Her Darkest Nightmare

by Brenda Novak

  She managed a benign smile. “Thank you.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “For what?”

  “For the compliment.”

  He hadn’t meant to flatter her. He’d meant to intimidate her. She knew the difference. But she also knew it would be a mistake to let him feel as if he’d been successful.

  “You’re not afraid of me?”

  She got the impression he was wondering if she might prove to be more of a challenge than he’d first thought. The idea of that seemed to intrigue him. “Why should I be?” she replied. “You’ll live the rest of your life in a cage the size of my closet. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Someday you’ll see what I can do.” That voice, threatening and low, brought back memories of Jasper: Hold still or I’ll cut you. You don’t want me to scar that pretty face, do you? Then no one will want to look at you, except me.

  “I say something wrong?” Garza jeered.

  She blinked and regained her focus. “No. You can’t reach me. That’s all that matters.”

  “Like I said, I’ll have my chance.”

  Nausea welled up, making Evelyn long to dash from the room. But now was not a time when she could show weakness. Forcing herself to remain right where she was, to tell herself she would not be sick or back down, she folded her hands in her lap so he wouldn’t notice how they trembled. “Was Hugo someone you’d hoped to add to your list of conquests, Mr. Garza?”

  Maybe Anthony had approached Hugo in the yard and Hugo had rebuffed him. Maybe Hugo getting stabbed had nothing to do with Fitzpatrick. If only it was all a big coincidence—but that didn’t account for the forged transfer order.

  “I wouldn’t have turned him down if he wanted to give me a blow job. But then I don’t turn anyone down who wants to suck my dick,” he said with a laugh.

  Working among such men, Evelyn had heard worse. A lot worse. She hated how crude they could be. But she’d learned not to let on. Otherwise, they’d talk that way nonstop. This was, basically, a fishing expedition. Garza was assembling his arsenal for future combat, and she was assembling hers.

  “It was a little early to be propositioning Hugo, wasn’t it?” she said. “Had the two of you even been introduced?”

  He scratched his head—an awkward endeavor with handcuffs. “I heard him bragging about touching you, kissing you. That was enough.”

  “Now you’re saying you stabbed him out of jealousy or possessiveness? I thought you were trying to punish me for bringing you here by making me look bad.”

  “You’re the shrink. You figure out my motive.”

  In a last-ditch effort to obtain some shred of useable information, she got up and walked to the glass. She also lowered her voice so whoever might listen to the video of this interview later wouldn’t be able to tell what she said. “What do you think of Dr. Fitzpatrick?”

  “Who?” Garza got up, too, and came as close as he could. For a change, this was what she wanted. Then she wouldn’t have to speak any louder.

  “Fitzpatrick.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “You haven’t visited with any of the other doctors?”

  “Just a tall, skinny one who thinks he’s God.”

  “That’s Fitzpatrick,” she said wryly.

  “You said you were my shrink. I don’t know why I had to deal with him. He looks like a fucking cadaver.”

  She ignored the cadaver part, although she could see how Garza came up with the comparison. “Did Fitzpatrick, or anyone else, mention Hugo to you? Draw him to your attention? Try to make you angry with him?”

  He leaned against the glass. “Are you saying you don’t trust your own staff?”

  “I’m saying they might have inadvertently created a target without realizing the danger they were putting him in. There has to be a reason you chose Hugo and not someone else.”

  “I told you. I did it for you.” With that, he kissed the glass as if he were kissing her, moaning and thrusting against it at the same time. “Anyone who touches you is a dead man,” he whispered when he pulled back.

  The sight of the glass, smeared with his saliva, turned her stomach. “You’re an animal.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You’ll be begging Colorado to take me back before I’m through.”

  She already regretted bringing him here. Satan couldn’t be any worse than this man.

  “Guard, get me the hell out!” Garza yelled, using his cuffs to bang on the plexiglass.

  Kush entered the room, and this time, when he looked at Evelyn, she nodded.

