Dreams in the Key of Blue

by John Philpin

  “What?”

  “Can you enhance that image?”

  “We don’t have equipment like that. Maybe if we sent it out, but I wouldn’t know where.”

  As I stared at the two women—the startled Squires, the unrecognizable woman and her gun—Jaworski walked through the door. “Heath’s in booking,” he said. “Jasper’s holding him as an accessory. They’re running Squires’s fingerprints. Janine Baker’s prints should be in the computer.”

  I pointed at the TV screen. “Meet Lily Dorman.”

  Jaworski looked from me to Stevens, then crossed the room and examined the indistinct picture.

  Before he could react, I asked, “Herb, does Portland have an amusement park?”

  “You don’t find us entertaining?”

  Stevens chuckled and left the office. I gave Jaworski the journal and pointed to the paragraph about the mirrors.

  “I don’t know of anything in Portland like what she’s written here, but it could be that little park up the street.”

  Jaworski gave me a brief history of the Screamin’ Demon, the amusement center that I had seen opposite the entrance to Harbor College. “When you walk into the mouth, blue lights flash and the monster roars. I always thought it was hokey, but the kids like it.”

  He walked to the window. I watched the TV view of him from outside.

  “The mirrors are in the old fun house,” Jaworski said. “They changed it, but it’s still there. There’s a giant slide with a big bowl at the bottom. The kids grab a burlap sack and walk up three flights to get to the top. You go left to get to the slide, right to enter the distortion room. The floors don’t meet the walls, the chairs and tables are oversized or undersized. That’s where they have the mirrors that make you fat, skinny, headless, or all head with no body. They call it the ‘House of Horrors’ now. You can hear the canned laughter on Main Street all summer. MI bought the place when they bought half the town. The new manager put every imaginable electronic gizmo in there.”

  Distortion.

  I felt as if my head suddenly filled with cotton candy. Thoughts tried to wade through the sticky pink cloud of spun sugar. I could not get a handle on any of them.

  Reflection.

  “Reporters are blocking the front again,” Jaworski said. “They’ve got police radios.”

  The reporters positioned themselves to know all things from all angles, to reflect back to us their impressionistic renderings of our lives. Reality is subjective and malleable. The only reality they could offer was their own.

  Lily Dorman asked for a new father, and her mother gave her one. Katrina rearranged reality that dark night when mother and daughter caught a bus to the hospital.

  “I didn’t want to go,” Lily wrote in her journal.

  “I don’t like the smells… the nurses’ mysterious sounds when they walk… the hallways where some noises echo and others do not.”

  My cotton candy cleared like tumbleweed in a brisk breeze. “Heath,” I said.

  “Reporters probably saw me bring him in.”

  I was out of Jaworski’s loop, on a totally different wavelength. “I have to talk to Heath.”

  “Can’t it wait until they process him?”

  “No.”

  Jaworski sighed. “I swear you jump around like crabs in a pot of boiling water. Come on.”

  THE CHIEF LEFT ME ALONE WITH EDGAR HEATH.

  The tall, muscular man sat with his head cradled in his arms on a table. I pulled up a chair opposite him as he sat erect and stretched, his sleep-deprived eyes swollen.

  “I don’t know where she is,” he said.

  “A month before Lily killed her father, you drove her to Mellen Street.”

  He wrinkled his forehead.

  “She went inside the apartment building. You waited at the car.”

  “That never happened.”

  “She wore a black dress, pearls, sunglasses, a black scarf.”

  “Who is she supposed to have killed that day?”

  “No one. She talked to a woman who was leaving the building, asked her where Harper Dorman lived, then walked out. You opened the car door for her.”

  Heath shook his head. “The ones I opened the door for never went to Mellen. When she was the one I drove to the jetport, she waited for me to come around the car.”

  His eyes betrayed no involuntary movement. “I haven’t committed a crime,” he said. “I answered the detectives’ questions. I am answering yours. I’m also tired. I need a shower. I’m hungry.”

  I showed him the photograph from Portland State University.

