In the Heart of the Wind Book 1 in the WindTorn Trilogy (19 page)

Sometimes he forgot who he was, where he was, why they were doing to him what they were doing. Sometimes he spent an entire day in the fog listening for some landmark to tell him where he was, who he was. The confusion was bad enough; the hallucinations were worse. Sometimes he thought he was being tortured, sometimes he thought he was in prison, locked away from any human contact.

Sometimes, like now as he looked into the mirror and saw his new face for the first time, he thought he had died and gone to hell.

“Jamie?” Patrick slowly he came to his feet, lowered his hands. “Jamie, are you all right?” He took a step toward his brother.

When Jamie’d been attacked that cold, rainy night in November of 1986, he hadn’t thought he’d live to see daylight ever again. When he’d been thrust into the back of Mike Cronin’s car that snowy night in November just a month before, he hadn’t expected to survive then either. When he looked into the mirror above the wash basin, he knew he hadn’t.

“Jamie?”

Dimly he heard Paddy’s voice speaking to him. He felt his brother’s presence just behind him, then shifted his eyes away from the image in the mirror to stare at Paddy’s image beside him. He locked his eyes on Paddy’s and heard an agonized scream tear from his own throat.

Patrick turned away
from the struggling man on the bed and walked to the wall, slid down to the floor and buried his head in his hands. He listened as Lassiter ordered 25 milligrams of thorazine administered, and flinched as Jamie bellowed in protest. He could hear Jamie thrashing on the bed, the orderlies and nurses cursing as they struggled to lash his wrists once more into the restraints. He looked up at a grunt of pain in time to see an orderly fly across the room, his nose pouring blood.

“The bastard kicked me,” he heard the man’s nasal shout of fury as his hand, held up to his battered nose, dripped blood between the fingers.

“Stop it,” Lassiter ordered. He grabbed a handful of Jamie’s hair and slammed his head into the pillow. “Stop it this instant or I’ll have you gagged!”

Jamie’s keening had been going on for more than ten minutes. His shrieks had brought orderlies rushing into the room, Lassiter at the run. It had taken two men to wrestle James Tremayne to the floor, two more to lift him, kicking and screaming, to put him in bed. His violent struggles had only gotten him pinned to the bed, the canvas straps cinched cruelly around his flailing wrists, but still he strained to get free.

“If you don’t stop, I’ll call your father!”

It was Lassiter’s last effort at controlling his patient, a gambit he had counted on to subdue James Tremayne. Patrick stared in awe as Jamie suddenly stopped struggling, fear blazing from his eyes. Jamie shivered violently then lay perfectly still, the keening, now a low moan of pure hopelessness, coming from deep within his soul.

“That’s better.” Lassiter let go of his hold on his patient’s hair and took the syringe his nurse had brought on the run. He jammed the needle into Jamie’s upper left arm. “You’ve just earned yourself some time in isolation and maximum restraint!”

The orderlies moved in, buckled the wide canvas straps across Jamie’s chest and hips, and lashed his ankles to the bed frame. All the while, Jamie lay utterly still, his eyes turned up to the ceiling, tears of frustration and hopelessness easing down the sides of his face.

“Your brother will not be allowed to disrupt this clinic,” Lassiter growled as he strode heavily to the door.

Patrick looked up as Lassiter walked past him. He didn’t miss the look of disgust on the man’s bearded face as he exited the room. He knew there’d be a call to Miami within the hour. And he knew Jamie would pay dearly for his outburst.

Scooting his back up the wall, Patrick stood, waiting until the others had left before he went to his brother’s bed. Jamie’s eyes were glazed. He was fighting the tranquilizer, desperately trying to stay awake. His breathing was shallow, deep, and his lips were open, trying to speak. His gaze found Patrick’s and held, the look pitiful and full of regret. His cheeks were wet with tears.

“Forgive me,” Patrick whispered. He started to touch his brother’s face, wanting to wipe away the moisture, but the look on that carefully constructed face stayed his hand. It was a look that said this last betrayal had been the final straw. Something painful stirred in Patrick and he began to cry once more. “Please forgive me, Jamie. I didn’t want to do it.” His shoulders hitched. “I really didn’t want to do it.”

