The Blue Journal (21 page)

“I'll stay another minute,” I told him, “but I'm not so sure about a second drink.”

“You're a careful woman, aren't you?”

“And you're very inquisitive.”

“Maybe. If I become too inquisitive, let me know.”

“I think I already have,” I told him.

I was handed a second vodka tonic.

He was comfortable with himself, a handsome man with dark hair, blue eyes and a determined look that told me he was accustomed to getting what he wanted.

After the drinks at the bar, we had dinner. Later we went to a club where the band played jazz on a small stage that looked out into a dark room. He asked for a table in the rear where there was less of a crowd and the music was not as intrusive. I excused myself to visit the ladies' room. He said he would order cocktails for us. He told me he would choose “something special.”

I returned and, after a few sips of the fruity drinks he had selected, I began to feel far more intoxicated than I had earlier.

“This is strong,” I told him.

He nodded his agreement and said, “Good.”

He told me he was from Boston, in town for a few days on business.

I told him I was single, but I don't recall if I told him that I lived in Connecticut. I do remember admitting that I was already in no condition to drive home that night.

Later, seated side by side on a banquette in the rear of the jazz club, he leaned toward me and we kissed. I felt no inhibitions about embracing in public that way, which is quite unusual for me. I was overcome by a sense of relaxation that was mixed with confusion. I was also feeling extremely aroused.

We ended up back in his hotel room, although I was not able to recall how we got there.

He ordered champagne, even though the additional wine was unnecessary. I recall the bottle in a frosty silver ice bucket on the credenza. I can still see him tearing off the foil and using his thumbs to work the cork free, sending it bouncing off the ceiling before it fell to the floor. The frothy wine spilled over the neck of the bottle as he lifted it and poured my glass full. I only took a sip, barely able to stand now, almost dropping the glass. He took it from me and placed it on the nightstand. Then he took me in his arms.

He kissed me gently at first, the tart flavor of the wine on our lips. We were standing in the middle of the room, the lights soft, the quiet strains of music coming from somewhere I could not identify.

I remember laughing, then falling sideways onto the bed.

He began to undress me, unbuttoning the front of my chiffon blouse, his hands reaching in to feel my breasts. He lowered his head to kiss them, then gently bit at them. He stopped to unbuckle his belt, undoing his pants and letting them drop to his ankles and kicking them away. He pulled off his shirt and tossed it aside. All I could do was lie there on the bed and watch, feeling as if any sense of self-restraint had somehow vanished.

He finished opening my blouse, then slipped off my skirt. His hands moved up and down, massaging my breasts, stroking my skin. I was wearing nothing now but filmy, white satin tap pants, and he reached down and caressed my ass underneath the silky panties, then pulled those off too.

He slowly brought his palms along the inside of my thighs, running up and down, repeating the motion again and again. I grew wetter under his touch as he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth, his bare chest pressed against the softness of my breasts.

I felt as if I could not move.

My desire was mixed with the muddled notion that I had abandoned my own instincts. His tongue found its way down my breasts and across the flat of my stomach. Then he shoved his fingers inside my pussy, not tenderly now but with force, and roughly stuck a finger up my ass.

It was as if he had become a different person, but I felt detached from the event, as if all I could do was observe it from somewhere above.

He pushed me on my side, one hand still jammed inside me, and began using the flat palm of his other hand to slap my bottom. He hit me harder and harder, the smacks against my fleshy ass stinging as they became more forceful. When he returned his attention to my breasts, he was no longer gentle with his touch. He squeezed my nipples between his strong fingers until I uttered a ­distant-sounding scream. He told me to shut up and, when I didn't, he slapped me across my face several times, hard enough to make my jaw ache.

I lay there helplessly as he pushed me onto my back and climbed on top of me, grabbing me by the hips and lifting me to him. He forced himself into me, jamming his cock in as hard as he could, the pain making me cry out again. I began to sob but he ignored my tears, rocking back and forth and thrusting with an angry energy. Then he abruptly stopped, pulled away, and forced me onto my stomach. I remember him binding my hands behind my back, perhaps with his necktie, I could not see. Then I felt a searing pain as he rammed his way into my ass.

He held my arms tight as he fucked me from behind. I wanted to scream, but my face was pressed to the bed. All I could do was weep uncontrollably as he heaved and groaned until he was spent, then collapsed onto me with all of his weight.

Even when he was done, I could not move. It was late, I had too much to drink, and I had too much of whatever he had slipped into my cocktail at the jazz club. Soon I fell into an uncomfortable and fitful sleep.

When I awoke in the hotel room early the next morning, he was gone. As I began to recall what I could of the brutal night, I dragged myself out of bed. I was so sore that I limped as I walked to the bathroom. There were black-and-blue marks on my ass and neck and breasts. My wrists were sore. My jaw was swollen and bruised.

I took a long hot shower, scrubbing myself, desperately trying to wash away the awful events of the night before. I dressed, then left the hotel, with a scarf around my discolored neck and face. I moved as if I were a fugitive, hurrying through the hotel lobby, relieved that there was almost no one around to witness my departure at six in the morning.

As I drove home I felt angry and mortified and physically shattered. The only satisfaction I could muster was the belief that I knew who he was. I would have my revenge, and soon.

It turned out he had given me a phony name—at least the name I recalled—and that was no surprise. But the hotel had records and I knew the room number. It took some effort, but I tracked him down.

He was stunned to receive my call in his office the next day, even more astonished when I told him what I intended to do.

I told him I had photographs of my injuries and the hotel record for that night, and I could easily retrieve copies of the restaurant and jazz-club receipts.

