Dominance (31 page)

Two minutes later a thin, silver-haired man stood at the door. He looked weary, as if this was his last stop of the day. He eyed the students suspiciously and said, “Terese said you wanted to ask me a few questions.”

“Dr. Morrow?” Alex asked.

“No,” the man said, a hesitant smile breaking across his lips. “My name is Allen Bern. I interned under Morrow. He died in '91.”

Her heart stuttered. They were too late.

“But maybe I can help you?”

“We're here because of a patient Dr. Morrow was in charge of,” Keller broke in. “He would've been very young, only a boy. He was at Shining City for a short time. But we believe Morrow had a profound effect on him. His name was Charles Rutherford Jr.”

The man's eyes jumped. He knew something.

“I'm . . . I'm sorry,” he said. “I think I should be going. I don't want to—”

“Please, Dr. Bern,” Alex said. She heard her own desperation and didn't try to check it. “We've come such a long way and we just need a few answers. If you know anything about this patient, anything at all, then—”

“He lied about not being able to speak.”

Alex blinked. “Excuse me?”

“I saw Morrow with so many patients over the years,” Bern went on. “So many troubled youths came through Shining City, and Morrow was brilliant with them all. Every one he treated as his own son, as if that boy was special. Unique. But Charlie . . .”

“Go on.”

“I had just started,” Bern explained. “I was young, not long out of med school. I was still learning my way into therapy, and to me Morrow was a sort of deity. I had read his articles at university, had begun to appropriate some of his methods in my own sessions. Everything he did with these patients I wanted to replicate.”

“And did you watch him treat Charlie Rutherford?” Keller asked.

Bern nodded. “I want to say I still think of it, but the truth is I don't. I haven't thought of it for a very long time. Almost twenty years now. Maybe I wanted to put it out of my mind. To forget it ever happened.”

“What happened?”

“He was performing the Rorschach test,” Bern said. “He was showing Charlie the ink blots. I remember Dr. Morrow shuffling through the cards, the sound of them against his fingers. That was the only sound in the room, because Charlie—of course he wasn't speaking. He never spoke. He wrote his responses on a little pad Morrow had given him.”

“What did he write?” Alex asked, and glanced at Keller. The Rorschach test—they were both thinking of it. What could it mean?

Bern turned to her slowly, resolutely. His gaze held the past now, the memory heavy and fierce. “Atrocities,” the man said. “Every blot, every image was another violent detail. One was fire; the next was pain; another was blood. All of these words scratched onto the pad. Sometimes he would
copy
what Morrow showed him. Draw his own blot and then hold up the card to the therapist as if he were some sort of mirror. Then
he would smile as if he had done something grand. When the session was over I looked at Morrow and saw . . . I don't know. I saw this
distance.
He was afraid of the boy.”

“But Morrow must have seen violent patients before,” Keller said, keeping his voice calm and steady. “It would have been common at Shining City for children to come through who had that kind of temperament.”

“No,” Bern said quickly. “Not like Charlie. The other boys, even the ones with violent pasts—they were acting. Playing a role. But with Charlie you felt it was real. He had been damaged innately. He had been
turned
, somehow.”

“You say he lied about being mute,” Alex goaded the doctor. She wanted to get to the bottom now, get out of this place. She was beginning to understand why Aldiss had sent them to this private little hell, but some piece of the puzzle was still out of reach.

“Yes,” he said, his gaze drifting away and his voice softening. “This was three months after he came to Shining City. They were having another Rorschach session. They were just to the end, and Charlie looked at Morrow and said something. It was one word—we both heard it. When the boy left the room Morrow came to me, pale and shaking, and said, ‘Did you . . . ? ' Of course I did.”

“But that must have been a breakthrough,” Alex said, remembering Lydia's praise of the doctor the night before. “Morrow's work, it would have been changing Charlie. Healing him.”

