With a look of relief, Ricky Weston stepped away from Dee Dee. Her eyes trailed hungrily after him. When they fell on me, though, her teeth clenched, and her face turned red. She was not happy to see me.
"Where's the kid?" Frank said when the Lieutenant was close enough.
"About twenty yards into the marsh," Weston said. "He's got the gun in one hand and a knife in the other. He has the second knife stuffed into the waistband of his pants. We've been trying to talk to him, get him to drop the weapons. He's not having any of it." He turned his attention to me. "Says he'll to talk to you and no one else."
"Any idea why?" I asked him.
Weston shook his head. "Won't tell us."
"Did his mother talked to him?"
"Once, when she got here. The kid started screaming, telling her to go away. He wanted nothing to do with her. She gave up, a little too easily if you ask me." Weston snorted. "Since then, she's been too busy looking for a boyfriend to worry about her kid. The lady's a piece of work."
If Dee Dee Belle had designs on Ricky Weston, they had just crumbled to dust. She wouldn't be finding a relationship with him.
"Has he said anything?" I asked.
"Oh, he's talking, but not to us." Lieutenant Weston suddenly looked uncomfortable. "It's like he's having a conversation. He turns his head when he talks, like someone's standing next to him. He talks, and then waits, and talks again. It's the creepiest thing, Doc."
A breeze kicked up, carrying Doug's voice from the marsh. His talk was gibberish, his words a mishmash of subjects, a combination of exclamations and pleadings that made little sense. I thought back to the boy I'd met less than two weeks ago; the boy who could kick ass in Connect Four and chew bubble gum like a pro wrestler. Doug Belle was more tormented than I thought.
"I need to talk to him," I said.
"First thing's first." Frank motioned to another cop, who brought over a Kevlar vest. Frank handed it to me. "Put this on."
"He's not going to shoot me."
"The kid's got a gun, Paco. No jackie, no talkie. Them's the rules."
I reluctantly slipped on the bulky vest. I expected it to be heavy, like carrying sacks of sand, but it weighed no more than a winter jacket. "Satisfied?"
Frank looked at Weston. "Take us to the kid."
We headed toward the marsh. Dee Dee Belle, who had been glaring from her position several yards away, saw us move and stormed over. She'd covered about half the distance when she lost a slipper, almost fell, and had to wave her arms to retain her balance. In the process, her robe slipped off her shoulders and the hem fell into the mud. She jerked it up. The embarrassing display didn't improve her mood as she stopped in front of us.
"What's he doing here?" No one had to ask who she meant.
"Your son asked for him," Frank said. "Doctor Jordan agreed to come. He wants to help."
"He's not Dougie's therapist anymore."
"He's also here at my request."
"I don't want him near my son."
"Stand aside, Mrs. Belle," Frank said.
Dee Dee Belle didn't budge. "He's already done enough damage. Get him out of my sight."
An anguished howl came from the marsh, followed by a series of high-pitched yips like coyote calls.
"Frank," I said in warning.
"I hear you." Frank pulled himself up to his full height. "Lieutenant Weston?"
"Sir."
"Remove Mrs. Belle. If she resists, put her in cuffs. If she fights you, lock her in a car. Under no circumstances is she to go near the marsh. Got it?"
"Yes, sir." Ricky Weston took Dee Dee Belle by the arm. "Ma'am, if you'll please come with me."
Dee Dee Belle stiffened. “Take your goddamn hand off me!"
Ricky Weston began dragging her away. When she tried kicking him, he pulled the cuffs from his belt and snapped one open. It made a sound like knuckles cracking.
The dramatic gesture got Dee Dee's attention. She stopped struggling. With a glance back at me, she said, "This is your fault. I'll make sure you lose your license over it."
Apparently finished with her threats, she allowed herself to be led away. The woman was probably already plotting how to get Lieutenant Weston into her bed.
Good luck with that.
Frank and I proceeded to the marsh. He stopped about twenty feet from the edge.
