by L E Fraser
Mom’s contrived lilting intonation drew attention to my father’s heavy Cajun accent. When people saw them together, Dad with his thick curly hair and knotted muscles and Mom with her silvery blonde tresses and elfin features, they often wondered what a genteel woman saw in such an uncultured man. One could easily imagine Dad shirtless and braced on the deck of a sea-soaked fishing trawler, while Mom sipped tea from Wedgewood china in an elegant drawing room. Not that she ever did that. My mother was a brilliant thespian who wove her life’s tapestry from satin threads of lies.
She claimed her provenance traced back to the founding father of the colony of Georgia and that her ancestors had been plantation owners in Savannah. She’d eloquently declare to fascinated guests that the vice president of the Confederacy had once sat upon a fragile chair with an unravelling needlework cushion that perched at the head of our dining table. Sometimes she’d offer me the slightest of smiles. You see, we’d found that ugly old chair on the side of a road in Iberia Parish. It was a reject from an estate sale—an item so undesirable that no one had offered a single dollar to possess it. I had just turned seven on the day I helped her load it into our pickup truck. Although I didn’t know the truth about her then, I understood her whimsical imagination and knew she’d knit a colourful anecdote about the chair’s history. What I could not see back then was that those harmless fantasies were evolving into her reality and precipitating her descent into madness.
My father meticulously repaired the delicate chair and refinished the wood. He left the worn needlepoint cushion intact because Mom said that the neglected appearance added authenticity to the story of its origin—a story that didn’t hold even a whisper of truth. When she ultimately came to believe that her family had indeed passed down that homely chair through the generations, my father listened with rapt attention and never contradicted the woman he adored.
When I was ten, Mom took me to East Gaston Street in historic Savannah to an elegant mansion where she claimed she’d lived as a child. On that sweltering day in August, the air was laden with oppressive humidity that threatened to drown you every time you took a shallow breath. Gnarled black branches of an ancient oak tree stretched across the sidewalk, and I swatted at the leaves that fluttered through the blistering air. My hair was too long, and it stuck in soggy clumps against the nape of my neck. Sweat gathered along the itchy collar of my button-down shirt. The sharp edge of a brown belt that I’d cinched around my baggy shorts chafed the slick skin of my hipbones. I didn’t know what had possessed my mother to drag me to Savannah, and all I wanted was to go home to my sister, Pearl.
The estate had a low brick fence topped with ornate wrought iron, which my mother stopped in front of as she gestured grandly at the enormous house and grounds. Her joviality and antics began to draw unwelcome attention. I was mortified. She pranced like a dressage horse across the sidewalk, pirouetting and waving her arms above her head. Women stared with disapproval as Mom pontificated on her childhood in the Georgian jewel with its antebellum architecture. Brash comments and snickers floated around us like the rotten leaves of the old oak tree. I averted my eyes, cringing as each hateful word assaulted me. Suddenly, something fleeting crossed my mother’s face, as if a deep pain afflicted her. Her gaiety ebbed and her gaze dropped to the sidewalk. A tear dripped onto the silk bodice of her outdated dress.
An ephemeral beam of maturity showed me the truth that day: her fantasies protected her from the harshness of reality. She needed them to survive, as much as we both needed the humid air we breathed. She needed me to believe, to be her armour against reality. It was a gift I had the power to bestow, a small token to shield her from the scorn of pitiless strangers.
I straightened my shoulders, raised my eyes in defiance, and took my mother’s hand. I glared at the privileged women who strolled along the streets of Forsyth Park, and the first worm of hatred toward the entitled burrowed into my brain. Imperious people were a stain on the fabric of humanity.
I told my mother she was dazzling in her seafoam silk dress, with its yards of chiffon that billowed around the perfection of her pale skin. I danced with her on that boiling sidewalk until her laughter drowned out the snide remarks.
