The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (16 page)

Hidden Lake Hospital was a
tiny red brick contraption in the older, poorer part of town. What
it was basically was a glorified ER. I don’t think they had more
than 12 permanent beds in the building. It was the kind of place
where they’d just give you the basics before shipping you off to a
bigger facility.

They let Wooly in to see
Nickie—he identified himself as her employer. I sat in the waiting
room and did some searching. It wasn’t easy. Castillo wasn’t
exactly an uncommon name. The first cycles produced nothing. Plus I
kept thinking about what she said to me that first night together,
when I asked about the scars under her eye.
Don’t ask. Don’t ever ask.

Finally I got a hit, from
years back. From deep in the
Newsday
archives. One story. The
headline:
Teen Acquitted In Mother’s
Death
.

This fucking town and its
maze of secrets. The hidden stories these people kept were as
twisted together as a tangled thicket of bushes out in the
Paumanok. I was starting to think some invisible boundary had been
drawn out there in the woods, some border I didn’t know about, and
somehow, by reading this story, I’d be crossing the
line.

>>>>>>

TUESDAY JUNE 19, 2:45
p.m.

EVERYTHING WAS
CONNECTED

Funny thing about silence.
In a cinder block cell inside an upstate prison, it can be a
depressing thing. In a guest bedroom in Wooly’s house, with a
significantly upset woman staring at you from the other side of the
space, it can be even worse.

She was sitting stiffly on
the edge of an armchair—stiff because of the stitches in her leg,
stiff because she was refusing to relax. She was a lightning rod
mounted on upholstery.

“Don’t bring it up to me,”
she said. “I’m warning you. Don’t go there. You’ll never get
back.”

“Hey,
they
brought it up, Roy and
Alex.”

“And
you
had to ask.
You
had to go looking.”

“I’m gonna ignore
it?”

“What’s the
matter
with you? Why do
you have to make everything so
complicated?”

Déjà vu all over again.
That’s
exactly
what my ex used to tell me. In fact, this whole thing felt
like a flashback to old fights at home.

Nickie was glaring at me,
mouth quivering. But then her body seemed to slump a little, just a
little.

“You ever want to shut
something out of your life?” she said. “Just close it off, shut the
door on it and lock it away forever?”

“I know what it’s like.” I
took one of the other chairs. “You know what I’m talking
about.”

She turned her eyes away
from me and fixed them on the floor, slowly nodding to herself.
Three seconds—count ‘em—went by. “You really want to know about my
mother?”

“I’d like to hear your
side of it, yeah.”

She eased back in the
chair just a bit, but still staying rigid. There was nothing soft
about her sitting.

“You know what it’s like
to realize you’re the most normal person in your house? You know
how scary that is?” She paused for a moment but she wasn’t waiting
for an answer. “I don’t know what she was like before I was born,
but after? I mean
just
after? I was a big baby, a 10 pounder. I just shot right out
of there. She broke her pelvic bone during the delivery, and I
think she carried the resentment with her after that. It was like
she’d written
drive daughter crazy
on her To Do list.
Drive
daughter as crazy as you are.
”

“How crazy was
she?”

“Very, clinically. She was
bipolar, manic depressive, whatever. She was crazy and she kept
going off her meds. I spent my life looking for the signs that she
was going off. My whole growing-up time I spent trying to read her,
trying to spot the signals. I spent my life taking care of
her.”

“Just the two of
you?”

“Just us.”

“Your father?”

“I never got a clear
explanation.”

“How bad did she
get?”

“She was
insane
. One day, I was
like 15, I bought a mirror and hung it in the living room. She said
what did you do that for? I said it makes the place look bigger.
She said why would anyone want that? Who wants it bigger? It’s just
more to clean.”

“She was
serious?”

“It got worse. About a
week later I came home from school, she had mirrors everywhere.
Living room, hallway, all over the house. She said she was using
the mirrors to put herself back together. She said she was using
all the different reflections to take herself apart and put herself
back again the way she should be.”

Nickie was still looking
at the floor. There was nothing there except beige carpet, but
that’s where her eyes stayed.

“It would’ve gone on like
that for who knows…” she said.

“But something
happened.”

She nodded. “I was going
out with this…
guy
. I was 16. One night, we were in the woods, he tried to
attack me. Or I guess he
did
attack me. He had a knife. I fought him off but
he swiped me a few times, going for my eye. I got away. I ran away,
took myself to emergency. Sat there in the hospital all night, all
by myself.”

Her hand moved. I thought
she was going to touch the grooved flesh on the side of her face,
but she went higher, pushed her hair back. I could see the gloss of
tears in her eyes.

“I got home that morning.
My mother looked at my eye and started screaming. What the hell is
that? What happened to you? I told her it was just an accident but
she wasn’t buying it. I think you’re whoring around, she kept
saying. I think you’re whoring around.

“We were upstairs, at the
top of the stairs. She was yelling at me and I really didn’t like
it. I’d just been knifed and nearly raped and I’d spent the night
in a hospital. I really didn’t like the way she was yelling at me.
I grabbed at her hands to shut her up. She pulled away, and as she
pulled she lost her balance and down the stairs she went. Head over
heels, down the stairs.

“It was a bad fall. I
could see it was a bad fall. I ran down there, are you all right?
She said she was. I said I’d call 911, I’d help her into bed. She
kept saying she was all right. I should’ve known she was too crazy
to be believed, but I decided to believe it. I had to go to school.
I believed it.

