In the Blood (20 page)

I told her about the game we’d been playing, about the clues he left, his scary poems. She didn’t seem surprised, just nodded and made affirming noises as I told her everything.

“He’s so good at reeling people in,” she said. She gave a little laugh and a shake of her head.

“Stop talking about me!”
he screamed from upstairs. More pounding ensued.

She put down my mug and sat across from me. “He knows exactly what to say and do to hook people into his games. They tell me he manipulates the children at school, that he promises them treats if they misbehave at a certain time. A Snickers bar for a meltdown at twelve thirty-four or something like that.”

That was not the picture he painted of himself at school. I thought he was being bullied, pushed around because he was smart and small. I could relate to that, someone being rejected because there was something strange and different about him. I guess he knew that somehow.

“Why?” I asked. “Why does he do that?”

“Because he can,” she said. “That’s the only reason. He gets so bored; he needs constant stimulation. He can’t handle the monotony of normal day-to-day school life. So he creates chaos just to entertain himself. That’s really the only reason, hard as it is to accept.”

Of course, I knew that. I had enough education and experience at Fieldcrest to know that she was right in her assessment of him.

“Did he tell you I abuse him?” she asked. I didn’t respond. “Well, he wouldn’t say it outright. Just flinch when you get near him, or show you some injury and then be like a textbook abused child saying he fell or something.”

“The bruise on his shoulder,” I said.

“Self-inflicted,” she said. “He did it here by repeatedly banging himself against the wall. Then he went to school and put on his little show. I was called in, naturally. Parents of troubled children can sometimes resort to violence. Not me, though. The doctors there are smart. It didn’t take them long to figure out what he was doing.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s awful.”

She raised her cup to her lips but then she didn’t drink, just put it down on the table.

“I watched a documentary once about these crazy people who keep wild animals as pets,” she said. “They buy these baby chimps or lion cubs, even bears. And at first, it’s all cuddles and milk from a bottle. Then, surprise, surprise, a year later there’s a deadly, wild beast living in the backyard.”

She paused a second, finally took a sip of her tea. Then she ran her fingers under her lashes, wiping away tears that had welled there.

“These animals, caged and miserable, will kill the minute they get the chance. But, you know, you can see that these crazy pet owners love their creatures, really
love
them. They’re lonely people, rejected, and this lion or baboon or whatever fills some void they have inside. They just don’t realize that the creature doesn’t—can’t—love them back.”

She looked at me to see if I was following her. I was.

“And I found myself thinking that I knew just how they felt. The only difference was that I thought I had a kitten, and he grew into a tiger.”

Upstairs, Luke started pounding on the floor again. He must have been jumping, or the house was just really shoddily constructed, because our cups shivered on the table with each rattling blow.

“It runs in my family,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “My father battled crippling depression, as well as chronic anxiety. And my brother was a lot like Luke, until he killed himself when he was sixteen.” I thought about the man in the locket and wondered if it was her brother.

She seemed so tired, heavy with fatigue. And who could blame her?

“I used to pray for a normal life,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to get out of my house. I wouldn’t have planned a child, not with my genes, not with the place I was in when I got pregnant. But that’s life. Things don’t always go as planned.”

She looked at me suddenly, as though she was snapping out of a trance. “I haven’t told anyone that. Not in years. I’m sorry. It’s a horrible thing to say.”

“No,” I said. Another loud boom resonated from upstairs. “I understand.”

“I know you do,” she said kindly. She put her hand on mine for a moment, and then took it away. How did she know that? I didn’t know what she meant, and I didn’t ask.

“I have to go,” I told her. “I’m sorry to leave you like this. But I have a crisis at home.”

She nodded. “I suppose you won’t be coming back,” she said.

“Oh, no,” I answered. “I’ll be back.”

She beamed me a wide grateful smile, and I realized that somewhere along the line we’d become friends.

After I left the Kahns’, I returned to my empty dorm room. It was dark and cold, and I wasn’t there a minute before I wanted to leave again. Dr. Cooper had left a message on my cell phone, and after I made myself some macaroni and cheese, I called her back.

“I was just checking in on you,” she said. “I dropped a bit of a bomb on you last session.”

“I was going to call you,” I said.

“Do you need to come in?” she asked.

“I do,” I said. “I think I really do.”

“It’s dark and really cold,” she said. “I don’t want you to ride your bike.”

She was always on me for riding my bike without a helmet at the best of times. I didn’t exactly relish another nighttime ride myself.

“I’ll take a cab.”

“Actually, I know my husband is on campus right now. He helped with the search today. It’s a little unorthodox, but if you’re comfortable with it, he’ll happily give you a lift and I’ll drive you home after our session.”

Jones Cooper, the man who investigated Elizabeth’s disappearance
and Harvey Greenwald’s suicide. Strange how he kept turning up.

“He’s a cop, right?” I asked.

“He’s retired now, working as a private investigator. He was just helping out today, volunteering. He doesn’t have anything to do with Beck’s case.”

My distrust of the police had been long established in our sessions. I felt an immediate sense of discomfort when they were around. They annoyed me because they thought they knew everything, and really they knew nothing. With all their special forensics equipment, cutting-edge technology, body-language reading, handwriting analysis, whatever other little tricks they pulled out of the collective hat, they still got it all wrong. It was human nature to see only what you want to see, and nothing would change that, no matter what tools people had at their disposal. The truth is only what you think it is.

“Is that okay with you?”

