When She Was Bad: A Thriller (6 page)

“Okay, here it is: screw integration.”

That brought Irene up short. The standard approach to treating multiples was to integrate the alter identities with the original personality to the greatest achievable extent. And the alternative to that would be…?

“Good lord, Al—you’re not talking about somehow eliminating the alters instead of integrating them, are you?”

Corder’s response consisted of a wink so smug and feline Irene could practically see canary feathers floating behind him as he led her up to Lily’s provisional quarters on 2-South. The security precautions were impressive as always—he had to punch codes into keypads to gain entrance to the glassed-in elevator lobby, again to summon the elevator, and a third time to gain access to the observation suite, a largish room decorated in shades of peach, apricot, and burnt umber. Lily lay on a comfortable-looking single bed—not a hospital bed—with her head turned resolutely toward the wall.

“Good seeing you again, Irene,” said Corder, framed in the doorway. “I’ll leave you two alone to talk—when you’re done, just press that intercom button over there. And Lily, you have a good night, don’t be shy about asking the nurses for anything you need.” He stepped backward as the door slid closed again.

“What a lovely room,” said Irene, approaching the bed. “And look, you have your own television!” As if that were something entirely new and marvelous. Attagirl, Irene told herself, perching on the edge of the bed. Could you
possibly
be any more fatuous?

“What do you care?” Lily’s elation at learning that Corder might be able to cure her DID had been short-lived, disappearing as soon as the door to her room had closed and locked behind her. “If you cared, you wouldn’t go away and leave me here.”

“Please
don’t make this any harder than it is already.” Irene reached out to pat the girl’s shoulder. She was sorely tempted to blurt out the unspeakable truth—that bringing Lily here hadn’t been her idea—but didn’t want to take a chance on upsetting the girl even more, or on selfishly undermining Lily’s relationship with her new doctor.

Lily stiffened at the touch, then wrenched herself around almost violently, turning a tear-streaked face toward Irene. “I miss them, Dr. Irene—Grandma and Grandpa, I miss them so much. And I’m so scared. Please don’t leave me here. Something terrible is going to happen, I know it is.”

“Ssh, ssh, it’s okay, I won’t let anything bad happen to you,” Irene crooned soothingly, taking the girl into her arms and hugging her tightly—something she’d never have been able to do before her ordeal with Maxwell. Awkwardly, one-handed, she fumbled around in her enormous purse for her card case and a pen, scribbled her home and cell numbers on the back of one of her business cards, and handed it to Lily. “Here, take this,” she said. “I’m no farther than the telephone. You can call me anytime you like, even if it’s just to talk, and if you really need me, just say the word and I’ll come running.”

A tear plopped onto the card; carefully, so as not to smear the ink, Lily brushed it away with her sleeve. “Is that a promise?” she said, slipping the card into the tight back pocket of her jeans.

“Cross my heart,” said the psychiatrist. They hugged for a few seconds, then Irene pressed the intercom button. Lily flinched when the door slid open, then lay back and turned her face to the wall; when she turned around again, she was alone.

Welcome to the snake pit, Lily told herself. She knew why they used to call mental hospitals snake pits: because—no lie!—doctors once thought the best way to cure people of certain disorders was to hang them upside down over a pit filled with poisonous snakes!

Of course, there were no snakes here at the Reed-Chase Institute—or if there were, they were very expensive, exclusive snakes, she thought wryly.

But no amount of pampering could pad the shock of finding yourself living out the single worst fear of your life. Ever since she could remember, Lily had been terrified of being locked up in an asylum—and now here she was. Talk about the other shoe dropping, she thought. In a way, it was like that old cliché about careful what you wish for because you might get it, only with a new twist. Be careful what you’re afraid of, is what they
should
say, Lily decided. Be careful what you’re afraid of, because someday it might get
you.

6

As much as he disliked the responsibilities that came with being the director of an institution the size of Reed-Chase—the administrative details that threatened to swamp him on a daily basis, the weight of all the people, staff and patients alike, whose welfare depended on his decisions—Al Corder had to admit that you couldn’t beat the commute.

