The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set
Page 66
“Dez?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“I know it’s hard. It’s impossible to not feel responsible. They’re so small and helpless at that age, so reliant on everyone around them. Rhona and I, we were having an argument as usual, and Artie started to cry. We left him for just a few minutes. It was all over something stupid, so stupid I can’t even remember anymore. I just remember my mom had this set of encyclopedias, and we knew we could settle the matter easily enough by looking it up. When we got back upstairs, Artie was floating facedown in the tub.”
The horror was clear on Lucienne’s face, mouth contorted, eyes wide as if she were witnessing the scene all over again. “We pulled him out. I tried to give him mouth to mouth, like we saw on TV. But it didn’t work. He just wouldn’t breathe.”
“You didn’t call for an ambulance?”
“That’s what makes it so much worse. We didn’t call anyone. We thought we’d get into even worse trouble, that we’d go to jail. So we just wrapped him up in his bath towel and left him on the bathroom floor. I know how it sounds, believe me. And what we did—what we didn’t do—is every bit as awful, and more. But we were so young. Rhona was the oldest of us, and she was only eight. How many eight-year-olds have you heard of being left in charge of children for longer than a few minutes? Our father was away for hours, our mother for even longer. And Mother put full blame on our shoulders, as if they deserved none between the two of them for leaving us all alone.”
Dez thought back to the file, to the question mark behind Rhona’s name. “Where’s Rhona now?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in years. Didn’t Lachlan tell you?”
“We didn’t have time to get into every detail of the case,” Dez said. “When and where did you last see her?”
“Longer ago than I care to think. It was around the time Sullivan was born. She moved out as soon as she turned eighteen and got her high school diploma. She never looked back. I can’t say I blame her. I just wish she’d stayed in touch with me, at least.”
“And about that whole education thing. You made it sound like you went to a regular school, but you didn’t. Your mother homeschooled you and your sister.”
“Not the whole time,” Lucienne said. “We got to go to school for a while. Mostly we had to study at home, but one or two years, when money was tight, Mother would have to go to work, so there was no one to teach us. At least that gave us a chance to make some friends.”
“I thought you more or less said you didn’t really make any friends.”
Lucienne smiled. “I made plenty of friends. It was keeping them that was the problem. Look, why do I feel like this is an interrogation?”
Dez leaned a little farther forward in the chair. “Maybe it is, kind of. I can’t help feeling like you’ve been holding out on me about something.”
“I was, I guess. I didn’t want you to know about Artie.”
“Why not?”
Lucienne’s expression registered disbelief. “Come on. When kids were feeling particularly mean—and, let’s face it, they often do—they called us the Baby Killers. I needed your help, and it was bad enough having to admit to you that I abandoned Sullivan to what turned out to be a pretty bleak childhood. The last thing I wanted was to further risk poisoning you against me by telling you I was also partially responsible for my baby brother’s death. Anyway, that has nothing to do with any of this.”
“Are you sure about that? Where are your parents now?”
“I have no idea where my birth father is. Probably dead, given the life he led. And my mother is in a care home. She developed an early form of dementia. Dr. Gerhardt—”
“Dr. Roman Gerhardt? From Lockwood? Is that where she is?”
“I said she was in a care home, not a psych hospital. But love him or hate him, when it comes to mental illness, he’s the best. Anyway, my mother swore by him since he supposedly cured me of my so-called hallucinations. She refused to see anyone else, and he was plenty happy to oblige her. He’d developed something of a soft spot for me and, by the look of things, my mother, too. He says the heavy amount of depression and stress she had to endure likely took a long-term toll on her mind. She’s not a vegetable or anything, and there are days where she’s perfectly lucid. But sometimes I don’t know who she is.”
“So you still go to see her?”
“Rarely, but yes. In many ways, she ruined my life. But I also have her to thank for all the good I’ve accomplished. And, after all, whatever I may think of her when she’s at her worst, she’s still my mother.”
“Listen, this might sound strange, and you might not like it, but I think I need to talk to your mother. Which care home is she in?”
A shade drew across Lucienne’s features, her doubt clear in the way she turned her head to look at him out of the corner of her eye. “Why do you need to talk to her?”
“Because I think I need to find Rhona.”
“I’ve tried repeatedly to find Rhona, never to any success. I don’t think she wants to be found, and I don’t blame her. We both wanted to put our childhoods behind us, never look back. Only somehow, I think she’s managed it.”
“Do you think she changed her name?”
“I’m certain of it. Look, I work in IT. I know computers, the web, various systems. I know how to find people. I have never been able to find her. It’s like she just disappeared.”
Like Sully disappeared. Dez kept the thought to himself, but it was sitting there heavily now at the front of his brain, at the tip of his tongue, in the pit of his stomach. He had nothing to base it on, nothing at all. But he knew, as clearly as he knew his own name.
Find Rhona and he’d find Sully.
21
For several hours, no one had come, as near as Sully could determine in the unending dim of the room, leaving him to suspect it might be nighttime.
