Hush

by Anne Frasier

  It was also said that dreams repeat themselves over and over until you "get it," until you learn the lesson your subconscious is trying to teach you.

  She used to think that maybe she was supposed to see the man's face, remember his face. But how could she remember something she'd never seen?

  "This the place?" Irving asked, maneuvering his car into position to parallel park.

  Ivy looked across the street at the five-story brick building that took up half the block. Different. Very different. Maybe that was good.

  The chipped white paint had been sandblasted off to reveal what it had been hiding: lovely red-orange brick. Different too was a green canvas awning that now covered the walkway to the front door. On each side of the path, perennial flower beds burst with color and greenery.

  "It actually looks inviting," Ivy said in amazement, her eyes still on the building as she twisted sideways in her seat, craning her neck to see through Irving's window.

  He smoothly wedged the car into a space Ivy would never have attempted. With an efficiency of motion that she was becoming accustomed to, he shut off the engine, and they got out.

  Max was poised to cross the four lanes that were lined with quaint lights and divided by brightly painted yellow lines when he noted that Ivy was hanging back, both hands clutching a small coin purse.

  She wore a red skirt that fit smoothly over rounded hips and fell to her knees. Her legs were bare. On her feet were the leather shoes she almost always wore. Her top was black, knit, and slightly fitted.

  He stared at her.

  Then stared some more.

  "Forget the meter," he said.

  "No. ... I better put in some money." She began digging around, and that's when he realized she was stalling.

  He squeezed between car bumpers to join her on the sidewalk. He caught her elbow and she looked up at him with her short red bangs and lips the color of her skirt. Was she doing something different? Wearing more makeup or something?

  "We don't have to do this," he told her.

  She slipped a quarter in the meter. "I don't want you to get a ticket."

  "Not the parking meter—and by the way, I won't have to pay the ticket. I mean this." He motioned in the direction of the looming apartment complex.

  She glanced at the building, then back at him, and he could see when the realization of what she was doing hit her. She smiled self-consciously, laughed a little, then snapped the small container closed and slipped it into a tiny black leather bag she wore as a kind of low-slung belt.

  She turned away slightly and put a hand to her forehead, almost as if to shield her eyes from what was out there. Then she ran her fingers through her bangs and blew out a breath. "The mission's gone. It used to be right there." She pointed.

  "Chicago's changed a lot in the last sixteen years."

  "And the apartment. It doesn't even look like the same place."

  "Maybe that's good."

  "Why would they get rid of the mission?"

  "They built a new one. Over on Lourdes. It can sleep a hundred people."

  "Oh. Well. That's good."

  "We don't have to do this," he said again.

  She checked for traffic, then stepped off the curb and strode across the street with Max quickly catching up, falling into step beside her as they went up the walk.

  "I have to do this." She paused. "Don't worry. I'm not going to fall apart on you."

  He put up both hands. "Never said you were. Never even thought it."

  But of course he had. Scene of the crime. Scene of the place where a serial killer had plunged a knife into her and murdered her infant son. In that setting, a breakdown was almost a requirement.

  Inside the lobby, they rang the building manager. A man's voice answered.

  "CPD," Max said into the speaker.

  "What?"

  "Police Department. Homicide."

  The buzzer went off, giving them immediate entry. The office was right inside the set of security doors. A small, worried-looking man got up from his desk as they stepped inside.

  "Homicide?" he asked, his eyes round, his hands moving frantically in front of him. "Who's dead? Who's been killed?"

  Max flashed his badge, then slipped it back into his pocket. "Nobody. Not recently, anyway. We just want to look at one of the apartments."

  "283," Ivy added.

  "283?" the man asked. "Why?"

  "Police business."

  "Is someone living in it?" Ivy asked.

  "We use it for storage. It hasn't been rented for years." He stopped abruptly, then began to wave his finger at Max. "Those murders. That's what this is about. Those women. The babies. I'm not supposed to tell the tenants, but 283 is the room where a woman and her baby were killed years ago. After it happened, nobody would live there so it was turned into storage. Even after the remodeling project five years ago, when everybody had forgotten about the Madonna Murderer, we decided to leave it as storage."

  "How long have you worked here?" Max asked.

  "I started when the place was remodeled."

  "Has anyone ever asked to rent that specific room?"

  "Rent it?"

  The man had an annoying habit of answering a question with a question. "I don't think so. Wait. The manager here before me told me that some guy wanted to rent 283. He didn't even care if it still had blood on the walls."

  "Would you have the guy's name?"

  "Maybe. If he filled out an application."

  "Check that out for me, will you? And the name of the previous manager. I'll need that too."

  "He's old. Really old. Like nursing-home old. Was losing his marbles when I started here."

  "I'd like to talk to him anyway."

  "Yeah, okay. I'll see what I can do."

  "Thanks."

  "Wanna see the apartment? Wait. I'll grab the key."

  A minute later they were taking a creaky elevator up to the second floor, then the man was scurrying along the hallway toward 283.