"Here you go. Do that voodoo you do best." He put a hand on my shoulder. It felt like a final, "gee shucks" gesture from the warden before he sent you to ride the lightning. "Help the kid, but don't risk your life. Keep a safe distance. If it looks like he's gonna start spreading lead, this session ends and we try something else."
"What does that mean?" I said, stepping forward. "Something else?"
"We take him down. There are two sharp shooters trained on him."
I froze. "He's a kid."
"He's a kid with a big ass gun, and it's my job to make sure he doesn't hurt anyone." He hesitated. "I know this sounds cruel, but a suicide's safety comes last. Doesn't matter if he’s a kid, if he looks like he's going to shoot, we stop him." His voice softened. "I hope you understand."
"I understand," I said. "I just don't like it."
With the protective weight of the vest bolstering my courage, I went to talk to my patient. Ex-patient, actually.
The marsh was part of a vast wetland stretching from Portage Lake along the Clancy River to Lake Michigan. A popular spot with hunters, the marsh was also dangerous. Poisonous snakes swam in the murky waters. Bears hunted along its shores. Wander in too far, step in the wrong spot, and you sunk up to your knees in soft, mucky earth. More than a handful of inexperienced hikers had been found dead because they couldn't get free and had suddenly found themselves at the bottom of the food chain.
Tonight the waters were calm with patches of ice floating on the surface. Twenty paces out, illuminated by the police lights trained on his thin body, Doug Belle stood waist-deep in the water. Like a waif in a Dickens story, he wore a grimy shirt of alternating blue and red stripes. Mud speckled the skin on his arms and spread like leprosy across his face. His right hand held the gun, a nickel-plated semiautomatic with half the barrel submerged in the water. Clutched in his left fist was a Bowie knife almost as long as his forearm. The hilt of a smaller knife stuck out from the waistband of his pajamas.
Head tilted back, eyes closed, he swayed back and forth, like he was listening to a symphony only he could hear.
I called out, "Doug? It's me. It's Doctor Brad."
He stopped swaying. His cracked lips peeled back until all of his teeth showed. "The distance was too great. Some things cannot be changed, no matter how smart you are."
He sounded exhausted, and I wondered when he had last slept.
"Doug, open your eyes. Look at me."
"In the end, it was easier to go through than across." He chuckled, a horrid, gurgling sound. "Did I say easy? Moving worlds would have been easier, yet I succeeded. I found the way." His face twisted in revulsion. "And how does she reward me for my work? She sends me here. Here!"
"Do what, Doug? What did you do?"
"I saved them," he said. "Only later did I realize I'd saved the wrong ones."
"The wrong ones?"
"Her people. That bitch, I should have killed her."
My heart sank. Doug was in worse shape than I'd thought. His speech was filled with confabulations, a mixture of fact and fantasy some psychotics used to build structure around their delusions, and it signaled a deeply disturbed person. How had he deteriorated so much in such a brief amount of time?
Doug suddenly lifted the gun. It looked like a cannon in his slender hand. He pointed it at the sky and shouted, "I deserved better from her!"
Alarmed, I stepped forward. Marsh water sloshed over my shoes, soaking my feet. "Doug, put the gun down. I can't help you if you don't put the gun down."
A loon sounded in the distance. Doug tilted his head. "It was our greatest accomplishment. Some said it cemented our genius. Ask the Str
anded, though, and I bet you'd hear a different story. I doubt they'd be so charitable."
The stranded? It sounded like a proper name, and psychotics rarely had the wherewithal to create specifics like names. Their delusions rambled too much.
"Doug, put down the gun and we can talk. I want to hear more about this success."
He chuckled again and finally opened his eyes, now deep-set and bruised. He wiped at the snot running down his nose. "She'll come for you. Like an unstoppable force, she will come and she will gather you together like the cattle you are and she will destroy any who don't fit her purpose. What she'll leave behind will be unrecognizable, a distorted shadow of who you were and the world you knew. In the end, your lives will be forfeit. If you had souls, I would pray for them."
I tried to parcel out truth from delusion. "Who will come?" Certainly it couldn't be his mother.
