Blood Memory (34 page)

“Daddy!”
I shriek.
“Wait! I’m coming!”

He keeps sinking, his face sadder than I’ve ever seen it.

“I can save you, Daddy!”

I jerk as hard as I can on the truck’s door handle, but it won’t open. I bang my fists on the window until my knuckles split, but it does no good. Then someone with soft hands takes me by the wrists.

“Catherine? Wake up, Cat. It’s time to wake up.”

I open my eyes.

Hannah Goldman is leaning over my cot, holding me by the wrists. Dr. Goldman has the kindest eyes in the world.

“It’s Hannah,” she says. “Can you hear me, Cat?”

“Yes.” I smile for her, my best smile so she’ll know I’m okay. It’s easy to be okay with Hannah here, even if it is only a dream.

“I’ve come to speak to you about something important,” she says.

I nod understanding. “Of course. What is it?”

“Agent Kaiser asked me to come. I think that was wise of him.”

“He’s a wise man,” I agree. “A very wise man.”

Dr. Goldman looks almost as sad as my father. “Cat, you know I believe in honesty and frankness, but life always finds a way to test our beliefs. There’s no easy way to tell you this.”

I smile encouragement and pat her hand. “It’s okay. I’m strong. You know I can take it.”

“You are strong.” She smiles back. “You may be my strongest patient. What I have to tell you is this. Your aunt Ann is dead.”

My smile broadens. “No, she’s not. I talked to her today.”

“I know you did, dear. But that was yesterday afternoon. You’ve been sleeping for quite a while. And sometime last night, your aunt drove to DeSalle Island and killed herself by taking an overdose of morphine.”

My smile freezes on my face. It’s not Dr. Goldman’s somber voice or sad eyes that convince me. It’s the morphine. And the island.

Hannah Goldman is about fifty, with graying streaks in her hair and deep lines at the corners of her eyes. Her eyes are kind, but the intelligence behind them is ruthless. Sitting under Hannah’s gaze, you can feel like a child under the care of a loving mother or a lesser mammal being scrutinized by a scientist bent on dissection. Agent Kaiser was probably right to bring her here, but now that she’s broken the news to me about Ann, I want Kaiser. Psychiatry isn’t going to solve my current matrix of problems.

I sit up on my cot and set my stockinged feet on the carpeted floor. “Hannah, I appreciate you coming here to give me this news. But I need to ask Agent Kaiser some questions.”

“I’ll get him for you,” she says. “But I want you to promise me two things.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll let me sit in while you talk to him.”

“Of course.”

“And you’ll talk to me alone afterward.”

This I don’t especially want to do, but it would be rude not to agree. “All right.”

Left in the silence of the empty office, I enter a strange state where all the images in my mind spin wildly against each other. Foremost among them is my father bleeding plastic pellets from his chest, then Lena the Leopardess pouring blood from her torn belly. I don’t know what that dream meant, but I have to find out. And to do that, I need Lena in my hands again. Only she’s buried in my father’s coffin, in Natchez, two hundred miles away.

I have to get out of this building.

The sound of the door opening and John Kaiser’s voice merge into one startling mix:
“Bam—Cat, what can I do for you?”

I stand and face him squarely. “I want the details of my aunt’s suicide.”

Kaiser glances at Dr. Goldman.

Hannah says, “You don’t have to treat her like she’s not in the room with us. Cat’s used to dealing with stress.”

He looks skeptical. “What do you want to know?”

“Does my mother know about it yet?”

“Yes. She’s enraged. She thinks Ann’s husband murdered her.”

“What?”

“Apparently your aunt was in the middle of a bad divorce. The husband wanted to keep her from getting any money. I talked to the guy. I don’t think he even knew where DeSalle Island was until I told him. It feels like a suicide to me.”

“Suicide,” I echo. “In some ways Ann was already dead. She had been for a long time.”

“What do you mean by that?” Kaiser asks, but Hannah is nodding.

“I’ll tell you in a minute. I want to know exactly where Ann was found, who found her, how she did it, whether she left a note, everything. Forget I’m related to her, okay?”

Kaiser leans against the closed door. “A woman named Louise Butler found her in a one-room building on DeSalle Island. I guess you know all about that island?”

“More than I ever wanted to.”

“Apparently Ms. Butler was looking for you. Your grandfather’s search for you had been called off, but Louise was in the woods and never got the word. She found your aunt instead.”

Despite the horror of this thought, the face of my father’s mistress gives me a comforting feeling as it rises behind my eyes, brown and still beautiful at forty-six. I’m glad Louise found Ann, and not Jesse Billups. Thinking of my last afternoon on the island, a cold certainty comes to me.

