Split (8 page)

Dead animal eyes stared down at Debbie Melmeth.

She sat vulnerable and exposed in the middle of a strange room, secured to a chair and surrounded by a plethora of unfriendly heads. Apart from the animals, Debbie was alone. She was hungry and afraid, and she prayed that someone would help her. She knew her captor would not. She’d begged and pleaded with him, but he gave nothing away, just stared at her with a half-smile.

Hunger and the dull ache of her body distracted her. She ran her tongue along her lips in an attempt to wet them, but her tongue had no moisture to offer. Time seemed to have stopped.

Since she had been confined to this horrible place—over a period of a couple of days was her best guess—the man had fed her some potato chips and occasionally made her drink beer. That was it. She hated beer, really hated it. Especially now. But it seemed that her captor lived on the stuff. He had taken to periodically walking
around the room, pacing with an open bottle in his hand, staring at her. Very occasionally he would talk nonsense at her, but wouldn’t respond to her attempts at conversation. He did not acknowledge her pleas. He would just pace and drink and pace some more, and sometimes even walk up to her unexpectedly, open her mouth with his brutish hands and pour the beer down her throat, ignoring her feeble protests. When he did this, he just stared at her blankly while she gagged and spluttered and tried to swallow. And then he would disappear again.

Debbie tried to figure out what was going on. She couldn’t remember how she got there. She was calling Brian from the bar, and then what? She could not recall what happened after that. She only remembered the strange comings and goings of her captor.

Debbie was a smart girl. Surely there was some way she could get herself out of there? If she paid close enough attention and used her head there must be a way. If only she could figure out what he wanted and why. What made this man come and go? What were the times of the day? That part was almost impossible to know. There was no clock in the room, nor was any visible when the door opened into the rest of the house. There were no windows she could see to gauge the light outside.

A noise snapped her out of her ruminations. She heard movement, and footsteps on the hardwood floor. The man emerged through the darkened
doorway, and although he had made countless such entrances in the past couple of days, her heart still froze at the sight of him.

He walked right up to her, stopping only a foot away. Debbie waited. She could smell him. He loomed over her and stared at her. The naked globe that hung from the ceiling threw light across him as he stood, leaving her in his shadow, her eye line positioned at hip level. She continued to wait for his cue. It was a game and she didn’t know how to play. She didn’t know the rules…or the aim.

Debbie couldn’t move away, couldn’t fight. She had been through it over and over in her head. Should she spit on him, just for the brief satisfaction of rebellion? Even if she wanted to her mouth was probably too dry. Was there something she could say? Something she could try? In Hollywood movies the main characters always came up with the most ingenious means of escape. But for some reason those means escaped her now.

As if in answer to her unspoken pleas his hands moved towards her. For a fleeting moment she thought she might be freed. But instead those hands moved from their position hanging at the man’s sides to the front of his pants, less than a foot from her face.

He unzipped his fly.

A rush of panic swept through her. She screamed as loudly as she could. “No!” she yelled. “No! No! No!” she shouted again and again. She wanted to
kick out, but her restraints would not allow it. The chair shuddered and jumped, guided by her frenzied movements. She tried to hop her way backwards, away from the man and his open fly, but she could not.

Through all of this, the man seemed not to hear her.

He reached into his open fly, and exposed his penis.

She reacted to the display with a physical revulsion that began at her toes and crept up through her body to the top of her head and back down again. Knowing that she could not hop her way backwards, she did all she could to turn her head. When she strained her eyes upwards to look into his face, she saw that he was smiling—not a real smile, not the kind she was used to, but some cheap imitation of a smile.

After standing exposed for what seemed an eternity, her captor zipped his pants up again. Then he laughed. He laughed at her, making the most horrible, humourless sound she had ever heard any human being utter. Then he just walked away.

He hadn’t forced himself on her. Yet. It would only be a matter of time, she feared. She needed to do something. She needed a plan, some semblance of control. Debbie even considered an attempt at seduction. She considered what she might achieve if she convinced him that she would cooperate, that she could love him. If he would just release her for a
moment, to move her to a better position perhaps, then she might stand a chance.

What is this game? What does he want?

Debbie didn’t know the answers, and she was afraid to find out.

Les Vanderwall came home with a headache, having left some of his old mates downing beers at the Waddling Dog Pub. It was a bit early for him to pack it in, but for some reason he didn’t feel well. Whenever that happened, he made a mental note of whether there was any link to his wife’s death. He’d noticed that he became ill every month on the anniversary of the day she died. Sometimes it wasn’t the right day of the month, but even just the time of day, or a reminder of some kind—a whiff of some special smell, a bit of her handwriting found unexpectedly in a cookbook, a memorable place, a phrase. The family doctor said this was not unusual, and that these reactions would ease in time.