A tremor like a seizure shot through his body. He shook his head violently, like he was denying a truth. This went on for several more seconds, and when he looked back at me, his anguished expression had been replaced with one of stark terror. "Doctor Brad, I can't take it. I can't listen to the voice anymore. It tells me things. Bad things. It tells me about her." He raised the knife to his tear-streaked face. "I don't want to hear any more."
"Doug." I took another step into the water. "Listen to me. I can help you, but you need to let me try. Together we might be able to stop the voice, but we can't until you drop the weapons."
His hand trembled as he said, "It's too late. She's here, and no one can stop her."
"Are you talking about your mom?" Given the woman's relentless narcissism, my next question should have been asked much earlier. "Did she hurt you?"
Doug made a whining sound, like a wounded puppy. "Don't make me tell you. Please, don't."
"I won't make you do anything." I kept my voice calm despite the alarm coursing through me. Doug’s distress was escalating. I didn't want him to lose it completely.
Doug's hand wavered. I thought for a moment he might drop the knife. Then his grip tightened, and he pressed the blade against his cheek.
"I'm a kid, right? A kid. School taught me about stranger danger, but what if the danger lives under the same roof with you? What’re you supposed to do then?"
"The lotion bottles in your room,” I said, a horrible suspicion coming to mind. “More than one boy would need. What did she do with them? Did it have something to do with story time? Is that why you would get so upset."
I heard a scuffle behind me, and Dee Dee Belle shouted, "You shut up about that, Dougie! That's Mommy time, and these filthy people have no business knowing about Mommy time!"
Frank barked an order. More shouting, this time from Lieutenant Weston. He was ordering Doug's mother to get into a patrol car.
"You're my good boy!" she yelled. "I love you more than anything! You keep quiet! You—"
A car door slammed, cutting her off.
Doug let out a broken sob. "I told her to stop, but she wouldn't. She kept going and going." He drew the knife down his cheek, drawing a line of blood. It dripped onto his shirt and into the water. "She'll never stop."
I charged into the water. Doug leveled the gun at me. "Don't make me kill you."
"Don't shoot!" I called out, more to the police than to Doug, and stopped. "Don't shoot," I repeated, more softly. "We can talk from here, Doug. Just put down the gun. I don't want anyone getting hurt."
"She wanted me to be him," Doug said, tears mixing with the blood. He moved the knife to the other side of his face. "She wanted me to be my father. She said she missed him so much, but at least she had me."
The blade skittered along his cheek, slicing open his skin. Blood flowed.
"She'd touch me while we read, told me it was good for us to be in love. When she finished the story, she would smile and put me in her mouth. Told me it was a reward for being good. I cried and told her to stop. She said I needed to behave—to be her good boy—or she would tell my friends what we did. Then she told me we should, you know, do it. That it would prove our love."
He paused. "The lotion was for me, because we couldn't d-d-do it like real adults. She said it would be a sin. We could only do it from behind, in her behind. The lotion helped me fit." He brought the blade to his throat. "I threw up the first time, right onto her back. She made me keep going. She turned me into something dirty, and I hate her for it. But more than my mom, I hate the other one. I hate her for what she's doing, and for what she's planning."
I risked another step toward him. If I could get close enough…
"Doug, please, you don’t have to do this. Anything can be fixed if we work together."
Doug's hand tightened on the hilt. "You know who I mean, don't you?"
Another step. "Put the knife down."
"It's her, Doctor Brad," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "It's the Green Queen."
I froze. How could he know about the Green Queen?
"Don't let her get you!" Doug cried, and jerked the blade across his throat.
I charged forward, threw my arms out to stop him, but I was too far away. The blade bit into his skin, peeling it back like lips to reveal pale cartilage and muscle. Blood fell in a red sheet down the front of his shirt. His other hand clenched involuntarily and the gun fired. The round flew harmlessly into the night. Then his legs folded, and he sank into the march.
By the time I reached him, blood had stained the water crimson. The paramedics arrived. They tried to save him, worked on him there in the water, but it was no use.