It was close to six o’clock when he left Irene Cogan and Lily to say their good-byes. Only minutes later he unlocked and ducked through the arch-topped door set into the ivy-covered brick wall bordering the northern end of the arboretum, strolled across the lawn, passed the disused swing-and-slide set, and let himself in through the back entrance of the eighty-year-old, half-timbered, Tudor-style fieldstone manor that came with the director’s job. End of commute.

“Home is the hunter, home from the hills,” he called.

“Hi, I’m in the kitchen.”

As he passed through the dining room, Corder noticed the table was set for two. “The princess does not deign to dine with the commoners this evening?”

Cheryl Corder was at the stove, wooden spoon in one hand, kettle lid in the other, her dark blond hair limp from the steam. “The princess,” she replied over her shoulder, “is a little down in the dumps.”

“Boy trouble?” Corder gave her a peck on the back of the neck, then peered over her shoulder into the kettle and inhaled greedily.

“What else?” She replaced the lid, set the spoon down carefully on a folded paper towel.

“Should I have a fatherly chat with her?”

“I suppose you might as well give it a shot—Lord knows she won’t confide in me.”

Knock, knock. “Allie? Allie, it’s Dad.”

“Yeah, I guessed from your voice.”

She can’t help it, Corder reminded himself, she’s an adolescent. “May I come in?”

“If you promise not to act like a psychiatrist.”

“Word,” said Corder; it sounded lame even to him, so he hastily added, “On it, you have my word on it.”

His quintessentially fifteen-year-old daughter lay facedown on the bed, her right hand under her cheek, her left hand dangling just above the carpet. She was wearing a pair of skintight, below-the-navel jeans and a cutoff top. She edged her legs away from the side of the bed to give him room to perch—a major concession.

“Speaking not as a psychiatrist but as a father—you want me to beat him up?”

He was rewarded with a giggle. “Oh, Daddy, he’s a football player.”

“I was on the track team—I could pop him one, then run away quick.”

As Alison rolled over and sat up, it struck Corder once again that somehow, almost overnight, his little girl had metamorphosed into, for want of a better word, a hottie.

“How come boys are such a-holes, Daddy?”

“Hormones, sweetie—at that age, they’re a raging stew of hormones. Speaking of which, your mother is cooking up a heavenly beef bourguignonne—if there’s beef bourguignonne in heaven. I’m, ah, thinking about cracking a real nice-looking ’98 Napa cabernet to go with it.”

She cocked her head like a curious jay. “Aaaand…?”

“Your mother and I were talking the other night about whether you were old enough—or I should say, mature enough—for us to start initiating you into the proper enjoyment of the, ah, fruits of the vine. So I was thinking, maybe I’d set out an extra glass tonight—if you’re feeling well enough to join us for dinner, that is.”

She nodded, slowly, responsibly, maturely. “Sure, okay.”

“Good, good—I’ll set a place, we’ll call you when dinner’s ready.” He patted her ankle and stood up, thinking that he’d surely kept his promise not to act like a psychiatrist. Making a unilateral decision—yes, he and Cheryl had talked about letting Allie have a glass of wine at the dinner table, but they hadn’t exactly reached a conclusion—not to mention bribing an underage kid with alcohol: that was about as unpsychiatrist-like as it gets.

But Cheryl let him off the hook with a raised eyebrow, while Alison was the picture of condescending adolescent maturity all through the meal, chatting politely with her parents just as if they weren’t hopelessly retarded. The only down note came when Corder told them about Ulysses Maxwell’s visitor that morning.

“What do you think’s going to happen to him?” asked Alison. Her father had first brought Lyssy over for Sunday dinner—along with one of his attendants, whom they made a pretext of treating as just another guest—when Alison was thirteen. The two had hit it off famously, not least because at that point Lyssy was more or less a boy of thirteen in a thirty-year-old body. Since then, he’d been invited to the director’s residence for dinner every few months or so—always with an attendant in tow, of course.

“Life without parole, at best. At worst, lethal injection.”

“But that’s not fair! Lyssy’s so gentle—he wouldn’t hurt a fly—you know he wouldn’t.”

“That’s true—but in a way, that’s also a function of his former disorder.”

“The DID, you mean?”