“No,” Bern said quickly. “That wasn't it at all. There was something about that word—something almost
teasing.
It was then that Morrow asked to be removed from the boy's case. Charlie had come a long way but there was no question—for the first time, Morrow had failed one of his patients. But I also saw relief. He had gone inside Charlie Rutherford's mind and had seen something truly ugly. Obscene. He wanted out.”

“Did you ever see Charlie again?” asked Keller.

“No. The boy's mother came a few weeks later and removed him from Shining City. I heard she lived alone in Hamlet. A beautiful woman, so different from her son. The husband had died by then. But by then none of it mattered. We just wanted to be free of that child.”

Bern walked them out. As she moved down the hall beside the doctor,
she turned what he had said over in her mind. She thought of the Rorschach, of the photographs she had seen of the Dumant victims, of the word Bern had used:
violence.
Aldiss had wanted them to know these things about Charlie. He had wanted them to draw a line between the damaged man and the murders at Dumant.

“The word,” Bern said now. They were at the exit, and outside the sky was darkening. Close to the end now.

“What's that, Doctor?” asked Keller.

Bern looked at them with such intensity that Alex shivered. He was trying to warn her.

“ ‘Daddy,' ” Bern said. “Just that one word, the only one Charlie Rutherford ever said. “He was saying ‘daddy.' ”

Aldiss was here. He had somehow gotten into the mansion; he'd killed Frank Marsden and now Keller was in danger. She felt defenseless standing there alone in the pulsing emptiness, the only thing in the corridor the empty, looping wire. Everything else was dark.

She took a step. Another. And where were the others? Why hadn't Black or Christian Kane come to this wing to check on her, to save her? Why—

There was a sound then, a ticking noise inside the blackness.

Alex froze. It had come from the far end of the hall, beyond Keller's room.

Fear welled up inside her, forcing her to move. One step, and then another—she had to get to the far end of the hall. She had to get off this floor and down. The closest exit was there, not twenty-five feet away, and she had to get there.

Another step. She was beside the window now where Frank had stood. There was blood stippled on the wall, and something else—heavy tracks on the corridor's carpet. A black slither of blood sweeping away from her, as if Frank had been dragged away.

Alex forced her eyes away from the stain. Moved on.

She moved fast toward the steps, thinking,
He could be downstairs
right now. He could be on any floor of this house, waiting for me.
She pictured Aldiss's face, the grotesque smile greeting her in the darkness.

Downstairs now. She took the flight of steps in two leaps and then turned, torquing her body with the rail, and pulled herself—

Out. Out into the cold, where the wind sheared away her fear.

There were people on the front lawn, a group of them standing over something on the ground. A clump of something, human-shaped. A thought screamed through Alex's mind:
No. Not Keller. Not Keller.

Tentatively, she stepped forward into the crowd and looked down.

It was Frank. Someone was doing CPR on him. Others were shouting, pointing toward a bundle of dark trees a hundred yards from the dean's house. She saw Black gesturing wildly, organizing something. The man's eyes fell on her.

“Shipley,” he said. “What the hell happened up there?”

“I . . . I don't . . .”

“We saw someone running,” Black went on. “Someone came out of the house and dropped Marsden, and then he took off toward campus.”

“Keller,” Alex said. He must have been going after Aldiss.

Black's eyes flared in the half-dark. Then there was movement on the ground, and the paramedic who had been working on Marsden shouted, “I've got a pulse!”

The detective turned away. The others in the circle all looked down at the man, who was still coughing blood and reaching out. Alex saw Lucy Wiggins there, crouching beside the fallen man. “Tell me what happened, baby,” she was saying. “Please tell me.”

Black took a step toward the dying man. A wild thought burned in Alex's mind:
Go. Now.

Another step by Black and Alex took off on a dead sprint toward campus.

Toward Keller.

Night.

Back in the hotel room they didn't talk. Not about Charlie Rutherford, nor about Shining City or what it might mean. That was for later. Keller turned off the lamp and they lay together in the darkness. Finally, her voice searching for him, she said, “I'm scared.”

