“Anything’s probably better than a state-run asylum,” I agreed.
“There is one slight problem, though. The bishop did tell the mother superior that Renata is a celebrity of sorts.”
“Celebrity?”
“You know what I mean. The mother superior isn’t happy about that. There are some patients at the convent who are members of fairly prominent families. If some nosey reporter starts snooping around, names might start appearing in public.”
“I get your point, Father.”
“Even the existence of the order is strictly confidential, but the location of the cloister is what you might call ‘top secret.’ The notoriety of Renata’s case truly concerns the mother superior. She does not want a horde of reporters and television cameras on her doorstep.”
“I can understand that, Father, but we’ll have to float this past Judge Compson before we get into the business of sneaking this past the reporters.”
“That might not be as big a problem as all that, Mark. There happen to be some fairly influential fellows in city government who might be able to persuade the judge that the cloister’s a good idea. Those particular fellows are the ones who say ‘how high?’ when the bishop says, ‘jump.’ And the bishop is going to call in some favors owed to him, because this is a special case. We don’t do this sort of thing very often, but we’ve been doing it for a long, long time so we’re pretty good at it. Trust me.”
“I’ll get hold of Les Greenleaf and see what he has to say, Father.”
I didn’t want to raise any false hopes, so I didn’t mention my conversation with Father O’Donnell when I got home.
We were all tense when we got up on Tuesday morning. Judge Compson seemed to be leaning in our direction, but things could still go wrong.
The reporters had obviously given up on us, so there wasn’t anybody around when we left to go back to the courthouse for Renata’s sanity hearing. And when we got off the elevator on the fourth floor, the hallway was deserted.
“I didn’t think she’d go this far,” Trish said, frowning slightly.
“Who was that, Mama Trish?” Charlie asked her.
“Judge Compson,” Trish replied. “Evidently, she’s declared the fourth floor off-limits to the media.”
“Can she do that? Legally, I mean?”
“Charlie, a judge can take any steps necessary to maintain order in the courtroom, but locking off the corridors is pretty unusual. Mr. Rankin can probably clear it up for us. We’ll see what he has to say.”
The bailiff at the courtroom door checked our names off his list and waved us in. Mr. Rankin was waiting for us at the defense table, and he had Dr. Fallon and Les Greenleaf with him. “Ah,” Rankin said, “there you are. We’ve been waiting for you.” Les Greenleaf was sitting off to one side, and he didn’t even seem to be listening.
Doc Fallon had a slightly amused expression on his face. “Which one of you came up with the brilliant idea of refusing to speak English to the reporters?”
“Charlie, of course,” Sylvia told him. “He’s our resident clown.”
“We don’t have too much time, here,” Rankin told us. “Judge Compson’s gag order is still in force, so nothing that happens here is going to show up on the evening news. Now that we’ve moved into a sanity hearing, the ball’s in my court instead of Fielding’s. I’m going to call Dr. Fallon here as my first witness, and I’ll be questioning him at some length, so I probably won’t be calling any of the rest of you today. Hopefully, we’ll finish with his testimony today, but I can’t predict how long Fielding’s cross-examination will take. Once he’s finished, I’ll start calling you—and Renata’s aunt, of course. You should pay close attention to the questions Fielding asks Dr. Fallon, because he’ll probably ask each of you similar questions.” Then he gave Charlie a stern look. “I’d advise you to answer questions in English, Mr. West. Judge Compson doesn’t have a very well developed sense of humor, so I wouldn’t clown around in her courtroom, if I were you—verstehen sie?”
“Jawohl, mein Herr,” Charlie replied, snapping to attention.
Rankin sighed, rolling his eyes upward.
Fielding entered the courtroom then, and he had Bob West and Burpee with him. They took their seats, and a moment later the two white-coated orderlies brought Renata into the courtroom. She was obviously still out of it.
Then the bailiff said, “All rise,” and we stood up as Judge Compson entered and took her seat behind the bench.