I took her to a bench and we sat in the shade of the oak tree. With nothing awry to gawk at now, people strolled by without paying us any mind. My mother’s melodic voice serenaded me with fanciful stories, and I willingly followed her down the rabbit hole. She may never have resided within the walls of that estate or been born into an aristocratic family, but my mother owned the lie. Sitting ladylike on the bench, she was a vision that had stepped from the pages of a history book to stir my imagination. I could so easily envision Old Savannah’s finest arriving for a ball hosted for the most sought-after debutante in Georgia. It was what she longed to believe, and my acceptance was the key to her happiness.
On that day in Savannah when I was ten, I began my metamorphosis into an intuitive chameleon, able to hide my true self and transform into what people desired me to be. My mother was a gifted prevaricator, and under her unsuspecting tutelage, I honed what would become an essential survival skill.
When a man appeared at the front door to the house, my mother called to him and, together, we charmed him into inviting us inside. He had recently acquired the estate, and it delighted him to learn about his home’s illustrious past from a previous resident. We stayed for an hour and had tea at a poolside garden. Every childhood memory Mom recounted to the enchanted Yankee rang with truth. But even if he grew to suspect her of fraud, it didn’t matter. Few men were impervious to my mother’s beauty. Her huge eyes were aqua, the colour of the Gulf of Mexico when the sun hits it just right. Her complexion and hair were so pale that she resembled an ethereal fairy. God had graced her with an aquiline nose and plump lips that were a natural shade of rose. She’d been a dancer in her youth, and her lithe body moved in fluid motions that resembled choreography. There wasn’t a man in the world immune to my mother’s beauty.
Except for my paternal grandfather, that is.
My father was born in the South, but not from old money. His kin hailed from Lafayette and were nouveau riche, which is often worse in terms of intolerance. His father, my grandfather, was a southern chauvinist who hung his Confederate flags with pride, drank mint juleps dark with Michter’s Bourbon, and exploited the Blacks he employed. Grandfather disowned my dad, his only son, the instant he married Mom. As a misogynist, my grandfather was invulnerable to Mom’s beauty and suspicious of her purported genteel charm. My grandfather was acutely aware of the subtleties of deceit, because he was a cruel and dishonest man. As I learned in my teens, Grandfather exercised great resourcefulness in exposing my mother’s true background. Tawdry detectives—some employed by the Lafayette Police Department—burrowed into Mom’s past like pigs rooting for truffles. My mother hadn’t perfected her delicate glass webbing of lies, and it shattered under their determined investigation.
The egg was her revenge. The egg was the catalyst that led to the brutality that eventually destroyed my family.
The last time Grandfather had tolerated Mom in his mansion, she’d lifted his prize possession, a Fabergé egg encased in aquamarine and adorned with emeralds and diamonds. She didn’t steal the egg; my mother was much too clever for such a pedestrian act. She simply broke it and left the pieces on the marble floor below its lit pedestal, which an artist had crafted to display its splendour. I imagine that the glittering shards had twinkled like the crystal splinters of the fantasy she had spun to gain approval from a man who was her inferior.
Beaten down and disowned, Dad dropped out of medical school and abandoned a promising career as a surgeon. Perhaps he did it out of spite—it had been my grandfather’s aspiration for his son to become a world-renowned surgeon. Perhaps he did it out of a calling to serve his country, because he immediately joined the army as a combat medic.
We lived inside the gates of Fort Polk Army Base in Vernon Parish. Whenever the arm
y deployed my father, it was my responsibility to keep the nosy military wives away from our house. But between school and caring for Pearl, I could not protect my mother. Eventually, there were rumours that she was unfit to care for us. So, my father moved us to an isolated property outside Breaux Bridge in St. Martin Parish, where my mother and Pearl would be safe from prying eyes.
Two limestone walls marked the entrance to a lane with dual tire tracks gouged into the earth. Beyond the wall were twelve acres of land that hugged the banks of the Bayou Teche. The day we arrived, my father slowed to make the turn onto the rutted dirt lane, and I jumped out of the truck’s cargo bed and scrambled onto the thick limestone wall. Shading my eyes from the brilliance of the sun, I looked toward the river and my gaze fell on an ancient bald cypress tree draped with Spanish moss. The magnificent tree stretched a hundred feet into the sky, like a sentry protecting the land it watched over. In that moment, I knew with absolute certainty that Mom and Pearl would be safe in this bayou oasis.