“I got home that
afternoon. There were police cars, EMT vehicles all over the place.
My mother had stumbled out of the house and collapsed in the front
yard. She’d died right there, massive internal injuries. She’d died
about two minutes after the first police got to the scene, which
was enough time for her to tell them I’d left her alone, I’d
abandoned her after she’d fallen down the stairs.

“I got arrested. They
charged me with—you should appreciate this—they charged me with
manslaughter. They said I’d callously refused to help her. They
said I’d just walked away and left her to die. I told the jury what
happened. They let me go. But a lot of people around here weren’t
convinced, not during the trial and not even after. A lot of people
around here thought I should’ve done something. A lot of people
around here thought I’d gotten away with murder and let my mother
die.”

She stopped talking, her
head in the same downward position.

“There are better ways to
grow up,” I said.

A single tear slowly
rolled down her cheek. It fell from the scarred eye, crawling down
her face until it came to rest in the corner of her
mouth.

“I can’t believe I’m
crying,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m crying now. The whole time
it happened, the trial, everything, I never cried. Crying was for
small things, not for big ones.”

“What happened after? Did
you stay around?”

“I went to live with my
aunt. I was 17, I went to live with her. I wasn’t going to hang
around, not with people hating me.”

“The guy who cut you—you
never filed charges?”

She wiped her face, wiped
her nose. “Too embarrassed, too ashamed.”

“So nothing ever happened
to him?”

“Yeah, something happened
to him. He got arrested today.”

You ever have one of those
conversations where the talk suddenly takes a swerve and drops you
off a cliff? “Him?”

“Roy. Roy fucking
Freeny.”

Connected,
connected—everything around here was connected.

A wounded silence had
settled over the room.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m
sorry I had to ask.”

She straightened up in her
chair. Her eyes were snarling at me now. “Get everything you
wanted? Anything else about my life you need to know?”

“I said I’m
sorry.”

“So am I. Don’t talk to me
anymore. I don’t want to talk to you, don’t talk to me. We have
nothing left to say. Just leave me alone.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

CHAPTER 7

9,000 STARS IN THE
SKY

>>TUESDAY JUNE 19 (2
days to go)

>>WEDNESDAY JUNE 20 (1
day to go)

TUESDAY JUNE 19, 4:10
p.m.

IN TWO SECONDS IT ALL WENT
WRONG

Not a good idea, I
thought, to be hanging around the house with Nickie in such a
blazing mood. Time to book. She had Wooly’s broad back—I could
leave with no security worries. So leave I did. Nickie and I needed
some zen spacing between us. A
lot
of it. My plan: Get something to eat in town,
then put an end to this long day in the Hidden Lake Hotel. I was
paying for the room, might as well use it.

Maybe a mile away from
downtown strange little warning beeps began popping out of my
phone. GPS. My tracking device was still snuggled under Georgiana
Copely’s XKE, and the car was on the move. Which meant the Jag
hadn’t been used since last Friday, four days ago, when for reasons
still unknown she’d visited Trident Manufacturing.

Georgiana—what a huge
question mark she still was. Everything she’d called had seemed to
come true.
Seemed
. But what part was she really playing in the Wooly Cornell
death saga? Maybe it was time to go back to school on her. I felt
like I’d taken a few steps inside her dim-lit study, but I could
only go so far. Some barrier I couldn’t see was holding me back.
There was something about her I didn’t know, but maybe I needed to
know it.

I picked the car up on
Woodland Avenue, staying about 10 seconds behind. Her assistant
Marco was driving. She was riding shotgun, white straw tumbling
down to her shoulders, wearing shades, just like she’d been
before.

The Jag turned on Prospect
Street and went to Pine Road, going in the exact same southeastern
direction it had taken the first time I’d tracked it. Pine to
Harrison to Northwoods. Minutes later we were driving into town,
sliding past the Hidden Lake Hotel.

Marco stopped at a red
light a few blocks way from the Executive Center. I pulled in two
cars behind, just like I did four days ago. Everything the same,
same, same. Everything seemed to be running on recycled
memory.

I thought about something
someone once said to me. I was working at the agency, and one of my
old bosses said,
It’s hard to spot
something when you don’t know what you’re looking for.

True enough, but isn’t it
harder
not
to
look for it?

Horns blasted behind me.
The light had changed seconds ago. I’d been daydreaming.

I think.

I caught up with the Jag
as it was passing the Executive Center, broken bits of low sun
bouncing off the building’s glass panels, shooting into my eyes
like a hypnotist’s light. Marco kept going, passing Wings ‘N Things
on the corner. Then he turned a block later and pulled into a
parking space. The same space he’d found before. The exact same
fucking space.

That’s when I knew. At
that moment, the moment I saw him taking the space. That’s when
I
knew
where they
were heading.

Ever find yourself sitting
in a windowless room and somehow you know there’s a storm gathering
outside? You can’t see it, but you know the sky is getting dark?
You just know it in the bones. Something in the air, some
electromagnetic charge, tells you a storm is coming.

Georgiana could’ve been
going anywhere. To any of the stores in the area. To Wings ‘N
Things maybe. But I knew she’d be going back to the building. She’d
be going back to the fifth floor. She’d be going back to the same
place she’d been before. I just
knew
it.