The Girls He Adored (15 page)

T
HREE TIMES THE HANDCUFF BRACELET
clenched in Maxwell's fist had come crashing down on the crown of Pender's skull. He felt only the first blow, as a jarring sensation, followed by the sort of breathless, welling nausea that usually follows a swift kick in the nuts.

Stunned, all but paralyzed, he saw the prisoner's hand rise and fall, rise and fall again, but couldn't make sense of what he saw. Couldn't hear anything, either, until he closed his eyes and began to tumble through darkness. As he fell, and fell, and fell, all the hollow, distant sounds of the jail, fragments of Spanish from the other cells, a toilet flushing, the sleighbell jingle of chains and fetters, washed over him with a roar like breaking waves.

He opened his eyes. The surf sounds abruptly ceased—the world was devoid of sound. He saw the cell bars, inexplicably horizontal—it wasn't until the deputy appeared in front of him that Pender understood that he was lying on the cell floor, on his side. It dizzied him to try to focus on the face filling his field of vision— it was distorted longitudinally, as if through a fish-eye lens. Then it disappeared. Pender felt an urge, not framed in words, to apologize to somebody about something, and as he closed his eyes and gave in to the darkness, he was overwhelmed by regret.

Time had passed—how much, Pender couldn't say. Now that the pain was in his head, his mind was paradoxically clear. He saw Twombley's underwear-clad body lying a few feet away and realized from the angle of his head that there was nothing that could be done for him.

McDougal will be so pissed, thought Pender. Got to help. Help me do this.

That last was a prayer—and Pender was not a praying man. But the results surprised him. Time slowed. Despite the pain he managed to raise himself up on his hands and knees, head hanging; he could see the blood from his scalp falling to the cement floor, drop by drop. Sometimes there were three or four drops in the air at the same time, like black rubies strung on an invisible chain.

Along with the clarity of vision came an increasing clarity of mind. His thoughts raced along swiftly, transparent and weightless. What have I learned that can help them? The motel in Dallas? The hooker? Old news. What's current? The shrink—he said something about hooking up with the shrink. What was her name? Hogan? No, Cogan.

Swaying, his left hand pressed against the dripping scalp wounds to slow the bleeding, he dipped his right forefinger into the warm pool where his head had rested on the cement floor, and wrote the following in his own blood:

Kogin akomplis?

Pender's strength failed him at the end. He drew the question mark lying on his belly. His use of phonic spelling was inadvertent. Whatever circuits in the brain governed that particular function must have been scrambled—he didn't even notice the misspellings until he found himself looking down from somewhere around ceiling height. From that lofty vantage he saw the two bodies below him, his own and the deputy's, the pool of blood, the clumsy scrawl. Then the walls and bars disappeared—he was in the dark; a tiny figure was walking toward him, the light streaming from behind it.

I don't believe in this crap, he thought, hurrying forward to meet whoever it was. It's a dream—it's only one last dream.

But what a dream. The figure grew larger. It was Pender's father, not as he'd been at the end, shrunken by cancer, but strong and tall and broad-shouldered in the bemedaled dress blues that he wore in the Veteran's Day parade every year in Cortland when Edgar was growing up. As a kid, Ed knew what every medal and ribbon represented, which was the Purple Heart and which the Silver Star. They'd buried the old man with them.

“Daddy?”

“It ain't Elvis, son,” said First Sergeant Robert Lee Pender, USMC, Ret. “You ready to go?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you mean, you don't know? Got any unfinished business?”

“The guy that killed me—he got away.”

“The one that killed all them women?”

“That's the one.”

His father laughed. “Well, shit, boy, he ain't killed you yet. Call me if he does, I'll come back for you. And don't forget, quitters never win, and Penders never quit.”

And with that, Sergeant R. L. Pender executed a smart about-face and marched back up the slope, leaving Ed alone. He looked down, saw his body lying on its face, right arm extended, as if pointing to the words he had scrawled in blood on the cell floor. It was still bleeding, still breathing—and a moment later he was back inside it.

I still don't believe in this crap, thought Pender. Then the pain hit him, and he lost consciousness again.

L
YSSY THE
S
ISSY
was frightened. He didn't like the dark. And this dark was worse than the closet his father used to lock him in. Because at least in the closet, even if you couldn't get out, you knew nothing else was going to come in.

But this dark was more like the basement. Bad things happened in the basement—it was the worst place he knew.

Although he had a watch, a big man's watch, Lyssy couldn't tell time, so he had no idea how long he'd been in this place. All he knew was that he was forbidden to cry, and he was forbidden to use the flashlight. Even so, soon his terror got the better of him. He struggled with the heavy switch—it was hard for his little fingers to operate it. Finally, using both thumbs, he managed to turn on the light, and immediately wished he hadn't.