She felt his gaze. Felt his touch on her. She closed her eyes.

“I'll protect you,” Keller whispered.

He kissed her. She had a thought that it was ending. It had already ended, perhaps, on the night she walked into Aldiss's classroom for the first time. Something would happen that would tear them apart. It was like driving a car in the dark, the feeling that something was plunging at them but they just couldn't see what it was. Then Keller was touching her and Alex closed her eyes and gave in. Let go. He was the first man to have done this, to have gotten this far, this deep: here, then, it all flipped inside out. The guilt, the fear that she wasn't doing something with what she had learned, that two girls were dead and she still hadn't figured out why—it turned itself to a sharpness, an electric kind of
pain,
and she held on to him and lost herself completely.

I love you,
she said when they were finished. She wasn't sure if she'd said it aloud but Keller pulled her closer nonetheless. He too saw that
object in the distance. He knew what was bound to happen when the morning came and the night class ended, and so he held her. He held her but gently, cautiously.

*   *   *

She slept. She did not dream of Aldiss, but when she awoke in the postdawn gray, she felt as if he'd been there in that room. Guiding her. Pushing her. She slipped out of bed, gently enough to not wake Keller, and said to herself,
Okay. Okay, Professor, I hear you.

*   *   *

Alex started the car and let the heat rush over her face. She wasn't totally awake. Not yet. She'd spent the past few hours thinking, debating whether or not to go back to the house on Olive Street. After they left Shining City she wanted to return there, but it had been late. Keller felt it was too dangerous. There were too many unanswered questions, he thought, too many loose threads.

But no. Alex knew that was wrong. So many questions had been answered now.

She had dressed and showered, returned to the room and stared at Keller. He slept peacefully. It was just before seven in the morning.
When are you going to tell him?
she thought.
When are you going to show him the book you found in the library?

But she wasn't ready. Alex was learning something about herself that maybe Aldiss had known all along. She wanted to win. She felt like the night class was hers. Hers and hers alone. The only way she could truly finish the class was to exhaust every angle. To go back to where she knew Aldiss was leading her. To return to Olive Street.

Alone.

As she walked toward the front door of the Rutherford house, she thought of Shawna Wheatley and Abigail Murray, Richard Aldiss's dead students. They had come this far; they had been this close. And then something had stopped them.

What had they found? What had they uncovered to get themselves—

Don't,
she thought.
They made mistakes that you won't. Aldiss has given you too much.

She knocked.

The door gasped open. Lydia Rutherford stood there with her robe cinched, her eyes suspicious. Something about her had changed.
Does she know why I'm here?

“Mrs. Rutherford,” Alex said, “I'm sorry for coming so early.”

“What do you want?”

Everything froze. This moment—Alex had practiced it in the hotel room that morning. Ran over it in her mind, got her lines exactly right. But now, standing before the woman, she could say nothing. She dropped her eyes to the porch.

“Charlie had a bad night,” she heard Lydia say. “Got real sick.”

Alex looked up. “I'm sorry.”

Something in the woman's glare broke. And as it did Alex saw that
this woman only wanted an ally. She wanted someone to tell her that everything was going to be okay, that her son was going to make it. Pity shot through Alex and she said, “I know how it is. My father . . . he's dying.”

Lydia moved back, her gaze still on Alex. She looked to be battling with herself, debating on the purpose of this student with her bed hair and her sleepy eyes. Finally, the better part of her won out and she opened the screen door wider. Said, “Come in. I'll fix you tea.”

Then she was inside the house. There was a flash of light, a mad cartoon soundtrack. Alex turned and saw someone sitting in a corner chair.

“Charlie?” Lydia said to the man's back, and when he didn't answer she said it louder: “Charlie!”

Slowly he turned and looked at his mother. The television light bathed his face in sickly greens and reds. He opened his mouth slowly but said nothing.