“It was Ricky.” Drummond’s voice had lost its paternal warmth.
There was only one person Helen knew for certain had been in the Pittock house without permission.
“I talked to Ricky in jail.” Wilson’s eyes darted toward Helen, then quickly returned to her target. “He did slash your tires. He followed you to the Cozzzy Inn, and he slashed your tires because he thought his father was having an affair with you. He had followed his father to the Cozzzy Inn before, and he was angry that Marshal would date another woman so soon after his mother’s death. Only it wasn’t you.”
Helen felt Drummond’s hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he whispered.
“It was Carrie. All those nights Marshal was out of the house, it was Carrie Brown he met at the Cozzzy Inn. The clerk said an older man met a young woman with a leather jacket. He said he thought it was probably a college girl, that they always paid cash. Marshal lied about Ricky’s alibi. Ricky was home the night Carrie was killed. It was Marshal who wasn’t.”
“Adair, give me the gun,” Drummond said. He reached around Helen toward Wilson.
“Move and I will blow your fucking head off.”
“You don’t want to do that,” he said. “Just give me the gun.”
Wilson said nothing. She squeezed the trigger a fraction of an inch. “Put your hands on your fucking head, Marshal. Walk back out that hallway. One stupid move and I swear to God I will kill you,” Wilson yelled.
I want her. Even now, I want her. Helen drew back, straightening her shoulders. She could not let desire sway her judgment. She could not let beauty decide, at this last instant, whom she trusted. She knew what was right. She knew where the path diverged, where she and Eliza parted ways. She had stood on that crossroad, and Eliza had called to her from a distance, from the shadows, from among the beautiful, horrid things that lived on the dark side of the mind. Beautiful like Wilson, with her wild eyes the color of ozone. So beautiful, even now, she took Helen’s breath away. But Helen had survived at that crossroad because she took the other path. It had to be Wilson who was mad, not Drummond. Wilson with her gun and eyes ablaze.
Drummond looked at Helen. “Do something,” his eyes pleaded.
“Give me your gun.” Helen’s voice was cool. “You trust me. Drummond trusts me. Let me hold the gun and walk us out. We’ll walk outside. You can talk to me. I’ll listen. Just hand me the gun.”
Wilson’s eyes were wide. If she let Wilson keep the gun, someone would die. Helen took a breath.
“I love you, Adair,” she whispered. “Trust me. I’ll protect you. I’ll protect us.” She took a step forward. “Give me the gun, and we’ll be together. We’ll walk outside. We’ll call the police. You and I will be together. Always.”
She could see the muscles in Wilson’s arms begin to tremble.
“No,” Wilson said. “You’ll never love me.”
“You have to give me a chance.” Helen held out her hand. “Give me the gun.”
****
The gun was lighter than Helen expected, like a terrifying toy. She held it awkwardly, pointed downward. She did not know what would happen if she accidentally bumped the trigger. She wanted to release the magazine and drop it on the floor, but she did not know how. Her heart raced. She gasped.
Drummond took a step closer.
“Helen, watch out!” Wilson yelled.
Suddenly, there was an explosion. Reeling in the empty seconds after the blast, Helen could hear nothing. She felt agonizing pain in her left ear, as though someone had stabbed her eardrum. Her hand was empty.
Wilson lay on the ground, her legs and arms shaking in hideous, stiff, rapid–fire jerks. The floor around her was wet with urine.
In the other ear, she heard Drummond hiss, “Fucking dyke.”
He grabbed Helen by the elbow. He was holding Wilson’s gun. He had wrenched it from her hand in the time it took Wilson to say, “Watch out!”
Now he pointed the gun at Helen’s head. “One move, one word, and I blow your fucking head off.”
Despite his warning, Helen reeled toward Wilson. She opened her lips, although she did not hear the scream issue from her mouth. Wilson was motionless. Helen tried to run to her side, to press her hands against Wilson’s chest.
“You killed her!” Helen sobbed.
The enormity of the situation gripped her. “Marshal?” Helen pleaded. “What are you doing?”