  Everything was new. New paint, new wallpaper, new red carpet, new light fixtures. But the floor under Ivy's feet was still uneven, still bowed from years and years of weight and shuffling feet. And the hallway, which went on and on, still seemed off, as if the perspective wasn't just right.

  Too soon they were standing in front of room 283. The door was the same door, now painted green instead of sticky varnished brown. But with a new door handle, new lock, new discount-store metal-punched numbers.

  The apartment manager unlocked the door and pushed it open. All three of them stood there, looking inside.

  Ivy's heart dropped.

  The remodeling project hadn't included room 283.

  Irving's voice drifted in her direction from what seemed like another dimension, muffled, indistinct. "Could you leave us to look around?"

  Another voice responded. "What? Oh. Oh, sure." Then came a shuffling, followed by the closing of the elevator doors.

  With feet that seemed mired in mud, Ivy stepped forward into the room. Her heart was beating so rapidly that she distantly wondered if she might have a heart attack. Wouldn't that be strange? To die here? To come full circle like that?

  The first thing that hit her was the smell. That creepy old-building smell, mingling with odors of all the people who had ever slept on the multitude of stained mattresses stacked against one wall, and all the people who had ever sat on the four porcelain toilets that were in various stages of decay. It smelled like stale sweat and urine and fabric that held the dust, skin sloughings, and mites of a hundred years.

  Ivy edged past one of the toilets that was lying on its side like a wounded soldier.

  "Quite a place," Irving commented, picking his way past a stack of linen and chenille bedspreads that looked as if they came from the fifties.

  It was an efficiency, set up in much the same way as Ivy's current apartment. Directly inside the door was a kitchen and sleeping area, the rust-stained sink stacked with plumbing and electrical supplies along with
long, narrow boxes that held fluorescent bulbs. There was no living room.

  The bed was still there.

  Next to the window the Madonna Murderer had escaped through. No sheets. No blanket. Just a stained, striped mattress. The same mattress?

  She couldn't move any closer.

  Her gaze shifted to the left of the bed, where the bassinet had stood. It was gone, thank God. The broken lamp was gone, and the shattered snow globe. But the mattress. The stained mattress. Was it the same one? If so, why in the hell hadn't they gotten rid of it?

  Even though she'd imagined standing in this exact spot hundreds of times in both her dreams and waking hours, nothing could have prepared her for the reality of it.

  Why hadn't they gutted the room? Left the way it was, it seemed almost a monument to the horrors that had gone on there. A place forever locked in time.

  "Do you think he was the one who wanted to rent this room?" she asked, feeling no need to explain who "he" was.

  "Maybe. Maybe not. Could have just been someone who wanted to be able to say he lived here. Like people always wanting to spend the night in the room where John Belushi died."

  "I'm not anybody famous."

  "Humans are morbidly curious as long as it has nothing to do with them."

  She was beginning to calm down. Her heart wasn't beating so rapidly.

  Seeming to sense that she'd gotten a grip on her emotions, Irving asked, "Does this trigger any new memories? Anything you may have forgotten?"

  Images flashed in her mind. A man in a dark hood bending over her baby.

  "No crying," she said. "My baby wasn't crying."

  She ran a tongue over her dry lips. "The killer, he was standing there. Over the bassinet. I turned on the light, and saw him."

  "Did he look up when you turned on the light? Do you remember his face?"

  She took a deep breath and concentrated very hard, then finally shook her head. "He would have looked up, wouldn't he have?"

  Irving shrugged in a way that said he probably agreed. "You'd think so."

  He seemed so out of place in the killing room. He was part of her new life, not the old. "Hypnotize me," she said.

  "What?"

  She could see that he thought he must have misunderstood.

  "I know you're a qualified hypnotist. I know that you once caught a rapist by hypnotizing his victim."

  "I didn't do it where the actual crime took place. And it was a long time ago."

  "I'd think the scene of the crime might be the best place." She tipped her head, watching him closely. "Are you worried that I'll flip out? Go crazy?"

  "Is this what you had in mind to begin with? And you knew I wouldn't go along with it if you told me back at Headquarters?"

  He was a hundred percent correct. "Look." She held out her hands to show him that she wasn't shaking. "I'm not afraid."

  "That makes one of us."

  "Wow. A man who admits when he's scared. I'm impressed."

  "I haven't hypnotized anybody in years."

  "I trust you."

  "I don't want you to have to relive your baby's death."

  Ivy chewed on her lip and looked away, her eyes not staring at walls with bloodstains that looked like rust, but into the past. Her brows drew together and she rubbed her forehead with fingers that turned white from the pressure.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah." She pulled in a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "Yeah." She waved her hand with a distracted, dismissive air, then sucked in another deep breath. "I have to do this."

  Without waiting for his consent, fearing it might never come, she dropped to the stained mattress, then lay down, hands on her stomach, eyes closed, head where a pillow should have been.

  Max had seen a lot of weird things in his days as a homicide detective, so why did the image of her pale face against its grisly backdrop give him such chills?

  And how could he say no to something that might help the case, that might help catch the Madonna Murderer?