  “She was just a kid then,” he said.

  Heath looked at me. “The smile, the bright blue eyes… I never saw her like that.”

  THE HALL WAS EMPTY. I WALKED TO THE REAR OF THE building and found a stairwell. In seconds I was in the familiar corridor that led to the municipal parking area.

  Loud voices carried from the street where the reporters gathered. I moved away between parked cars and found an alley that led to Main Street two blocks south of the police station.

  One hundred yards ahead, silver fangs glimmered, poised thirty feet above the sidewalk.

  I STOOD AT THE PLYWOOD FACADE THAT PROTECTED the amusement park from winter storms and local delinquents. A padlock on the temporary structure’s makeshift door was shattered, the door splintered. I crouched to examine wood slivers so recent that the lingering wind had not moved them.

  You killed Amanda Squires, then you came here from Monhegan.

  The serpent’s silver fangs glistened with blue pockmarks, as if sea spray had probed the teeth with tiny, piercing blades. I yanked open the door and slipped into summer’s screaming demon. Blue strobes ignited in cluster-bomb bursts, sapphire clouds that hovered like a hologram in the air. The park was powered up, as if vendors expected a crowd of children to charge, squealing, through the fractured gate.

  Rasping laughter exploded from speakers that surrounded the entrance to the House of Horrors. The metallic din startled me, the jarring blasts a blend of sadistic gaiety and guttural syncopation.

  A child’s trip to the ocean and this amusement park became her touchstone for terror, for the nightmares she would know and the shadowed images that lurked behind her mind screen.

  Lily Dorman had been here. Perhaps she remained inside, waiting for the man she knew as father to leapfrog logic and find her. Then she would kill him.

  The door to the House of Horrors dangled on a single hinge. I stepped into the dimly lit foyer where, in summer, a ticket seller sat in a booth and triggered gusts of air from the floor when the hapless thrill-seekers paid their admission.

  I slipped over the turnstile, my feet landing on two planks that immediately slid back and forth in oppositional rhythm. I stepped to my right and remained against the wall. Tinny laughter resonated through the cavernous room that resembled a gym divided neatly in half by the three-story slide, its bowl at the bottom.

  Did Harper extend the invitation? Or was your curiosity piqued by the aura of the fun house?

  One of you said, “Let’s go inside.”

  I moved along the wall to the stairs. The sweet aroma of hemp wafted from burlap sacks piled beside the steps for kids to grab on their way to the slide.

  Bags to carry snakes.

  A quick scan of the catwalks revealed no movement above, so I climbed.

  You played on the slide for a while. Any kid would. Then did you go to the rolling barrel? Or was Harper impatient to enter the mirrored room?

  Sparrows wintering in the rafters fluttered in awkward, stuttering loops beneath the ceiling. Water dripped from the porous roof, leaving small pools and filling the air with the dank stench of moldering wood.

  As I climbed, the laughter grew louder, bleating from metal speakers pitched high in the corners and slathered white with bird shit.

  I turned right on the catwalk, away from the slide, and walked the twenty yards to the room where a message scrawled on the door announced,
LIVE BACKWARD IS EVIL. I pushed the steel door and stepped into the room. The door slammed. A sign informed me that the metal entry was not an exit.

  The floor slanted into the room. Slabs of brightly colored wall, metallic blues and electric yellows, met the floor at freakish angles in impossible juxtapositions of matter and space. Four legs of different lengths supported a neon-red table; green chairs were too small or too tall.

  I stepped forward, and light vanished, leaving me in blackness.

  Pressure plates in the floor.

  Brief explosions of light offered glimpses of shifting black structures, large rectangular blocks adorned with rotating mirrors that reflected fleeting images of me, a graybeard with wide, startled eyes.

  I stared back at me, studied my eyes. I was immersed in the experience, and I was an observer.

  At the center of the riotous whirling and flashing, a single, pulsing strobe illuminated a revolving mirror that spit out a headless reflection.

