In the Heart of the Wind Book 1 in the WindTorn Trilogy (23 page)

A gentle smile played over his lips and his eyes held light for the first time since he had been brought to this terrible purgatory. In his drugged mind, he saw a faint glimmer of light.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

Beecher stopped him. The orderly stepped in front of him blocking his way into the chapel. His ugly face and mean look made it plain he wasn’t going to let Jamie inside.

“I wanted to go to Mass,” Jamie whispered, so afraid of the man standing in front of him he could barely be heard. He began to tremble, his chin quivering. He lowered his eyes to the man.

“Well, you ain’t,” Beecher sneered. He half turned away and reached for the handle of the right pocket door to pull it closed.

“Beecher, please,” Jamie begged, looking past the man to the little priest who was staring back at him with pity. “I just want to go in and hear—”

Beecher spun around and shoved Jamie causing the younger man to stumble and fall, crashing to the tiled floor with a grunt of unexpected pain.

“Your Daddy said you wasn’t to attend none of the services ‘cause you been kicked out of the church,” Beecher hissed at him as he stepped inside the chapel and began to pull the left pocket door to meet the right.

Jamie stared up at the man with confused, stricken eyes. “Kicked out?” he echoed. His heart leapt at the word, his head hearing the real word ‘excommunicated.’ “But why?” He could hear the whining in his own voice and it sickened him. “What have I done?”

A smirk plastered itself on Beecher’s face. “‘Cause you’re married to two women, that’s why! You took off on your real wife and little kid, left them to fend for themselves, and that’s a sin.” He shut the door with a snap.

For a long moment, Jamie crouched on all fours staring with bewildered eyes at the closed door. The last ray of hope dwindled in him, the light flickering in the distance, and he began to feel for the first time the horribly exacting revenge his father had planned so well.

Jamie crawled to the door, wanting to pound against the portal, knowing he’d better not or Beecher would gladly make him regret it. Instead, he curled up to the door, his back to the panel, his knees drawn up, and listened as best he could through the wood. He made the sign of the cross. He softly answered the greeting and said the Creed, the Our Father; silently mouthed the words to the Communion and Recessional hymns.

When the people inside the small chapel began to filter out, they ignored Jamie Tremayne, sitting quietly on the floor, his head down, his eyes filled with tears. Only the little priest looked down at him as he came out of the chapel.

“Pray, my son,” Father Tolbert said in a gentle voice. “Pray for God’s forgiveness.” He reached out to touch Jamie’s head, but drew his hand back slowly, uncertainly.

Jamie looked up, his need in his eyes. “Will you hear my confession, Father?” he pleaded.

The little priest hesitated as if understanding the pain in the young man’s bewildered voice and recognizing the desperation in his eyes. It seemed as if he wanted to turn back into the chapel, to ask Jamie to accompany him inside. But Beecher stepped out of the chapel and took Father Tolbert’s arm in a firm grip.

“I’ll see you to your car, Padre,” the orderly warned.

Jamie watched the priest until he was out of sight. He was still sitting by the chapel door when Beecher stalked back down the hall and reached for him with vicious, hard hands even as Jamie threw up his arms to ward off the blow which, thankfully, did not come.

“From now on,” Beecher snarled as he dragged him down the hall to his room, “when they’re having church services, you keep your ass in your room or I’ll tie you to the bed! Do you understand me, boy?”

He understood.

There was to be no comfort, none at all, for him in this place. There was to be no solace, no peace, no words from his God to him here in this darkness. There was to be no light at the end of the tunnel for him.

“Not in the dark of buildings confining,

“Not in some heaven, light years away.”

Bridget Tremayne
Casey thrilled to the clandestine. She was invigorated by deception and underhanded operations. Her body throbbed with impatience as the sleek black sports car wound its way through the foggy Louisiana night to Lassiter’s clinic. She hummed as she expertly handled the car, proud of her driving as she slid around an armadillo intent on committing suicide under her wheels. Glancing in her rearview mirror, she smiled at her carefully made up appearance and reached up to fluff her strawberry sweep of hair.

She liked what she saw staring back at her. Sweeping her eyes to the woman sitting in the passenger seat, Bridie Casey sniffed and turned her eyes back to the road.

It had taken some maneuvering to leave her clinic in Savannah to make a run for the helicopter her father had placed at her disposal in La Grange. The chopper had touched down only briefly in Fort Walton Beach to pick up the other passenger for Baton Rouge, Kristen Tremayne. The two women had left Baton Rouge at 10 a.m. and headed south, careful precautions made which would see that no one followed them.

“I wish you’d let me bring Melissa,” Kristen complained as she glared out the window. “He’s never seen her.”

Bridget ground her teeth. “And he’s never going to.”

Kristen turned an angry face to her sister-in-law. “Don’t you think that’s carrying his punishment just a bit far, Bridie?”

Shrugging her elegant shoulders in her suit, Bridie turned her face to Kristen, one titian eyebrow lifted in challenge. “Are you questioning Papa, Kristen?”

The question sent a warning through Kristen Tremayne and she shook her head. “I don’t see what harm it’ll do for Jamie to meet his daughter.”

The smooth white hands clutching the steering wheel increased their pressure as rage began building in Bridget. With practiced ease, she geared down, slid the sleek black car over to the side of the road, and stopped. She turned in her seat to face her sister-in-law.

“Because he’s asked to see her, that’s why!” With the high performance engine of the car idling like a panther ready to pounce, Bridget drove in her point. “Because he seems to think he can simply ask and he’ll be given, he won’t!”

“That’s not what he’s doing,” Kristen protested. “He’s not trying to manipulate you or his father. He’s just asked to see his child.”

“A child he abandoned,” Bridget pointed out. Her eyes narrowed. “As he abandoned you!”