Helen felt the butt of the gun crack against her temple. She dropped to the ground. The pain was excruciating. She could see only red. She felt Drummond grab her arm, and half–walk, half–drag her down the hall, away from Wilson’s body. Then she passed out.
Chapter Forty-nine
When Helen woke, she was strapped down. Her legs were bound together, her arms fastened to her sides. Above her, the ceiling was low. Droplets of water clung to the rough surface. She turned her head, wincing at the pain in her temple. The walls beside her were carved out of stone, like the root cellar in her grandmother’s New Hampshire home. On the other side of the room, a propane lamp rested on a metal cart. Beside the lamp lay an array of objects, the flotsam and jetsam of the asylum. An old saw. A syringe. Then it hit her: they were not refuse. They were tools, carefully laid in a row.
“You’re awake,” a familiar voice said from behind her head. “What a quick recovery. You must be in very good health.”
Drummond moved into her line of sight. He looked like himself, handsome and composed, his salt–and–pepper hair neatly shaped around his face. His sport coat hung on the back of a folding chair. His shirt was spotless.
“What are you doing?” Helen asked. She tried to shake free of her bonds. She surmised she was on a gurney. The flimsy metal rocked with the motion of her body, but the restraints held her tightly. “Let me go!”
She screamed for help, expecting Drummond to silence her with a fist.
Instead, he simply regarded her, his expression thoughtful.
Finally, he said, “Josa Lebovetski would be so unhappy. I haven’t kept it at the right temperature, the right humidity. It’s not archival at all.” He stood up and took a folded piece of paper out of the pocket of his jacket. He unfolded it and held it over Helen’s face. “No one knows where this room is. Scream all you want. You’re twenty feet underground.”
“You can’t do this to me. Someone will find me.”
“They won’t be looking. You were so traumatized by that little stage production in your office, you ran away.” His voice was conversational, almost friendly. “We talked about it for a long time, you and I. And you wrote such a nice resignation letter, complete with a forwarding address. Someplace much nicer than that slum Carrie rented.”
“Marshal, you can change your mind. You’re not well. This isn’t your fault. You don’t have to do this.”
Helen’s mind raced. She briefly entertained the notion of a hallucination, but this was nothing like the visions of Eliza. The pain in her head told her this was real.
“You don’t even know what I have in store for you,” Marshal said. He moved in front of the table with the lantern, casting a shadow that engulfed the room. “Carrie was so sweet.” He spoke like he was only half–aware of being overheard. “She had such pretty breasts. Young women always do. I bet Adair’s are starting to sag, aren’t they?” He turned to face Helen again. This time his voice was hard. “What is she, thirty? Thirty–five? She’s nothing now, though. She’s dead. Your little dyke lover. I could have told everyone, Helen, but I didn’t. It didn’t even matter. You were so discreet, slipping away to her house after you fucked in the theater.”
Helen felt a deeper chill run through her bones. He had known. He had watched. He had been in the theater. In her house.
“Don’t look surprised. There are many ways in and out, if you know the campus.” He had been toying with something in his hand. Now he lifted it up. A syringe filled with milky liquid. “Carrie wanted it. You never understood that. You were so sad that
she died. Poor little Carrie, but she wanted it.” He held the syringe up to the light.
Helen had to keep him talking, anything to stop the syringe in his hand.
“You’d be surprised what you can still find in here,” he went on. “Drugs. Tools. Equipment. When they closed down the asylum, they ran. No one would stay here if they didn’t have to, not even the doctors.”
“Tell me about, Carrie,” Helen said. “I want to understand.”
Drummond snorted. “She was a whore, but she wanted it like I did.” He took a step closer, the syringe still in his hand. “She wanted to cut her legs off. She’d been fantasizing about it since she was six years old, rubbing her twat and thinking of cutting off her legs. Ricky knew it, but Ricky is weak. He said it was weird. He said it scared him.”
