Trust Me (23 page)

Leanne said, “He pushed a young woman off a pier. At night.”

Phyllis Stanley flinched, but contained it, tried to stop it, as though struck and too proud to acknowledge the insult. She reached for the glass and he saw, as she lifted it, that her hand shook. He wondered if it had been like that before Leanne had spoken.

The woman took her time draining the glass, staring out at him over the rim as she drank. When she was done, she took a long drag on the cigarette and then blew the smoke out so that it went upward and sideways from the corner of her mouth. “What do you want from me?”

“We’d like,” he said, “to understand him. We think that he has harmed others. He needs to be stopped.”

“I am not my brother’s keeper.” The woman sat erect in her chair, as unmoving and unblinking as a lizard on a hot rock.

“Maybe not now, but you certainly were back in North Vancouver.” He watched the woman’s eyes as they registered suspicion and flicked to Leanne, then back to him.

“So, you’re police.”

“No, but they’re right behind us.” He held her gaze.

The woman’s hand went to her crucifix and caressed it. There was another long silence. It seemed as though measurements were being taken, history reviewed, values and costs weighed, all behind that penetrating stare, before everything seemed to click into place like a lock on a safe and a surrender was made. Phyllis Stanley breathed deeply, then looked down at the gold cross. “All right.” She looked back up, then pushed a button on the console with her left hand and maneuvered the wheelchair down the ramp.

CHAPTER 53

⍫

Phyllis Stanley’s wheelchair hummed slightly as it led the way across the gravel drive to a ten-foot-wide strip of lawn.
Ron and Leanne followed until the woman stopped at the far edge of the grass strip; from here the hillside of scrub brush and mesquite dropped off steeply and the view looked out on a panorama of the valley.

“I have always feared this moment.” The woman’s hand, Ron noticed, still rested on the control console of the wheelchair, her finger poised over the forward button, as if on a whim she might launch herself over the edge and down into the gully below. Her fingers were long and slender, her hands surprisingly attractive. “Even God couldn’t ease the fear.”

“What have you been afraid of?” Leanne asked. She held Ron’s hand as they stood at the woman’s side.

“That my brother would finally cause trouble. Real trouble. Followed the Devil’s path, I would have called it—” she paused “—when I had faith.”

“What happened?” He felt the softness of Leanne’s skin, the welcome kiss of a gusting breeze, and wondered if Phyllis Stanley had any people in her life, friendships, a partner.

“To my faith?” She reached down by her side and produced a pint bottle of Seagram’s 7 and poured decisively into her cup. “I have faith in this now. It gives me solace, while it lasts, where otherwise there is none.”

A hawk circled against the stark desert sky, drifting with a predatory economy of motion. It rose effortlessly on a thermal and then hung, suspended, before spiraling down into the gully. Leanne reached out and touched the woman’s shoulder. “Tell us about your brother.”

“Yes . . . my little brother.” Phyllis Stanley nodded thoughtfully, and then went on. “You know, I tried to offer Jackie a good life, but too much had already happened. God knows, the boy never really had a chance. I couldn’t help him, and he wouldn’t seek salvation in the Church. He was too damaged by then.”

Leanne pressed on. “How was he damaged?”

“Hah!” It was a bitter snort of a laugh. “When Jackie was first learning to walk, I remember our father slapping the back of his head. Knocked him down face first on the concrete driveway. He didn’t stop doing that until he disappeared three years later.”

“Disappeared?” He remembered Peter’s report: “Father’s whereabouts unknown.”

“That’s what he did.” The woman took a deep draught of her whiskey. “He left the house drunk one night and never came back. We lived in fear of the day of his return for a year, and then our mother gave his clothes to charity. We had two glorious years after that. Best years of my life.”

“He came back?” Leanne said. She would, he thought, have been a good interviewer, the way she could draw a story out of a reluctant witness.

“No. Much worse. Mother brought Harold home . . .” The woman drank again, then lit a cigarette. He noticed that her hands were steady as she lit the match and brought it to the tobacco. “And from then on, Harold ran that house like Stalin ran Russia.”

“And he beat Jack?” Ron asked.

“Oh, no. He had a special fondness for little Jackie. A very special fondness.”

He had a feeling about where this was going. “How did he show that fondness?”

“Oh, well, I didn’t see it now, did I? But little Jackie always threw up after he came out of the room they were in, so you use your imagination.” She cocked her head and squinted at them, the first time she had looked up since beginning her story.

“Where,” Leanne asked, “was your mother while this was happening?”

“She was working. Somebody had to, and Harold wasn’t about to any more than good old Dad ever had.”

“Didn’t your brother say anything to her?”

