The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  I explained to him that people who accept abuse in adulthood often come from abuse in childhood. That if it forms them, they might forever equate violence with love.

  He asked me early in our work together: Am I him? Will I hurt the people I love?

  It’s a good question. What makes us who we are? Is it nature or nurture, or more likely some impossibly complicated helix of both of those things? I’ve been working with some of the most traumatized, the most broken among us, for a while now. I don’t have the answers. No one does. Some of them are in prison. Some of them overcome and go on to lead healthy lives. Others languish in a misery maze—unable to love or be loved—that seems to have no exit.

  I think we make choices, or can. I think the fact that you’re even asking the question means that you can be a better man than your father was.

  Which is just a shrink way of saying, I have no idea, kid.

  “Walk through that doorway, frightening as it is,” I tell him. But I’m distracted. Why has the young FBI agent returned? “There’s no other way out. Face down those dream demons. And we want to avoid sleep deprivation.”

  After Kreskey, the nightmares were the worst thing. Yes, a dark doorway. I scribble the phrase on my notebook; it’s a good one, accurate to a fault.

  “Never get too hungry, too angry, too lonely, too tired,” says Patrick. He has a slow way of talking, draws out his words. He’s repeating something I’ve said to him many times.

  “That’s right.” It’s an AA thing but I think it’s a good rule of thumb for pretty much everyone.

  “If you have nightmares and wake up, continue to journal or draw,” I remind him. “Bring your work to me and we’ll discuss it next week.”

  At the bottom of the stack of drawings, there’s the portrait of a girl. She has lavish copper curls and sea-glass-blue eyes, a smattering of freckles. Color, light coming in from a window. She lays a hand on a tabletop.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Amanda,” he says.

  “Your prom date?”

  He blushes and smiles, a rare thing. It’s the first drawing I’ve seen from him that isn’t unsettling. I’ll take this as another promising sign.

  “This Saturday, right?” I say. “Bring pictures next week. Have fun and be safe.”

  Then he’s gone. I watch from the window as he leaves the building, climbs into his aunt’s waiting car.

  Brenda, my receptionist, would have left after she greeted Patrick. She leaves at three to pick up her daughter at school, except on Wednesdays when we see the late patients. I watch as the redheaded FBI agent and her partner leave the car and enter the building. A few minutes later, there’s a knock on my outer office door.

  “Sorry to bother you again,” she says. She wears a cool smile. This is our second time talking about her case. “Agent Brower. My partner, Agent Shultz.” Maybe she thinks I have a poor memory. I don’t.

  “Anytime,” I say, stepping back to let them both come in.

  I lead them past the foyer into the room where I see my patients. Agent Brower sits but Agent Shultz stands as he did in my home last time. Again, he goes right to the bookshelf.

  “I don’t mind admitting that we’re floundering a bit,” she says, leaning forward on her knees. “In the absence of physical evidence, we’re trying to create a profile.”

  “You still think the two crimes are connected?”

  Last time she was here, she wanted my consult on whether I thought the vigilante murders of Steve Markham and Wayne Garret Smith were connected.

  “In reviewing other cases, we think there may be more.”

  “Oh?”

  “Two years ago, a man charged with the beating death of his wife and stepson was acquitted on a technicality. Six months later, someone beat him to death. And then there’s a case you’ll be familiar with, doctor.”

  “Let me guess,” I say. “Kreskey.”

  “That’s right,” she answers. “I don’t mean to bring back bad memories.”

  Her eyes are almond shaped, trained on me. She laces her fingers, long and thin. Her nails are cut short, and filed square, unpolished. She is slim, but her legs and hips are muscular. A runner.

  I almost smile. Instead I bow my head. “Trauma like that,” I say. “It doesn’t leave us. We adapt, learn to live with it.”

  “Is that why you do the work you do?”

  She doesn’t know what she’s asking.

  “It helps me to help others, yes,” I say. But there are other reasons.

  She nods solemnly, unlaces her fingers and leans forward.

  “I think we might have a revenge killer,” she says. “Someone murdering people who are guilty of crimes for which they’ve not been punished.”

  I sink into the chair behind my desk.

  “There’s no real precedent for that, is there?” I say. I said as much during our last visit.

  “That’s what I wanted to discuss further,” she says.

  She’s young, I realize in that moment, really young. It’s a thing you don’t really encounter until you reach a certain age. Where people in authority positions are younger than you are. And though she carries herself with confidence, I see clearly in that moment that she’s struggling. Self-doubt, a bit of angst.

  “I see.”

  I am a bit of a celebrity, if I do say so myself. The surviving victim of a child killer, I then went on to earn multiple degrees in psychiatric medicine and abnormal psychology, specializing in victims of trauma. I am a bestselling author, an expert witness, a media consultant and an occasional source for law enforcement agencies—though not usually the FBI, who are quite proud of their elite behavioral sciences unit. (They even have their own podcast now.)

