Boundaries (6 page)

David said, "I think horrific is the wrong word, Doctor."

"Yes," Flexner said, " ‘horrific’ is entirely the wrong word. And of course there is the fact that you have recently lost a loved one to a tragic event."

David looked at Flexner for a long moment. Then he said curtly, "I’m sorry, but I’m really not up to this, now. I hope you understand."

"And you can well imagine," Flexner went on, his tone crisp, authoritarian and nasal, "that such an event could trigger impulses that might lead to self-destruction. It is a given in cases of severe depression. It is the set of your emotions which drives you; and so we must alter that set of emotions, Mr. Case."

David wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at his feet sticking out from beneath the blanket. He had his arms folded. His face was expressionless. Under other circumstances, he would have been thinking that Dr. Flexner was an ass. But he was thinking, instead, about his sister, about Brian Fisher, and about answers he did not have. Flexner went on, clearly annoyed, "Sir, if this is the wrong time—"

"It is," David said. "As I’ve said already."

"Then there will be another time," Flexner said and, with David’s attending physician following him, he left the room.

~ * ~

David had visited his sister often, and had sometimes spent the night in one of the many unused bedrooms on the second floor. On the nights when he stayed, he occasionally woke early in the morning because he could hear her moving about in the dark house. It had been a nearly lifelong habit with her—getting up in the wee hours to walk by herself in the darkness. "It’s good for thinking, and for dreaming," she explained, "to walk in the dark, in a house that I know."

Often, she sang in a small, barely audible voice. The songs she sang would have been unrecognizable to a casual listener because she sang so softly. The songs that David heard were, he guessed, songs that their mother sang to them both when they were very young, songs that had usually accompanied them into sleep. Ironic, he thought, that Anne, as an adult, should sing them as she walked through her house late at night.

On an overnight visit six months before her murder, David woke, saw her padding past his door, and called, "Anne? Is everything all right?" He had never called to her before upon waking in the small hours to find that she was up and about, and he wondered what had made him call out to her now.

She did not answer him at once. He heard her stop walking—that is, he heard nothing. Then, moments later, she reappeared in the open doorway. A diffused yellow light shone from somewhere beyond her, and he could see little more than her soft profile. She said. "Did I wake you, David? I’m sorry." Her voice was low, concerned.

"Is everything all right?" he said again.

"Why do you ask?" It was an evasion, and he knew it. She went on, "You’ve seen me walking in the house late at night before."

After a moment’s hesitation, he said, "What’s wrong, Anne?"

And, after only a moment—because obfuscation and evasion between them were uncommon things—she answered, "I’ve made a mistake." She sighed. It had the odd quality of being both fearful and resigned. "I’ve made a very bad mistake, David."

He got out of bed—he was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt—crossed the room, put his hands on her shoulders. Behind her, the hallway stretched for twenty feet in both directions. David noticed again the diffused yellow light he had seen from the bed, but it was brighter here, at the door. He stuck his head out the doorway, looked right and left. He saw that all the lights were on in the large, open room to the right, and over the stairs to the left. This was odd. Usually, when Anne walked the house at night, she walked it in almost total darkness.

"You’ve got all the lights on," he said.

She nodded. "Yes. Downstairs, too. I didn’t want to turn the light on here"—in the hallway—"because I thought it would disturb you." A brief pause. "I never knew before what was in the darkness. Do
you
know?" She paused, then continued, her voice low, as if she were sharing some awful secret, "It hides monsters, David. The darkness hides monsters."

"Anne—"

She put her fingers on his lips. "No. It’s all right. I want to talk about it. Believe me I do. But not now. I have a lot of thinking to do now. Perhaps in the morning. Okay?"

"I don’t understand—"

"Please, David, go back to bed. We’ll talk. In the morning."

And because he was her brother, and knew her as well as anyone, he realized that any resistance would be futile. "Yes, in the morning," he said, turned, and went back to bed. When he looked toward the doorway again, she was gone. He fancied he could hear her padding about in the large open room at the end of the hallway, fancied he could hear her singing. But he knew that he couldn’t. This night, he realized, was very different from other nights. This night, there were monsters in the house.

~ * ~

But he and Anne did not talk the following morning. She was making breakfast when he arrived in the kitchen, her mood cheerful and talkative, so he thought he had better wait until she brought up the subject of the night before. But she never did.

In the dark room, the dust collected itself, and stood. It looked about, and was frightened. The dust felt no tug of gravity. It felt a tug from above. This was, at once, strange and comforting.

Eventually, the dust collected itself sufficiently that it scratched at an itch that had always bothered it. Then it stood and, without real purpose, moved about in the room. At last, it went back to where it had arisen.

It lay down.

It wept.

It laughed.

As strange as this place was, it was oddly familiar, too, and the dust desperately needed the familiar.