Jamie tried to focus on Paddy’s face. He could hear the tears in the man’s voice. Patrick had always been the sensitive one; the weakest of the three boys. His heart was even more tender than James Tremayne knew his own to be. There was such desperation in Patrick’s voice, such shame, Jamie wanted to reach out to his brother to soothe him, but his hands were lashed to the bed frame, his legs and torso as well. All he could do was tell his brother he understood, but when he tried, his words were slurred and unintelligible. In a fog of numbness, he saw Paddy’s head come up.

“Can you ever forgive me?” his brother cried.

He tried to nod, but he couldn’t do that either. The drug was taking over, controlling him, doing the expected to him. He wanted to reach out to Paddy, knowing the contact would save him from the bitter darkness creeping up for him, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t.

He turned his head into his pillow and saw again the image he had seen in the mirror and he felt another scream building in his throat. Just as he began to go under he heard Kristen speaking softly to Patrick.

“It’s just what Liam wanted, isn’t it, Paddy?” Her voice was hushed, a bit afraid.

“Oh, God, what have I done?” Patrick sobbed as he hid his face.

“He’s handsome, Patrick,” Kristen whispered. She walked to the bed and stared down at Jamie. “I didn’t know he would be so handsome.”

Patrick gazed out from between his fingers and looked into the face of his brother, but it wasn’t Jamie’s face. This face was thin, the cheekbones high, the bridge of the nose straight and perfectly formed. The lower lip was now full, seductively so, and the cleft was gone from the strong chin. Gone, too, were the dimples Jamie had inherited from his mother’s side of the family and the thick bushy brows which had been electrically tweezed to a bold, perfectly arched line. Even the scar that had somehow looked so interesting beneath his brother’s lip was gone.

No, it wasn’t Jamie’s face Patrick saw as he looked at his handiwork. The only similarity between this face and Jamie’s was that it, too, was the face of a thirty-nine-year-old man with minute crow’s feet beside the beautiful black eyes; faint creases in the smooth forehead; shallow laugh lines beside the mouth. It was handsome, there was no mistaking that. In some ways, it was far more handsome than the face Jamie had grown into. There was strength in this face. There was a bold signature written across this visage that said this was a Celtic face with its soft angles and masculine look.

And it was an exact replica of Liam Tremayne’s at that age.

“What do you
suggest, Bruce?” Liam took a sip of his whiskey.

“I’m going to increase the dosages for a few days so I can keep him manageable, then I’ll taper it off. He’ll be in maximum restraint until morning, possibly beyond. It depends on how he reacts.”

Liam nodded. “I agree with increasing the drugs, but keep them at the increased levels until I tell you differently. What about electroshock therapy? I understand that’s effective for manic depression.”

“I can obtain the same results with insulin,” Lassiter explained. As he spoke on the phone with his patient’s father, he toyed with a lead paperweight, bouncing it in the palm of his hand. “Insulin shock has the same therapeutic value as electroshock without the side effects.”

“Will he feel the insulin?”

A cold premonition of what was to come shot through Bruce Lassiter. He gently laid the paperweight on his desk. “Do you want him to feel it, Liam?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Lassiter stared at the receiver in his hand, the connection to Miami broken, the incessant buzzing a low-key warning going off in his ear. Slowly he replaced the phone in its cradle and looked up at his night nurse.

“Was I right?” Marjorie Petersen asked.

“Yes. Yes, you were.” Lassiter sighed. “I don’t like this sort of thing, Marge. I’m here to help my patients, not hurt them.”

“Do you want my advice, Bruce?” the nurse asked. At his slow nod, she lifted her head. “Keep Liam Tremayne happy. Just this once, teach his son the lesson he wants you to, then keep James Tremayne so tranquilized he won’t even know he’s in this world.”

“But electroshock?” Lassiter shook his head. “If I do it Tremayne’s way, it could induce acute psychosis in the patient.”

“If you don’t,” Marjorie reminded him, “who knows what Tremayne will do.” She reached out to touch his hand. “To his son or to you.”