  I put on my glasses, and rock back in my chair a bit. Agent Shultz has taken a book off my shelf. I can’t see which one it is.

  “Most serial offenders, as we discussed last time, are motivated by deep-seated needs and compulsions. It seems unlikely to me that someone might be motivated again and again to kill for revenge. It takes an intense amount of planning, a dehumanization of the victim, a tremendous and burning desire to kill. And serial offenders are exceedingly rare, by the way. Usually when a crime of revenge is committed, it’s passionate, full of rage and hatred. You’ll be looking to the families of the victims for these crimes.”

  “No,” she says with a neat shake of her head. “These were not crimes of passion. They were meticulously planned, seamlessly executed, with not a shred of physical evidence left behind.”

  “Hmm.”

  “If not for the proliferation of home security cameras, we’d have nothing to go on at all.”

  She slips a file from her leather case and rises to slide it across the desk. There’s a photo inside, grainy and green, indistinct—except for a hooded form wearing a bird mask—feathers, a curved yellow beak.

  “That image was captured the night of the Markham murder.”

  She hands me another file. “This is from the Boston Boogeyman murder.”

  Another grainy image, another hooded form in a bird mask.

  I put them side by side, make a show of looking closely at each.

  “I see,” I say, pressing my glasses up a bit.

  “I just wondered if you’d take some time with these. Give the connection some thought.”

  “Of course,” I say. “Anything else connecting the cases? Any other details, no matter how small, could help me.”

  “I’ll get you copies of the files if you think you have time to look them over.”

  “Like I said, anything I can do.”

  When they are gone, I allow myself a moment to stare at the images. How fucking stupid can you be? Those cameras are everywhere; I should know that better than anyone.

  I am aware of Tess before I look up and see her sitting where Patrick was
a few minutes earlier. The girl I see today is not as you remember her, Lara. She’s not a girl with braces, with a funny, awkward kind of beauty. She is tall, willowy, so much like her mother, Sandy, with straw-blond hair. She often wears black—a dress with high boots, sometimes jeans and a charcoal top. Tess.

  “Do you think they know something?” she asks.

  She looks worried. Remember how she always worried about everything. She hated roller coasters, and never wanted to watch all the scary old movies we were dying to watch when my parents weren’t home—The Exorcist, Jaws, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I was Eeyore (sometimes Pooh) and you were Tigger. But she was Piglet—fretful, nervous, but so sweet. She still worries.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  When they came the other day, I assumed it was just to ask for my opinions, my insights into their case. Something was a bit off this second time.

  The sun has gone down and the room has grown dusky. When I look over to Tess again, she’s gone.

  FOURTEEN

  Lily fussed all the way home, overstimulated and out of routine. By the time they were pulling into their driveway, Rain was exhausted. It was dark, but she was still surprised to see Greg’s car in the garage, the door standing open. It was more than an hour before he usually came home.

  She saw him silhouetted in the doorway a moment, and then he stepped out and came to help her with Lily and her plethora of baby gear. How could one little person need so much stuff?

  “You’re home early,” she said, handing him the diaper bag.

  “Where were you?”

  She didn’t love his tone. Taut, a little cool. He worried, she knew that about her husband. He had his reasons—legitimate ones. She’d made mistakes, big ones. She hadn’t always been honest with him. Even now, there were things she hadn’t told him that she should have. Those sins of omission.

  Still, she bristled a little when she felt like she had to account for her whereabouts; she had an independent streak, like her father, didn’t like answering to anyone.

  But that wasn’t fair, was it? Now that she was the mother of Greg’s child, his wife. That was part of the territory.

  “I just went to see my father,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. What started as a whimper when Rain took Lily from the car seat was blossoming into a full-blown cry.

  “Everything all right?” he asked over the din.

  He slung the diaper bag over his shoulder while Rain shifted Lily, patted her back. There was that frazzled feeling so familiar now—too much on her mind, the baby crying, her breasts engorged.

  “Yeah,” she said, her frustration rising. “Is it okay with you if I visit my dad? Should I have asked for your permission?”

  Lily’s cry escalated, now an angry wail that was growing in pitch.

  Greg rolled his eyes, an action he knew she hated.

  “It would have just been nice to know you wouldn’t be home,” he said. “I left early tonight so that we could eat together, give you some time to go to the gym—or whatever.”

  Now guilt, which made her angrier. “There’s this brilliant device? It’s called a phone.”

  “I’ve been calling for an hour.”

  Lily took it up another notch. Rain bounced the baby on her hip, which honestly only seemed to annoy Lily more. Rain started swaying side to side.

  “But we don’t talk and drive, right?” she said. Her tone was sharper than she intended. She wasn’t angry with him. “Especially not with the baby in the car. I have that Do Not Disturb while driving thing on.”

  She’d disabled the Find My Friends app, too. So, if he’d tried to find her that way, he would have received a “location unavailable” message. It wasn’t personal. She wasn’t trying to hide her whereabouts from her husband. Today.