  The programmed, maniacal laughter abruptly stopped. What had been an auditory assault suddenly became a suffocating silence punctuated by throbbing light and the gentle aroma of burning sandalwood. Incense, I thought, as my mind flitted through scenes and sensations from the 1960s, random associations triggered by a scent.

  I struggled to cling to the moment, to the room that jarred my senses, skewed time, and sent the years tumbling over one another like stones in an ocean storm.

  I was frozen in place, caught on a downward slope in a maze designed, I was certain, by a woman who wanted me dead.

  Lily Dorman, like every human predator, was a student of behavior. People are seldom unpredictable. We like to think that we are inscrutable, but a moment’s or a month’s study reveals our habits, the patterns of behavior we become aware of only if we pause and take a long look inside. In the frenetic world that we’ve created, we’ve left little time for the luxury of selfexamination.

  You made yourself whole. You pulled together fragments, shaped an entity that fueled itself on rage at a father who had the power to set you free and refused.

  Mirrors continued to spin, the lights to erupt in splashes of color like flakes of broken glass blasted from a cannon. My eyes accustomed themselves to the pulsating lights and allowed me to identify fragments of reality—a gray mop and bucket in a black corner of the twisted room, a snarl of black cables against an orange wall. I shifted my weight and slipped six inches to my right.

  The aroma of pine replaced sandalwood.

  The mirrors pivoted with an audible click, the explosions of light hesitated, then resumed, and I heard the unmistakable snap of a gun’s steel hammer readied for firing.

  I dove to my right as the weapon exploded, smashed a mirror to fragments, echoed thunderously through the room, and filled the air with the smell of cordite.

  I crawled until I collided with the wall. The gun fired a second time and shattered another mirror.

  “Shit,” I muttered as I scrambled forward, again hitting a concealed pressure plate.

  The large-caliber weapon blasted a mirror behind me, showering my legs with glass shards.

  Convinced that technology, not Lily Dorman, held me captive, I slithered forward on my stomach until I reached the corner.

  I found the mop, removed it from the bucket, and wedged it behind the power cables. I threw my weight against the mop handle and felt the cables yield. White light arced and buzzed in a crazed, frightening dance as the electrical connection severed at its U-bolt.

  In seconds, the room was black and silent. I lay on my back.

  After a moment, I stood, and felt my way along the wall until I found a door and shoved it open. Afternoon’s light and a cool ocean breeze greeted me. I breathed deeply, surveyed Main Street and the ocean from my sixty-foot perch, then turned and gazed into the room.

  A black curtain covered the largest rectangular shape in the room. I shoved aside the drape to reveal a computer console—the source of the light show, the images, the fireworks.

  “Fuckin’ computer nearly got me,” I grumbled, and headed for the fire escape.

  AS I STUMBLED THROUGH THE PLYWOOD DEBRIS AT THE park entrance, Jaworski drove to the curb and climbed from his cruiser. “Figured I’d find you here,” he said. “She in the park?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You look like you’ve been crawling around on the floor.”

  “You’re a perceptive sonofabitch, Herb,” I said, brushing grime from my shirt and pants.

  I gazed up at the metal jaws. “I made a mistake. She knew that I’d find this place. She rigged the mirrored room for me. It’s activated by pressure plates in the floor. Lights and mirrors with Magnum firepower accompaniment.”

  “She doesn’t sound so fragile anymore.”

  “She isn’t.”

  When Lily Dorman escaped from the hospital, she headed west with her friend Janine. Dorman was shattered, bits and pieces of a soul cast like pulverized crystal into a gale. I imagined her clinging to the streetwise Janine Baker’s sleeve. She had no choice; a bubbling stew of feeling and thought beneath consciousness determined her behavior.

  “When they were on the West Coast,” I said, “Lily modeled herself on Janine Baker, mimicked her friend, learned a sociopathic lifestyle. Think of what she was imitating. Baker was trouble. Lily assumed her personality, then escalated.”

  Jaworski unwrapped a stick of gum and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “That journal has the ring of truth,” he said.

  “Her evolution didn’t stop with what’s in the diary,” I said. “When Janine worked the streets, Lily waited tables and read books. What was she reading?”

