Cruel Minds (18 page)

“And who knows what inside. I’m going with my instincts on this one and they’re telling me that shed could be important.”

“Your instincts or your ego?” Jerome said. “We have no idea what’s going on here. People are missing and dead. It’s not worth the risk, Helen.”

“So you won’t come with me? It could be research for that slasher movie role.”

Jerome dug his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry but Emily’s right. It’s almost dark and we need to be inside.”

“That’s disappointing,” Helen said. She turned and tapped Melody on the shoulder. “You’ll do. Let’s go find a torch.”

Before Melody could refuse, Helen snatched up her hand and pulled her through the gate.

Looking over her shoulder, she said, “I’ll be quick. We’ll be safe.”

The garden closed in on Emily.

“I can’t decide if I really hate that woman or admire her tenacity.”

“I’d say sixty-forty,” Jerome said. His expression soured as he stared at the house, then up at the sky.

Clouds were rolling in fast, their edges stained black like mould.

Emily squeezed his hand. She took in a breath, pushing down the anxiety blocking her throat.

“Don’t worry, I’ll do the talking,” she said.

Together, they walked towards the house.

P
amela was waiting for them in her living room. She showed them to the couch, then perched on the edge of the armchair. Her skin had been drained of its vitality and was now the colour of spoiled milk. Her fingertips dug into her knees as Emily spoke.

“We’ve looked all over Meadow Pines but we can’t find Sam. Perhaps Helen is right. Perhaps he did head off to go looking for...”

The words dried up in Emily’s throat. She glanced sideways at Jerome, who was staring intensely at the rug.

“Where are Melody and Helen?” Pamela’s voice trembled with panic.

“They’re ... doing another quick sweep before it gets dark.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on. How could Sam just disappear? Why would he go off without telling me? It’s so irresponsible.” Pamela brought her hands together and entwined her fingers.

“There’s something else,” Emily began. A mild wave of nausea washed over her as she struggled to assemble the right words. How did you share awful news? Did you soften it with kind words? Did you build a safety net of
it’s going to be alright
and
I’m sure your daughter will come out of this alive
? Or did you plunge in headfirst? Rip out the heart, tear the last strands of hope like hair from the scalp? No matter which way you chose to tell it, the end result would always be the same. Emily chose the quickest route.

“We found the Land Rover,” she said, forcing the words out of her mouth. As she described the broken window and the blood inside, she watched Pamela’s face grow impossibly white. She left out the drag marks she’d found in the grass—the image it conjured was worse than that of the blood.

Pamela grew very still.

“There’s more,” Emily said, hating herself as she pulled Oscar’s wallet from her pocket. But it had to be done. Meadow Pines felt unsafe now. Dangerous. If Pamela was holding something back, then everyone needed to know about it.

She held up the card. “Oscar was a private investigator. We think he was here looking for the man in the photograph, the one I described to you. Someone’s taken that photograph, Pamela. It’s gone.”

Pamela sagged, the strength that had been keeping her upright suddenly spent.

Emily leaned closer. “Who is he Pamela? Who is the man from the picture? Why was Oscar looking for him?”

Now slumped in the armchair, Pamela rested her chin on her chest. She lifted her hands and covered her face. She remained like that for the longest time, unmoving apart from the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Then, without speaking, she pulled herself out of the chair. She stood still for a moment, swaying from side to side. Then, crossing the room, she slipped through a door in the far wall.

Emily exchanged worried glances with Jerome.

“Do you think we should check on her?” he asked.

“Give her a minute.”

Emily felt wretched. She shut her eyes for a moment, trying to conjure up Kirsten Dewar’s soothing tones.
Imagine you are in a calm place. Somewhere you feel safe
. She almost laughed. Meadow Pines should have been that place. Drawing in a calming breath, Emily held it for a few seconds, then exhaled.

She opened her eyes and found herself staring at Pamela’s bookcase. She reached out and squeezed Jerome’s arm.

He frowned. “What are you doing?”

Emily was off the sofa and in front of the shelves in a second.

“The Happiness Hall of Fame,” she whispered.