“Did the building Ann was found in have a tin roof?”

Kaiser’s eyes narrow. “How did you know that?”

My hands suddenly feel clammy. “Was she found in the building they call the clinic?”

He nods slowly, waiting for an explanation.

“Tell me how she looked when they found her.”

Kaiser glances at Dr. Goldman but answers anyway. “She was naked, lying on the floor by an examining table.”

A deep ache begins in my heart. A lot of suicides take off their clothes before killing themselves. But Ann’s nakedness wasn’t a matter of fastidiousness or infantile regression. “Did she leave a note?”

“No note.”

Doing it in the clinic was her note.
Kaiser sneaks another glance at Hannah, and I know he’s holding something back.

“What is it?” I demand.

“She didn’t leave a note, but she did leave something. Before she died, she drew two skulls and crossbones on her lower abdomen, about where her ovaries would be. There was a Sharpie marker lying beside her body.”

For the first time, I feel the sting of tears.

“That means something to you?” Kaiser asks.

“Ann was obsessed with having a baby. She never could get pregnant.”

“At fifty-six she was obsessed with having a baby?”

“No, but she never got over the failure. My grandfather performed an emergency appendectomy on her in that clinic when she was ten years old. He always said the infection she had then was what made her infertile. That it blocked her fallopian tubes. I think a dye test may have later proved that correct. Anyway, when she finally gave up on having a baby, she died inside.”

Kaiser doesn’t know what to make of this. I turn to Hannah. “I’ve been wondering if that appendectomy might really have been an abortion.”

Hannah sits in silence, her mind clicking through what she knows of my family. “Ten is too young for pregnancy,” she says finally. “I’m sure it’s impossible.”

“Sexual abuse again,” says Kaiser. “That’s why Ann was a patient of Malik’s, right?”

“We don’t know that for sure,” I point out. “She could have been seeing him for her manic-depressive disorder.”

“Well, we need to know which. I want an autopsy done on her as fast as we can get one. Would a botched abortion be detectable all these years later?”

“Possibly,” Hannah says. “That depends on what kind of mistake was made. After forty years, scarring from infection would be difficult to attribute to therapeutic abortion based on pathological findings alone. There’s also the complication of possible later abortions. But this is an academic question. If Ann was ten years old, she wasn’t pregnant.”

“You need to talk to my mother,” I say softly. “When it comes to Ann, she’s the only one who knows the private details.”

Hannah looks puzzled by something. “
Why,
” she says deliberately, “was there enough morphine to kill someone in a one-room clinic on a rural island?”

“I asked the same thing,” says Kaiser.

“You ever see a chain saw accident?” I ask. “They’re as bad as war wounds sometimes. A chain saw can take off an arm or a leg in two seconds.”

This seems to satisfy Kaiser, who served in combat in Vietnam.

“What’s your next move?” I ask him, wondering how I can get out of here.

“Rush your aunt’s autopsy, if I can. Her body is already at the morgue in Jackson, Mississippi. I need to rule out murder. She was too close to Malik to discount that possibility.”

“I want to see her autopsy report.”

“I’m sure you’ll be here when I get it. Carmen Piazza still wants you locked in a cell downtown.”

This probably isn’t the best time to ask if I can leave.

“I’ll tell you what
I
want,” Kaiser intones. “I want that film Malik was making. If we find that, we’ll find our killer.”

“Film?” Hannah asks. “Nathan Malik was making a film?”

“A documentary about sexual abuse and repressed memory,” I answer. “It shows a group of female patients reliving sexual abuse, and some other things he wouldn’t tell me about. He said it would galvanize the nation on the issue of sexual abuse.”

“That’s one film I’d like to see.”

“Cat thinks the killer is a member of that group of women,” says Kaiser. “Malik called them Group X. I think Ann Hilgard may have been part of it.”

“Group X?” echoes Hannah. “Strange.”

“With Ann and Dr. Malik dead, only that film or surviving members of Group X can tell us who the members are.”

Hannah looks oddly at Kaiser. “I sense you have something to ask me.”

“I do. Is there any possibility that Cat could have been a member of that group without being aware of it? Dr. Malik suggested that she might suffer from multiple personality disorder.”

Hannah looks briefly at me, then back at Kaiser. “Ridiculous. Cat has certainly experienced dissociated states. But the idea that she suffers from full-blown dissociative identity disorder is preposterous. Put that nonsense out of your mind, Agent Kaiser. Nathan Malik had flashes of genius, but he was also a flake.”

That’s a fucking relief,
I say silently.