We lived in a mobile home for a year, while Dad and I completed our elevated home. We built the hipped-roof cottage from cypress timbers, and the foundation sat on steel pilings to raise the house and safeguard us from flooding. We built my mother a grand staircase that led to a deep porch that surrounded the four sides of the house. Inside was a kitchen at the back, a living room with a limestone fireplace, and two bedrooms on either side of the living space. I slept in a loft with a small window that overlooked the ancient bald cypress tree I had grown to love.
Whenever Dad was stateside, Mom and Pearl would accompany us while we trawled the bayou, pulling up traps laden with crawfish. My mother’s sweet voice would float over me as I rebaited netted cylinders with beef melt and returned the traps to the still water. Mom would stretch out in the boat and tell mesmerizing stories of her fantasized childhood in a non-existent palatial estate in Old Savannah.
When we’d arrive home, her long white skirt would float around her legs as she and Pearl stepped into the water to wait for me and my father to pull the small mud boat to shore.
Dad would drape his arm around my shoulders and we’d watch our fairies dance beneath the twisted branches of the cypress tree. The sun would form lustrous halos around their platinum hair, and the twirling edges of their dresses would dry in the last whisper of the day’s heat. I’d clap to the beat of their steps and their sultry laughter would float across the breeze as delicate needles dropped from the tree’s gnarled branches.
That cypress tree, exquisitely strung with webs of Spanish moss, would come to embody the annihilation of everyone I loved. From beneath its aged branches, I would rise from the ashes of our demise as a ubiquitous avenger of the persecuted.
But I digress. There is so much more you need to know, so much more for you to understand.
CHAPTER SIX
Sam
SAM HAD BEEN waiting in Dr. Armstrong’s office for nearly an hour, and security had paged the neuropsychiatrist three times. From the large window, Sam watched two police cruisers pull up to the clinic. Maybe they were bringing in a patient for an involuntary psychiatric assessment. That would explain why Emily was so late for their meeting.
Security had also paged Ophelia, which had been a huge relief. After an hour listening to incessant chatter and gossip, Sam had wanted to gouge her ear out with her pen. The nurse’s one-sided rhetoric was an inauspicious start to bridging a positive relationship. Off-putting personality aside, if they were going to work together, Sam had to figure out a way to connect with her.
She dropped a copy of American Journal of Psychiatry onto the teak coffee table. Dr. Armstrong’s paper on experiential therapy was intriguing. It left Sam battling her conscience again over the proposed internship. The research had cited the high success rates Serenity Clinic had had with non-traditional treatment settings, such as sculpting and rock climbing, for treatment-refractory depression and severe psychological trauma. And Emily had given credit to her former intern and praised his doctoral dissertation. A co-authored paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry would launch any psychologist’s career and garner instant respect in the industry.
Bored, Sam repositioned a turquoise throw pillow on her armchair. Hues of teal, green, and blue were everywhere. They gave the place a peaceful, oceanic ambience, but the space was a mirror image of reception and lacked personal touches. She wandered around, stopping at a tall bookshelf to snoop for items that might offer a hint about her potential mentor’s life. The shelves held nothing but academic textbooks. Emily had hung her medical degrees from the University of Toronto, Western University, and Dalhousie University, but there were no photos on the glass desk or any indication of the woman’s family or interests. Sam was returning a Montblanc fountain pen to the desk when Emily breezed into the office, flushed and slightly out of breath.
“I’m so sorry for being late.”
“I hope everything’s okay,” Sam said. “I heard the security calls.”
Emily hung her suit jacket across the back of her desk chair. “A patient left last night. It happens.” She crossed the room and took a seat on the sand-coloured sofa.
Sam sat on the adjacent armchair. “Was the patient an involuntary admission?”