She pulled the photograph album from the second shelf and brought it to the coffee table. Sinking to the floor, she opened it up and turned to the first page. Jerome scooted forwards.

“What have you found?”

“Melody told me that at the end of every weekend, Pamela takes a photograph of her guests as a kind of record of the happiness they find at Meadow Pines.”

Emily scanned the photographs in front of her. Each one showed a different group of people. Some stood in the garden while others assembled in the dining hall. All had wide smiles, relaxed shoulders, and bright eyes.

Jerome looked up from the album to the door.

“She’ll be back soon,” he said. “Let’s not tip her over the edge.”

Emily turned a few pages, then stopped. “Look.”

The group shot at the top had been taken on the back porch. Melody stood at the centre of the back row, her face beaming. Dates were handwritten beneath the photograph:
8-10 August, 2013
.

Emily continued to flip the pages, the memories of each weekend reflecting in her eyes. Then, she froze. Her lips pressed together until they were almost white.

He was standing on the edge of the front row, a few, noticeable inches separating him from the rest of the group. Where his fellow guests flashed their teeth at the camera, his lips remained flat and still beneath unreadable, dark eyes. And although the picture was slightly grainy, the scar above his left eyebrow was still visible.

Emily caught her breath. “It’s him. It’s the man from Oscar’s picture.”

“His name is Franklyn Hobbes.”

She and Jerome looked up in unison to see Pamela standing in the doorway, a wad of tissues in her hand. She’d been crying and had done a poor job of covering up the fact. For a few seconds, she hovered in the door, swaying back and forth. Then, she drifted into the room and seated herself on the other side of the table. She took the photograph album and turned it to face her, pointing to the picture with a trembling finger.

“It was December 2014,” she said. “We usually close for three months during winter. It’s hard to heat this old house. Costly too. But we were having such a mild start to the season that I decided to keep Meadow Pines open for an extra month. Marcia wasn’t particularly happy about it. Winter is our only real time off. But we’d had an unusually quiet summer and so any extra income was a blessing. That may sound very materialistic of me, but as much as I view Meadow Pines as a sanctuary, I have no illusions about it also being a business. Without money, Meadow Pines falls by the wayside. It’s a sad fact but such is the way of the world—even on its peripheries.”

Emily stared at the man’s picture, transfixed by his eyes. They were black and lifeless like doll’s eyes.

“Back then, Meadow Pines was a different place,” Pamela continued. “How much do you know about Vipassanā?”

Emily and Jerome shook their heads.

“Buddha discovered that we can remove suffering from our lives by understanding our true nature. Vipassanā means exactly that—to see things as they are. It helps us to step back from the situations we experience, to observe them unfolding rather than to react or attach to them. Because all forms of attachment, whether good or bad, lead to craving. And craving leads to misery. Just think about your reluctance to hand over your phone, Jerome. Your attachment to it left you feeling threatened. Its removal left you feeling miserable because its presence brings you a perceived kind of happiness.

“Yeah, and then its theft left me feeling pissed off,” Jerome muttered.

Emily waited as Pamela considered her next words.

“A Vipassanā retreat isn’t easy: ten days of Noble silence in which you cannot speak to or make eye contact with other participants; deep meditation sessions that begin at four-thirty in the morning and end at nine at night. There can be periods of intense highs, followed by intense lows. But it’s all part of the path to the realisation of the true nature of things.”

“And what is the true nature of things?” Emily asked.

“To truly understand the answer in its purest form, you must take the journey to awakening yourself. In its simplest form, the answer is this: Nothing is permanent. Our minds, our bodies, everyone and everything around us are in constant change. All of our cravings, our aversions, our addictions are birthed from basing our happiness on things that change. You buy the latest TV and you feel great. Then a newer model comes along and suddenly your TV isn’t good enough. Or you meet someone and you fall in love. You put your faith in the idea that you’ll spend the rest of your lives together. But then the relationship suddenly ends, and it takes your happiness along with it—not because of the love you shared but because of the attachment you developed to the idea of permanence.”

