Denial (29 page)

The anesthesiologist was moving more quickly, his face mask billowing with panicked words.

I thought again about Kathy's sister, lost in the fire that destroyed the family's home.  Could any drama mimic that tragedy more closely than the one I was watching?  A child was in danger, likely of suffocation.  The kid was
inside
and needed to get
outside
.  But this time Kathy had the knowledge and the wherewithal to deliver that child to safety.

She took a scalpel off the surgical tray and, with no apparent hesitation, cut an eight-inch, transverse incision below the woman's navel.  She sliced through the underlying layers of tissue, set the blade aside, then reached deep into the wound with both hands.  A moment later her hands emerged, clutching a screaming infant covered in blood.

I turned around and headed back up the stairs and out of the amphitheater to wait in the doctors' lounge.  It was only a matter of minutes before Kathy walked in.  She froze when she saw me sitting on the bench in front of her locker.

I stood up and shrugged.  "They evaluated me in the emergency room, but I passed for sane."

"Doctors make mistakes all the time."

"How about you?"

"Sure.  But not in your case."

"Did Trevor put you up to it?"

"He has bigger things to worry about.  He could be locked up for life."  She started to walk past me to get her things.

I caught her arm.

"Let go of me!"  She struggled to free herself from my grip but couldn't.  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.  "You didn't really think I would sit still so you could enjoy your little whore, did you?"

"What?"

"Did you think I was going to let you get away with that crap again?  Haven't I been embarrassed enough?"

"You actually did this out of pure jealousy?"

"Humiliation would be more like it."

"And having me committed was your idea of revenge."

She shook her head.  "Don't you get it?" she sputtered.  "You're out of control.  You need to be locked up, for your own good."

"No.  I don't get it."

She looked away and shook her head.  "It doesn't really matter anymore."  She pushed past me to her locker.

I walked over to the elevator and pressed the
DOWN
button.  The door opened.  I stepped inside and turned around.  Kathy kept her back to me.  "You can pick up the rest of your things at the house anytime," I told her.  "And leave your key."

*            *            *

I took a taxi to the Rover, then started the drive home to Marblehead.  I needed some quiet time to get focused again.  In my private practice I had urged dozens of families to use the courts to force loved ones into detox, and part of me still wanted to believe that Kathy had begun the commitment process out of concern for my well-being, however misguided.  But that vision of her motivation didn't square with the morbid jealousy I had seen in her face.  I had to take her at her word:  She had gone to court in anger, to
control
me.

I reached into the glove compartment, grabbed a Marlboro and lit it.  I inhaled deeply and held the smoke as long as I could.

So why did I still hesitate at the thought of packing her things?  The answer was the same one I had given to countless patients who puzzled over why they felt bound to toxic relationships:  Being controlled, not loved, was what I had known as a child.  I was, as a professor of mine used to put it,
lost in a familiar place
.  It was no wonder Kathy and my mother had become allies.

Not that I could give myself more credit than I gave either of them.  I knew that losing a childhood home and a younger sister could leave a girl terrified at any hint of chaos.  I knew a tragedy of that magnitude could kindle intense possessiveness in relationships.  Yet I hadn't offered Kathy any real security.  And I hadn't dug deeply enough into her past to help her overcome her fears.  Far from it; I had held her down during her tantrums, restraining her until her emotions burned themselves out.

The truth was that neither Kathy nor I had done for one another what Rachel had done for me — helped me to embrace the grief and hatred in my heart, thereby lightening it.  Why, I wondered, was help of that kind so rare in the world?

I sucked in another half inch of my cigarette and slowed the car as I passed a new billboard at the Lynn line.  It read
LYNN.  LYNN  CITY OF WIN!
  I smiled.  The slogan was part of the Redevelopment Authority's campaign to give the city a facelift.  We had all learned the real jingle growing up on its squalid streets:  Lynn, Lynn, city of sin.  Never come out the way you went in.

I tossed my butt out the window and turned onto Atlantic Avenue.  A minute later I took the right onto Preston Beach Road and pulled into my driveway.  I sat there a few moments, troubled by something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.  I shielded my eyes from the sun and squinted at the house.  Then I realized what was bothering me.

The door to the house was open a few inches.  I hadn't slept home the previous night, and my memory of leaving with Levitsky to find Emma Hancock was sketchy.  Maybe I hadn't pulled the door tight.  The wind off the ocean had blown it open plenty of times.  Still, I felt uneasy.  I reached between the seats for the fur handle of my hunting knife, but it wasn't in its usual place.  I got out, keeping an eye on the door to the house, and crouched by the side of the car.  I ran my hand under the seat.  Nothing.  I scanned the carpet.  No luck.  I figured some scavenger had stopped to check out the Rover where I'd left it by the side of the road and had grabbed the only thing that wasn't screwed down.  Or maybe Malloy had doubled back to confiscate any ‘sharps’ I could use to kill myself — or him.  I stood up.  I had my penknife, but that wouldn't do me much good, unless the intruder had a painful hangnail I cold help him with.

I walked to the rear of the car, eased open the tailgate, and fished out the tire iron.  I started up the flagstone path to my door, intentionally scuffing my boots on the ground with each step.  If somebody was in the house ripping off paintings, I wanted to give him every chance to get out.  I was insured for theft; I didn't see any reason for one of us to get killed over it.  At the threshold I rang the bell several times and shouted ‘Hello!’  There was no response.  I walked inside.