Les was worried that he might become antisocial. His mates couldn’t truly understand the impact of the loss of his wife. None of them had been through anything similar, except John and his divorce but that was hardly the same as he’d
instigated it. Now that Jane was gone, Les had no one to relate to emotionally, the way married couples did. He was alone in his grief. He didn’t want to burden his daughters. They had their own lives.

Les Vanderwall felt like half a man. It was gradually forming a wedge between him and his friends. That could be a terrible problem. He had to make an effort to stay in touch socially. Les knew that if he became a hermit he wouldn’t last much longer.

Wearily, he dragged himself up the steps and into the kitchen. The answering machine was flashing.

“Les, it’s Christopher Patrick here…”
His lawyer.
“It’s about five-thirty, perhaps you can call me back tomorrow morning? There are a few issues with the estate.”

There were always a few issues with his late wife’s estate. Eighteen months on, and there were still issues. How could there
still
be issues? The real issue was that she was gone. Nothing could reverse that.

The machine beeped and played the second message.

“Hello, Les, it’s Ann calling from Vancouver. How are you? I, um…I was wondering when you are in town next. Perhaps we could grab a coffee? I was wondering if you had passed my details on to Makedde? It’d be a pleasure if I could help in some way. Anyway, talk to you soon. Bye.”

His heart lifted at the sound of her voice.

I like that woman,
he thought.
She’s a good woman. Tony never deserved her.

As soon as the thoughts came into his head, he felt a stab of guilt, but not for Tony Morgan. His life partner, Jane, was gone now, but he couldn’t help but think of her watching over him. A partnership like that came along once in a lifetime, he believed, so was he doomed to be a lonely widower now that she was gone?

What would she want for him?

A second chance?

Makedde woke with her heart pounding in her chest and the sound of an alarm drilling loudly in her brain.

Okay, okay, I’m awake already! I’m awake!

She sat up straight in bed, grabbed her tin alarm clock off the bedside table and fumbled for the “Off” switch on the back. The small retro-style clock, which was round and stood on two legs, decided to protest by leaping out of her hands and falling onto the floor with a crash, increasing the dent on its right side while continuing to buzz with annoying insistence.

Oh, will you just shut up!

Irritably, she snatched the dented clock up off the floor and managed to flick the switch. Through bleary eyes, she read the silver hands. It was already 7.00 am. That depressing fact confirmed Makedde’s suspicions that somehow not all sixty-minute time frames were of the same duration. The hours between midnight and 4.00 am had crept past at an excruciatingly slow pace, whereas the last three hours could only have slipped by
in a heartbeat or two—three heartbeats at the most. She felt like she had blinked rather than slept.

Makedde distantly remembered her life as “a morning person”—day after day of waking up fresh, all sweetness and light after another pleasant and effortless sleep. Where had those days gone? Where had that Makedde Vanderwall disappeared to? Luckily, there was no one around to see her in the morning these days, as she’d be quite a sight. But then again, perhaps she’d be in a better mood if she had company?

To o long. It’s been too long without someone to hold me while I dream…

Such thoughts should really have been far from her mind. There was no one on the horizon, but still, her mind drifted back to the times in her life when she did not sleep alone. She thought of all the lovers in the world, and how she was not one of them.

Mak crushed the saccharine sentimentality as soon as it surfaced.

Foolishness.

Automatically, she reached beside her and pulled open the drawer of her bedside table. She took out a small arty-looking notebook she had bought at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art gift shop, and flipped it open to September 22. She slid the miniature pencil out of the side, and wrote:

Three hours sleep. 4.00 am until 7.00 am. I had a nightmare about Andy chasing
me through the woods. (Damn him for coming back into my dreams!) He was wielding a scalpel and I was wearing my father’s police uniform again. I couldn’t run fast enough. I woke up before he caught me. No devil this time.

She went to close the book and then opened it again and scribbled one last comment:

I feel like hell.

She flipped it closed and rubbed her eyes.

Damn. I really do feel like hell. How much longer can this go on?

In Makedde’s research on sleep disorders she had discovered that one common recommendation was to keep a diary of sleeping patterns, and so each morning for the past week, Mak had dutifully scribbled down details of her sleep, or lack of it. Looking at it now, it made depressing reading. As she sat in bed contemplating her nightmares, she wondered sceptically whether a psychiatrist could really shed any new light on her problems. How? What would Ann make of her diary? Mak was well aware that her nightmares were the abstract manifestations of the trauma she had experienced in her recent past. But so what? It seemed unlikely that there would be any benefit in having a qualified expert point out the obvious.