Kaiser and Hannah are lost in their own musings, but something won’t let me focus. It’s not grief over Ann. I’m too numb to feel anything about that now. It’s a sense of something missing.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, John.”

He looks up and shakes his head. “Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know. Have you told me everything about Ann’s death? The scene? Did you leave anything out?”

His brows wrinkle. He looks like he’s making an honest effort. “She injected the morphine into veins in both arms. That tell you anything?”

“Only that she was serious. What else? Do you have photos from the scene?”

He nods cautiously. “I had the West Feliciana Parish sheriff’s department e-mail me their crime-scene stuff. That’s how I knew the building had a tin roof. Are you sure you want to see them?”

“Yes.”

He glances at Dr. Goldman again. Hannah studies me for a few moments, then says, “Cat’s already in shock. If it will help solve the murders, I don’t see any point in keeping them from her.”

Kaiser promises to be right back with the photos, then leaves the room.

Hannah looks up at me from the cot where she’s sitting. “I’m worried about your affect, Cat. You do know you’re in shock?”

“I suppose so. I feel numb.”

“And you’re not drinking?”

“Not for days now.”

Her eyes probe me like a metal instrument. “You’re not taking your medication, are you?”

I hate to answer this. “No.”

“How long?”

“I’m not sure. A week, maybe.”

She shakes her head. “I dislike mechanical analogies, but today that’s the only thing I can use. Watching you now is exactly like watching a machine. All the biology is working, but you’re not present. You’ve described yourself as being that way when you have sex.”

“I know, but this isn’t that. I’m like this when I work.”

“Always?”

“Yes.”

Hannah looks over at the door, as though she hears Kaiser returning. “I was that way at times during medical school. But something about you seems different. And this isn’t a normal case, no matter what you tell yourself. You can’t pretend you weren’t related to Ann. You were. You
are.
In the Faulknerian sense of the past never really being past. Faulkner said that if the past were truly past, there would be no grief or sorrow. Ann was your blood relation, Cat, and she took her own life. Something you’ve thought of doing yourself many times.”

“I have to find the truth, Hannah. That’s the only thing that will keep me sane now.”

Her gaze doesn’t waver. “Will it?”

“It’s my only hope.”

The door opens, and Kaiser walks in carrying some eight-by-ten photos. Before second thoughts can stop me, I take them from him and shuffle through the stack as I would photos from any crime scene.

Hannah was right. This is not just another case.

The mere sight of the clinic brings on a wave of nausea. A small, tin-roofed building sitting in a sun-scorched field of weeds. A lone fig tree beside it. I can feel splinters being pulled from my hands, tetanus shots being stuck into my shoulder.

The next photo makes me thankful I haven’t eaten. It’s not gross—no blood and brain matter covering a dinner table, no ejected shell casing lying in the blasted wreck of a human face. It’s just my aunt, my once glamorous aunt lying naked on a bare wooden floor, her breasts and thighs sagging like pools of melted wax. Her mouth yaws open in the gape of sleep, eternal sleep this time, and—

“Cat?” Hannah says softly. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

It’s a downward-angled shot. It shows the legs of the examining table, a pair of brown feet in sandals—probably Louise’s—and the molding at the bottom of a cabinet. Just behind Ann’s head, there’s something rounded and dark, but I can’t make out what it is. I slide the photo over and move it to the bottom of the pile.

And my heart stops.

In the next photo—shot from a different angle—a stuffed animal lies on the floor about three feet behind Ann’s head. It’s not just any animal. It’s a turtle. And his name is Thomas. Thomas the Timid Turtle.

“Thomas,” I breathe.

“What?” says Kaiser.

I point at the turtle.

Kaiser walks up to see. “Is that turtle important?”

“Thomas was Ann’s favorite toy, ever since she was a child.”

“I had no idea. Apparently there were several stuffed animals in the room. We figured they were there to let kids hold while they got injections or something.”

“They were.” Ivy always kept stuffed animals in the clinic. She would hand you one as you came in. But along with the feeling of comfort came a sense of betrayal, because you knew pain was coming soon. Still, you clung to the animal. The pain wasn’t his fault. “Thomas didn’t live at the clinic. Ann brought him there. I’m surprised she wasn’t holding him when she died.”

“She may have tried. There’s some indication that she started out on the examining table, then fell to the floor after losing consciousness.”

I don’t know I’m crying until the tears fall onto the obscene photograph, one of hundreds I’ve studied in the past few years. I never want to see another one again.

“Cat?” says Kaiser.

I shake my head and try to get control, but the tears keep running down my face like they’re never going to stop.