Imola (4 page)

Dr. Leahy turned back to Agnes. “Don’t you report him?”

“No. We all talked about it. He gets really mean when he gets in trouble for it, so we just decided to take care of it ourselves. He needs help, not more trouble.”

“How do you take care of it?”

Hurt him
.

“We each have our own way. I just cover up and give him a dirty look. Marsha gives him an elbow in the ear. Tammy tries to kick him in the crotch. The only one to get him to stop is Patty. She followed him to his room one day, held the door open, and told him what a loser he was for doing what he was doing.”

Masturbating
.

“If that gets him to stop, why don’t you all do it?”

“It made him cry. Then he got really mean with all of us. I guess it’s easier to let him have his fun. He seems harmless.”

“I don’t understand. Why would they put him in a co-ed ward?”

“From what I’ve heard, they’ve had him on two or three other wards, with all men. He kept getting beat up. They say the last time he got messed up pretty bad. They probably moved him here because they’re afraid of a lawsuit. Here it’s our word against his. And we don’t leave scars.”

Dr. Leahy put her hand on Agnes’s upper arm and steered her toward the conference room. “But doesn’t it bother you? When he touches you?”

“You mean because of what happened when I was little?”

“Yes.”

“I guess I feel sorry for him.”

Not me
.

“He’s like a little boy around girls who are just developing.”

Dr. Leahy put her attaché on the conference room table. They both sat. Her tongue pushed against the inside of her cheek, and her jaw went still. “What would your Aunt Gert have said about him?”

“That he’s not one of the good ones.” The corners of Agnes’s mouth twisted upward. “Gert would’ve got him to stop.”

You know how
.

Dr. Leahy reached across the table and took Agnes’s hands in hers. “Are you sure you’re all right in here?”

“I’m fine. I’ve been trying to help some of the people here. They just need someone to talk to them and to listen to them. Someone who isn’t judgmental.”

Dr. Leahy withdrew her hands. “Am I judgmental?”

“You have to be. It’s your job.”

Bitch
.

Agnes smiled. “How else can you make me better?”

“But you talk as if being judgmental is bad.”

“Maybe there’s a difference between helping someone and making them better.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Spend some time in here.”

Dr. Leahy chuckled. “Sometimes I don’t think you belong here.”

“Then get me out.”

“We aren’t even close to finishing your treatment. And the alternative would be prison.”

“And the difference would be?”

Dr. Leahy shook her head as she picked up her pencil and steno pad. “Does everything have to be logical with you?”

“Should I strive for the illogical?” Agnes said.

“Sometimes emotion should rule over logic.”

“Since when?”

“Since humans gained the capacity for abstract thought,” Dr. Leahy said.

Agnes relaxed into the chair back. “I have dreams. That doesn’t fall in the logical category, does it?”

Dr. Leahy posed the pencil. “It depends on how you look at them. What kind of dreams do you have?”

“Some good, some bad.”

“Any that repeat?”

Agnes bobbed her head and frowned. “One.”

“Is that one good or bad?”

She turned her eyes to the bare wall and deepened her frown. After a few seconds, she flicked her head back and looked Dr. Leahy in the eyes. “I don’t know.”

Dr. Leahy wrote. “Does it have anything to do with Lilin or your father?”

Agnes’s response was immediate. “I don’t know.”

“It might?”

She shrugged.

Dr. Leahy leaned forward. “Can you tell me about it?”

Agnes removed her hands from the table and folded them in her lap. “I used to travel the coast highway frequently, and there’s a turnout on a cliff overlooking the rocky shore—about two hundred feet below. I’ve seen the actual turnout a number of times. I drove by it on the way to my animal care presentations. It’s just a few miles south of Mendocino. In the summer, an ice cream truck used to stop in the turnout and sell ice cream to people driving the highway. The turnout was always crowded when the vendor was there.”

“Are you mixing reality with dream right now?”

