports into eternity.

  Rob took the file and returned to his own desk in the squad room. It was the same color and style as Mooney's, only older and more dented. A few phone message slips on his blotter. None from Connie. He wondered why he felt relieved. Another love affair down the tubes. It was getting to be a habit.

  He picked up the sheet with the notes he'd made on that lawyer yesterday and tossed it out. Ed Bannion checked out okay: a tax attorney with no record. Still… one nervous guy. Rob uncrumpled the sheet and slipped it into the back of Kelly's file, then went over the new information he'd dug up on Dr. Gates—or rather, Lazlo Gati.

  It hadn't been easy. Little Lazlo's immigration papers said he was seven years old when he arrived in the United States. He took the oath of citizenship at age 21 and had his name changed to Lawrence Gates that same year. Beyond that, Rob had come up blank. Then he'd remembered Doc Winters' passing remark about an older brother and sister who'd died in West Virginia a while back. A department contact at a Wheeling newspaper faxed him a couple of articles. The first to come through was three years old and concerned Marta Gati's death in a fire that gutted her house. The circumstances were deemed suspicious, especially since the young handyman and the maid had disappeared. Interesting, but it told Rob nothing about Dr. Gates. Then another article came through, a few years older than the first, concerning the death of the senior Gati sibling, Karl, an independent mine owner who suffered a fatal heart attack.

  Rob hit paydirt in the second article. It contained an interview with Karl's sister, Marta, wherein she chronicled the family history. A fascinating story.

  The Gati family had run one of Hungary's major mining concerns since the turn of the century. Somehow, through bribery and political influence, they managed to survive the Nazi occupation with all six members alive and the family fortune hidden away nearly intact. When the communists took over, however, they decided to flee. They gathered up all the gold and jewels they had squirreled away before the war and headed for the border. Mama and Papa Gati sent the kids across first. They were supposed to follow soon after but they never showed up. The children later learned that they had been captured and shot. Karl, the oldest of the three brothers at twenty, took over as head of the family. There was no opposition. Lazlo was just a boy at the time, and Marta and the other brother, Gabor, both suffered from unspecified but apparently disabling birth defects. The article mentioned that Marta was confined to a wheelchair.)

  Karl turned the gold and jewels into cash and brought the family to the United States. He settled them in West Virginia where he invested their money in the familiar business of mining. He did very well, moving from comfortably well-off to extremely wealthy. Lazlo was accepted at NYU premed and moved to New York, taking the sickly Gabor with him. They all fel
t Gabor could get the best care in the various New York medical centers when the need arose, but apparently he died anyway. Marta was proud of her younger brother, Lazlo—she never referred to him by his American name—who was now a respected new York psychiatrist. And now that Karl was dead, Marta was all alone in the big house he had built for her, but she was not afraid. She had a loyal staff to take care of the place for her.

  Rob shook his head as he folded the glossy fax sheets and slipped them back into the folder. Some loyal staff! The place burned to the ground a few years later, taking her with it.

  He had one more slip of paper on the Gati family: a copy of Gabor Gati's death certificate, dated eight years ago.

  Immediate cause of death: cardiopulmonary collapse;

  secondary to: overwhelming infection;

  secondary to: multiple congenital defects.

  So, Dr. Lawrence Gates' older sister and both his brothers had all died suddenly a few years apart, leaving Gates as the only heir to a considerable fortune. How convenient.

  This was all a sidebar, though. There might or might not be something fishy there, but it had no bearing on the Kelly Wade case, at least none that Rob could see.

  He had the file cover half closed when the signature of the attending physician on the death certificate caught his eye. He looked closer, blinking. No, he was wasn't mistaken. The signature read:

  Lawrence Gates, M.D.

  Now that might not have been illegal, but it sure as hell was irregular to have one brother sign the other's death certificate.

  Rob decided he'd better have another talk with Doc Winters about his former resident.

  February 15

  5:33 A.M.

  She was awake.

  And as soon as she realized it, Kara threw down the quilt and top sheet and felt the soles of her feet. She couldn't see in the predawn gray, but they seemed okay. She snapped on the bedside lamp and looked.

  Clean. Thank God, they were clean!

  The sense of relief brought her close to tears.

  She'd never paid much attention to washing her feet, it was just part of her shower routine. But last night she'd washed them carefully, inspecting them again before she turned out the light. They'd been clean.

  Sleep had been a long time coming, kept at bay by the nightmare possibility that sleep might release another someone within her, might allow that someone to use her body. No matter how often Kara dismissed the idea, it crept back. Exhaustion finally overpowered apprehension and she drifted off.

  But it was okay, now. Her feet were clean. They had been spotless last night, and they were spotless now.

  She hopped out of bed. Her muscles ached from the aerobic and Nautilus work-out she'd put herself through at the gym yesterday. But it was good pain. Constructive pain.