I expected him to be contrite, to apologize, to beg my forgiveness. But instead he was incredibly arrogant. He said I was just a horny bitch he had picked up at a bar, a woman who wanted to be roughed up, who had willingly gone back to his room to be fucked. The bartender in the hotel saw us drinking together, the people in the jazz club saw us kissing. He told me I could do whatever I wanted, but in the end I was only going to be humiliated in the process.

As you might expect, I could not prove he had placed drugs in my cocktail, nor that he had forced me to do any of the things he did to me. I never contacted him again, and it was the last time we saw each other.

All that was left to me was to learn from the experience.

When Randi finished reading the chapter she read it again, and then a third time.

This was not one of Elizabeth's memories, not something Elizabeth had experienced. This was an eerily precise description of what Randi had suffered, less than a year ago, when she attended a conference in New York City. Every detail, every nuance.

Randi sat there, staring at the pages, her hands trembling as she relived the horror of that night. She had never shared this with anyone. She had certainly not divulged a single word of this to Elizabeth Knoebel.

So how
? Randi wondered.
How could she have known?

Unless, of course, Elizabeth had engineered the entire event. Unless Elizabeth had set her up.

It was so unthinkable, so malicious, Randi could not even fathom the evil that could drive someone to this.

But there it was on the printed page. There was no other possibility.

And then she recalled how, a few days after the rape, when she returned to her office still bruised and enraged by the event, she found a single red rose taped to her door. Without a note. Without explanation.

Until now.

CHAPTER 25

Monday morning, after an early session with a new patient, Randi Conway was seated at the desk in her office, the printed pages of Elizabeth Knoebel's journal before her.

The final chapter was so utterly different in tone than the rest of the diary it felt as if someone else had written the scene. For a moment Randi was tempted to go back to the beginning and read it through all over again, but she was still too shaken by what she had read the day before. Instead, she pushed the pages away and stared at them, wondering what to do next.

Walker had been right. Elizabeth had made a pale effort to disguise the various players and, despite the coded names, Randi knew most of the people portrayed. The character traits, the descriptions, the intimate details Elizabeth revealed, it was all painfully clear. Elizabeth had used her, and had exploited the other women in her group. She took their secrets and then tracked down their husbands, attempting to seduce each of them for the sheer sport of the chase, for the mere experience of the conquest.

And the women were not immune from the twisted game Elizabeth was playing. She tormented Fran Colello in ways that went far beyond what Randi had witnessed in group. She took advantage of Nettie Sisson's weakness, something Randi had long suspected but now acknowledged as something she should have faced. Elizabeth manipulated Phyllis Wentworth and Joan Avery, encouraging fears about their failing marriages, pushing them to the limits of personal despair. Even Lisa Gorman came under her sway, forced to question the prospects for her young family.

And then there was the pain of what Randi had been made to suffer.

Not only was it now clear that Elizabeth was behind that brutal assault, but there were also the taunts she had leveled against Randi in their private sessions.

As a therapist, Randi understood that patients play all sorts of games that are inspired by many different psychological forces. Transference. Role-playing. Fantasies. Egotism. Narcissism. Randi was trained to deflect these gambits in an effort to bring the patient in touch with his or her true feelings.

But Elizabeth was motivated by sheer malice, and Randi had never broken through the veneer that hid the causes for her malevolence from view.

Now she had to wonder—why had she failed, and why had she put up with it?

At dinner on Saturday Walker had mentioned Randi's book,
The Cheating Heart
, and she surprised herself by admitting that it had been written as a therapeutic exercise. It was never intended as a serious treatise, it was pop psychology, something she created to deal with the pain of her broken engagement. In some ways, it was payback for the way that miserable sonuvabitch had walked out on her.

It became evident that Elizabeth had read the book, dissected it for use in her sessions, and turned many of their discussions into attacks on Randi rather than counseling for Elizabeth.

Again, Randi was left to wonder why she did not take another approach, or resign as the woman's therapist altogether.

And then there was the issue of Elizabeth's marriage.

Randi asked Walker why he thought Knoebel allowed the police to see Elizabeth's journal, but Walker had no reasonable explanation. While that remained unanswered, this much was obvious—Stanley was an intelligent man with a controlling personality—whatever he did, he did with purpose.

Elizabeth had written the scene about Randi, disguising the incident as if it had happened to her. But Randi was the lynchpin around which Elizabeth's entire scheme of seduction revolved. Her overtures to Randi, although rejected, should have made it into the diary, should they not? Were there things Elizabeth wrote about her that had been deleted? And if so, by whom? What might Elizabeth have written that did not survive?

Randi slowly opened the desk drawer, took out the anonymous notes she had found in her office, then placed them atop Elizabeth's manuscript. The first said:

DR CONWAY
YOU MUST NOT BETRAY HER.
YOU MUST NOT BETRAY ME.

The second typewritten note said:

DR CONWAY
I AM SORRY

Walker was right again, she told herself. Elizabeth's murderer lived in the pages of this journal. As the police sought to decipher the clues depicted in these torrid, angry scenes, Randi knew that she was better qualified than anyone else to make sense of it all— and the one person to whom the danger of that reality was the greatest.

She picked up the phone and dialed Bob Stratford's office.

“You don't sound like you're having a very good morning,” he said.

“I'm not,” she replied, making no effort to conceal her gloomy mood. “You have a few minutes to talk?”

“I'm all ears.”

She began by returning to the notes, then told him about her dinner with Walker and the threatening phone call she received while they were at the restaurant. She said that she had described the call to Walker but, for reasons she could not explain, had not told him about the notes.

“We'll figure out how to handle that,” Stratford assured her.

“After I told him about the call, he said he wanted to take my phone and have it traced.”

“Understandable.”

Randi took a deep breath.

“I take it there's more?”

“There is,” she said. “The main thing I wanted to talk with you about is something that Walker gave me, something Elizabeth Knoebel had written. A diary of some kind. A book, really.”