In the shadow cast by the lantern, she could no longer see Drummond’s face. Terror gripped her. He was probably going to torture her, and then he was going to kill her, There was nothing she could do. Even when she saw Eliza lying in her own blood, her eyes ripped from their sockets, she had thought to stop the bleeding, to find a towel, to call someone. There had been a possible action and then another, to carry her from the horrifying discovery into the bleak busyness that follows a tragedy. Now, there was nothing.
Drummond laid the syringe beside her. The glass rolled against her leg.
“I was going to take her to South Africa. Other countries understand. They’re honest. Money buys everything here, and it buys everything there, but in Africa you don’t have to negotiate so much. I found a doctor who would take off her legs for a price, send her back once she healed. She wanted to do it.”
Helen watched him turn back to the table and pick up the saw. The teeth glinted in the lamp light. She thought she might be crying, but couldn’t tell. The terror was so intense it ripped her mind from her body. I’m not here. I’m not here.
But she was.
The part of her mind that could still reason, forced the words out of her mouth, “Why didn’t you send her to South Africa? Why kill her on the train tracks when she wanted the same thing you did?”
“You were so weak.” The comment seemed directed at Carrie. “You wanted your forum, your friends. You wanted to be normal. Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Ha! You were just as sick as I was. You weren’t normal. We can never be normal.” Drummond refocused on Helen. “I wanted to fuck her stumps.” His face contorted. He no longer looked recognizable. “She wanted to live with it, with her legs and her need. But I can’t live with it.”
“What can’t you live with?” Helen asked.
“I need it.” He was breathing through his mouth. “I needed her stumps.” He stood, slamming his fists down on the gurney beside Helen’s head. “Father can’t hurt me anymore.” He paced the small room, muttering.
Helen tried to see how his distraction could work to her advantage, but her arms and legs were fixed. She tried to jerk her body enough to throw the syringe to the floor. It didn’t move.
Drummond’s pacing slowed, then stopped. “Now I have you. No one can stop me, and nothing can take you away from me.” He picked up a band of surgical rubber from the table. “After I cut off your legs, I can keep you alive for days… maybe years.”
“No, you can’t,” Helen said. “They’re going to remodel this building. They’re going to find me. Dead or alive. They will find me, and they’ll find you. It’s not worth it. If you let me go, you’ve only committed one murder. The courts will look at it like that. Only one. You can stop right now.”
Drummond picked up the band of rubber and slid it under one of Helen’s legs and between her bound thighs. He tightened it and tied a knot. He pinched the fabric of her pants above her pubic bone, laughing to himself. Then he reached for the other band.
“No. I couldn’t stop at one. I couldn’t stop at Anat. She’s just like you, only I didn’t think to tie off her legs. She bled out in minutes. Carrie. Lebovetski. And don’t forget my loving wife. It was so sad how that trailer fell on her. Ricky still hates me for not catching it, not warning her, not knowing it was going to tip. But I pushed it. And then of course there were all those whores. No. I couldn’t stop at one, and the courts won’t give me any reward for good behavior.”
Helen felt the rubber cords cutting into her legs. Her feet were already numb. Drummond picked up the syringe again, held it upright, tapped the air bubbles and pulled back the plunger.
****
With all the strength she had, Helen wrenched her body in its bondage, rocking the gurney just enough that for a second her hand touched the wall. She pushed off with her fingertips, praying she’d have enough strength to topple the gurney. It swayed. For one heartbreaking moment she felt the wheels reclaim their place on the floor. Then one of the wheels hit an uneven spot. The gurney tipped. Helen slammed to the floor, still tied down. She collided with Drummond’s legs, sending him sprawling. The syringe shattered against the floor.
In the silence that followed, Helen heard a voice so faint it could have been in her head.
“I could read your fortune for a dollar.”
A second later, another voice hushed the first.
Then, “She’s down here. I saw him take her down.”
“Where?”
The second voice sounded like Thompson. She screamed. Drummond leapt to his feet and reached for the gun, but Helen didn’t care if he shot her. She screamed and screamed, drawing the voices closer.
With a crash, the door swung open. From one side of the frame, Helen heard Thompson’s voice, clean and loud this time.
