The Girls He Adored (49 page)

If that's lucky, thought Irene, I don't want to know about unlucky. But she made no attempt to stop him. She liked having him this close—he was shelter, he was safety. She knew that nothing he was telling her should have made any difference to her Hippocratic oath. She also knew she had to hear him out.

“But if you were unfortunate enough to be born with a strong constitution, or a fierce desire to live, it would have ended with a knife.”

Pender's mind drifted back to the bedroom of the little ranch house in Prunedale.
Harriet Weldon pulls back the sheet that Maxwell had drawn up to the dead women's waists. One of the investigators gasps, another moans. The photographer snaps a flash picture; the sudden glaring whiteness sears the image into Pender's memory. How many knife blows would it take to obliterate a woman's private parts, reduce them to this unrecognizable state, he wonders. A hundred? A thousand?

“Agent Pender?”

Pender was vaguely startled to find himself standing over Maxwell's body. “Sorry. Drifting. Must be more beat than I thought. Where was I?”

“A knife?”

“Oh, yes. A knife. A good strong butcher knife—sturdy enough to survive being driven through bone—pelvic bone—again, and again, and again, until there's nothing but a bloody—”

“No more. Please.” Irene's head was spinning. She was afraid for a moment that she was about to pitch forward across Maxwell's body. Pender slipped his arm around her.

“Kinch,” she said as he eased her back into a sitting position a few feet from the body.

“What?”

“Kinch—that's the name of the alter who carves the women up.”

“Then you'll let me do it?”

“Do what?”

“Loosen the tourniquet.”

Irene thought about it. She thought about it longer and harder than she'd ever care to admit, even to herself. In the end it wasn't
her Hippocratic oath that swung the balance, it was the fact that in more than ten years of specializing in dissociative disorders, Irene had never heard of, much less treated, a multiple even remotely like Maxwell. He was sui generis. The chance to study him, to learn from him, might in the long run lead to breakthroughs in the treatment and understanding of DID that could benefit victims like Lily DeVries. Against that, her own fear, and a vaguely defined urge for revenge, didn't measure up. She shook her head no.

Pender climbed wearily to his feet. “Is there a telephone back at the house? My cell phone doesn't work out here.”

“Not that I know of.”

“I'm going to hotwire one of these vehicles then. Will you be all right here if I go for help, or do you want to come with me?”

“No, I think I should stay with Donna and Dolores.”

It didn't register for a moment—then, for the second time that day, Pender's universe underwent a paradigm shift. “Say again?”

“Donna and Dolores—I should stay with them until the ambulance comes.”

“Donna Hughes and Dolores Moon? They're alive?”

“You didn't know?”

No, Pender started to say. Then he realized that he had—that somehow or other he'd known all along. He just hadn't always believed it.

H
UDDLED BY THE VENTILATION
shaft next to the faucet after Maxwell dragged the psychiatrist out of the drying shed, Donna and Dolores held hands. An eternity passed.

“It'll be over soon,” said Dolores.

“One way or the other,” Donna replied.

It was the very phrase that had been going through Dolores's mind, though she'd chosen not to voice it. “Know what I keep thinking about?” she asked Donna.

Again their thoughts were in synch. “Tammy?” After going five days without a meal during the last week of Max's absence, Tammy Brown had drowned herself under the cold-water tap while the other two slept. It couldn't have been an easy thing to do. They'd found her lying on her back on the grate the next morning, her body cold, her skin slick and pebbly as a dolphin's, her parted lips blue. And after Donna shut off the faucet, they saw that Tammy's open mouth was full to the brim with clear dark water, like a fathomless lake about to overflow its thin blue banks.

“If she'd only held on a little bit longer.” Maxwell had arrived that very night, dumped her body into the privy, and shoveled a bucket of lime over it.

Another eternity passed. It was nearly dark—then it was dark. They'd left off holding hands. Dolores had her back to the wall, facing the door. They heard the outer hatch sliding open. The eternity that passed between the opening of the outer hatch and the inner door, though it contained only footsteps and the tinkling of keys, was the longest eternity of all. Dolores felt her heart pounding at her ribs and thought it was about to burst.

Then the door opened and a huge blood-spattered bald man stood there holding a battery-powered lantern. Beside him, the psychiatrist had her arms full of clothes.

The alter or entity known as Max had never been entirely sure about his own nature, or origins. The fact that the other alters looked upon him as some sort of demon was of course convenient, and had helped him wrest dominance over the system from Useless and Christopher. But for himself, the possibility that he might be an incarnation of Carnivean was only conjecture based upon the circumstances of his first appearance, the perverse delight he'd always taken in activities that others saw as shameful or evil, and the system's undeniably superior level of functioning, compared not only to other multiples but to the human race in general.

It might be coincidence, it might be random mutation, but the possibility that an evolutionary leap such as he represented might also be the result of demonic possession could never be entirely discounted.

So as he found himself slipping into the darkness, once again Max managed to convince himself that it wasn't all bad. At least he didn't have to worry about hell. If it existed, he told himself, he was on the board of directors; if not, oblivion, and an end to the agonizing pain he now found himself in. And in either event, the riddle of his origins would be solved soon enough.