The woman looked back out at the valley. The gully below was already in shadow as the sun moved toward the sea behind them. “Oh, he tried, but she wouldn’t have any of it. Told him he was a liar, that he was living in a fantasy world, and anyway, didn’t he see he was better off not getting beat all the time.” She shook her head, almost imperceptibly, as if inwardly facing something she refused to accept.

“How long did this go on?” Leanne asked.

“Almost two years.” Phyllis Stanley pushed a button on her console and the wheelchair turned so that she faced him and Leanne. She picked up her glass, which was half full, and drained it quickly, then brushed at her upper lip with the tips of her fingers. “One day we took a day trip to Vancouver Island. A picnic at the park, looking out over the bay. Pretending to be a nice little family. Hah!” Another bitter snort, followed by a fit of coughing. “Mother and Harold were standing at the cliff, watching the boats. Jackie was . . . I don’t know. He must have been nearby. I was reading a book. That’s what I did. I read anything I could find that would take me away.”

In the distance, a pair of military helicopters crossed the sky, heading north. Probably, he thought, to Camp Pendleton, just past Oceanside. He wondered why he had come, how this pathetic story was going to help him, what his motives had been. And why should Leanne be part of this? What had he expected to hear about a psychopath’s childhood?

No one spoke for several minutes. The woman finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in a shot glass that served as an ashtray. Then she resumed her story. “I heard my mother shout, ‘Hey!’ and then scream, but when I looked up she wasn’t there . . .” She stopped again.

“Yes . . .?” Leanne prompted.

“I heard Harold call Jackie a crazy little son of a bitch and start beating on him. I looked around, but mother had disappeared. I got up and walked over to where Jackie was lying on the ground and saw Harold go to the edge of the cliff and look down. He was shaking his head and looking all around. Then he just took off. He must have run all the way back to the ferry landing and caught the first boat back.”

“Where was your mother?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer.

“She was on the rocks far below, half in the water. The Harbor Patrol took us home. A week later the RCMP picked up Harold trying to cross into Washington state. He tried to convince them that Jackie had pushed our mother, but they weren’t having any of it.”

“What happened to him?” he asked.

“He went to prison. They gave him twenty-five years, but he got killed after two. Someone stabbed him in the neck with a homemade knife.”

Leanne said, “So then it was just the two of you.”

“That’s right.” The woman wheeled the chair around and headed back toward her home. As they crossed the drive she said, “I gave the next five years of my life trying to make it right for that boy, but it wasn’t enough.” When she reached the bottom of the ramp leading to her front door, she turned to face them. “That’s all. I haven’t seen him in years. He used to visit, send money once in a while. It helped.” She nodded, as if in dismissal, and turned to negotiate the ramp.

“Do you know where he is now?” He had a feeling she had left something out.

Phyllis Stanley pressed the button that took her wheelchair to the doorway of her mobile home and then turned so she could back in through the threshold. She disappeared into the mobile home for a moment. When she returned she leaned down and passed him a photograph and a folded piece of paper.

Ron looked at the photo and showed it to Leanne. It was a faded black-and-white of two children, a boy and a girl in what looked to be a backyard. Between them stood a woman in her mid twenties. Tall, slender, attractive, and blond.

Leanne studied the photograph and handed it back to the older woman.

“He’s staying with some people in Brentwood. That’s the number he left.” She guided the wheelchair backward again, pushing the door open behind her.

“Miss Stanley?” Leanne called out.

“Yes?”

“I don’t mean to get too personal, but would you tell us how you came to be . . . um . . . how you hurt yourself?”

She looked down at them, harsh and distant as when their visit had begun, and said, “I fell.”

CHAPTER 54

⍫

When Jeff arrived at Holly’s around ten that evening, his first thought was that she looked pretty frayed at the edges.
The first time he had seen her, that night at the SOL meeting, Holly, dressed in faded blue jeans and a simple white sleeveless blouse, had looked terrific. Beautiful, unattainable, the kind of girl he could only think about and desire from a distance. The next time, she had been dripping wet in her clothes, fresh from the Malibu surf, grim and pale, although on the following day she had put it back together and looked great again.

This time, Holly had that look he knew so well; he had seen it too many times before in the mirror—the no-sleep, running on coffee and nerves and whatever-else-it-takes look. When she answered the door, wearing cutoff jeans and an Elton John tee shirt, she didn’t even say hello; she motioned him in, leaned out the doorway and looked up the stairway immediately on the right and down the hallway beyond it. Then she ducked back in and locked the deadbolt that he had put in a few days before.

“Look at this. You won’t believe it,” Holly said. There were clothes all over the floor of the hallway, mainly coats and jackets. The hall closet, just to the right of the front door, was open, a bare bulb illuminating its interior. The closet ceiling sloped up from left to right, conforming to the stairway outside. On the floor inside the closet, the carpet had been ripped up and peeled back, exposing a trap door.

“Pull it up,” Holly said.

