Head to Head (26 page)

“Oh God.”

Yeah, Black, oh God. That’s exactly how it happened. And I’ve relived it so many thousands of times that it’s a waking nightmare. I was in a nightmare now.

“I’m telling you, Nick, this girl’s gotta be screwed up after all that went down. Then the media got into the act and hounded her until she finally packed it in and blew town. Nobody knew where she was for over a year, and I haven’t been able to find out, either, then surprise, surprise, she turned up at the Canton County Sheriff’s Department under an assumed name, just in time to investigate Sylvie’s murder. You know the rest.”

Black didn’t say anything, so Booker went on. “Nobody has luck this hard. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in psychology to know when death follows somebody around like a shadow at night, there’s usually a reason to suspect foul play. I’m no shrink, but I think she attracts a little too much death and destruction to people around her. Is she mentally disturbed in your opinion?”

When Black hesitated, I watched him closely, sick to my stomach and afraid to hear what he’d say.

“She’s got some issues, but she’s no serial killer.”

“Well, if I were you, pal, I’d cut bait and watch that lady from afar.”

“She could shoot somebody in the line of duty—she already has—but there’s no way she’s capable of cold-blooded murder.”

Booker said nothing, which, of course, said a lot to me. Then, “Well, you’re the shrink, Nick, not me.”

“What about the mother’s background? Regina Baker?”

“When she disappeared, the newspapers said she grew up in a little place called Hartville, Missouri. That’s not far from here. Mrs. Barrow remembered a lady up there named Helen Wakefield. Helen came down to Poplar Bluff when Regina disappeared and stayed with Annie until Kathy and Tim picked her up.”

Black was scanning the map again. “I can get to Hartville in under fifteen minutes in the chopper. What’s that name again?”

“Helen Wakefield. Her phone number’s unlisted, but she lives on a farm along a creek called Walls Ford near the Gasconade River. It’s a small town. Probably anybody can give you directions to her house.”

“I’m going down there. I want you to find out where Claire went that year she vanished. There’s a state psychiatric hospital in Farmington, about an hour north of Poplar Bluff. See if she might’ve checked herself in there for treatment. She hates psychiatrists; maybe that’s why.”

At that point I’d had enough with the eavesdropping and decided that neither one of them was going to harass my Aunt Helen. I stepped into the room. “Yeah, I hate psychiatrists, all right, and now I have another really good reason to hate them.”

Both men jerked around. I watched Black, and he had the decency to look as guilty as hell.

“Hello, Claire. I didn’t see you come in. How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough to know you had me investigated behind my back, and that your sneaky little friend, Booker, here, thinks I’m a homicidal maniac who killed everybody in my family. Who knows, maybe I am. Maybe I want to kill both of you at the moment. Maybe if I had my gun back, I would. And maybe you’d both deserve it.”

“Let me explain.”

“Oh, right, Black, an explanation is definitely in order. But hey, Booker has already pretty much summed up every hellish detail of my life. I guess I ought to thank you, Booker. Now it’s out, and I don’t have to lie on the couch and be analyzed anymore. You can attend the sessions with Black for me and let me know later if I’m sane or not.”

“I think I’ll take off now and give the two of you some privacy,” said Booker to Black.

“Privacy, Booker? Coming from you? I wouldn’t think you’d know the meaning of that word. Besides, why would you want to leave now? The fun’s just getting started. Maybe you can watch the good doctor strap me into a straitjacket and give me a lobotomy.”

“Claire, don’t do this.” Black kept his eyes on me as Booker left the room by a different door. Drop the bomb and then run like hell, the Booker family motto.

I was so angry I could barely breathe, but I had a handle on it. I wasn’t throwing things. I hadn’t slugged either of them. “I can’t believe I actually trusted you. That I was trying to get the nerve to open up to you about all this, when all the while you had Booker out digging up dirt on me.”

“I asked him to check into your past when we were in California. At that time I didn’t expect you’d let me within ten miles of you, much less sleep with you.”

“Yeah, after this, ten miles is way too close.”

“You’ve got to be reasonable.”

“Reasonable? Screw you.”

I started to turn around and leave, but he was right there, grabbing my arm. “Don’t do this. We’ve got a chance to find out why these things happened. Everything’s out in the open, and some of this stuff just doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re telling me that? I’ve lived with it, pal, ever since I was little. You and Booker both think I’ve been killing people around me. You can’t deny that, can you? Go ahead, ask me if I have blackouts where I don’t know where I’ve been or what I’ve done, and terrible headaches that nearly break open my skull, and two or three other personalities that like to kill people.”