“Sure,” I said with a lightness I didn’t feel. “That’s great. If he just rings downstairs at the Evangeline dorm, I’ll come right out.”

I thanked her and ended the call.

Was it weird that I had just been reading about Jones Cooper in the article about Harvey Greenwald? Or that he had worked Elizabeth’s case, and I had the feeling he never liked me? Oddly, the fact that he was married to Dr. Cooper had never bothered me before. It was something that I knew, but just filed away as irrelevant.

Dr. Cooper never spoke about her husband. And she was such a stickler about boundaries and privacy that I never worried that she might talk to him about me. But they
were
married. How likely was it that she would be able to keep the secret of my past from him? Especially back when he’d been working Elizabeth’s disappearance,
which involved me in a peripheral way. And now he was volunteering on the search for Beck. Was this some kind of trick the police were playing? Maybe they were hoping I’d say something to him that they could use. But that would mean my therapist was colluding with the police. Or maybe I was just being paranoid. Paranoia—the voice in your head that tells you everyone has a secret agenda that he’s running against you. The confusing thing is that sometimes it’s true.

If you don’t say anything, they can’t hurt you.
It was my father’s voice in my head.
Don’t give them anything, no matter how small, that they can use to manipulate and work their way into your cracks.
They could try to trick me all they liked. But it wasn’t going to work, because I had learned from the best.

I opened my laptop and entered Cooper’s name into the search engine, and started scrolling through the long list of articles in which his name appeared. By the time they rang me from downstairs, I knew a lot about former lead detective Jones Cooper.

I had also found something else: the location of Luke’s next clue.

Then one night, her son returned

His mind ruined by secrets and lies.

He started digging beneath the earth

Where the truth so often hides.

There was a slew of articles about Cooper’s first case as a private investigator, a cold case. A woman named Marla Holt had gone missing back in the eighties, and she was never found. There was always some suspicion surrounding the husband, but ultimately, because she had been having an affair, the police concluded that she’d run off on her family.

Last year, after the husband died, her son returned to The Hollows hoping to find out exactly what had happened to his mother. He discovered her body buried deep in The Hollows Wood next to an abandoned barn. And in finding her, he discovered the real truth of her death.

As I read the articles, my whole body started to shiver. Though it wasn’t quite the same set of circumstances, the similarities between that story and my own cut a deep valley of dread through me. The details, like the details of Harvey Greenwald’s suicide, just grazed the boundaries of my truth. Did he know me? Did Luke know who I was? The panic of the discovered liar was a drum beating in the back of my head. I wanted to race out the door, and go straight to that abandoned barn in The Hollows Wood. I needed to find out what he knew about me; it was a desperate and terrified drive. But I looked out my window and saw Cooper’s SUV idling in front of my building.

Like his pal Detective Chuck Ferrigno, the lead on Beck’s disappearance, Jones Cooper seemed like a nice guy. He was big and beefy, ruddy-faced and clean. He was the kind of guy who could wear a barn jacket and still look tough. He got out of the car to open the door for me. He waited until I climbed inside, then closed it carefully after me. His handshake had been warm and firm, but not too firm, the way some men use it to show how strong they are.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to take a ride with strange men?” he joked as he got into the driver’s seat. He had a scent, not cologne but something soapy, and crisp.

“Well, since Dr. Cooper seems to think you’re all right,” I said, “I figured you were a safe bet.”

“She
is
an excellent judge of character,” he said.

He started the engine and the big SUV rumbled to life. He pulled slowly onto the drive that led out of the school.

We passed by the crowd of volunteers still gathered in the parking lot. The gym was lit up brightly and milling with people. I knew it was where the police and Beck’s parents were running the command center. There were more news vans than there had been this morning. The story was heating up. Beck hadn’t used her phone or any of her credit cards since the day she went missing. I knew this from my last check on the Facebook page. I hadn’t heard from the police or from Beck’s parents. It seemed like I was being purposely kept out of the inner circle. But again, maybe that was just paranoia talking. Not everything is about me.

“Must be a hard time for you,” Cooper said.

I nodded, still staring out the window. I found I couldn’t use my voice, didn’t trust it not to betray me. I drew and released a deep breath.

“She’s my friend,” I said. “I hope she’s just pulling another one of her stunts. I really do.”

“Me, too,” he said. “Three-time runaway, right?”

I nodded.

“But never like this?” he said. “Causing so much worry?”

“No,” I admitted. “Usually she was in touch with someone after a day or so.”

As we pulled past the gym, I saw flashlight beams bouncing in the woods. They were still out there looking.

“Do you remember me?” he asked after a minute.

“Yes,” I said. “You worked Elizabeth’s case. You were there when they found her.”

He’d had a lot of questions for me back then. Someone said that
they overheard Elizabeth and me arguing. Someone had heard me say:
You can’t tell anyone, Liz. It’s not true
. I didn’t have any memory of that event, just the floaty, foggy images that came back in my dreams. But there was no evidence of any foul play in Elizabeth’s death. So eventually, they dropped it.

“That’s right,” he said.

He’d been involved in a number of missing-persons cases over the course of his career, according to the Web. Though, of course, it was a small town with a small police department. So naturally, as the lead detective, he worked most of the big cases.

“Did you find anything today?” I asked. “I wanted to be out there. But—I just couldn’t go through it again.”

“I understand,” he said. “No one should have to go through a thing like that twice.”

Three times, I thought, but naturally didn’t say.