The Many (16 page)

4

Karl made sure he arrived ten minutes early so he could get a table facing the entrance. He also wanted to have a coffee and a muffin in front of him, thinking it would make him appear more approachable. He couldn’t afford Isobel's daughter to lose her nerve as soon as she walked in the door. Judging by their abrupt phone conversation, she was pretty highly strung.

Glancing around the coffee shop, he guessed Addict was one of Isobel's old haunts. Colorful nature art on the walls, a vegetarian blackboard menu, and lots of middle-aged women with short hair and hooped earrings. In fact, apart from a bearded guy who looked like a lost tourist, Karl was the only male customer. It didn't bother him – he wasn't being stared at too much – but he could see why Isobel's daughter had chosen the venue. If he’d turned out to be a weirdo, the whole coffee shop would be in her corner.

He spotted her passing by the front window. It had to be her – wearing a thick black coat, her head bowed to the wind. She stepped inside and surveyed the crowd, bringing her chin up to show she wasn’t intimidated. Shoulder-length black hair, a pale, heart-shaped face and dark green eyes. Cute, if she didn’t have such a furious expression.

Karl caught her eye and smiled, gesturing to the chair in front of him. She stood perfectly still, taking careful note of his appearance before approaching.

Karl opted to stay seated instead of rising to greet her. She was small in stature and he would've towered over her.

“Hello Dawn,” Karl said when she reached him. “Thanks for coming.”

She looked around the coffee shop again, seeming to draw confidence from the familiar surrounds. Then she sat down quickly, keeping her coat on tight. “Can I see your ID?” she asked.

Karl nodded, reaching into his back pocket. Smart move, he thought. Paranoid, but smart.

Dawn studied his driver’s license closely, her eyes shifting between the photo and his face.

“I've had it cut since then,” Karl said, brushing a hand through his hair.

“It's still pretty long,” she observed.

“Yeah, I guess.”

She handed back his license and stood up to unbutton her coat. Evidently, Karl had passed whatever test she’d just conducted.

“So tell me about your sister,” Dawn said when she was settled.

Karl gave her the full story, from the morning Stacey arrived back from her date, to the nightmarish therapy session with Dr. Ramirez. Dawn listened keenly throughout, interrupting him only once to order a large mocha from the counter. Even when he moved on to the bizarre twists of the past week – his encounter with Maxine, the revelations about Professor Leach – she never screwed up her nose or arched an eyebrow in disbelief.

As Dawn quietly sipped her mocha, Karl began to wonder if she was as smart as he'd thought. She seemed to accept everything he said without question. “So you're actually buying into this?” he eventually asked.

“Yeah.”

“You don't find any of it...far-fetched?”

She shrugged. “It makes more sense than anything else I’ve heard. I've been saying all along that Maxine did something horrible to my mom that night. And after the way she died..."

Dawn’s voice had suddenly thickened and she paused to take a deep breath, collecting herself. “After the way she died, I knew she was still haunted by the memory. Her mind was completely gone. It wasn't Isobel anymore.”

“Same with Stacey. She was a different person after her date with Dr. Reynolds. I knew it wasn't a mental illness, despite what the experts said.”

“The experts don't have a fucking clue,” Dawn sneered. “They even told me Isobel’s behavior was normal for a person with rapid onset schizophrenia – like they'd seen it all before. Can you believe that? They just can't think outside their fucking textbooks.”

Karl gave her a sympathetic look. “What actually happened to your mom?”

Dawn's eyes narrowed, sizing him up again. He'd passed her initial test, but opening up about her mom obviously required a new level of trust.

“Or maybe just tell me what you know about Maxine?” he said.

“No, it’s okay,” she said, her face softening a little. “You told me about your sister – it’s only fair.”

Isobel’s post-date experience sounded just as traumatic as Stacey’s. The parallels between the two were uncanny – the hazy recollections of their dates, the explicit sexual references, the sudden bursts of anger. Karl had no doubt that Isobel had been taken to the same basement as his sister and subjected to a similar violation.

As illuminating as Isobel’s story was, it was when Dawn mentioned her meeting with Lila Hewitson that Karl’s ears really pricked up. “That must be where Leach is hiding,” he said excitedly. “In a cabin near Hood River.”

“Yeah, but that’s a big area. And Lila never actually made it to the cabin.”

Karl wasn’t about to be deterred. “She was on a gravel road in the middle of the woods. She must’ve been close. And I guarantee if we find the cabin, we find that fucking basement.” His heart was beating fast, the caffeine zinging through his veins. “You’ve got to talk to Lila again,” he said decisively.