Because there, lying only a few feet away from him on the dusty gray floor, was the skeleton of a dead bird. Seeing those empty eye sockets, that hungry beak, was worse than the dark. Lyssy tried to turn off the flashlight, but the switch wouldn't budge. He tried to cover the light with his hand. His fingers glowed red—he could see through them—he could see his own bones.

Please,
he said, his lips moving silently.
Please help me.
Then he heard the voice again.

Lyssy?

Yes?

You want my help?

Yes.

You know you've been a bad boy.
It was not a question.

Yes.

If I help you, will you do what I say from now on?

Yes.

No more talking to the nice doctor unless I give you permission?

Okay.

No more talking to anybody unless I say it's allowed?

Okay.

You promise?

I promise.

Cross your heart and hope to die.

Cross my heart and hope to die.

You also have to promise to share what you know with me.

Sharing's good.

Sometimes. Tell me what you told the doctor this afternoon.

I told her about the dream—the dream about the masks. And what Daddy did.

Did you tell her about the other people, or where we live now?

No.

About me?

No.

Cross your heart?

And hope to die.

Attaboy.

Can I leave now? Can I go to sleep?

Yes. But when you wake up again, remember what we talked about. And don't forget your promises. Do you know what will happen if you break your promises?

I don't want to talk about it.

I'll put you back in the dark, and the dead bird will come to life and peck out your eyes. Or I'll burn you—remember how bad it hurted you, last time?

You're bad. You're scaring me, and you're bad.

Well ain't that the truth, little man. I am bad. And I am scaring you. But that's nothing compared to what I can do if you ever break your promise.

I won't. I said I wou'n't, and I won't.

All right then. Off you go.

Max opened his eyes. The body was still charged with adrenaline— he took a few deep breaths to calm it down and quiet the pulse pounding in his ears, then switched off the flashlight and listened in the dark. No sirens, no sounds from below—nothing but a little traffic out on Alisal Street. He pushed the illuminator button on
Twombley's Indiglo watch. Nine
P.M.
Full dark. Suddenly Max was immensely hungry. Hungry and horny. He yawned, stretched, rose to his feet. Time to book on out of here for real. He had places to go, people to see.

Max started to give the dead pigeon a wide berth on his way out of the cell, then realized that his repulsion was only a leftover from Lyssy the Sissy's time in the body, and gave it a good boot with the toe of Twombley's shoe. The skeleton dissociated as it skidded along the floor; by the time it hit the wall it was only a pile of bones and feathers.

I
RENE
C
OGAN'S BATHTUB WAS
big enough for two—she and Frank had made sure of that—and took forever to fill. While she was waiting, Irene tweezed her eyebrows, then the nearly invisible granny hairs growing at the corners of her mouth. Granny hairs aside, she thought, her face was standing up pretty well to the rigors of the big four-oh, thanks to a good Garbo-esque bone structure—the younger,
Queen Christina
Garbo.

Before climbing into the tub, Irene put up her shoulder-length hair, placed her Dictaphone on the toilet seat, fast-forwarded the tape for thirty seconds or so, then pushed play and adjusted the volume. As she slipped into the steaming water, she heard Max's voice:

“ . . . what spooks me, Irene, is not that there's somebody else
talking
inside my head—it's this feeling I can't shake that there's somebody else
listening.”

Irene nodded approvingly at the classic image, reached up, dried her fingers on the bath mat, and fast-forwarded again in spurts through the relaxation exercise and most of the regression, then pressed the play button—“five candles, one two three four five”— sank back into the water, and closed her eyes.

Twenty minutes later she heard her own voice. “. . . I need you to know you're safe telling me anything at all—nothing you tell me can ever come back to hurt you.”

Irene sat up, shivering, turned off the Dictaphone, let some of the cooled water out of the tub, and ran some more hot in, thinking all the while about little Lyssy. She pictured him as a five-yearold—cute little heart-shaped face, wide gold-flecked brown eyes,
shock of hair falling across his forehead. If only she could go back in time. How she'd like to take that poor child in her arms and hug him close and tell him everything was all right, that what had happened wasn't his fault, and that he mustn't blame himself.

But of course you couldn't go back in time, and everything
wasn't
all right—the little boy had grown up to be a murderer. Then it occurred to Irene that that wasn't precisely true. If Lyssy were suffering from DID, then only
part
of him had grown up to become a killer, as a subconscious response to unfathomable psychological pressures.