“You may be seated,” she told us.
We all sat back down.
Judge Compson pursed her lips. “The purpose of this hearing is to determine Miss Greenleaf’s competence to stand trial. In order to determine this, certain formalities will be relaxed. I may from time to time question some of the witnesses myself. I’m sure that neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney will have any serious objections if I happen to interrupt them during the proceedings.” She looked at Fielding and Rankin with one raised eyebrow that spoke volumes.
“Mr. Fielding and I will be guided by Your Honor in these proceedings,” Rankin said rather floridly.
“Nicely put, Mr. Rankin,” she said. “You may call your first witness.”
“The defense calls Dr. Wallace Fallon,” Rankin said.
Doc Fallon rose and went to the witness stand. The bailiff swore him in, and he took his seat.
“If it please the court, may we dispense with an extended examination of Dr. Fallon’s professional credentials?” Rankin asked.
“The prosecution has no objection, Your Honor,” Fielding stated. “Dr. Fallon’s professional standing is well-known.”
“Excellent,” the judge said. “You may proceed, Mr. Rankin.”
“Dr. Fallon,” Rankin said then, “are you acquainted with Miss Greenleaf?”
“Yes, Mr. Rankin. She was a patient of mine for quite some time a few years ago. Her parents placed her in my sanitarium in the early summer of 1995.”
“Then she is, in fact, Miss Renata Greenleaf?”
“We can’t be absolutely certain of that, Mr. Rankin,” Fallon replied. “She’s either Renata or Regina Greenleaf. That much we know. Which one she is, isn’t clear.”
“Could you clarify that, Dr. Fallon?” the judge asked.
“Regina and Renata Greenleaf were identical twins, Your Honor. The footprints customarily taken of infants at the time of birth have been lost, and identical twins have identical DNA. We know that the young lady present in this courtroom is one of the Greenleaf twins. It’s impossible to say which one with any degree of certainty.”
“Wasn’t she able to identify herself when she entered the sanitarium?” the judge asked him.
“No, Your Honor,” Fallon replied. “The trauma of her sister’s murder had caused her to regress to early childhood, a fact that was made quite obvious by her inability to speak or to understand English. She answered any and all questions in cryptolalia.”
“In which?” Judge Compson asked.
“The term means ‘secret language,’ Your Honor,” he explained. “Virtually every set of twins invents a private language before they learn the language of their parents. In most cases, that private language falls into disuse and fades away by the time the twins are three or four years old. The Greenleaf twins kept theirs intact, however. Their family and friends referred to their private language as ‘twin’ or ‘twin-speak.’ The Greenleaf girls were very close, and the surviving twin was evidently regressing in order to escape from the trauma of her sister’s murder.”
“And how long did that continue, Dr. Fallon?” Rankin asked him.
“About six months,” Fallon replied. “Then one morning for no apparent reason, she started speaking English. The first thing she said, though, was ‘where is this, and who am I?’ She obviously couldn’t face or accept what had happened, so as a means of escape, she simply erased all memory of her previous life.”
“Amnesia?” Rankin suggested.
“Exactly. Her amnesi
a was a flight from reality, and made more complicated for those of us trying to treat her by the fact that she was almost certainly thinking in two different languages, and we could only understand one of them. It’s obvious that when she lapses into that private language, she’s talking with her sister. They appear to have been living in an entirely different world from the rest of us—and that’s the world where the survivor’s gone.”
“But her sister’s not in that world anymore, Dr. Fallon,” the judge objected.
“Miss Greenleaf seems to believe that she is, Your Honor.”
I almost choked on that one. There was no way that Doc Fallon could know about it, but Father O and I had seen Renata’s sister in the church. We’d heard her speak the language of that separate world to her anguished sister. And then she’d taken Renata in her arms and merged with her, and together they had left the rest of us behind and gone their own way.