“Do you have blackouts?”

“Oh, God, you
do
think I did these awful things, don’t you? I bet you even think I murdered Sylvie.”

“No, I think you lied to me last night about where you were born and about having a brother, when you don’t, and I want to know why.”

“I didn’t lie about anything. That’s what I was told. And I do have a brother. I don’t know anymore what to think. I don’t even know this Barrow woman that Booker found.”

“There’s a way we can find out. Maybe Helen Wakefield knows something.”

“Aunt Helen doesn’t know any more than I do. And you’re not going to go down there and get her all upset.”

“Watch me. My gut tells me she knows something that’ll help you.”

“If she knew something that would help me, she’d have told me about it a long time ago. No way. I mean it, Black; you leave her alone. I love her more than anybody in this world, and I’m not going to let you hurt her.”

“I’m going down there to talk to her. You can either come with me or not, but I’m going to ask some questions that should’ve been asked a long time ago.”

“You’re a bastard.”

“I can be.”

I watched Black pick up the telephone and order the helicopter to be readied for flight. I felt helpless to stop him. I felt helpless, period.

But there was no way he was going to go see Aunt Helen without me. And there was one question I wanted an answer to. “Do you think I’m capable of killing people and not remembering it?”

“No.”

“What do you think?”

“I think that experiencing so much tragedy at such an impressionable age could lead to severe psychological problems. I’ve seen it before. Sometimes the child grows up to be a killer, or is tortured by multiple personalities or disassociative identity disorder. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they just become hard-assed detectives with awful memories that give them headaches and keep them awake at night.”

I said nothing, but what he said was what I wanted to hear.

“No, I’ve seen the anguish in your eyes, and the compassion and tenderness you’re capable of. No, you’re not a murderer. You might need some help dealing with the terrible things you’ve experienced, but you couldn’t kill anybody in cold blood, and you couldn’t abuse anybody the way Sylvie was tortured. No way.”

To my utter shock, I wanted to weep with relief, but I fought down the emotion. “Give me the phone. It’ll scare her if we set down a helicopter at the farm without her knowing what’s going on.”

Black handed me the phone. I punched in Helen’s number and told her we were coming.

Brat killed often after that, sometimes because a man he passed in a car resembled the embalmer or because they had long blond hair like the cook who’d left with the little girl, but most of the time, Brat killed because the mother got lonely and bored with the friends Brat brought home to her. They traveled everywhere in the silver travel trailer, all over the country, looking, looking, looking for the best ones to kill.

Once they found the perfect one in Louisiana, where long gray moss hung from live oak trees and everyone talked with a funny drawl. They found the girl living on the LSU campus, and the mother liked it there around so many young people, so Brat found a place in a KOA campground where lots of college students lived in trailers during the school year. For over a year they lived there and watched the college girl while Brat worked in a mortuary on Plank Road and often brought parts of special friends home to the mother. She always loved each and every one of them. At least for a while.

Sometimes Brat walked around on the campus with other young people around the same age, and sometimes wanted to be in college like the rest of them. But that was okay. Dead people were the only ones you could trust; they were loyal and quiet and left you alone when you wanted to be alone. One day in April, Brat decided to kill the college girl and bring her home to the mother. For three weeks Brat followed her everywhere she went, and then one night, she came outside alone and walked across the campus to the bookstore. Brat trailed her back to the apartment building she lived in, and when she climbed the steps to the third floor, Brat grabbed her, with a hand over her mouth, lifted her up over the railing, and hurled her down the concrete stairs.

Someone sitting on a balcony on the first floor saw her fall and screamed, and Brat quickly walked away into the shadows. The fiery river began to cool then, and by the time the ambulance siren wailed, Brat felt hungry. Brat stopped the station wagon at Taco Bell on the way home and got two Chalupa Supremes, one for Brat and one for the mother.

Brat was twenty-three years old.

The next one was an old woman in her bed. They’d been in California for a year, and it had taken Brat a long time to find this one. She baby-sat a child when the mother was at work, and the mother was a police officer, so Brat had to be very careful. The neighborhood was nice and quiet, though, and everyone went to bed early so they could get up and go to work in the morning or take their children to school without being late. Thus Brat could walk the streets at will and peep in windows without anyone ever knowing it.