“Yes. The turnout is real, and the vendor sold ice cream there in the summer. When it was warm.”

“What’s the dream?”

“Someone’s always in the car with me. Telling me that I can stop, but I can’t have any ice cream. I pull over, but the person won’t let me get out of the car. Won’t let me open the door.”

“Do you stop?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you keep going?”

“I don’t know. The view is incredible, but I don’t think that’s it.”

“You never just keep going?”

“No, I always stop.”

“Does the person hold you in the car in any way?”

“No. Just says I can’t get out—that I can’t have ice cream.”

“Do you want some ice cream?”

“Yes. I crave it.”

“Why don’t you just get out?”

Agnes thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t feel safe. I guess I don’t trust the person in the car.”

“Is the person a man or a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long have you had the dream?”

“A long time.”

“Weeks? Months? Years?”

“Years.”

“Have our meetings affected the dream?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“It’s more frequent.”

Jason flopped onto the couch next to April Leahy and swung his arm around her head so she could nestle her forehead into his neck. The three-way bulb in the adjacent lamp seemed to be at middle click, casting a soft glow over the ubiquitous earth tones in April’s great room. The television on the far wall matched the color scheme with a subtle background of flickering light and expressionless sound. April’s wineglass was three-quarters empty. His was untouched.

She put her right hand on his chest. “Thank you for coming over. It’s been a while.”

“I had an idea. I’m surprised I didn’t think of it before.”

“I’ve got an idea, too.” She dropped her hand to his lap and gently kneaded his crotch.

“Not that.” He looked down at her hand but let itcontinue its circular caress. “I’m not in the mood for that right now.”

April kissed his neck. “Part of you says otherwise.”

He pulled her hand from his pants and dropped it over her lap. “I’m serious. I don’t want to.”

“Since when is a man not in the mood? And don’t tell me you have a headache, because even if you do, I can make it go away. Guaranteed.”

He didn’t have the courage to tell her the truth. That their passionate moments weren’t developing the intimacy he was looking for—the incredible emotional closeness he’d felt with Eugenia. From a physical standpoint, April was an excellent lover. Excellent? Why had that word popped into his mind? Why not wonderful? Fantastic? She was technically proficient, expert, but the difference between making love and falling in love was like the difference between the proper alignment of a piston in a cylinder and the integrated function of the entire engine when perfectly tuned. The power of the former was significant, but paled in comparison to the output of the latter. And it wasn’t evolving. At least for him. Then again, maybe he wasn’t giving it enough of a chance. Not it. Her. Maybe he wasn’t giving her enough of a chance. Was that the problem? Was he looking for an “it” instead of a “her”? Maybe he was the problem. Or was there something else?

He swiveled his body to face her on the couch, dislodging her head from his neck. “I had an idea about Agnes’s case. That’s why I came over. I can’t believe I didn’t—”

April threw her hands against his chest and pushed him back into the arm of the couch. She stood up and hovered over him, shifting her weight from her right foot to the left.

He tried to interpret her action, her expression, but his understanding of the female mind still required training wheels. So, what now? Forge ahead? Make a lame apology? He picked up the wineglass and downed over half of it in one gulp. Lame apology. “I’m really sorry, April. But you know how I am. When I get something in my head, I stay on that track until I hit the coast.”

She reached for her wineglass and tightened her fist around the stem. “I need more.”

More what? Wine? More from him. Crap. Should have just lain back and enjoyed it.

April stomped into the kitchen.

Jason thought he heard the sound of a cork popping from a bottle, and his mind looped back to the time he was nearly expelled from school for feeling up Diana Venturi in the middle school boys’ room. His mother had frozen him with the one phrase that could uncouple time from matter and space in the theory of relativity: “Wait until your father comes home.”

Now he counted three heartbeats for every swing of the pendulum in April’s mantle clock. Two minutespassed. Three.

April slinked back and eased down in the overstuffed chair opposite the couch. Her eyes were dry but ringed red. A crumpled tissue was in her left hand, a full wineglass in her right.