~ * ~

Detective Fred Collins was off work and he was thinking about Anne Case. Collins lived alone in a three-room apartment on a pleasant street on Batavia’s east side, and when he did not have to work, he stayed in his apartment, listened to soft rock music—The Carpenters,
Carly
Simon, early Beatles and Beach Boys—and thought about his work, and about the people he dealt with, both the living and the dead. What he was thinking about Anne Case was that she had been doomed from the beginning of her life. He had no hard and fast reason for thinking this. He had not known her in life. He had first lain eyes on her a week earlier, when she’d been dead for half a day and her body had had sixty-three stab wounds in it, most of them concentrated in her stomach and in her upper back. When he saw her then, he thought that she had looked strangely serene, as if she had died in her sleep. It was true that many murder victims looked passive, as if they were sleeping, and that was simply because, in death, the muscles relaxed. But few of the dead actually looked serene, as Anne Case had. And that was why Fred Collins was thinking that she had been doomed from the beginning of her life, because she had clearly been living it in preparation for that moment—the moment of her death.

Fred Collins whispered to himself, "You don’t know what you’re talking about." He supposed that these thoughts were no more than mental games he played because he was trying to humanize the people he dealt with. It may or may not have been correct that Anne Case was doomed from the start of her life, but it didn’t matter because he always kept such ideas to himself.

He had begun to believe that Brian Fisher was not her murderer. It was a doubt he had expressed once to his partner, Leo Kenner, who had guffawed and said, "Sure he was, Fred. Of course he was. He murdered her because he loved her. That’s obvious."

Collins shook his head. "People don’t murder the people they love, Leo."

"People murder whoever’s available—
especially
the people they love."

"I know what you’re saying, and I think you’re wrong. He didn’t . . . this Brian Fisher didn’t
possess
her, he really did love her. I’m convinced of it. And I don’t think he murdered her. I think he may have
blamed
himself for her murder, but he didn’t actually do it." He paused "And there’s this ‘frenzy’ thing you were talking about, too, which doesn’t hold up."

"Frenzy thing?"

"Yes. She was stabbed sixty-three times. We know that. We counted the wounds."

"So?"

"So it doesn’t add up to frenzy, Leo. It adds up to . . ." He paused. "Here I am, I’m the murderer, and I’ve stabbed her—what?—twenty or thirty times in the stomach, and now, just to make it look
symmetrical
. . . I don’t know, just so it won’t look
half-assed
, hell, I’ll turn her over and stab her another twenty or thirty times in the back. That’s not
frenzy
, Leo. That’s premeditation."

But in the end, Collins had felt certain that he’d convinced Kenner of nothing; Kenner had, in fact, made him feel as if he were impossibly naive and a little
addlepated
besides, so Collins had said nothing more about it.

Today, in his apartment, Anne Case would not leave him. He wondered about her life, about her growing up, about her passions, her last morning, her last moments alone.

He thought that she had been softly attractive. People used to use the word "frail" to describe people like her. He had heard about her agoraphobia and had thought, yes, she looked the type, the type to
prefer
wandering about in her big house all alone.

He did not think that her death was a sad thing. If this had been his first case, his second, his third, he would have been torn up by the fact of a life so quickly and cruelly taken, by the pain she had clearly suffered, and by her aloneness. But after so many years dealing with the dead, he had grown beyond that. Her murder had not been sad. Her death had not been sad. Her
life
had been sad because she had been doomed from its start to constant agony, and to a terrible death.

~ * ~

The afternoon following Christian and Karen’s visit to his room at Syracuse General, David was visited by Detective Leo Kenner, who showed David his badge, introduced himself, and asked, "Do you remember me?"

"Yes," David said.

"May we talk?" Kenner put his shield back in his coat pocket.

"How did you know I was here?"

"From your place of work. Your doctor called them to find out what he could about this drug you took."

"Oh," David said. "Of course."

"May we talk?" Kenner repeated.

"I doubt that there’s much to say," David said.

"Perhaps I could be the judge of that."

David was still in his pajamas; he gestured toward the closet. "Will you excuse me a moment while I get some clothes on?"

"I won’t take much of your time," Kenner answered. He was tall and stocky, and his body presented an almost impenetrable wall between David and the closet. "I’d simply like to ask you one or two questions."

"What questions? About Anne?"

"About Brian Fisher."

"I didn’t know him. I met him once. Twice. We shared a Christmas dinner at Anne’s house last year; he was quiet, I would say he was shy. Painfully shy. I respected that; I let him be. We’ve said maybe three or four sentences to each other."

"Did your sister talk about him?"

"Anne wasn’t much of a talker."

"She said nothing about him?"

"Of course she did. She said that he treated her well and that she was happy when they were together. She didn’t elaborate."

"Would you say, Mr. Case, that they had a passionate relationship?"

"I have no idea what they did in
bed
, Detective—"