He looked at her questioningly, uncomfortable with her intensity, the nervous edge to her command. He squatted at the entrance to the closet and lifted the loose plywood square from the floor.

About two and a half feet down was hard-packed dirt. He saw footprints in the dusty surface immediately below. To the right, leading into the darkness of the crawlspace, were other marks, like tracks—the kind, he thought, that someone would make if they were crawling on hands and knees.

He glanced over his shoulder at Holly. “What does this mean to you?”

“This is how he gets in,” she said.

“Who?”

“Art. How many psychotics do you think I know?”

He stifled a grin as he realized that he didn’t have an answer for that question. For all he knew, she was a living magnet for pathological nut cases. “Did you rip up the carpeting, or was it already loose?” He indicated the row of carpet tacks sticking out of the bottom of the fabric where it lay peeled back from the hatch.

“I had to pull it up,” Holly admitted.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because, goddammit, he was in there half the night and then disappeared. I told you, when I opened the door he was gone. What do you think we’ve got here, fucking Houdini?” She almost shrieked this last, on the cusp between anger and hysteria.

“Let’s go sit down and talk about this calmly, can we?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he took Holly’s hand and led her to the living room. She followed docilely and sat on the sofa. There was a flashlight on the coffee table.

She seemed subdued for the moment. He went to the kitchen and brought back two glasses of soda. “Look,” he said, sitting down next to Holly, “you’ve got to admit that this is pretty far-fetched. I mean, even if there’s a way into the crawlspace from outside, it’s not very likely that anyone, even Jack Stanley, would be—” he groped for words “—
stalking
you, for Christ’s sake.”

“Listen to this.” Holly turned and knocked on the living room wall behind her. It produced a hollow sound. “What do you suppose is on the other side?”

“I have no idea,” he said. He pictured the configuration of the building; half of the wall behind the sofa was also the right-hand wall of the hall closet. She had knocked beyond the end of the closet. Holly’s kitchen extended from the far end of the living room, and the two bedrooms were beyond the opposite living room wall. “Maybe it’s part of your neighbor’s apartment.”

“No,” Holly said. “I’ve been over there. When they knock on the wall facing this direction, you can’t hear it from here. There’s something in between. It’s where he stays and listens to me.”

“Really!” Christ, she was over the edge. He remembered looking out his apartment window once at five in the morning, all the lights turned off, staring into the parking lot across the street at what he was convinced were two people having sex on the ground. When the sun came up all that was there were two parallel concrete tire stops, painted white. In the dark he had been convinced of what they were, that they were moving, writhing, passionate and insane in their indifference to their exposure. “Excuse me,” he said, and he got up to go to the bathroom.

He looked into the mirror for a moment and then rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes and the bridge of his nose. What was going on here? This girl had flipped—what did she want from him? Looking again at his reflection, he combed his hair back with his fingers. His glance fell to the counter.

An array of small orange plastic containers lined the tile where it met the wall. He picked up the nearest one and read the label. Tegretol. There were only a few tablets left. The next vial was half full and read, “Lunesta. Take one tablet at bedtime.” He checked the other two bottles. One contained Xanax. Hard to get, but better than Valium. The last vial was marked “Adderall” and was nearly full. Something he had read about but never tried. It was meant to calm down hyperactive children, but was supposed to have an opposite, stimulant effect on non-afflicted adults. He wondered how many Holly had taken. Depending on when she had started, it could definitely account for her behavior now.

He replaced the bottles and returned to the living room. Holly was still sitting on the sofa, staring out across the room, alert, as though listening for a sound she was expecting to hear repeated.

“Holly—” She turned and focused on him, surprised. “How long since the last time you slept?”

“I don’t know. Sunday night, I slept at Ron’s house.”

“That was Saturday. Three nights ago.”

“I know. I slept here Sunday night. Then Monday morning . . .” She hesitated, then continued. “You know, I told you, I had a seizure. I woke up from that in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yeah, yesterday. Why?”

“You’re taking drugs.” He watched her face, feeling sorry for her, the way the chemicals were affecting her.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It could have a lot to do with the way you’re seeing things.”

“You think I’m seeing things?” She said this defiantly, almost amused, as if she had some proof to show him that would validate her whole paranoid theory.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said, exasperated. “I’m talking about the way you’re seeing . . . Oh, the hell with it. Look, why are you taking all that stuff?”

Holly looked down at her hands in her lap. Her nails, he noticed, were bitten short. She took a deep breath, which turned into a yawn, then placed her hand over her eyes for a moment. When she looked at him again, she seemed suddenly exhausted.

“The Tegretol keeps me from having seizures. I stopped taking it when I met Art. That’s one of the reasons I kept listening to him; I didn’t have any seizures during the time I knew him.”

“What about the other stuff?”