Judge Compson ordered a short recess at that point, and when we returned, Mr. Rankin picked up where he’d left off. “Are we to understand then, that Miss Greenleaf had no memory whatsoever of her life prior to her awakening in your sanitarium, Dr. Fallon?”
“Almost no memory, Mr. Rankin,” Fallon replied. “There was one exception, though. She didn’t recognize her parents, but she did recognize Mr. Mark Austin, a longtime friend of the Greenleaf family. Mr. Austin had been a key figure in the twins’ early childhood, and his presence seemed to give her something to cling to. Her motivation isn’t very clear.”
“What is your current diagnosis of her condition, Dr. Fallon? Is she paranoid-schizophrenic, manic-depressive, or what?”
“My best guess at the moment is the fugue state, Mr. Rankin,” Fallon replied.
“Would you clarify that for us, please?”
“The ‘fugue’ is an episode of altered consciousness during which the patient wanders off and may do or say things that are very uncharacteristic. When the episode concludes, the patient is frequently agitated and confused. I was not aware of these episodes during Miss Greenleaf’s stay at the sanitarium. They were probably taking place, but they were so brief that we didn’t realize that they were happening. In her present condition, there’s no way that I could verify this, but as I suggested before the recess, I’m convinced that Miss Greenleaf’s alternate persona is her twin sister, Regina.”
“Objection, Your Honor,” Fielding stepped in. “That’s pure speculation.”
“Overruled, Mr. Fielding,” Judge Compson said. “This is not a trial, so we can be more flexible. Please continue, Dr. Fallon.”
“Yes, Your Honor. After her recognition of Mr. Austin, Miss Greenleaf’s recovery seemed quite rapid, so I began to grant her furloughs to her parents’ home. By the late spring of ’97, she appeared to have progressed far enough that I decided to upgrade her to outpatient status, and she soon expressed an interest in attending the University of Washington.” He leaned back in the witness chair, squinting reflectively at the ceiling. “Given what’s been happening recently, I can’t be entirely positive which of her identities was making decisions at that point. It may have been Renata’s normal persona, or it could very well have been her fugue-state identity. If it was, in fact, the Regina side of her, she fooled me completely. I thought that permitting her to stay with her aunt and audit classes would aid her recovery, and she and I had regular weekly sessions so I could evaluate her progress. As luck had it, Mr. Austin moved into a nearby boardinghouse, and one of the other boarders there was Miss Sylvia Cardinale, a graduate student in psychology. After Renata and Miss Cardinale became acquainted, Miss Cardinale undertook a case history on Miss Greenleaf.”
Judge Compson glanced up at the clock. “Would this be a good place to break, Mr. Rankin?” she asked. “We’re getting close to lunchtime.”
“I was about to suggest that myself, Your Honor,” Rankin replied. “Dr. Fallon and I can pick up after lunch.”
“How much longer do you estimate that Dr. Fallon’s testimony will take?”
“Not much longer, Your Honor. Mr. Fielding should have most of the afternoon for cross-examination.”
“Good,” the judge said. “Court’s adjourned until one-thirty, then.”
We grabbed a quick lunch in the cafeteria. Trish assured us that reporters weren’t permitted to pester people while they were eating, so we waited in the cafeteria after we’d finished. Les Greenleaf ate with us, but he didn’t say very much.
“How are we doing, Trish?” Charlie asked with uncharacteristic seriousness.
“Not bad,” she replied. “Mr. Rankin’s managed to slip several things in that wouldn’t be admissible during a criminal trial. Judge Compson’s cutting him a lot of slack.”
“We’re winning, then?”
“Let’s wait until we hear Fielding’s cross-examination before we start celebrating, Charlie,” she said.
Judge Compson reconvened the hearing at one-thirty on the dot, and Rankin picked up where he’d left off. “You mentioned Miss Cardinale’s case history, Dr. Fallon. Did I understand you to say that she was tape-recording her interviews with Miss Greenleaf?”
“Yes, Mr. Rankin. Renata knew the tape recorder was running, but it didn’t bother her.”