He would have liked to rest as he suspected his captors were, but sleep would leave him vulnerable. He was hungry, parched and well past tired, the added psychological strain pushing him into exhaustion. But sleep built on fatigue gave no guarantee he would awaken in time to recognize and fight whatever danger might next come at him.
Lucienne Dule’s journal proved a godsend, the slightly tattered find acting like a jolt of caffeine as he read through it.
It was undated, and Sully quickly realized why that was. Like him, she’d been a captive here. Like him, she’d had no awareness of night or day—or of any passage of time save that which her guards might share.
I thought things couldn’t get any worse than Lockwood. Now I’m not so sure. Mother and Wayne say I have to stay in this room. They say it’s for my own protection. But now I’m afraid Gerhardt is going to come through that door and tell me I have to go back. I can’t go back. Not ever. I’ll die first.
The journal went on from there.
Wayne brought me this notebook to pass the time. Time for what? I don’t understand. I still haven’t seen Mother since they brought me to this room. Wayne says seeing me is too hard for her. He’s nice, at least. Funny how sometimes the people who share your blood are the people in the world you know the least. I wish Wayne would stay and talk. It’s lonely down here. At least until THEY come. And they always come. Walls and locked doors can’t stop them. And I have nowhere to run ….
I have no idea how long I’ve been down here. A few days for sure. I think Wayne said it was Tuesday when he gave me the notebook and pen. It was a Sunday when I came home and they brought me to this basement room. Tuesday feels like forever ago ….
I asked Wayne today if he’d heard anything about Gerhardt. He said no. I don’t know what that means, but I’m afraid to ask any more questions. I don’t know what Mother and Wayne would think if they knew the truth. Maybe Gerhardt will come back for me. Maybe he will come back in a way only I can see ….
I wonder about him all the time, that beautiful baby boy. With nothing much else to do down here, I think about him all the time. W
here is he now? Is he okay? Will I ever see him again? If I don’t, will he ever know about me? How will he ever know how much I loved him, that I loved him enough to let him go, to give him hope for a better life than he could have with me? It was amazing, seeing him for the first time after all those months. His tiny face, those little fingers and toes. I only wish I could have looked into his eyes before I had to give him away. I know they will be beautiful too. It’s terrible and amazing at the same time: how could something so perfect come from something so ugly? ….
I’m beginning to think I’m never going to leave here. Today, Wayne told me it’s Tuesday, so it’s been at least a week. Wayne was quiet, just brought me my breakfast and answered that one question and then he was gone. He seemed sad. Like really sad. I don’t know why, and I can’t hear anything from down here. The walls are concrete and the house is so big. If they’re fighting again, I would probably never hear from down here. Rhona used to say Mother is a hard woman. I used to think Rhona meant Mother’s figure. But I understand now. It’s not Mother’s body Rhona meant. It’s her soul ….
Artie came again today and looked at me with those eyes. They’re dead eyes, not really seeing, but it’s like he can see through me anyway. “Bad Lucky,” he said to me. “Bad Lucky.” I know I am, and I told him that. I told him I was so sorry I left him there with Rhona. Artie was my responsibility, and I let that stupid fight get in the way. I know it sounds weird because I’m just so terrified every time I see Artie or the others, but I wanted him to stay with me. I just want someone. Sometimes I’m selfish, and I just want my little baby Sullivan ….
The blood rushed from Sully’s head along with all sense, his vision swimming and his breath catching. Had he not already been sitting, he would have fallen.
Lucienne Dule—or Lucky as she called herself—wasn’t just some girl who had been trapped down here like he was now.
She was his mother.
He tried to think through what that meant for him now, why he was here, who was responsible, but it was like something had short-circuited in his brain. Thoughts roamed free, none connecting, few making sense. Questions formed but disappeared before he grasped them. Answers were non-existent in his current state.
He’d spent his whole life wondering. He knew he’d been given up, left on a doorstep, but nothing else. He’d always assumed he’d been so despised, so unwanted that his own mother figured leaving him with a stranger, abandoning him to the outdoor dangers until he was noticed, was preferable to a proper adoption. Her way of letting him know he didn’t deserve that dignity or comfort.
And yet, he’d never hated her for it. It was impossible to know where his life would have led had it gone down another path. He knew it never would have led him to the Braddocks. How could he hold a grudge over that?
The journal hadn’t answered everything—not by any stretch—but it did provide a few basic truths. One was her youth. Her writing was small but bubbly, and her style and language spoke of someone too young to have endured what she had and, as a result, too old for her years. And, most importantly, she had loved him. She had not thought him a curse but a blessing, one she believed she did not deserve.
He wondered what kind of mother she would have been to him had their situation been different, had her family supported her as the Braddocks had supported him.
His heart broke for her, and he didn’t even know her.
Or maybe he did. They were bonded, after all, in a way neither time nor distance could sever.
“I always know when Dez is in trouble,” Mara Braddock had once said when her then-teenaged son was getting his first taste of freedom, out past curfew and causing no end of worry to his parents. “A mother knows these things.”
Sully wondered if his own mother had known, had felt something was wrong all those times he’d been frightened or in pain. Was she aware on some level? If she was, had she ever tried to find him?