The old woman lived in a stucco house the color of peaches. There was a window open in the basement, and Brat used a small penlight to find the way upstairs to the kitchen. The house was silent. The first bedroom held a crib, and there was a light on the dresser that sent stars and moons reflecting on the ceiling. In the crib a pretty little blond-haired child of two lay sleeping. Brat thought it was a boy, but it might’ve been a girl. Brat watched it for a while and the way the light reflected off its tiny head. The fire started to burn, and Brat’s hand tightened around the baseball bat.

A gasp sounded from the doorway, and Brat spun around as the old woman ran down the hall toward the back bedroom. Brat took off after her, swinging the bat as she grabbed at the telephone on the bedside table and continuing to hit her until she lay still. Brat got out the cleaver but stopped as an arc of car lights swung into the driveway and made a slanted pattern from the Venetian blinds across the wall behind the bed. The car lights went off, and a man got out. Brat heard the baby screaming then, and the man must have, too, because he ran up to the front door. Brat took off out the back door and across the neighbor’s backyard, and the man came out with the crying baby and squealed off in the car. Brat took off in the station wagon in the opposite direction but could not stop shaking. Brat had barely gotten away this time.

“You’re getting careless, and now I don’t have a friend to talk to,” said the mother later.

Brat was over thirty years old.

Cattle scattered beneath us as we skimmed the treetops over my Aunt Helen’s verdant pastures, looking for the best place to set down. I felt a familiar sense of peace roll over me. The farm below was the closest thing I had to home and family, and I loved it. The property was beautiful and rolling, with a high forested ridge rising over the far bank of a wide creek called Walls Ford. A gravel road formed the other boundary, running in front of Aunt Helen’s farmhouse and barn. I could see a white sheriff’s car in the driveway. That would be the Wright County sheriff, Daniel Harnett, who’d given us permission to set a helicopter on the Wakefield property. Black finally selected a dirt clearing near the weathered gray barn and we settled to the ground gently and he cut the rotors.

Removing his headset, Black fixed the controls and turned to me. “You ready?”

We’d said next to nothing during the trip, maybe because I was mightily ticked off at him for being so cavalier about snooping around in my pain, not to mention my life in general. He now seemed to think he owned me and could do anything he wanted, whenever he wanted. Wrong. Time for a wake-up call, Black.

Truth be told, though, I actually felt better since some of this was coming out. And maybe because Black said he didn’t think I was responsible for all the death I’d seen. Maybe I wanted somebody to tell me that I had nothing to do with the accidents so I could believe it myself. Maybe he was right that I shouldn’t have kept it all buried inside me for so long.

But none of this was any of Black’s business. I was still highly miffed with him for taking liberties with my life, so I said, “She’s not going to know anything that I haven’t already told you. You’re wasting your time questioning her.”

“It’s worth a try. If nothing else, it’ll give me a chance to meet somebody in your family.”

“Well, I can promise you one thing, Black, she won’t tie you to a chair and knock you in the lake, like your family did to me.”

“I thought we’d worked through that.”

“Nope.” I opened the door and jumped out. I could see the sheriff in his dark brown uniform and my aunt standing next to him, wearing a pink dress, her white hair vivid against the blowing green trees. They waited at a metal cattle gate that divided the yard from the sprawling green pastures behind the house. Forty head of cattle bunched together a good distance away from us and looked collectively pissed off.

I ran ahead of Black and gave my Aunt Helen a tight hug, very glad to see her again. We talked on the phone sometimes, but it’d been months since I’d spent time on her farm.

“Well, aren’t you something?” said Aunt Helen to Black when he walked up, still wearing his aviator shades. “Landing out here like a regular George W. Bush.”

Black laughed and stretched out his hand. Aunt Helen took it in her firm, no-nonsense grip, and they stared at each other, obviously measuring each other up. Then he shook hands with the sheriff. “I appreciate your letting me set down out here.”

“Are you sure you’re all right, Annie?” Helen held my hand and looked into my eyes. She was a pretty lady, well into her seventies, with the unlined skin of women from an era that didn’t cherish suntans. Her blue eyes were fixed on me; then she looked at Black in a way that said: Don’t you dare hurt Annie, or you’re dead meat.

“It’s started up all over again, Aunt Helen.”

“I know. I’ve been watching it on the news. You’ll get through this just fine. Last time made you strong enough for anything. You know that.”

“That’s right,” Black said, putting his hand on my back.

Helen watched me move away from his touch, then cut her gaze to Black’s face. “You haven’t known Annie long enough, I reckon, to presume so much. Flashy types like you cause more trouble for a person than you’re worth.”

Black took that well, like a psychiatrist should. “Believe me, Mrs. Wakefield, hurting Claire’s the last thing I’d ever want to do.”