Corder nodded. “When a child’s psyche dissociates—that just means it breaks apart—it splits off, not into lots of other complex personalities, but into its own component parts. Each of the alter identities represents a particular, ah,
aspect
of the original personality—so far we’ve identified sixteen classes of alters”—administrators, analgesics, autistics, children, cross-genders, demons/spirits, handicapped, hosts, imposters, internal self helpers, MTPs or memory trace personalities, persecutors, promiscuous, protectors, substance abusers, suicidals—“that work together to help the child deal with traumas he or she has no other way to deal with.

“And many of these alter identities embody or express the character traits that the original identity finds disturbing. Sexuality, anger, feelings of aggression, and so on. In Lyssy’s case, all the anger he felt at having been abused, along with the desire to strike out, to avenge himself, all those feelings that if expressed would only have resulted in even more abuse, were, ah, segregated into alter identities.

“So while it’s true that Lyssy, as Lyssy, the original personality, couldn’t hurt a fly—or protect himself from one, for that matter—his psyche manifested at least two alters, Max and Kinch, who gloried in violence.”

“But they don’t exist anymore, right? Because you helped him get rid of them.”

“Well, yes. Unfortunately, though, no jury has ever bought DID as a defense in a criminal case.”

“But couldn’t you convince them?”

“I’m going to try, sweetheart.”

“You better.” Alison sipped thoughtfully at her wine, trying not to pull a sour face, then looked up brightly. “I just remembered—doesn’t Lyssy have a birthday coming up this month?”

Corder nodded glumly. “On Wednesday.”

“Are we going to have a party for him again?”

“I don’t know—it’s a stressful time for Lyssy, and—”

“Please? You know how much he loves coming over—and if what you said is true, it could be the last birthday party he ever gets to have.”

“That’s true enough.” Corder glanced over to his wife. “What do you say, hon?”

She shook her head dubiously. “Wednesday’s a bear for me. I’m getting my hair done in the morning, my book club meets in the afternoon, I’m not sure how I’d—”

“Please,
Mom? I’ll bake the cake.”

“That I have to see,” said Cheryl Corder—and so the family’s fate was decided.

7

For three years, Irene Cogan had been nursing an unlikely crush on the man who’d risked his own life to save her from Ulysses Maxwell’s hellhole. Or perhaps not so unlikely, despite his unprepossessing (well, okay, downright homely) appearance—she didn’t need her Stanford degrees to understand how a damsel in distress might develop an affinity for the knight in shining armor who’d ridden to her rescue, or to recognize the resemblance between Pender and both her father
and
her late husband—big, easygoing men in whose strong arms a gal couldn’t help feeling safe and protected.

At the time, though, Irene had been too traumatized by Maxwell to trust her feelings for Pender, never mind
acting
on them, and any remaining chance of a relationship developing between them seemed to have dissolved entirely when instead of moving out to California following his retirement from the FBI, as he’d once thought of doing, Pender had accepted a law enforcement job on the island of St. Luke, a U.S. protectorate in the eastern Caribbean.

Irene told herself it was just as well, that it would never have worked out for the two of them anyway. Then a few months ago Pender had called Irene out of the blue to tell her his plans had changed, that things hadn’t panned out for him on St. Luke, and that he was thinking about moving to the central coast after all.

So much for
just as well.
Irene had helped Pender find a cottage to rent only a few blocks from her place in Pacific Grove, and he’d quickly been assimilated into her circle of friends and acquaintances. He’d grown particularly close to the DeVries family—Lily had taken to calling him Uncle Pen, and he’d become golfing buddies with both her real uncle, Rollie DeVries, and her grandfather Lyman.

But when it came to reciprocating Irene’s romantic feelings, nothing had changed—their relationship was platonic, and in dire peril of remaining so. Then, a little over a month ago, Irene and Pender had each been contacted by
The People’s Posse,
a Portland-based basic cable show on the order of
America’s Most Wanted,
and asked to appear on an upcoming episode featuring the Maxwell case.

The offer—an all-expense-paid trip to Portland and a modest emolument—wasn’t all that tempting until the two compared notes and discovered they were scheduled to be interviewed on consecutive days. To Irene it had seemed like a perfect opportunity to take one last shot at upgrading the relationship. She’d suggested to Pender that they make a joint vacation out of it; when he agreed, she booked them adjoining rooms at an upscale hotel advertising romantic midweek getaways.