  20

  It wasn’t as dark and scary as it sounds. I had a lot of fun … killing somebody is a funny experience.

  —ALBERT DESALVO, THE BOSTON STRANGLER

  Hugo Evanski didn’t die in surgery. The sharpened pen Anthony Garza jammed into his sternum had nicked his aorta and caused a pericardial tamponade, just as Dr. Bernstein had guessed. How Hugo’s heart had held up under the pressure no one could really say. But after five hours of surgery, he’d been deemed “stable.” Unless he suffered a setback, Evelyn expected him to live. With any luck, he would be back at HH in a few weeks.

  She’d received this update around dinnertime. That report had brought her a measure of relief—but by no means solved all her problems. Those problems seemed to crowd close now that it was growing late and she was alone with her thoughts. But at least she’d managed to outlast the rest of the mental health team. After what Fitzpatrick had done, going to Warden Ferris and also overriding her request to see Anthony Garza, she had to come earlier and stay later than everyone else just to protect her interests.

  Although she’d passed Fitzpatrick in the halls twice since that less-than-friendly encounter in her office, they’d avoided making eye contact. They hadn’t even nodded hello. She was glad he hadn’t tried to engage her. She wanted a chance to see if she could figure out who’d signed her name to that transfer order before she and Fitzpatrick had another conversation, even a conciliatory one. She had to be decided on her position, so she wouldn’t fall victim to the anger and fear that had caused her to speak so impulsively last time. There were moments when she was horrified by her own lack of faith in him, was certain she owed him an apology. Accusing a prominent psychiatrist of murdering two people was no small matter.

  But … there were also moments when she wondered if, somehow, Hugo could be telling the truth. Fitzpatrick had easy access to all the forms they used. He was almost as familiar with her signature as she was. And who else would be so brazen?

  There were the COs who had to be hoping to save their jobs, she reminded herself. She and the warden were keeping the investigation so quiet Snowden and Dugall and the others on that list didn’t even know they’d been discovered. But they had to have heard that Danielle was missing. If they were aware of her black book, they could realize what was at stake if it was found.

  Still, Hugo had been so damned convincing, gasping with what could’ve been his last breath that Fitzpatrick was a danger to her.…

  Then there was the matter of Fitzpatrick’s actions since the stabbing. They seemed to indicate she couldn’t trust him. He was staging a takeover, was grappling for control of Hanover House. But whether that was because he felt she was truly unfit to continue performing as she had in the past or he was moving in for the kill on some well-executed plan to punish her for rejecting him she couldn’t be sure.

  The telephone rang. She considered letting it go to the answering service. Since it was coming through to the administration offices, it had already been routed through Corrections and could wait until Penny returned to sift through messages in the morning. If anyone on the secure side of the institution needed Evelyn—if Garza was acting out again, for example—she had her radio.

  But then she thought it might be Glenn Whitcomb. She’d taken a break and gone down to speak with him earlier, asked him to see what he could find out about that transfer order. Maybe there was some rumor or other detail floating a
mong the COs—about Fitzpatrick or even someone else—that Glenn could make himself privy to.

  He’d promised he’d do all he could to help.

  Her caller could also be Amarok, looking for the reason she wasn’t home. She’d spoken to him once, around three. They’d had a brief conversation in which he’d asked some additional questions on Lorraine’s routine and habits—he was still searching for the rest of her body. Then he’d gotten interrupted and had to go before Evelyn could even tell him Hugo had been shanked.

  The phone had rung four times already. Gathering what remained of her mental fortitude, in case it wasn’t Glenn or Amarok but Fitzpatrick wanting to have a heart-to-heart, she picked up the phone. She’d been expecting one or more of her colleagues to request a meeting or phone call. That was how they handled their disagreements, mild though they’d been in the past.

  The voice on the other end of the line didn’t belong to the sergeant, Glenn or a colleague.

  “I just heard the news!” her mother cried. “My God, are you okay?”