Lassiter flinched. “But James is already receiving a high amount of barbiturates. The man will become addicted in no time. If I sedate him with higher doses, he’ll be nothing more than a vegetable.”

Marjorie shrugged. “Isn’t that what his father wants?”

Patrick was quiet
as the limo wound its way along the two lane blacktop with rain misting softly against the tinted windows. Beside him, Kristen was pensive, her thoughts on the new face her husband had been given.

At first, seeing the bruises and discolorations, Kristen had been dismayed. There was puffiness along the nose and cheekbones. Both of Jamie’s eyes had been black and brown. Dried blood had crusted under his nostrils and there were delicate stitches still left along his cheeks, chin, and temples. But it wasn’t the bruises or stitches which had shocked her.

She’d been shocked by the uncanny resemblance to her father-in-law. It was like looking at a younger, weaker, very vulnerable version of Liam Tremayne. Like the man he might once have been before high living and rich foods had filled out his cheeks and added an extra layer of fat under his chin, and absolute power and authority had given his face a hard, cold edge.

It was not a thought she liked to entertain. A nagging worry entered her mind and she turned to Patrick.

“That computer picture I saw,” Kristen said. “Whose face was that?”

There was a fierce scowl on Patrick’s face. “Papa’s idea of a joke. He had me make it up. That’s the way he wanted my brother and sister to think Jamie would look. He thought it would be funny to be there when Drew and Bridie see Jamie for the first time.” He clenched his teeth. “Real funny joke, huh?” He turned his eyes to the window once more.

“But why?” Kristen probed. “As much as he hates Jamie, why would he do this?”

Patrick let out a harsh sigh. “You’d have had to have grown up in our house to understand, Kristen.” He reached for the bottle of gin and poured a generous measure into his glass. He took a swallow, grimaced at the strong taste and then gulped down the liquid. He poured another.

“When Jamie was growing up, he hated everything Papa stood for: the racketeering, the prostitution, the drug selling. We all knew what Papa did for a living. We knew where the money was coming from. Some fathers were doctors and lawyers and architects. Our father was a mobster. It didn’t mean anything to Drew, Bridie, or me. If anything, it was rather exciting, you know?

“Of course you do. You grew up that way, too. But, Jamie—” He took another long swallow. “—Jamie was bothered by it. It ate at him.” He looked around at Kristen. “He was different from us. From the time he was old enough to ask ‘why?’, he was different. And Papa despised him for it.”

“Liam abused him.” Kristen had heard the tale from Jamie’s own lips. Most of it she had either discounted or ignored. Now she couldn’t. “Was it bad for him?”

Patrick’s eyes glazed with memory. “It was as though Papa thrived on hurting Jamie. Every bruise, every cut, every welt seemed to give him pleasure. At first Jamie would cry, but soon he realized that by crying, he only prolonged the pain, so he stopped and took it as best he could. Stoically, I guess you’d call it. Once Papa found out he couldn’t make Jamie cry, the abuse didn’t usually last as long and the beatings became less frequent.”

“Didn’t your mother try to stop him from hurting Jamie?” Kristen loved her daughter. She couldn’t imagine any woman condoning the abuse of her child.

Patrick nodded. “But she’s weak where Papa’s concerned. She does what he says. It was the way she was brought up—to accept her husband’s absolute authority in all matters. Jamie was wild and arrogant. He had an ‘attitude’ as they call it now, and whenever there was trouble, Mama just turned her head away. She trusted her husband to chastise their son.”

Kristen felt sorry for her husband. She had long since banished any love she might have for the man, but he was still hers, and Kristen Marie Connors never let anyone take what was hers. Jamie would be hers until he died. “He must’ve had a horrible childhood.”

Patrick poured another drink and sipped at it.

“Once, when Jamie was about fifteen or sixteen, I don’t remember, he and Papa got into it over this boy who’d been expelled from Benedictine for doing drugs. The kid had OD’ed, but survived. He was a friend of Jamie’s and Jamie was spitting mad when he found out Mike Cronin, one of Papa’s men, had been the one to give the kid the dope.