“And all during this period, murders were taking place all over the Seattle area?”
“So I understand. Mr. Austin made certain connections that the rest of us missed, and I’m sure that he’ll go into much greater detail than I can.”
“Then to sum up, it’s your opinion that Miss Greenleaf has crossed the line into a perpetual fugue state?”
“We can always hope that she might recover someday, but given the circumstances, I’d say that the chances of that are very slight.”
“Then her alternate persona—her sister—simulated recovery for one purpose only—to track down Mr. Fergusson and take her vengeance upon him.”
“So it would seem.”
“And the earlier killings were little more than practice murders to hone up her skills?”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far, Mr. Rankin. It’s more probable that she was trying to lure potential rapists into attacking her in the hope that sooner or later, the man she was really looking for might turn up. The alternate persona was functioning at a very primitive level, especially at first. It was only after several killings that she realized that the license plate number she’d happened to see at the time of Regina’s murder was the crucial piece of information. Once she’d made that connection, the random killings stopped, and she went after the one man she’d been seeking since last September. Her revenge is complete now, and she’s retreated into a near-infantile state—that period in her life before the horrors of her sister’s murder and her psychotic obsession with retribution. There’s no way I could verify this—Renata is the only one in the world who understands that private language—but I’m almost positive that she sees her sister. Even as she sits here in this courtroom, she and Regina are talking to each other about things that none of us here could possibly understand.”
“Thank you, Dr. Fallon,” Rankin said. Then he turned to Judge Compson. “No further questions, Your Honor,” he said.
“Your witness, Mr. Fielding,” the judge said then.
Fielding was staring at Renata with a troubled expression on his face. “No questions, Your Honor,” he replied quietly.
“Very well,” the judge said. “Court’s adjourned. We’ll reconvene tomorrow morning at ten A.M.” And she rapped her gavel down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I didn’t sleep very well on Tuesday night, and I don’t think anybody else at the boardinghouse did either. Doc Fallon’s testimony had definitely gotten Judge Compson’s attention, but whether it’d been enough to persuade her that Renata didn’t belong in some state-run asylum was still up in the air.
Then too, Mr. Rankin had told us that we’d each be called to testify on Wednesday. The anticipatory stage fright that followed that announcement certainly helped keep us awake. I think
we were all grateful when the smell of Erika’s coffee came wafting out of the kitchen.
“Mr. Rankin wants us in early this morning,” Trish told us at breakfast. “He’s made arrangements to use one of the conference rooms in the courthouse. He doesn’t like surprises coming up in open court, so he’ll go over our testimony with us.”
After breakfast we caught a couple of TV news programs and the reporters were still pretty miffed about the news blackout. We got some more sermons on the first amendment and the “public’s right to know.” For some reason, no reporter ever gets around to mentioning “the right of privacy.”
Isn’t that odd?
We took off at a quarter after eight, and when we reached the courthouse, Trish led us to the conference room. Mary was already there, and she was still wearing her uniform—probably at Rankin’s suggestion. I guess he thought it might not hurt to let Judge Compson know that the whole Seattle Police Department wasn’t in the same camp with Burpee.
Les Greenleaf was also there, but I think the boss was still pretty much out of it. This whole thing seemed to be almost more than he could handle.
“Now, then,” Rankin told us after we’d all filed in, “this is the way we’ll proceed: I’ll put Mary on the witness stand first. I’ll want to establish Miss Greenleaf’s periodic breakdowns fairly early. Judge Compson’s probably been going over Dr. Fallon’s testimony in her mind since yesterday afternoon. Mary’s testimony should help to confirm most of what Dr. Fallon said, and to keep the word ‘psychosis’ out in plain sight. Then I’ll call each of you in turn. We’ll start with James. Let’s use that magnificent voice to our advantage. I’ll want you to give Judge Compson an overall background of your housemates, James. Let’s establish the fact that this is no ordinary student group—you aren’t any run-of-the-mill collection of party animals.”
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