  Evelyn cringed. She didn’t want to have this conversation, wasn’t sure she could withstand the emotionality of it, not in addition to everything else she was going through. “I’m fine.”

  “Why haven’t you called? Didn’t you realize we’d be worried?”

  “Is Dad there, too?”

  “Of course he’s here.”

  “Hi, honey,” he called out from somewhere in the background. It was the same words he always used, but tonight they sounded stilted. Obviously, Grant was as upset as Lara.

  “He doesn’t understand why you haven’t called us, either,” her mother said.

  What was so difficult to understand? Evelyn saw no need to upset them. They’d only start pleading with her to leave Hanover House and return to the Lower 48. They’d barely stopped that a few weeks ago, when she’d finally told them she wouldn’t stay in such close contact if they couldn’t accept her life choices.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to get in touch, but … I was hoping to have some answers before we talked, something to … to explain what’s happening and put your minds at ease.” She stared at the digital clock on her desk, watched the numbers flip from 8:08 to 8:09.

  “How could you ever put our minds at ease about a murder?”

  Evelyn didn’t answer that question. It was rhetorical, anyway. “How’d you hear?” They never watched the news. After what’d happened to her, they couldn’t tolerate the crime reports. Even relatively mild stories could cut them like a razor; no way could they handle the really bad stuff.

  “The neighbor,” her mother said. “Can you believe that? Your father and I were just getting home from having dinner with your sister when Chad pulled into his drive. He said he’d been at a fund-raiser where that busybody on the corner had mentioned two people were recently murdered in Hilltop.”

  “Theresa? That busybody?”

  “Of course. Who else?”

  Her parents still held some of the things Theresa had said twenty years ago—when Evelyn went missing—against her. Judgments Theresa had had no business making about Evelyn “reaping what she’d sown” by getting so intimately involved with a boy before marriage.

  “Chad wanted to know if you were okay and that blindsided me—because, of course, we feared you might not be. We haven’t heard from you in over a week, since before—”

  “Mom, stop getting yourself worked up.” Evelyn wished she had contacted them, but even if she had she doubted their reaction would’ve been any less severe. “I’m sorry I wasn’t the one to tell you. I really am. But as you can imagine, this has thrown me for a loop, too.”

  “Of course it has! Chad said one of the victims was Lorraine Drummond. She was your friend, right?” Her voice broke and she cried through the rest. “I’ve heard you mention her many times. She stayed with you not long after you moved to Alaska, when she was separating from her husband.”

  Evelyn dropped her head in her hands. This wasn’t helping anything.

  “Evelyn?”

  Fighting the lump rising in her own throat, she said, “Yes, I knew her well.”

  “We can’t face another nightmare like the last one,” she responded with a sniff.

  “It’ll be okay,” Evelyn promised, which sounded absurd. How could anything be okay when two people were dead? There was no way to return them to life.

  “Tell me Jasper hasn’t followed you up there!”

  “At this point, we know very little. It could be anyone.”

  “Not someone so fixated on you!”

  Apparently, the neighbor hadn’t heard, or hadn’t relayed, the part where a portion of a human limb had been found in Evelyn’s bed. Thank God. “I’m with you on that.”

  “So when will you be leaving that place?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What are you waiting for? Lorraine’s head was cut off and one of her eyes was gouged out! You have to get out of Hilltop. Right away, do you hear me? I don’t know why you ever went up there to begin with. The wilderness is no place for a girl like you. With your education, you could go anywhere.”

  Her parents had never liked that she’d decided to use her psychiatric degree to study psychopathy, and they’d liked that she was moving so far away from them even less.

  I don’t see how you can put the past behind you if that’s all you ever think about, her father would grumble. Then her mother would add, Don’t you think psychopathy is all a bit … depressing?

  Both parents seemed content to label Jasper an “evil man” and let it go at that. They didn’t mind that “evil” could be so inexplicable. They just wanted to forget and get on with their lives, as if drawing a curtain would make what was on the other side disappear.