I took Aunt Helen’s arm and walked toward the house with her before she and Black got into fisticuffs. “I’m so glad to see you again, Aunt Helen. Let’s talk on the porch, where it’s cool.”

As we walked around to the open front porch, which ran the length of the old farmhouse, then wrapped around the far side, Sheriff Barnett bluntly asked Black what his business was in Hartville, listened politely—obviously scoping him out to make sure he could leave Black alone with his Wright County constituents—then said he’d be on his way. I thanked him and took a seat in my favorite place, a long white swing at the end of the porch. Black stood leaning up against a porch pillar.

“You have a beautiful farm here, Mrs. Wakefield.” Doctor Nick Polite all of a sudden.

“Thank you.” Aunt Helen was nobody’s fool. She eyed him suspiciously, like he was going to steal her porch swing out from under me. But she was being polite, too. We were in the middle of a war of polite, but I was abstaining from civility until I heard what Black had in mind.

Aunt Helen said, “Would you like some lemonade? I’ve got fresh-squeezed this morning in the icebox.”

“That sounds great,” Black gushed.

Jeez. I looked out over the quiet, peaceful pastures.

After Aunt Helen disappeared into the house, Black said, “I don’t think your aunt likes me.”

“And that surprises you?”

Black was on his best behavior, so he ignored this. “It’s really peaceful out here.”

“That’s why I come down here.”

“Is this where you went the year you dropped out of sight?”

“Yes. I sat out here on this swing most of the time, just staring out over the fields. Everybody around here let me alone, and the media never found me. I love all this peace and quiet. I wish I could live here.”

“I can see why.”

Aunt Helen came back outside a few minutes later and set down frosty glasses of lemonade with lemon slices floating on top, a platter of her famous two-layer red velvet cake with cream cheese icing, white serving plates, forks, and white paper napkins with red hearts on them. While she cut the cake, she said to Black, “I believe I’ve seen you on my television set a time or two. You do that kind of work, do you?”

“Yes, ma’am. But most of the time, I’m just a doctor.” Boy, he
was
on his best behavior.
Ma’am
, and everything. I sure never heard him call anybody else ma’am.

Aunt Helen said, “What kind of doctor?”

“I practice psychiatry.”

Helen questioned me silently with narrowed eyes that asked:
Quack?
Then she sat down on a metal rocking chair beside the swing. She folded her hands in her lap. “So what do you need to know from me?”

“I told him that you can’t tell him anything more than I did, but he doesn’t believe me,” I said.

Black took a green metal chair across from us and leaned forward. “Mrs. Wakefield, I think you might be able to clear up some things about Claire’s childhood that only you would know. She’s been through more than any one woman should have to endure, and I want it to stop.”

Helen looked troubled. “That’s true, and her mother, too.”

“Clarie doesn’t remember much about her mother’s disappearance.”

I said, “I told you everything I can remember. If there’s anything more, Aunt Helen would’ve told me a long time ago. Wouldn’t you, Aunt Helen?”

When Aunt Helen leaned back in her rocking chair and clammed up, I dragged my foot and stopped the swing. Uh-oh.

“Aunt Helen? You have told me everything, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there are some things I haven’t mentioned.”

I knew at once she was hiding something. By the look on Black’s face, so did he. He said, “Do you know what happened to her mother? Did she really just disappear?”

“Yes.” Helen rocked gently. “Did Annie tell you we’re not really blood kin, Dr. Black?”

“No, something else she just forgot to mention.”

“I didn’t see any need to mention it.” But I felt edgy and nervous, afraid I was about to be buried under another avalanche of hurt.

Aunt Helen looked at Black. “Annie’s mother, Regina, was best friend to my daughter, Linda, all through their high school years.”

Black said, “Did Regina’s family live around here, too?”

“Used to, but most of them are dead now. Father was a minister, a good man but strict as fire with those poor girls of his. Both of them got away from home as soon as they could.”

I said, “Why didn’t you tell me this, Aunt Helen?”

“I didn’t see the need.”

Black probed deeper. “Regina had a sister, right?”

“Yes. Kathy. She took her own life years ago. Annie, you found her.”

“Yeah, I found her.” I put my cake down on the table, suddenly not hungry anymore.

“I guess the time has come to tell you the truth, Annie. I guess I’ve been trying to protect you all these years, too.”

“Tell me what?”

She sighed. “The truth is that long before you were born, your mother, Regina, ran off with a boyfriend home on leave from the Marine Corps. When the boy shipped out, she came back home, but her father, your Grandpa Baker, disowned her and threw her out of the house. That’s when she came here and lived with Linda and me for a while.” Aunt Helen took my hand. “And that’s when she found out she was pregnant with you, Annie.”