  “Probably get Ken Starr to find out,” Jaworski cracked.

  “You’re spending too much time around me, Herb,” I said. “Lily knew that she didn’t want to live her life as a victim. When she was her father’s toy, she had to split herself away to survive. Feelings overwhelmed her, threatened to destroy her. In the world, she needed to be whole. To her, that meant that she had to have no emotions, that she had to become the aggressor.”

  “What about Harper Dorman?” Jaworski asked. “Baker was a street con. As far as we know, she didn’t spill blood.”

  Lily Dorman evolved from the dissociative extreme to a determined, focused, emotionless predator. She knew that she was a hybrid.

  “She educated Baker,” I said, “seduced and controlled her with money, the promise of limitless wealth, and fear. Dorman so believed in her own invulnerability that she planned to kill Beckerman at the memorial service in front of an audience of cops. Dorman studied Baker, but Dorman already possessed the raw, primitive material that she needed.”

  “Lucas, is she one person now or a crowd? We’ve got one weapon, but the crime scenes look like the work of different killers.”

  “It’s possible that Baker committed some of the murders,” I told Jaworski, “but I doubt it. I think that Baker’s appraisal of the world coming down around their ears was more pragmatic than Dorman’s.”

  Years after serial killer Sydny Clanton’s psychiatrist had written to me about her client, I met Dr. Susan Paynter at a conference in Las Vegas. “Sydny adapted,” Paynter said, when I inquired about her former client. “She did what she had to do to survive in prison.”

  Clanton had operated at a primitive level when she had killed her parents. The murders she committed between Idaho and California, however, were the work of a deliberate, focused killer. Paynter believed that Clanton’s slaughter of the Gleid family was a regression to the feral condition she had exhibited at home.

  “Six months after they locked her up,” Paynter said, “she had herself and her world under control. She was the most together woman on her wing. She wrote legal appeals for other inmates, counseled them on their personal problems.”

  Crazy or sane, there are few stagnant pools. We continue to evolve and to adapt.

  Again, I gazed at the park entrance. “My mistake was to think of Lily Dorman as the
same product of her unconscious that she was as a child. She acts roles in a well-scripted play, Herb. She doesn’t slip from one personality to another.”

  “So where is she?”

  “She wants me to think that she created these distractions, then disappeared. I’m not dead yet, so she’s still here. We’ll find her where I would least expect her to go. It’s ironic. The amusement park represented the terror she experienced as a child, but the House of Horrors doesn’t complete the circle.”

  “The trailer park?”

  I wondered if she would carry the performance home.

  “Maybe a final visit with her mother before she disappears again.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to suggest.”

  AS WE DROVE SOUTH THROUGH A THICKENING FOG, JAworski called Norma Jacobs and arranged for her to meet us at the entrance to the trailer park.

  I slumped in my seat and dozed fitfully. Blurred video images of Lily Dorman fluttered through my mind as I struggled to make sense of the strange and lethal being that she was.

  “Trees down from the storm,” Jaworski said, stopping the cruiser fifty yards from the Bayberry entrance. “A place like this will be the last the crews get to.”

  Jacobs drove in behind us.

  “Fuckin’ mess,” the Portland detective said as she approached and surveyed the blocked road. “Looks like cruisers on the other side of Bayberry.”

  Jaworski and I pulled ourselves from the car and looked where Jacobs pointed.

  “Ain’t Portland P.D.,” Jacobs said. “I just left there, and there wasn’t anything on the radio. Must be Jasper and the feds.”

  “Why are they down here?” Jaworski asked.

  We stepped over a fallen tree and wound our way through brush and limb wood to a barricade of three unmarked sedans and a state police cruiser. Jaworski’s friend, Trooper Newman, flashed his halogen light at our racket.

  “You ain’t sneakin’ up on no one,” Newman said with a laugh. “Jacobs, they drag you along, too?”

  “I figure to come back and pick up a cord of firewood when the highway department cuts this stuff,” she said. “What’ve you got, Newman?”