  She took a deep breath. Sunday. This was going to be a good day. She'd been too tense to do much writing yesterday. But with the early start she was getting now, she'd make up for that today.

  She padded to the bathroom to brush her teeth and throw some water on her face. The medicine cabinet over the sink was open. Jill must have been up during the night and not pushed it closed firmly enough. She grabbed the toothpaste tube and slammed the door shut.

  And stared.

  Someone had written in lipstick on the door's mirrored surface.

  Kara felt the toothpaste slip from her fingers as she stood there and trembled. It took all her strength of will to keep from screaming. She leaned on the sink and steadied herself. She had to be calm. She had to control this situation. Most of all she had to protect Jill from it. She couldn't let Jill see the writing, and she couldn't let Jill see her mother like this.

  Forcing her hands to be steady, Kara took a handful of tissues and began to rub at the letters. First they smeared and merged, and then with increased effort they began to fade. When they were gone and only her own ashen, frightened face showed in the glass, she carried the wad downstairs to the kitchen garbage.

  As she stood in the kitchen, she felt off-balance, physically as well as mentally, as if she were tottering on the brink of some sort of breakdown. It would be so easy to give in to the impulse to run screaming from the house, to lose herself in panic, to exhaust herself in blind flight. But there was Jill to think of. And there was the overriding realization that she could not run from this.

  She went through her purse and found Dr. Gates's card. It was early and it was Sunday, but she had to call him now. She had to do something, make an attempt to speak to someone who knew about these things, even if it was only to leave a message on his answering machine, tell him that she was falling apart and ask him what she could do about it.

  "Dr. Gates' service," said a woman's voice after three rings.

  A real person! An answering service! They'll know where he is!

  "Hello, my name is Kara Wade, I'm a patient of Dr. Gates' and I need to reach him immediately. Can you connect me?"

  "I'm sorry. Dr. Gates is not available for the weekend. He'll be picking up his messages tomorrow morning. Dr. Fleischer is covering any emergencies. Can I have him call you back?"

  No, that wouldn't do. Only Dr. Gates would understand the situation and know she wasn't hallucinating. She thanked the operator and hung up. She'd have to wait until tomorrow.

  Delusions… hallucinations… she walked over to the kitchen garbage pail and stared at the clump of red smeared tissues. Still there. She touched it. Still very real.

  She glanced up at the clock over the sink. Ten to six. It was a long, long time until tomorrow morning. But she could do it. She could make it. She could handle this until then.

  ▼

  11:35 P.M.

  Kara sat staring at the TV. A repeat of one of the old black and white Avengers episodes was on channel 12, but she wasn't paying attention. It had been a long day. She was emotionally drained and exhausted. Her body cried out for sleep but the prospect terrified her.

  No sleep.

  Sleep was a luxury she couldn't afford. Sleep was when you lost control. So the answer was to stay awake all night. She had coffee, she had the television. Jill was peacefully asleep upstairs. Kara would stay down here, and stay awake.

  Janine. The name had plagued her all through the hellishly long day. Writing had been impossible because she couldn't stop thinking about Janine. If indeed there truly was a Janine inside her, where had she got the name? Since her unconscious had presumably created Janine during Kara's childhood, where had it dug up a name Kara had never heard as a child? Or at least did not remember hearing. Maybe the source of the name was locked away with the personality that bore it.

  But another question haunted her: Did Janine really exist? Or was what had happened here these past two days a part of her own reaction to Kelly's death? She clung to that explanation. She had to.

  She could probably clear it up with a simple phone call to her mother. Or could she? What could she say? Mom? Did Dad rape Kelly and me on a regular basis when we were kids?

  No way.

  Shuddering with revulsion, she got up and poured herself another cup of coffee, then settled herself on the straight-back wooden chair and tried to lose herself in the irrelevance of a three-decades old British television show.

  It beat thinking.

  February 16

  5:45 A.M.

  Kara realized she had been asleep.

  She jumped up from the chair and stared frantically around the living room. Good God, it was morning already! Body by Jake was on the TV. How long had she been out? Was anything different? Had she done anything while she was out? She checked her feet—clean. But that hadn't meant anything yesterday. She scanned the kitchen. Everything seemed the same there except for—

  —the carving knife on the counter.

  Feeling weak and sick, Kara stumbled toward the kitchen.

  Please, God, no blood. Don't let there be blood on that blade.

  There wasn't. The blade was clean. It was Dad's ancient carving knife. It had been ne
w when it was a wedding gift thirty-five years ago. He'd honed it so many times over the years, standing before Thanksgiving turkeys, Christmas hams, and summer steaks, that the blade was now half its original width. Kara had never thrown it away. It had always been special. Now she didn't want to touch it. But she did.

  As she lifted it gingerly and carried it to the sink, she saw that the point was broken. She didn't remember ever noticing that before. What could—?

  "Mom?"

  It was Jill's voice from upstairs. She sounded a little frightened. Probably looking for her. Kara hurried to the foot of the stairs.