Kristen knew it would do no good to argue with Bridie. All the woman was doing was parroting her father. Slowly she turned her head away from the ugly smirk on Bridie’s face and gave up any notion of trying to make life better for Jamie.

Bridget’s eyes flared with triumph and she eased her foot from the clutch. The powerful car moved onto the road and began to pick up speed. Bridget shifted the gear and looked down to watch the needle on the speedometer arcing to the right.

“You do know he’s developed some rather bizarre behavior over the past three months, don’t you, Krissy?”

Kristen flinched. She looked at the woman beside her. “What kind of bizarre behavior?”

Bridget glanced in the rear view mirror as they passed a Louisiana State Patrol car. She kept her attention divided between the road in front of her and the patrol car until the vehicle was out of sight and she could breathe easier.

“What kind of behavior?” Kristen repeated.

“James had always shown signs of latent neuroses.” She glanced over at Kristen and smiled. She had the other woman’s attention. “When he was a child, he was always falling into deep spells of depression and going about the house trying to avoid the rest of us. He was always hostile toward me and Drew. Always imagining we didn’t like him.”

Kristen’s eyes turned cold. “And did you?”

“Not especially. What was there to like? He was forever twisting reality, distorting everything he heard and saw at home, imagining boogie men in the closets.” She laughed. “There was a conspiracy against him, you know!”

Kristen stared at the woman’s profile.

“There was always trouble between him and Papa.” Bridget shrugged. “James was a very angry person, inflexible in his belief Papa was a horrible person. Not a day went by Papa didn’t have to get on to him about something he’d done. No matter how many times Papa took the belt to him, James just turned around and did what he wanted, and hang the consequence. He was self-centered and self-absorbed. In psychiatric terms, we call it ‘rigidity.’

“In such a personality disorder, a child will develop certain tendencies. One such tendency is to repress the anger he feels toward a parent because he has no real control over that parent. In James’ case toward Papa, he developed even stronger hatred toward his family, imagining we were somehow in league with Papa and ‘out to get him.’ James was always babbling about how Papa tried to control him and keep him down. In the beginning stages of this neurotic state, he began to have a craving for a freedom he thought he’d been denied.”

“Freedom from control and discipline,” Kristen injected.

“Precisely. And he expressed that need by running away from the family when he was eighteen, by running away from the hospital in Augusta, by leaving you, by marrying that woman in Iowa. Chances are he would’ve eventually left her, too.”

“Has he tried to run away from the clinic?”

“He hasn’t been given a chance.” Bridget changed lanes, shooting past a slower-moving vehicle. “He’s been kept well-sedated and manageable, but he’s developed certain tendencies that are the reason I was sent here.”

“Such as?”

“In James’ mind, he had an unbearable childhood.”

“He did, didn’t he?”

Bridget frowned, cutting her eyes over to Kristen. “He made his own childhood unbearable, Krissy, by constantly testing Papa’s authority.”

“So now he’s right back where he started from being controlled, denied his freedom, and that’s done something to him,” Kristen said quietly.

Bridget glanced at her sister-in-law, surprised the woman had any grasp at all of the situation. “James has began to detach himself from those around him. He’s showing signs of acute disassociation.”

“Which means?”

“There are two commonly know dissociate reactions. One is amnesia. You understand what that is?”

“Yes.”

“The other is somnambulism. The everyday term for that is ‘sleepwalking’.”

“And which has Jamie developed?”

Bridget slowed the car, took a sharp right turn down a long, live oak-draped corridor. Ahead she could see the double, wrought-iron gates that barred the entrance to the old Harrington House where Lassiter’s clinic had been established.

“James has been showing a rather dramatic type of dissociate reaction which is rare.” She pulled up to the gate and honked. A speaker box on her side of the car came to life.

“One moment, please, Dr. Casey,” the disembodied voice crackled.

Kristen watched the heavy gates begin to open and shuddered. It would be virtually impossible to escape this place. The grounds were surrounded by the wrought-iron fence work ten feet high and no doubt electrified. Twin cameras were positioned on stanchions on each side of the gate, and as she looked behind them, she could see another hidden in the branches of a tree, taking pictures, she’d been told, of their license plate. Even as the gate began to open, two armed men strolled out from a small, carefully-camouflaged building to the right of the gate and headed their way.

“They don’t take any chances of being invaded, do they?” Kristen sneered.

“There are patients interned here who are from influential families. We don’t need reporters from the tabloids or other rubbernecks disturbing them while they recuperate.”

Kristen snorted in a very unladylike way. “Or being able to find them.”

Bridget smiled. “Precisely so.” She put the car in gear and moved through the gate as the two guards took up positions behind the car to block anyone from attempting entry.

“You said Jamie had developed a rare reaction?” Kristen prodded.

Bridget nodded. “Indeed he has. I’ve been sent to address the situation and see if I can’t find a way to control it.”

Kristen clenched her teeth. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong with him or are you going to just let me stroll in there and find out the hard way?”

A cold grin settled on Bridie’s smooth features and she turned blank eyes to Kristen. “Well, dear, it seems you’re going to get two husbands for the price of one!”

Dr. Bruce Lassiter
offered Kristen a chair. “Would you like some tea, Mrs. Tremayne?”

Kristen shook her head. “Where’s Bridget?”

Lassiter seated himself behind his gilt-edged Louis Quinze desk and folded his hands. “She’s gone in to see your husband.”

Kristen leveled her gaze on the doctor. “She has explained to me that Jamie is having problems. I’d like you to give me your impression of what’s happening to my husband.”

“Your husband has developed two separate, independent personalities, Mrs. Tremayne. One of them, James, is a very cooperative, well-mannered, polite young boy of about eight years of age. He does as he’s told, causes no trouble, just sits and plays solitaire hour after hour.”