Doug ended up on a gurney in the back of the ambulance, a sheet pulled over his pale face.
From the back of the patrol car, Dee Dee Belle screamed and pounded on the glass. No one paid her any attention. For a narcissist, it was the worst punishment imaginable.
Frank came up and draped a blanket over my shoulders. I nodded my gratitude, and he walked away without saying a word.
* * *
Frank had an hour or two of unpleasant paperwork staring him in the face. He attacked it with the appetite of a man rich in anger. A child had died on his watch. Suicide or not, he would blame himself. I had no doubt he would experience nightmares about this night for years.
Sitting in Frank's Charger, I found my own demons scratching at the door with long, bloody nails.
For a therapist, work long enough in the field and you eventually had to deal with a suicide. Someone who placed his care in your hands, who trusted you to make his pain go away, found himself ultimately with nowhere to go, overwhelmed by despair on a scale no human should have to suffer, but some did. Despite your best efforts, your patient's depression worsened. The vegetative symptoms, the ones you could see like sleeplessness and poor appetite and withdrawing from others, became a standard of living—a prison cell more formidable than any created with concrete and steel—and along with it, a crushing sense of hopelessness, a bleak view of the future where there was no out, no chance for improvement, no reason to continue living.
In my years of practice, Doug Belle was the third patient to end his own life.
He was also the youngest.
Turning my back on the circus of rescue workers, police, and now the news media, I turned the car's heater on full, and cried for the young boy for whom I had grown so fond.
* * *
With my eyes now dry, I opened up the recording app on my smartphone and dictated what had happened. Whether or not Dee Dee Belle followed through on her threat to sue me—unlikely, given what her son had publicly proclaimed—I wanted a record of the events leading up to Doug's suicide.
Resting my head in my hand, I recalled as accurately as possible the gibberish Doug had spoken, his rambling statements about success and punishment and going through rather than across something. Perhaps I could make sense of them later, once I had examined them in light of his mother's sexual abuse.
I hesitated at his mention of a Green Queen, debated leaving it out, but ultimately decided to keep it
.
But more than my mom, I hate the other one. I hate her for what she's doing, and for what she's planning.
Don't let her get you.
Toni had also mentioned a Green Queen. It had happened last Saturday, after I'd noticed Thumbkin had been moved and asked her about it. Her expression had grown strangely distant as she gazed at the doll. When she spoke, I hadn't recognized the voice as completely her own.
"The Green Queen...she wants something, you know, something important...she wants us, and with us, she wants the world."
The car grew cold despite the heater. How could my patient and my wife, two people who to the best of my knowledge had never met, share the same delusion?
Perhaps it wasn't a delusion. Perhaps they had, in fact, known one another. He was a student, and she a teacher.
I pulled up Toni's number on my phone. It didn't take long for her to answer.
"Honey, do you know a student named Doug Belle? Eighth grader? He's new to the district."
She hesitated. "Where are you?"
"Rock Mills, remember? My patient?"
"Who's with you?" She sounded cautious, almost afraid.
"No one," I said. "I'm sitting by myself in Frank's car."
"The chief's not there?"
"Barry Trumble?" I said, referring to Rock Mills's head lawman. "He's probably somewhere nearby, but I don't see—"
"No," she replied. "Not Barry. I'm talking about Chief Couttis. Is he there?"
I frowned. "Why would Gordon Couttis be here?"
"Look around, will you? Do you see him?"
"Wait. Why am I looking for Couttis?"
"Just do it!"
Maybe it was her tone, or maybe I'd had enough drama for one night, but whatever the reason, her words grated on me. "No, I won't. Not until you tell me why you think Emersville's chief of police would be here, forty miles from his town, at a crime scene unrelated to his duties, in the middle of the damn night. Better yet, why are you worried he'd be here?"
I listened to dead air for too long before she said, "Oh god, your patient. He died, didn't he?"
"Yes." I leaned forward until my head rested on the steering wheel. "Killed himself, not ten feet in front of me. Cut his own throat."
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