“This is the police. Drop your weapon, and put your hands on your head.”
“Sully, get back upstairs.” It was Giles, hiding on the other side of the open door. He raised his voice. “We’re prepared to shoot. We will open fire.”
Helen looked up. She could not turn her head far enough to survey the whole room, but she could see Drummond’s feet. His stance was rigid. He had not moved.
“He has a gun,” Helen cried out.
“Put your gun down,” Thompson yelled. “If your hands are not on your head when I enter the room, you’re dead. You can’t escape. The building is surrounded. Marshal Drummond, you have a chance to save your own life. Walk slowly out of the room with your hands on your head.”
“I’m coming out.” Drummond’s voice held the calm of a college provost. “Please, don’t shoot.”
As Drummond took a step forward, he came into her line of sight.
“He’s still armed,” she yelled.
Drummond took one more step forward.
Thompson and Giles appeared simultaneously on either side of the door. Drummond raised Wilson’s gun. Gunshots reverberated against the stone walls. Drummond dropped to his knees. For a moment, he froze in that position like a penitent sinner. Then he fell, face forward, onto the floor.
Giles pointed his gun at Drummond’s head, while Thompson kicked the Glock away and put handcuffs around Drummond’s wrists.
“Is he dead?” Giles asked.
“He’s going to be if the paramedics don’t get here fast. I’ll stay here,” Thompson said.
“Come on,” Giles said to Helen. “I’ll get you out. You’re going to be all right. It’s over.”
Helen felt the rubber tourniquets released from her legs, then the cuffs that held her legs and arms. Giles did not even offer to let her walk. He picked her up in his enormous arms, and carried her like a child.
Chapter Fifty
Giles accompanied the ambulance to the hospital, asking repeatedly if the paramedic could give Helen something.
“Not until we check for neurological damage.”
“Are you sure?” Giles kept asking. “Look at her.”
Helen was aware of someone sobbing breathlessly, but it didn’t feel like her. Maybe it was someone who looked like her or maybe there was someone else in the ambulance.
At the hospital, the staff protected her from the barrage of reporters. The doctor gave her a
battery of tests, and then a painless injection that sent her into deep sleep. She dreamed of Eliza, not the horrific tableau of her suicide, just Eliza as she remembered her from their young adulthood, a sullen, stringy–haired woman drifting through life. In the dream, Helen called out to her. Eliza kept drifting, like a piece of gray cloth carried along by a current. Helen tried to run alongside her sister. Her legs were heavy and Eliza kept gaining ground, growing father and father away. “I have to find Adair,” Helen kept saying. “Where is Adair?” In the dream, Eliza knew, but was too preoccupied to tell her. Helen felt waves of despair as Eliza drifted father. “You have to help me. I’ve done everything for you!” Helen screamed. “I gave you my whole life!”
In the dream, it was cathartic. I’ve been waiting years to say that.
When Helen woke, pulled to consciousness by a nurse checking her blood pressure, she felt none of the relief from her dream world. Eliza was dead. Adair was dead. Both of them were dead because she hadn’t listened. She sat up.
“How are you feeling?” The nurse had tiny, nimble fingers, no thicker than the fine cornrows arranged across her head. “Can I bring you anything?”
“What time is it?”
The woman checked a small, digital clock mounted on the wall beside Helen’s bed. “About 10:00 a.m. You’ve been here overnight.”
“Am I hurt?”
“The doctor wanted to keep you for observation.”
“Can I go?” Helen asked.
“Lie still, and I’ll get the doctor. He’ll clear you to go home.”
The nurse disappeared. Slowly, Helen assessed her body. Her head still pounded and her temple was painfully tender. She felt stiff and bruised but nothing more. She lowered one of the bed rails and swung her legs off the bed. Glancing around, she saw that someone had brought her clothing. It was probably Margie. The sweatshirt on top of the pile bore a puff–paint likeness of the statue of Liberty. When she unfolded it, she read “God Bless America.” There was a small bathroom off her room. Helen stepped inside and changed.
The Admirer Page 26