  Evelyn wished she could live like a normal person. But Jasper had made that impossible. He’d opened her eyes to a problem she might never have encountered otherwise, at least not personally. And now she was determined to do something about it. If she could stop just one person—be it a sixteen-year-old girl, a fifty-year-old woman or a nineteen-year-old boy—from suffering as she had, it’d be worth all the sacrifice. She didn’t want Jasper, or anyone like him, getting away with more pain, degradation and murder.

  So what if you’re back? she thought, picturing his preppy-looking face as she remembered it from high school. He hadn’t even been capable of growing a beard when she knew him, had seemed so innocent. I’ll fight you. I’ll fight you till my dying breath—just like I did last summer.

  She’d fight Fitzpatrick, too, if necessary.

  “I’ll pay for your plane ticket,” her mother was saying. “Just go to your house and pack up.”

  Her parents had been through an unimaginable ordeal when Jasper did what he did. For three days, Evelyn and her friends had been missing. Everyone, and no one more so than Lara and Grant, had feared the police would discover her body. Or that they wouldn’t find anything at all—no trace of her. Her mother had once said the possibility that they’d be left to wonder for the rest of their lives had probably been the worst of it. Lara couldn’t bear to go through anything like that again. And Evelyn couldn’t blame her.

  But she’d started Hanover House, still believed in it. She couldn’t pack up and walk away. That would be conceding to the opposition, conceding to him.

  “Calm down, okay?” She changed the phone to her other ear. “We both know that terrible things can happen in Boston, too. I’m proof. Remember last summer? Jasper will come wherever I am.”

  “Not if he can’t find you. What you’re doing now is courting trouble!” Her mother sounded almost hysterical. “Rubbing elbows with known sadists. When we welcomed Jasper into our lives he seemed like a sweet seventeen-year-old boy. What happened wasn’t our fault because we didn’t know to keep you away from him. But we’re fully aware of the type of people you’re with up there—and they’re some of the most notorious killers in America!”

  “At least I know they’re da
ngerous. These men can’t surprise me the way Jasper did.” Even as she said that, Evelyn couldn’t help flashing back to the moment Hugo had slammed her up against the wall yesterday. That had been a close call, could’ve gone very differently.

  Her mother wasn’t satisfied with her response, anyway. Evelyn could tell by the sudden silence. She almost thought they’d lost their connection. “Mom?”

  “And your father wonders why I need anti-anxiety drugs,” she mumbled.

  Evelyn’s breath hitched. Had she heard correctly? “You’re on medication? Since when?” And did Evelyn’s sister know? If so, Brianne hadn’t mentioned it when they’d spoken just a day or two before Lorraine was murdered. “Mom?”

  There was no reply.

  “Answer me!”

  “I can’t deal with this,” Lara finally responded.

  Evelyn tightened her grip on the phone. “Let me talk to Dad.”

  “He just walked out of the room. I-I’ll have him call you tomorrow,” she said, and hung up.

  Evelyn sat staring at the phone. She couldn’t bear worrying about Lara on top of everything else. She was about to call back, to try to offer her mother some comfort and achieve reassurance in return. But the phone rang before she could.

  “Hello?” She tensed as she waited to hear her mother’s or father’s voice. But it wasn’t either of them.

  “Hey.”

  Amarok. She rested her head against the back of her chair. “Hey, yourself,” she said, striving for calm even though her stomach was in knots. Maybe she’d needed to get away from her family. Maybe that was another reason she’d come to Hilltop. They were as damaged as she was. But that also made her feel obligated to return and take care of them. “You home?”

  “Not yet. I stopped by the Moosehead so I could give you a call. I’m on my way to check something out.”

  “Something?”

  “Bill Jenkins’ dog has found some bones. But don’t get your hopes up. Chances are they’re the remains of some animal.”

  “Any word on Danielle?”

  “Yes. That’s primarily why I’m calling.”