  From the chaos in the room, he located a vinyl- covered kitchen chair and placed it near the bed. Then he sat and began to coax Ivy into a hypnotic state, leading her down a long flight of stairs that would take her deeper and deeper into her subconscious. They were halfway down the steps when he suddenly stopped.

  With her eyes closed, she frowned, waiting for him to continue.

  "You know what?" he said, putting his hands on his knees. "I'm not going to do this."

  Her eyes flew open.

  "Why not?"

  "We'll do it the right way. In a neutral environment. With a video camera and tape recorder." He couldn't believe he'd almost let her talk him into it. "This is wrong. Too fucking creepy."

  She sat up and swung her bare legs to the floor. "You're a homicide detective. You should be used to creepy by now."

  "You never get used to creepy."

  She put her hands over his hands and squeezed hard while staring into his eyes. "We're running out of time. It's been almost two weeks since Sachi Anderson was murdered. That means the killer could strike again soon. It's not going to matter if you don't have documentation. It's not going to matter if I freak out. It doesn't even matter if this drives me over the edge and I go insane. Which, by the way, isn't going to happen. I've lived for this moment. I've spent the last sixteen years waiting to catch this maniac. Don't make it harder. Don't put up roadblocks. Because you know as well as I do that tonight might be the night. Tonight you might get a call telling you there's been another murder. Do this," she pleaded. "You have to do this."

  And so he did it.

  She was a good subject and went under fairly quickly. And when he took her back to the night of sixteen years ago, it happened just the way she'd said, starting with a noise in the room and Ivy turning on the light.

  "Now what are you doing?" Max asked, leaning closer.

  "Screaming," she said in a chillingly monotone voice.

  He swallowed. "Why? Why are you screaming?"

  "There's a man in my room, standing over my baby."

  "Remember, you're simply observing, not participating. The man you see—does he look up?"

  "Yes."

  "Can you see his face?"

  She frowned in concentration.

  "Ivy, can you see any of his face?"

  "My name is Claudia." She continued to frown, as if looking deeply into her own mind. "A pale cheek. Pale skin. Very pale skin."

  "Albino?"

  "Not like that. Like someone who doesn't go outside much."

  "His eyes. Can you see his eyes?"

  "He's wearing a black hood. His face is in shadow."

  "What's he doing now?"

  "He's dropping something. A snow globe. I can hear the glass shattering. The baby isn't crying. Why isn't my baby crying? I scream and throw myself at him. But he's so strong. His hands are like claws, like bird claws. Talons. And he's so strong. He's throwing me back across the bed and the lamp is knocked to the floor. Now the room is dark. And the baby isn't crying." Her voice rose hysterically. "The baby isn't crying!"

  "Did you see anything? Before the light went out?"

  Without hesitation, she said, "Mother."

  "Mother?"

  "A MOTHER tattoo on his forearm. With a rose. A red rose. Mixed in with the tattoo are hairs. White skin with straight black hairs."

  She let out a gasp. "He's hurting me," she said. "He's hurting me." All the terror, all the horror of the moment was evident in the shocked disbelief of her voice.

  "Do you know him? Do you see his face?" he persisted.

  "No . . . No . . ."

  "He can't hurt you. Nobody can hurt you," Max reassured her. It would do no good to keep her under any longer.

  She let out a sob.

  Max grabbed her gently but firmly by both arms, speaking close to her face, to her tightly closed eyes. "You're safe, Ivy. You are safe. It's sixteen years later, and you are safe."

  She pulled in a shuddering breath.

&n
bsp; "We're going to go back up the stairs one at a time until we reach the top. When we get there, you'll wake up. When you wake up, you won't remember any of this. You will feel rested, refreshed. You won't remember any of this. Up the stairs. One, two, three. . . . You've reached the top step, full consciousness. . . . Now, slowly open your eyes. . . ."

  Max sat back in the chair as Ivy slowly opened her eyes, her unfocused gaze clearing as she realized where she was. She groggily sat upright and swung her legs to the floor. With arms crossed at her waist, she sat there trying to get warm even though she knew it had to be at least eighty degrees in the small room.

  "Do you remember anything?"

  She touched her face. "Have I been crying?" With the back of her hand, she wiped at the tears. "That's the last thing I wanted to do. Cry in front of you." She sniffed and wiped a little more, then said, "I remember trying to see his face, and it was like the dreams I sometimes have where it's always hidden by a black hood."

  "Is the hood like an executioner's? Or Death's? Something he wears when he's killing?"

  She thought a moment, then shook her head. "It's a sweatshirt. A black sweatshirt. He probably wore it into the building in case someone saw him, so they wouldn't be able to identify him. Damn," she said, pounding a fist against her leg. "I was hoping to come up with something new."

  "Don't be too hard on yourself. You may not have remembered his face, but you remembered something else. A tattoo."

  "Tattoo?" She gave that some thought, then her face cleared. "A tattoo that says MOTHER. It's on a banner woven through a red rose. That's good. That's something," she said.

  "That's very good. More than we've ever had on him before."

  "So now what?"

  "We'll see if we can come up with a match on the Internet. If not, we'll get one of our sketch artists to put together an accurate image, then we'll run it through the tattoo database and also get it out to the media."