But no sooner had Max arrived at this state of inner peace than it was shattered by the sound of Miss Miller's voice. She had somehow managed to hump her way across the loft on her uninjured back, though her arms and legs were still securely—and painfully—bound, then work the gag out of her mouth.

“Ulysses?” she called.

Max opened his eyes, saw that night had fallen. What a sky, what a sky! “Down here. He shot me.”

“I heard.”

“I think I'm dying.”

“Oh, you think you're dying every time you stub your toe. Remember when you were twelve and you had the flu? I've pulled you through worse scrapes than this, young man. Now get up here and untie me.”

“You're safe now,” Irene said soothingly, though she had to wonder whether any of them, including herself, could ever feel truly
safe again. At the moment, she understood, they were all suffering from acute stress disorder, a precursor of post-traumatic stress disorder that included all the PTSD symptoms, plus severe dissociative symptoms like selective amnesia, affective numbing, and derealization. But Irene shrugged off her own problems—not only was she the least affected of the three, she was a psychiatrist, for crying out loud. “It's over—you're free. He can't hurt you anymore.”

She kept repeating variations on that theme as she helped Donna Hughes to her feet, helped her get her arms through the sleeves of an orange blouse, steadied her while she stepped into a pair of shorts, helped her up the steps and out into the moonlit meadow. A moment later Pender emerged from the hatch with Dolores Moon in his arms, still clutching her blanket around her, unwilling to give it up though Irene had brought her a selection of what appeared to be her own clothes, judging by the sizes.

Irene herself had changed back into the cranberry cardigan, short-sleeved blouse, and white ducks she'd worn—was it only that morning? Time had ceased to have much meaning—she recognized that as a dissociative symptom.

Pender eased little Dolores onto her feet and put his arm around her to steady her. She leaned against him, and with his help turned a full hundred and eighty degrees, turning her back to the two-horned peak to the west, facing the house at the edge of the meadow, and behind it, the full moon rising over the forested ridge.

“Isn't that something?” she said.

Pender looked down at her, then up at the moon. Next to him, Irene and Donna were supporting each other, their arms around each other's waists.

“It sure is,” he agreed. He might have been suffering from a touch of acute stress disorder himself—he couldn't access his emotions, they were too big and too deep. It was as if he'd never seen that full moon before, as if he'd landed on a planet with a whole different sky.

A lesser man, a singular man, would never even have made it into the barn, much less dragged himself all the way to the foot of the loft essentially one-armed and one-legged, and nearly bled out. It required the cooperation of all the alters except Lyssy, and the autistic Mose. Each of them took a turn, then slipped back into the
darkness. In the end only blind Peter was left to drag the body the last few feet.

“Where's the ladder?” he called—up until then he'd known only the terrain of Miss Miller's bedroom. “I can't see.”

What was the matter with the boy? thought Miss Miller, vexed again. The barn was certainly light enough, with the moonlight pouring in through the open hayloft shutters. Still on her back, she wedged her shoulders against the barricade of books Pender had erected and began shoving against them, trying to get to the edge of the loft to guide him to the ladder.

A paperback volume struck Peter on the back of his head. Stunned and confused, he tried to shield himself from the shower of books with his good arm as he crawled under the overhang of the loft to safety.

“Are you all right?” she called, hearing him grunt in pain. No answer. Worried that she'd accidentally harmed him, she braced her back and shoulders against the barricade again, drew her legs up, heels against thighs, and pushed backward with all her might.

Pender's original plan was to get the women settled at the house, find the keys to, or hotwire, the Cherokee, shoot the remaining dogs if they gave him any trouble, drive toward town until his cell phone kicked in, then drive back up to Scorned Ridge and await the ambulances or medevac choppers and the Evidence Response Team. There would be no further need for a Hostage Rescue Team, though knowing the bureau, Pender thought they would probably dispatch one anyway, with a video team, just for the image-positive footage.

But the original plan hadn't accounted for the possibility that neither of the two original hostages would allow him out of her sight. To them, Dr. Cogan didn't count—she was just another in a parade of strawberry blonds. So, exhausted though he was, he carried the little Moon woman up the blacktop toward the barn in his arms, while Donna and Irene followed behind, their arms still around each other's waists.

As she hiked behind Pender, sometimes supporting Donna, sometimes being supported by her, Irene couldn't shake the dreamlike feeling that when they got to the barn, Maxwell's body would be gone. It was such an overwhelmingly strange sensation, and made such an impression on her psyche, that when Pender reached the hump in the ridge first, muttered an obscenity, set
Dolores on her feet, drew his gun, called to the women to wait for him there, then set off at a trot down the slope to the barn, Irene knew in advance what she'd see when she reached the hump in the ridge herself.

Or rather, what she wouldn't see: Maxwell's body was no longer lying in the doorway where they'd left it, apparently unconscious, only fifteen or twenty minutes earlier. Where it had been, she saw only a pool of blood, black in the moonlight, and Pender slipping sideways into the barn, holding his gun at his chest.

Seconds later he emerged waving, and called to Irene, beckoning her down the hill. She hurried down the sloping blacktop, Donna in her orange blouse and shorts and Dolores in her blanket following behind, now supporting each other.