  She simply didn’t like the idea that her phone knew her location every second. When had they all given up their freedom of movement? Henry had a whole rant about the location services on your phone, too.

  They’re always watching. Never forget that.

  Rain moved into the house, with Greg right behind her, and saw the takeout on the counter. Chinese from her favorite spot, way out of his way home. Another even sharper note of guilt joined the cacophony in her head.

  She moved through the kitchen to the stairs, dropping her purse as she went. Lily was in full-scale meltdown, and Rain’s head was going to explode.

  “Let’s get you fed, in the bath and straight to bed,” she said, keeping her voice soothing and light. “Okay, baby? You’re so tired.”

  Thankfully, Greg didn’t follow her upstairs, just stood at the bottom and watched her climb. She turned back to him at the landing, and there was something unreadable on his face.

  She nursed the baby, then bathed her. In the tub, Lily was sated and quiet, happily splashing in the warm water, the dim light.

  Her visit with her father, the things he said, the images still dancing in her head from Henry’s email. It all receded as Lily settled, happy again, splashing and cooing. Lily used chubby fists to rub at her eyes as Rain lifted her perfect baby body from the tub, dried her with her duck towel, kissing her toes and belly button.

  While she was nursing, Greg came in and kissed the baby on the head.

  “We should talk,” he said quietly.

  He lingered a moment, watching them. She waited for a comment about her nursing, but instead he offered her a sad smile, and left the room.

  Downstairs, he’d set the table and was waiting for her with a glass of wine.

  “I should have called earlier,” he said when she sat. “To let you know I was coming home.”

  “And I should have called to let you know what we were doing today,” she conceded. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’m sorry.”

  She took a big sip of wine, felt the warmth of it move through her, ease some of her tension.

  “I’m worried, Rain.” He closed his eyes and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

  Something about his tone was off, and then her eyes fell on the stack of letters next to his plate.

  “When were you going to tell me about these?”

  He laid his palm on the pile and regarded her, brow furrowed.

  “Where did you find those?” she asked, a tightness in her throat.

  He sighed. “In the drawer of your desk.”

  She could get angry about that, she guessed. Violating personal boundaries and all of that. Snooping was low, wasn’t it? But it wasn’t like that with Greg. Plenty of couples she knew led these weirdly separate lives—different bank accounts, phones that were off-limits to partners, locked offices, password-protected computers. But she and Greg were entwined—she’d have no qualms about sitting at his desk; his email browser was always open. He might answer her phone.

  That he was in the drawer of her desk wasn’t a big deal; that’s where the checkbooks were. There were no off-limits spaces. In fact, she kind of had a thing about that. She remembered the room that belonged to her father, the one they were never supposed to enter. It came up again and again in her parents’ arguments. You’d rather be in that room than anywhere else in the world. What goes on up there, Bruce? Rain didn’t want secret spaces and locked doors in her marriage to Greg. They were best friends first, then husband and wife.

  That she’d not told him about the letters, that was a big deal. She’d meant to. She wasn’t really even hiding them. Why hadn’t she told him? Why had she kept them? Worse—why did she read them, sometimes more than once? Shame was hot on her cheeks. Another drink of wine. No good words to say.

  “I don’t know what to think about this,” he said when she stayed silent. “I’m—concerned.”

  “I don’t answer but he keeps sending them,” she said, finally.

  He pointed at the address. “He knows where we live.”

  “Yes.”<
br />
  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  She had been unsettled when the first letter arrived—after they’d had Lily, after they’d moved. But she hadn’t been surprised. And wasn’t she even a little relieved?

  “But,” she said quickly, “it’s not like that. He’s not going to hurt us.”

  Why did it sound like she was defending him? She put her hand in her pocket and touched that crystal heart. Greg cocked his head and squinted at her, the look of the skeptical newsman. It would annoy the crap out of her if she wasn’t so far in the wrong.

  “We’re—you know,” she said, looking at Greg, trying to grab his eyes. He distanced himself when he was angry, went behind what she thought of as his journalist face—which was stern, seeing, skeptical. She wanted him to understand but she wasn’t sure she even understood herself. “Bound—by what happened.”

  “No,” said Greg, leaning forward. He wasn’t one to yell or bang his fist on the table. But he might as well have. The sudden intensity in his gaze pushed her back. “You’re not. You’re bound to me, to our daughter. Not to him.”

  No, no. That wasn’t true.

  She was bound to the present, to the future, with her family.

  With Hank—the boy who was taken when it should have been Rain or Lara or LAH-raine or whoever she was—with Hank she was lashed to the past.

  She sat there for nearly twelve hours, she’d later learn, huddled in the wet hollow of the tree. It didn’t seem like twelve hours or twelve minutes. It was a space that existed without time, a dream, a twilight between life and death. She was bleeding profusely—another couple of hours and she would not have survived. But it might have been a year, or five minutes. She’d separated out from time, stayed suspended by pain, terror and shock so far out of the realm of her nearly twelve years of life experience.