Memories of Lewis flooded Emily’s mind. She pushed them out.

“Basing your happiness on temporary things is like building a house on a crumbling cliff—it will only lead to disappointment. Happiness cannot be found in the past, nor can it be found in the blank uncertainty of the future. No, true happiness can only be found within the now and within ourselves. This is what Vipassanā teaches.” Pamela paused, looking up from the album to gaze at Emily. “Let me give you an example. I want you to both take a moment to think about chocolate.”

Jerome looked sideways at Emily, then back to Pamela.

“Should we really be thinking about food right now?” he said.

Pamela smiled as she continued. “To the vast majority, the smell and taste of chocolate are overwhelmingly delicious. The endorphins that are released as we eat it generate feelings of pleasure and a sense of well-being. But because those pleasurable sensations only last for a short while, we’re soon left with a craving to experience them again. Vipassanā meditation teaches us to observe the sensations of the body without reacting to them. We eat the chocolate, we observe the pleasurable sensations it gives us, but we do not crave more.

“For those new to the practice, it can be difficult. Having an itch that you can’t scratch can be truly maddening. But Vipassanā teaches you to merely observe the itch, to wait and see how long it takes to disappear. And it
will
disappear. As we observe our bodily sensations while neither clinging to them nor pushing them away, we train our unconscious mind at the deepest level to change its habit of reacting. We see things as they truly are. Because we are not our minds. Of course, there’s much more to the path to awakening. A Vipassanā retreat is only the beginning.”

Pamela paused to run her fingers over the photograph album. When she looked up again, the whites of her eyes were tinged with pink. She gazed past Emily and Jerome, towards the window. Outside, darkness was falling fast. Clouds were fattening, threatening to burst.

“As enlightening as this all is, what does any of it have to do with Franklyn Hobbes?” Emily asked.

There was a long pause before Pamela spoke again. “The first time Franklyn came to us, taking a vow of Noble silence didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary for him. It was all I could do get him to tell me his name when he checked in. He seemed pleasant enough. Harmless ... but the type of person who’d spent his life being invisible. He settled in quickly and he seemed to take to the technique easier than most, especially for someone who had never been to a retreat.

“By the end of the ten days, I can always see a significant change in my students. Not just in the words they say or the thoughts they share, but in their physicality. It’s as if they are seeing the world through new eyes.” She pushed the album back towards Emily and Jerome. “With Franklyn, I saw nothing. I don’t doubt he underwent changes—it would go against Nature’s Law for him not to—but his eyes were black and empty, as you’ve seen for yourself.” Pamela pulled her knees up to her chest. “I didn’t expect to see him at Meadow Pines again. But four months later, there he was. The change in him was dramatic, to say the least.”

“What do you mean?” Emily asked. She tried to look away from Franklyn’s picture but those two black hollows were dangerously hypnotic.

“It was as if a different person had stepped into Franklyn’s body,” Pamela said. “Gone was the quiet young man who barely spoke a word, and in his place was a man filled with agitation and nervous energy.” She paused, her shoulders heaving. “I should have put an end to it there. I should have stopped him from participating ... but in my infinite wisdom, I thought that the retreat would help him to work through whatever was troubling him. It wasn’t until the second time he broke Noble silence that I learned what he’d been doing.”

The air in the room grew heavy, pressing down on Emily’s chest.

“As I said, the Vipassanā technique is not easy. It requires extreme focus, which comes from hours of practice. Ten days of intense, silent meditation is a revelatory experience but also an exhausting one, which is why a period of at least three months between retreats is recommended. In the four months since we’d last seen him, Franklyn had attended six other Vipassanā retreats.”

“Six?” Emily repeated. “Why would he do that?”

“As students of the Vipassanā technique begin to successfully detach from sensations, to instead observe them as they pass through, extreme feelings of peacefulness often occur. At first, this can feel like an intense high. But highs and lows are still sensations, and as with all sensations, if we become attached our ego will crave for more. As students work through the process, they soon come to understand that chasing the perfect high is pointless. There
is
no perfect high because there
is
no permanence.