Mak swung her legs out of bed and hopped up. She shook herself from head to toe in a half-hearted attempt to shake off the bad night, then slipped on a pair of fuzzy bed slippers and wrapped a thick white robe around her naked body. Her preference for sleeping in her birthday suit had little to do with Marilyn Monroe’s famous comments, and everything to do with Makedde’s own tendency to be an overactive sleeper, twisting PJ’s, slips, boxer shorts, or whatever else she happened to be wearing around her while she slept. That is, when she did sleep. On more than one occasion she had woken up struggling for air with a T-shirt wrapped tightly around her neck and the bedsheets and duvet tossed on the floor on opposite sides of the room.

Robe-wrapped and vertical, Mak shuffled over to her computer.

“Welcome to AOL Canada,” came the chirpy greeting as she logged on. “You have mail.” Her saturnine mood lifted slightly, and the corners of her mouth curled into a sleepy grin. She had checked her mail a couple of times the night before but there was nothing there. Well, at least nothing interesting. She was kind of hoping to discover a little email from a certain young man.

Hmmm…Word of the Day. Some mail from the Forensic Psychology list.
Aha…What’s this?
An email from one “BlakeR”. Subject line: “A question”.

Bingo!

Hi Makedde,

It was nice meeting you today. I found the conference interesting, but of course you were a highlight. I won’t be able to go tomorrow…

Damn.

But I was wondering if we could perhaps catch up for dinner afterwards?

Yes!

I hope you don’t think me too forward. Send me an email, or better yet, give me a call.

She re-read his email. Twice. He must have sent it after she logged off at 1.00 am. Perhaps he was a night owl as well? She checked the time logged on the correspondence. Yup, 1.16 in the morning. That’s pretty late.

Roy Blake.

Yes, she was intrigued. But a fully-fledged date? It would have been better if he was just coming to the conference and they could chat a bit without any of the “date” formality. She hadn’t been on a proper date in how long? A year? Well, not counting that disaster with Henry. But that didn’t really qualify. She had left before the appetiser arrived.

She went to the kitchen and put on a pot of water, and then distractedly went about making a cup of coffee.

Mak found herself smiling as she considered her reply. She sat down at the desk, and sipped her drink. She was actually contemplating seeing Roy. Which was weird. But how to go about it?

Hi Roy,

Thanks for your message. It was nice meeting you, too. I must thank you for saving me from Professor Gosper and my bubblegum. :-) Thanks for your offer. Perhaps we could meet up for a quick coffee or a drink instead? Around eight would probably work for me, otherwise we could catch up sometime on the weekend. Give me a call.

She typed in her number, and was about to press “send” when a feeling of doubt overtook her.
This guy is a stranger, Mak. Do you really want to give him your number? Do you really want to meet him somewhere alone?

Makedde recognised that her fear was a little irrational. She wouldn’t be alone at all. She would be on familiar territory if she chose the bar or café, and she could excuse herself after a single beverage if need be. It was safe. Besides, he was a security guard…
well, not that that really meant anything, but he did work on campus at least. Mak pressed “send” before she scared herself out of it, and then it was gone, despatched into cyberspace.

At ten minutes to nine, Makedde arrived at the Graduate Center Ballroom at UBC and glanced around the gathering crowd. No Roy, just as he’d said in his email.

Good. No distractions,
she told herself.

Professor Gosper was nowhere in sight, so she could relax. Makedde noticed there were considerably fewer people attending the second day of the conference. Either that or they were all late. Dr Hare had pulled a huge crowd of curious university students that first day, but only the more hard-core attendees had stayed on. There would probably be more people in the afternoon for the talk from the FBI agent on crime scene analysis and how that relates to the clinical construct of psychopathy. It sounded like an interesting lecture, and Mak was sure that any mention of the FBI would result in a standing room only situation. That was the
X-Files
for you.

The thought of the FBI steered Mak back to Quantico and to Andy Flynn, again. Since his call she’d had trouble getting him out of her head.

Should I try to call him back?

After what had happened in Sydney, whether she liked it or not, Andy Flynn was a part of her life. She didn’t love him—or at least that was what she kept telling herself—but the experience they’d shared had forged a difficult bond between them, and like the branding of a red-hot poker, the events had marked them forever. But that wasn’t love. That wasn’t any reason to regret that he was so far away.

No, I won’t try to track him down,
Makedde decided.

Let it be. Move on, Makedde. Move on.

A bitter lump formed in her throat, and she ignored it. She had a big day ahead of her.