“The anti-convulsant acts as a depressant. It makes me so lethargic, I can’t do anything. So one doctor prescribed the Adderall—it’s a stimulant mixed. It worked pretty well but sometimes it would last too long and I couldn’t get to sleep.”

“So you got the Lunesta.” He could understand the logic of it perfectly. Juggling chemicals, just trying to feel normal.

“Right. They would knock me out. Then I told another doctor what I was doing. He was shocked, and told me to throw away the uppers and downers. He prescribed the Xanax for anxiety.”

“So which of these have you been taking?” he asked.

“All of them.” He could see the desperation in her eyes. “I couldn’t just go to sleep. I tried, but God! He was listening to me. Watching me, for all I know.” She stood, picking up the flashlight from the table. “Come with me. I‘ve got something else to show you.”

He followed her down the hallway and out the front door. They turned right and walked through the outside hall, past the neighbor’s apartment and the one beyond that, then down a few stairs.

The stairs led out to the carport. Holly turned right and walked the width of one of the parking slots and then led him through an open door. They were in a laundry room; he could tell by the smell and the boxlike outlines of the machines. Holly turned on the light and guided him diagonally across the room to the far corner where two large dryers were stacked.

“Look.” She pointed at the cinderblock wall behind the dryers. The machines were set so that their backs were close to the wall, but were offset by several feet from the corner.

Holly pointed the beam from the flashlight into the recess and played it across a large rectangle of particleboard set against the wall, extending from the corner to somewhere behind the lower dryer. “Move that aside.”

He slid the particleboard to the right and looked down at a hole in the wall where six cinderblocks were missing. At his feet, the dirt floor of the crawlspace met the concrete floor of the laundry room. In the circle of the flashlight beam, a footprint, and beyond, the same impressions as in Holly’s closet.

“I know how crazy it sounds,” Holly said from behind him. “But how does it look?”

“It’s pretty spooky, I’ll give you that.” Still, the crawl space, and the access, had been there since the place was built—probably fifty years ago—and the marks could have been left by anyone. An exterminator looking for termites, maybe.
Yeah, right
, he thought.

“Where are you going?” Holly asked, following him around to the driveway and out toward the street.

“I want to get something from my car.”

At the curb, he opened the Audi and groped in the glove compartment. He felt the familiar handle of a Buck knife, pulled it out, and locked the car.

Back in the apartment, he stepped into the closet and down into the crawl space. The floor was now level with his thighs. Turning to his right, he pulled out the Buck knife and stabbed it into the wall. The hard steel point bit deeply into the soft material.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Holly asked.

“Well—” he yanked down on the knife handle and then sawed briefly. “Now you’ve got me curious about what’s behind your living room. Don’t you want to know?”

She didn’t say anything. He stabbed the knife into the wall again, this time about two inches to the left of the first cut, and again sawed downward. Finally, connecting the tops and bottoms of the incisions, he gouged out a square of the drywall.

“Pass me the flashlight, would you?” Holly handed it down to him. He pointed the beam into the opening, but could see nothing. Putting the flashlight down, he made another hole about four inches below the first one.

Now he put the flashlight flush to the wall against the lower hole and his eye to the upper one. About seven feet away he saw two-by-four framing outlining large areas of unfinished particleboard; it was the back of the living room wall Holly had knocked on earlier. He pointed the flashlight to the left. About ten feet away he could see another wall.

“What do you see? There’s a space behind the wall, isn’t there?” Holly knelt on the floor next to the hatch.

“You’re right. There’s a whole goddamn room there. It’s wasted space under the stairway and the upper landing.” He pointed the flashlight downward. The wooden framework extended down into the ground, while the particleboard ended flush with the flooring. Below it, the dirt surface extended far beyond the flashlight’s reach.

He handed Holly the flashlight and said, “Shine this down through the hatch in the direction I’m facing.”

Looking downward through the lower hole, he saw the beam cross the space and disappear into the gloom. “Point it downward,” he said, his forehead to the wall.

“Stop! Back up a little.” He couldn’t believe what he saw. “Now sweep slowly to my left.”

Dazed, he stared at the dirt. Beer bottles littered the ground. A larger bottle stood upright, still partially full.

“What is it? What do you see?” The beam wavered as Holly’s hand shook.

“Give me back the flashlight.” He took it and ducked down under the floor, crawled through a narrow space between two-by-fours, and stood up in the room that Holly had predicted, that he had so confidently denied. There was still a chance, he thought, to disprove the whole fantasy, to find a reasonable explanation—that the bottles were left over from contractors doing structural repair, something that made sense.

He bent down and aimed the light at one of the beer bottles, unsurprised to read the familiar Moosehead label. With resignation, he swung the beam around to illuminate the distinctive square body and gold label of the Bushmills bottle.