I couldn’t move, couldn’t believe she’d kept this from me all these years. Aunt Helen shook her head. “It was so different back then; you just wouldn’t believe the way it was. Such a terrible stigma to be an unwed mother, especially when your father was a clergyman. So, before she got big enough to show, I got her a job cooking and cleaning for some friends of mine who ran a soup kitchen down in Poplar Bluff. They had a place where she could live safely while she worked there, and I knew the people were good-hearted and would do right by her. Regina wanted out of this town more than anything. She didn’t want anyone here to know she was having a baby.”

I blinked and stared at her, then blinked some more, having some trouble taking this all in.

Black said, “So that’s where Claire was born? In Poplar Bluff?”

I said, “Why did everybody tell me I was born in Dayton, Ohio?”

“Your mother didn’t want you to know the truth.”

I just sat there. Black got up and sat down on the swing beside me.

“Linda and I kept in touch with your mother as much as we could, mainly by telephone. Her family never really accepted her back into the fold.”

Black said, “And Annie’s father? What happened to him?”

“He never made it back home, got killed in some godforsaken place.”

“How could you not have told me all this? Why did you keep it a secret all these years? Who was my father? What was his name?”

“His name was Scott Parker. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t see the need to go into all the sordid details of the past, especially when Regina went to so much trouble to conceal it. You’d suffered enough without hearing about the unpleasant circumstances of your birth.”

Black said, “Booker found out that Regina eventually got married in Poplar Bluff to a man who was an undertaker. Is that true?”

Aunt Helen’s blue eyes studied us both, and she seemed reluctant to reply. “Well, his name was Landers, and he was an embalmer. She worked for him a while, but I don’t know for how long. He offered her a little house at the back of his property where she could live for free if she’d do some cooking and cleaning for him. She went to work there so you’d have a nice, safe place to play, Annie.”

“I grew up with the Landers name. Does that mean he adopted me after he and Regina got married?”

Aunt Helen leaned back and studied a cow looking at us over the fence. She was hesitating again. Gee, this just got worse and worse. “Tell me the rest of it, Aunt Helen, please. Did he adopt me? Where is he now?”

“The fact is, dear, your mother never married him. She just worked for him.”

“But I thought they were married. I had his name.”

“Regina didn’t marry him. She just told everybody up here she did, including her sister. She was ashamed and didn’t want her family to know you were born illegitimately, so she took his name for the both of you. No one was ever the wiser after Landers died in a fire, and even before that, because apparently, the man was a recluse his entire life.”

“Oh, my God, I can’t believe this.”

“Then your mother just up and disappeared one day. Regina went outside one night to smoke a cigarette after she put you to bed and just vanished into thin air. Thank God, her sister, Kathy, took you in.”

Black said, “Do you think Regina deserted Claire?”

“No, never. She loved you more than life itself, Annie. She would never have left you alone like that. There was foul play involved, but the police never figured out what happened to her.”

I said, “What about my brother?”

For the first time, Aunt Helen looked nonplused. “Regina never had a son. Just you, Annie. You were her whole life.”

“But I remember him; I know I do. And his name was Thomas.”

Helen shook her head. “I don’t know who you’re thinking of. Regina never had another child.”

Black said, “So this embalmer, Doctor Landers, died in a fire. Do you know what caused the fire?”

She shook her head. “Regina told me that he was very weird and strange acting. Lived in a spooky old house and did his embalming in the basement. Maybe the chemicals he used caught fire, or something like that. Regina said he drank too much whiskey.”

I kept trying to remember any of the things she was telling us about, but I couldn’t. It seemed impossible. “Are you sure there wasn’t a little boy that lived with us or played with me? I remember him. I know I do.”

“Well, you know, now that I think on it, Regina did tell me once that Doctor Landers had a son. That’s right. She went on a bit about what a peculiar boy he was, always whispering and sneaking around. She said he gave her the creeps, but you might’ve played with him, Annie. I bet he’s the child you remember.”

“Did she call him Thomas?”

“I just don’t remember.”

I waited, growing anxious and resisting the urge to pace. “Please try to think.”

Aunt Helen shut her eyes a moment; then she said, “I just don’t know his name, but I seem to recall that he had a nickname, and it was something bad, like Snot or Jerk or something. No, I think it was Brat that they called him. Regina said Landers and the boy were both so strange that she finally quit working there and went back to cook at the soup kitchen.”