Jason straightened up and searched her face for a hint of what was to come. She had time to guzzle a couple glasses in the kitchen, and her drooping eyelids suggested she had.

“What about Agnes?” Her monotone seemed icy.

“We don’t have to talk about her.”

“Then what should we talk about?”

He fidgeted through the silence. How long before his father would come home?

April tipped the wineglass to her lips and let the liquid slide down her throat with only a few swallows. She leveled her eyes at him and then dropped her gaze to the floor.

His mind flipped back to his childhood room: His father had just barged through the front door. It hadn’t taken long for the door to his room to fly open, then slam shut, the huge figure of his father charging like a bull. The memory came back in detail. His father had stopped short, glanced over his shoulder at the door, and leaned forward. His voice was a whisper instead of a bellow. “Did she let you?”

Jason remembered how thick the words had been on his tongue. “It was her idea.”

His father had swatted his own thigh three times with the stick, each echoing in the room and, hopefully, down the hall. His voice remained a whisper. “This is a lesson. Girls are going to chase you until you catch them. Once you do, everything is going to be your fault. Do you understand?”

He hadn’t at the time, but now his father’s lesson was beginning to sink in.

April shifted in her chair, bringing his mind back. “I’m sorry, Jason, but sometimes I just don’t get you. And I want to.” She relaxed into the chair and tipped the glass to drain the last few drops of wine. “I know I shouldn’t push you, but I just get impatient. When you come here, I want it to be about us.”

“I know. I’m not very good at this. Forgive me?”

“Special dispensation. I’ve downed most of the bottle, and it’s hitting me hard. Hell, I’m halfway to forgiving my father.”

He tried to push out of the couch but failed. “I should go.”

“Are you sure? You know what I like to do when I get a snoot full.”

He flopped back into the couch. She was chasing. He had only one chance left. “Do you have the number of the lawyer who’s handling Agnes’s affairs?”

She put her glass on the coffee table and slinked over to the couch without standing up straight. She stabbedher left knee into the couch cushion next to his right thigh and swung her other knee over, straddling him.

Jason sent a silent apology to his dad.

“It’s in the card box next to the phone. Get it on the way out.” She fell against him and exhaled into his ear. “And don’t forget to lock up.”

Jason hit the button, and the driver’s window of the Volvo whined down. The crisp morning air swirled around him, ruffling his hair. He needed to shed the head-bobbing fatigue brought on by a lack of sleep and the monotonous drive to Mendocino, so he channeled his mind on his objective. He was doing it for April and for Agnes. But that wasn’t all. This time, his curiosity exceeded his reporter instincts. Ever since he had helped catch Agnes and send her off to Imola, he wanted to find out more about her. To help her. Why had her father molested and then killed her twin sister, Lilin? And why not Agnes? On more than one occasion, April had said that having that one piece of information would be invaluable in helping Agnes.

Jason leaned over and nodded to his image in the rearview mirror. He knew Detective Bransome had shut the investigation down as soon they found out Lilin was a construct of Agnes’s traumatized mind.

Jason suspected, hoped, that Agnes’s U-Store garage was left untouched. If her great-aunts had kept any information about their brother, Eddie, it wouldn’t be stashed in the house. It would have been hidden away just like Eddie’s identity had been hidden from Agnes until Lilin’s murders started.

As far as Jason could tell, Eddie was such an embarrassment to his sisters, they had pushed him into nonexistence. And it was no wonder. He was Agnes’s biological grandfather and her biological father. He had molested his own daughter, Agnes’s mother, and after she died, he started molesting Lilin. April had said she was convinced that Eddie didn’t molest Agnes, but she thought he made her watch everything that happened to Lilin, including her murder. Quite a satchel for a four-year-old to carry. No wonder Gert and Ella took Agnes away. No wonder they had severed all connections with Eddie. The U-Store garage would be a reasonable exile for his memorabilia, if any existed.