“At first, yes. The certificate expired a month ago. Based on her willing participation in therapy, I decided against signing a renewal.” There was a note of sadness in Emily’s voice. “She was free to go, but she was making significant progress. I can’t understand what motivated her to leave without telling me.”
“Does it happen often?” Sam asked.
Emily shrugged. “It’s difficult for teenage patients to be cooped up during the spring and summer months.”
“How old was she?”
“Fourteen.” Emily plucked a speck of lint off her black pencil skirt.
“Her family must be frantic,” Sam said sympathetically.
“This isn’t the first time their daughter has run. After a few days, she’ll show up,” Emily stated brusquely, then changed the subject. “Before we discuss the reason I asked you here, I’m eager to learn what you discovered in the security footage.”
When Sam finished updating her, Emily’s distressed expression accentuated the crows’ feet around her hazel eyes. “Someone inside the hospital tampered with the files,” she said softly. “I can’t believe anyone who works here would do such a thing.”
“Danny found an escape hatch on the server. It’s possible an outsider accessed the system that way,” Sam said. “How does security handle visitors in the facility?”
“All visitors report to reception, sign in with one piece of picture identification, and receive a dated photo badge,” Emily said. “The badge must be worn and visible at all times.”
Sam had done all that herself, but the four-storey building spanned nearly a full city block. There had to be multiple access routes. “Could someone bypass reception?”
Emily shook her head. “People can exit through some of the doors without a keycard, but they can’t get in. All the exterior doors automatically lock.”
“What about police? Where do they bring involuntary admissions?”
“A block to the south, where the parking is. There’s an ambulance bay at the rear of the building,” Emily replied.
“I imagine it’s chaotic when a patient is brought in by force,” Sam said. “Is it possible for someone to sneak in unnoticed?”
“I suppose.” Emily’s frown was skeptical. “But employees are conscientious about patient privacy. If a stranger were roaming the halls, someone would detain the person and notify security.” A tic in the corner of her mouth twitched. “If the employee recognized the person, though, their response might be different,” she admitted. “We keep circling to the same conclusion. Whoever assaulted Fadiya is known to us.” She crossed her legs and wrapped her arms around her thin waist.
Sam disagreed. It was just as likely that the rapist was on the premises visiting a patie
nt. “Once visitors are inside, can they walk around unsupervised?”
“They’re supposed to stay in the visitor centre, the restaurants, or the courtyard garden. If they’re here for family counselling, they’d be with an employee,” Emily said. “But we aren’t running a prison, Sam. So long as they weren’t in the lockdown unit, which is supervised visitation only, and they had a visitor badge, unescorted guests wouldn’t raise any red flags.”
“The patient that left last night—how did she get out of the building without anyone noticing?” Sam asked.
“Like I said, there are exits that open from the inside, in compliance with fire laws,” Emily said. “We run on a skeleton crew after midnight, so it’s possible she left without anyone noticing.” She checked her watch. “I’m late for a meeting with Fadiya’s mother and brother. That’s why I asked you here. Mrs. Basha is eager to meet you.”
“Why?” Sam asked.
“She’s aware of your connection to Bueton.” Emily held up a hand before Sam could respond. “I didn’t tell her. She recognized your name from the publicity after the mass murder.”
“I’m committed to helping you uncover the security breach, but I haven’t decided on the ethics around the practicum,” Sam stated honestly.
Emily waved her hand dismissively. “This isn’t a ploy to strong-arm you. When facing a life decision, information is empowering. Wouldn’t meeting Fadiya and her family help you to decide?”
“Well, yes, but I don’t want to mislead them.”
Emily stood and walked over to her desk. She repositioned her fountain pen beside a notebook and took her jacket from the back of the chair. “I understand, but please don’t worry. They’ll accept whatever decision you make.” She led Sam into the corridor and locked her office door. “The boardroom is on this level. Did Ophelia give you a full tour?”
“All but the cellar.” Sam followed her down a long hallway. “Last time I was here, she said it was off-limits. I understand it was a boiler room in the early nineteen-hundreds.”