The place was a shambles.  The coffee table was overturned, with one leg broken off.  Half the curtains had been yanked down.  Kathy's collection of colored glass hearts was lying in pieces by the far wall, little dents showing where each had hit the plaster.  The oil paintings were still hanging, but the one I liked best — a scene of the Titanic going down — had been slashed.  I took a few more steps and noticed that one of the seat cushions of the couch had been cut open.  The phone was on the floor, its cord ripped from the wall.  I stood perfectly still, listening for any movement from above, but all I could hear was the distant thunder of waves rolling onto the beach.

I hadn't expected to hear anything else.  This wasn't the work of an anonymous intruder.  Kathy had obviously spun into a frenzy again — but without me around to stop her.  I figured she had come back during the night to talk things over.  I pictured her waiting for me, getting more and more furious with every passing hour, until she realized I wasn't coming home at all.  Then... this.

I laid the tire iron on the couch and started upstairs.

I hoped Kathy had confined her tantrum to the living room, but when I got to the top of the second-floor landing, I saw she hadn't.  Vases lay smashed in the hallway.  A collage of half-dead flowers and water stains covered the walls and oriental runner.

The bedroom was in even worse shape than the living room.  The oak armoire was lying on its side.  The dresser mirror had been shattered.  Just past the doorway I stooped to pick up a white satin and lace pillow I had given Kathy for Valentine's Day.  It smelled of smoke.  I turned it over and saw that the embroidered inscription,
SWEET DREAMS, I LOVE YOU
, had been burned off.  Maybe she'd lighted it on fire and tossed it into the room, hoping the whole damn house would go up.

The den seemed to have survived largely intact.  The only damage was that Kathy's collection of Trixie Belden books had been swept off the shelf and lay scattered on the floor.  I scanned the room.  The art deco bar was open, and one of the chrome tumblers was missing.  I spotted it on the side table next to the leather wing chair.  I walked over and picked it up.  It smelled of gin.  Kathy almost never drank, so a few long swallows of that might help explain her rage boiling over.  I glanced down and saw she had left Volume 1 of her Trixie collection on the seat cushion.  The spine was broken, and, as I held the book, the pages parted naturally to Chapter 19.  I started to read:

Trixie rubbed her eyes again.  Something white and feathery was seeping up around the roof of the mansion.  As she watched, it disappeared into space, but then, as a puff of wind blew up from the hollow, she could see another pale form take shape on one side of the house...

It looks like ghosts, she thought with a nervous giggle.  I guess the moonlight's playing tricks on me, and I must be sleepier than I thought I was.  She turned to go back to bed when, with a start of horror, she remembered...

"It's not a ghost," she cried out loud, wheeling back to the window.  "It's smoke... The mansion's on fire!"

I shook my head.  Between the burnt pillow and Kathy's choice of reading material, I was starting to feel lucky the house was still standing.  I wondered where she was at the moment she had exploded.  Not
physically
where, but
psychologically
.  Was she an adult, a physician, a woman with resources at her disposal, or was she the twelve-year-old who had helplessly watched her sister consumed by flames?

I gathered several of the books off the floor and arranged them on the shelf.  I reached for more but stopped, spotting a sheet of crinkled paper near the base of the standing lamp.  I picked it up.  It was notebook paper, the kind with pink lines that I remembered girls using in grade school.  The penmanship looked adolescent, too — bit, bowing characters, with hearts dotting every
i
and too many exclamation points.  From the yellowed crease, I could tell it had been folded in half a long time ago, maybe to fit inside the cover of one of the books.  It read:

Daddy—

I thought you loved me!  But you love Blaire better!  I saw you going into her room tonight.  I thought and thought and thought why.  Is it because I bleed now?

I can't help it!  It's not my fault!

Why am I being punished!?

I hate her!

Please give me another chance.

Love,

Mouse  (Remember?)

P.S.  Blaire can't keep secrets!

My hand was shaking.  I lowered myself into the wing chair, laid the sheet of paper on the side table and stared out the window at nothing.

I hadn't spent more than a dozen hours in the presence of Jack Singleton, Kathy's father.  He was a decent-looking man, though slightly underweight, who had made a fortune in textiles — producing the interwoven materials that line coats, waistbands and the collars of some shirts.  I remembered joking with him that only in a great country could a man get rich off something no consumer had ever thought about, much less heard of.  He had laughed, but tightly, a reaction I was glad for, because he rarely laughed at all.  Before I'd met him, Kathy had warned me that he had never recovered from the loss of his younger daughter, something I took to explain his aloofness from Kathy herself.  Some parents engulf the surviving child after a sibling dies; others retreat into themselves, as if they believe that declaring their love might tempt a return visit from Death.

I had missed the real drama of closeness and distance between the two of them.  Jack Singleton had violated his daughters in the most intimate way possible.  Perhaps he wasn't sure whether Kathy remembered the trauma or had suppressed it.  And he seemed not at all eager to find out.

I got up and poured myself a scotch, then walked aimlessly from one room to another.  I had the impulse to page Kathy, to tell her that I understood, that I felt, strangely, closer to her than I ever had before.

A moment later the phone rang.  I have always believed people can take different routes to the same moment and I raced to pick up the extension in the bedroom, hoping she would be on the other end.  "Frank," I said.

"Glad I found you," Paulson Levitsky answered.  His tone was grave.

"What's wrong?"

"Plenty."

I put my drink down.  "Let's hear it."

"Number four came in.  About an hour ago."

"God, no."  My heart was pounding.  "Male or female?"

"Female."

I took a deep breath.  "Same MO?"

"Not exactly.  The body was badly burned, for one thing.  But the breasts are gone.  And the groin was shaved."

"We know who she was?"

"Another dancer."

"From the Lynx Club?"

"She worked there.  She lived in Chelsea.  I got the body because of the ongoing investigation."

My vision blurred.  My legs felt short and weighty.  "Where in Chelsea?"