“What more can she tell us?”

“Details she forgot to mention the first time. A clue to the road she was on. She might’ve seen a mailbox, an abandoned car…”

“–It was dark. All she could see were trees.”

“She probably wasn’t trying very hard. If she knew how valuable her memory was, she might remember more. Fuck, maybe we could get her to try hypnotherapy.”

Dawn looked at him. “After what your sister went through?”

Karl leaned back, checked by the hesitancy in Dawn’s eyes. He was talking too fast, steamrolling the conversation. “I’m sorry,” he said, letting out a gust of air. “Man, they make a strong coffee here.”

Dawn’s lips twitched, almost managing a smile. “Is there any other type?”

“Not in Portland, I’ve discovered. I grew up on instant coffee, so this espresso stuff is a real head rush.”

“You can get drip coffee here.”

“I’m trying to fit in with the city folk.”

She smiled, a proper grin this time. For an instant her face lit up, and Karl saw a pretty teenager. Then her features bunched, and it was back to her default scowl. “So what next?” she said. “Can we go back to the police with our stories? I know they’ve written us off separately, but maybe together, we could get them to listen.”

Karl shook his head. “McElroy said we shouldn’t talk to anyone but him. He seems….suspicious of the other cops. He said nothing less than hard evidence is going to move the investigation forward.”

“Then why did you ask me here?” Dawn snapped. “To start a fucking support group?”

“No, I just don’t want to go back to McElroy
yet
. There are things we can investigate ourselves. We can ask around at the university – find out exactly what Leach was doing to those students. And also the hospital he escaped from – they’ve got to know Leach’s secrets. We could head over there, see if anyone’s willing to talk.”

Dawn nodded. “I could do some reading in the library. See what I can find out about Leach’s research.”

“Cool.” Karl checked his watch – it was past eleven o'clock. A longer meeting than he’d anticipated. Ravi would be fuming. “I've got to get back,” he said. “But I'd like to talk more, if that's okay. Can I call you tonight?”

“Sure.”

He stood up and put on his jacket, hesitating when he noticed Dawn was still seated.

“I'm going to stay a while,” she explained. “I don’t like being alone these days.”

As soon as she uttered the words, Karl felt his own emptiness wrap around him. “Yeah,” he said, looking towards the entrance where rain was now frantically lashing the front windows. “I know what you mean.”

5

Lila stared at the smear of dirt on her floor. The mark was barely noticeable, and it could easily be wiped clean, but she wasn’t worried about the dirt itself. She was worried about how it got there. 

Since buying her own apartment, Lila had got into the habit of removing her shoes just inside the front door. It wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule, just a routine she’d fallen into. Yet there it was, a dark blemish on the pale floorboards just outside her kitchen. The soles of her feet weren’t that filthy. And she couldn’t imagine how dirt would get onto her socks.

Had someone been inside her apartment? As soon as she asked herself the question, Lila realized how fucking paranoid she was being. A random smear of dirt on the floor did not equal an intruder. Nothing else in the apartment looked out of place. The locks hadn’t been fiddled with. She was alone. Safe.

Lila got a cloth from under the kitchen sink and wiped away the dirt. Then, she fixed herself a large gin and tonic. The business with Maxine had obviously rattled her more than she liked to admit. Immediately after the date, she hadn’t been worried at all. She’d been more amused than anything – thinking the freaky bitch was just desperate for a fuck. But after the news about Dawn’s mother, and then the detective’s visit yesterday, Lila had begun to suspect she’d been a whisper away from death. And now, the mere thought of Maxine gave her chills. 

Lila took a large gulp of her drink and returned to the living room, collapsing on the sofa and hitting the TV remote. She was tired, that was all. Working ten-hour shifts could fuck with your head – make you worry about shit that wasn’t real. Besides, she didn’t do scared. Scared was for straight girls and little kids. She’d grown out of that weak-minded bullshit years ago.

There was nothing good on the movie channels so Lila switched to CMT, her 3 a.m. guilty pleasure. She drank her G&T quickly and poured herself another, thinking she might crash on the sofa tonight. Lila didn’t feel like going to bed alone and the glow of the TV was comforting. A few more drinks and a few more songs and she’d forget all about the dirt on the floor. When the sun came up, maybe she’d see if one of her friends wanted to stay over for a week or two, just until she got this Maxine crap out of her head.

Lila was falling asleep in front of an Old Crow Medicine Show video when a sudden creak snapped her to attention. She sat up and muted the TV, leaving images of a hurricane-ravaged New Orleans to play in silence. Her eyes shifted to her closed bedroom door. The creak had sounded like her closet. She’d been meaning to oil the hinges for months, but had never got around to it. Actually, she was pretty damn certain it was her closet. But how had the door moved? She always left her bedroom window shut, meaning it couldn’t have been the wind.