Had she ever even had the chance?
He thought back to his time at Lockwood, to the faces of the other patients. Was one of those women his mother? If Lucienne Dule had him as a teenager, she would be close to forty by now. There were plenty of women around there that fit that age frame. She had known Gerhardt, seemed to hate him as much as Sully himself, and he wondered whether she too had been exposed to his experiments.
The idea that she might have been there, so close, the comfort of family within reach in those moments when the Braddocks weren’t there—that was almost as hard as the thought he might have been some comfort to her and hadn’t been given the chance.
His head stopped spinning, leaving him with the exhaustion that was becoming his constant companion.
It was a risk, and a big one. But lack of sleep wouldn’t help him either, so he finally gave in and laid back on the mattress, allowing his eyes to close only after he’d tucked the rolled notebook and pen within an inside pocket of his outer jacket.
He tried to find some comfort in the proximity in space to his mother, that she’d once been right where he was now, that she’d once breathed this air and touched these walls. He tried, but ultimately found nothing but sadness there.
And then, as a dead sleep closed over him, all thought blessedly faded.
Dez awoke to the smell of maple bacon and the feel of a tongue on his cheek that definitely did not belong to Eva.
He cracked an eye open to see Pax sitting next to him, tongue hanging out as the full morning sun began warming his apartment to the point of serious discomfort. The place had come with a small box unit air conditioner mounted in the wall. Naturally, on the hottest days, the fan was not always content to spin at higher speeds. He could hear it wasn’t running now.
Dez lifted his head from the back of the chair and gave Pax’s ears a good morning scratch as he massaged the kink out of his own neck. His upper spine responded with a satisfying crack as he turned his head to look at the pullout.
It was empty, and he spotted Lucienne in the kitchen, standing at the stove as she monitored a couple of frying pans.
Pax seemed to have noticed, too, his dislike of Lucienne all but forgotten as he trotted to the stove to supervise her progress.
Lucienne at last turned to look in Dez’s direction, and she smiled a greeting. “Good morning. I was wondering when you would wake up. I hope you don’t mind, but I noticed your fridge and cupboards were almost bare, so I went out and bought some groceries.”
Dez stood, his hip cracking. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“It’s the least I can do, given everything you’re doing for me and my son.”
“Well, thanks. I appreciate it. I haven’t managed to make it to the store recently.”
Lucienne smiled. “You don’t say. Oh, and I couldn’t find any dog food here, so I picked up a small bag. I’m guessing he’ll likely go through it within a day, though. He’s a hungry guy.”
“So he ate?”
“Yeah, and it looks like he’s still plenty interested. He only left the stove long enough to go check in on you.”
“Yeah, I’m noticing he’s kind of a pig in wolf’s clothing. Is the air conditioner on the fritz?”
“No, I turned it off. I was a little chilly.”
If there was one blessing to being on his own—and one blessing was just about all he could come up with—it was that he could have it as cold as he wanted, when it worked, and not worry about offending shivering females. “Are you still cold? I mean, it heats up in here pretty fast when it’s hot out.”
Thankfully, Lucienne gave him the go-ahead to turn the unit on, and he was doubly blessed when the thing actually kicked in on high. He thought better of it, splitting the difference and lowering it to medium before taking the few steps to the kitchen to check out breakfast in the making. Lucienne had bought a loaf of bread; he dropped a couple slices into his toaster as he considered how best to broach the necessary topic of conversation.
Then he decided there really was no best way, or even a good one.
Lucienne stiffened, hand stilling over the frying pan containing the scrambled eggs she had been in the course of flipping. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“She’s not well, like I told you. She upsets easily.”
“Look, I’m not a jerk. I’ll be sensitive about it, and I won’t push her hard.”
Lucienne gave up the eggs for the moment, turning to face Dez head-on. “Why is it so important you talk to her?”
Dez crossed his arms, forming his own immovable wall—because one way or another, he was not giving an inch on this. If he was going to find Rhona, what better way than to go through her mother, presumably the person who had been in a position to know her the best, even if just for a while?
“I was a police officer long enough to know the answers to most questions can be found with the people surrounding the subject of an investigation, whether that’s a suspect or a victim,” Dez said. “Nine times out of ten, that’s family or close friends. Now, as far as Sully goes, I’m family and a close friend, and I know all of his secrets involving the life he knew. What I don’t know is what he didn’t know, and that’s his birth family. Now, Lachlan was piecing something together, and he ended up being attacked. Sure, there’s a chance it was about some other case, but I seriously doubt it. If Sully really is out there and needs our help, I am going to turn over every stone until I get what I need. What he needs. Right now, your mother is one of those stones. You have to help me, Lucienne. For Sully.”
Studying him, she didn’t answer immediately. Dez held both his position and his ground. He’d meant every word and if she wasn’t going to help him, he would find another way.
With Dez remaining firm, it was only a matter of time before Lucienne broke, a sigh escaping as she first looked away and then returned to the frying pans. It was likely the eggs had partially burned in that weighty pause, but if she provided him with what he was after, he’d happily eat a barely edible breakfast.