Lila’s skin prickled with sweat. She knew there was likely an innocent explanation, but at that moment, she couldn’t think of a single one. She got to her feet, taking a moment to find her balance. Her thoughts were slow and mushy with alcohol. How many G&Ts had she had? She could only remember finishing two, but it felt like she’d drunk a half dozen.

She crept across the living room to her bedroom, putting an ear to the door. Her heart began to beat rapidly. Jesus. Was she hearing things or was someone on the other side, their breath hissing against the wood?

“Fuck!” she yelped, jumping back from the door. The phone had started ringing from the side table by the sofa. The harsh trill always came as a surprise – so few people called her landline these days. Only annoying salespeople and survey takers, and even they wouldn’t have the nerve to call at four in the morning.

Grandma
, she suddenly thought. Grandma still called people’s houses.

Lila hurried to the phone, picking up just before the call went through to voicemail. “Hello,” she answered breathlessly.

A man with a barrel-deep voice answered, and as soon as he started speaking, Lila’s eyes glazed over. His words seemed to tap right into her brain stem, spreading out through her body. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. She listened in silence, her breathing slowing down to a sleeping rhythm.

When the man finished talking, Lila calmly replaced the receiver and went to the bathroom. She switched on the lights and removed her clothes, leaving them in a heap in the middle of the floor. She ran the tub, watching it slowly fill with water. Steam flattened her hair and moistened her skin. When the tub was three quarters full, she turned off the water and stepped in.

She lay low in the water, breathing the steamy air through her nose. The heat was turning her skin pink, but she didn’t feel uncomfortably hot. She was content – doing exactly as she was asked.

After a while, she heard the bedroom door click. Footsteps approached and came to a halt just outside the bathroom. She turned her head to the statuesque figure standing in the doorway, squinting to confirm the intruder’s identity. Blonde hair, blue eyes. A ripple of fear passed through her.

“You,” she said.

“Me,” Maxine confirmed. She moved closer to the tub, running a critical eye over Lila’s submerged body. “Ah, to be young,” she said with a sneer.

“What do you want?” Lila asked tentatively.

“Don’t look so scared. I’m not going to fuck you, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

“Okay,” Lila said. She was willing to do anything Maxine asked, but she was still relieved there were no sexual demands. That would’ve been weird.

“It’s important you answer honestly,” Maxine said. “Yesterday, a policeman visited you at the bar. Detective McElroy. What did he want?”

“To talk about our date.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“Everything I remembered. The restaurant, the dinner conversation, falling asleep in your car…” Lila’s voice trailed off, uncertain if she should go any further.

“And?” Maxine prodded. “I want the truth, Lila. Don’t worry about offending me.”

“Okay. And I told him how you drove me to a cabin in the woods when you were supposed to take me home.”

“Did you describe the location?”

“I said it was somewhere near Mount Hood.”

“That’s it?”

“I couldn’t remember anything else. Only trees and a dirt road. Then getting back on the highway.”

Maxine nodded, wiping a lick of sweat from her brow. Next she asked: “Did McElroy mention the name Adam Reynolds to you?”

“No.”

“Ivan Leach?”

“No. Who are they?”

“Never mind. What else did you discuss?”

“We talked a bit about Dawn Flint. I mentioned we met for coffee a couple of weeks ago–”

“Yes, yes, I’m not worried about her,” Maxine said impatiently, wiping her brow again. “Anything else?”

“No.”

“Good,” Maxine said with a nod of finality. She reached down to open the vanity drawer and pulled out a large ceramic hair dryer, the one Lila had bought when her hair was down to her shoulders.

“What are you doing with that?” Lila asked.

Maxine didn’t respond, inserting the plug into the wall socket and flicking the switch. She took a step back from the tub, dangling the whining hair dryer from her hand.

Lila was suddenly gripped by fear. Seeing the wicked twinkle in Maxine’s eye, she guessed what was about to happen.

“No, please no…” she begged, but the hair dryer was already falling through the air. She watched helplessly as it splashed between her legs.

There was a loud fizzing sound and Lila’s muscles seized hard. Then her entire body began to spasm uncontrollably. Blue and white sparks blinded her vision and her madly jerking limbs flung water out of the tub.

The pain was excruciating. She felt her brain cells popping, her organs frying. Blood ran out of her eyes and nose. And then, when most of the bath water had slopped onto the floor, she gave a weak, final twitch and lay still.