by Jan Burke
“Yes.”
“About four years ago?” I ventured.
“No — yes. I mean, no, longer than that.”
“Strange. Jason thought you saw him when he showed up to stalk your mom.”
“What?”
“You know, the night you were baby-sitting, and Parrish’s car was outside the house?”
“Jason said that? You can’t believe anything that kid says.” She shook her head. “It’s sad.”
I thought it was sad that I hadn’t believed every word Jason told me about his sister, but I said, “Oh, wait, now I remember — he said there was a car, but you went outside and couldn’t find it.”
She shrugged. “Not that I remember.”
“You know, I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you again, anyway,” I said, moving between her and the door. “I thought you might help Ben Sheridan with his dog.”
“The man who lost his leg, you mean?”
“Come on, now, Gillian, you know more about him than just that fact. You had contacted him about your mother’s case.”
“Did I? I contacted so many people. I don’t remember. You said something about helping him with his dog?” she asked uneasily. “What dog?”
“Oh, you know this dog really well — Bingle. He used to be David Niles’s dog.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I saw some interesting videotape this morning. You went out with the SAR group he worked with, right? I saw you on the tapes, talking to David, learning to work with Bingle.”
“Yes,” she said, “I thought maybe if I could learn to work with cadaver dogs, I could go out on searches for my mother.”
“Your dedication to finding her was so inspiring,” I said, and tried a small bluff. “Learning about forensic anthropology, and cadaver dogs, and even talking to Andy Stewart about how botanists can find unmarked graves.”
“Like you said, I wanted to find her.”
“Mmmaaah,” Parrish said again.
“What do you think he’s saying?” I asked.
She shook her head mutely, but those blue eyes were wide, frightened.
“They think he’ll be able to talk again in a few days,” I lied.
“They do?”
“Yes.” Bigger bluff. “A neurologist was just in here, saying he’s improving by the hour. That’s why I’m waiting here. I’ll have a question for him when he can talk.”
“You will?” Gillian asked.
“Yes. About something he said to me not long before he fell. This has been on my mind all morning, and I can’t wait for him to come around so that I can ask him about it.”
“What?”
“You remember that article Frank showed you when we visited you at your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a great apartment, over a garage. On — what street is it?”
“Loma, near Eighth,” she said, staring at Parrish again.
“I think Ben was over that way, earlier today — a search exercise with Bingle. Anyway, about that underwear story—”
“It was so funny,” she said, giggling a little.
Parrish made a gurgling noise.
“You remember it that well?” I asked.
“Sure. It wasn’t that long.” She recited it almost word for word.
“Amazing. You know, it never ran in the Express.”
“No?”
“No. That’s why I was so surprised when Nick here quoted some of it to me last night. How could he have known what was in that column, if he never saw it?”
Gillian finally looked away from Parrish. “It must have been someone else — that lawyer they were looking for—”
I shook my head. “You, Gillian. You.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said quickly. “Why would I have anything to do with Nick Parrish?”
“I don’t know the answer to that. But then again, maybe I do. Maybe I should have listened to what Jason said about that, too. That you’re cold. That you genuinely hated your mother.”
She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. The look in her eyes was one of pure malice. “Nicholas Parrish said this, Jason said that. You say you never showed that article to anyone else, but I don’t believe you.”
“They’ve searched the garage beneath your apartment, Gillian. Frank got a warrant. The dogs were there while you were at work this morning. Even before they went inside, Bingle and Bool and a bloodhound named Beau were alerting to the presence of remains.”
She went back to looking afraid.
“They were right, of course,” I said. “There were remains there. Pieces that match up with the femurs of the woman from Oregon.”
“Femurs?”
“Leg bones.”
“You mean Nicholas Parrish had the nerve to use my own garage—”
“You won’t be able to bluster your way out of this,” I said. “They found your toolbox.”
“What toolbox?”
“The one the dogs refused to bother with when commanded to search for Nicholas Parrish’s scent. You were at the SAR training sessions, so you know how this works. Two bloodhounds were given one of Nicky’s dirty socks, then asked to find him. They alerted all over your garage, even up in your apartment. But they weren’t interested in the toolbox. The one that has the helicopter drain plugs in it — the plugs with your fingerprints all over them.”
She started crying.
“If I thought those tears were for anyone other than yourself, I might be moved by them. Your own mother, Gillian!”
“You don’t understand!” she said.
“God knows I want to!” I said. “You’ve got a reason? Just let me know it.”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“My own father never believed me, why should you?”
I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding.
“Your father,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully, “doesn’t like unpleasantness, does he?”
“Unpleasantness?” she mocked. “No, he doesn’t like to know about anything that’s unpleasant. And my mother controlled him. She tried to control everyone. Jason, my dad — but not me — you understand? Not me! She tried — and tried — and tried — but I won! I did.”
“How did she try?”
“How do you think?” she sneered.
I didn’t answer.
“You think this is the first time I’ve been in this place?” she asked. “You should ask my dad about how ‘accident prone’ I was before Jason was born.”
“But I thought hospitals—”
She gave me a pitying look. “Maybe it was all the time my mother spent chairing the Las Piernas General Hospital Auxiliary — you think? We didn’t come to St. Anne’s very often, but I knew what a nun was before I was five, and we sure as shit weren’t Catholics.”
“So you weren’t always treated by the same doctor?”
Her lips curved into a cold smile. “You’d be surprised how far we had to drive sometimes to get to a hospital.”
“Jason didn’t know about it?”
“I’m not really close to my little brother, you know? I mean, we didn’t have the same childhood — get it? He wasn’t around for the scaldings, the fall down the stairs, things like that. I don’t remember all of it. I was little. After Jason came along, she learned to work it so that I didn’t have to see doctors — didn’t leave marks. He just heard what she said — ‘Gillian’s bad. Gillian disobeys. Gillian’s out of control.’ Out of her control, all right.”
“If you were—”
“If. You see? Why believe me, right?”
“I was going to say, if you were a friend of David’s—”
“I wasn’t, all right? I just wanted to learn about the dogs. What has that got to do with anything?”
“Nothing, I’m sorry to say. So your father never saw her mistreat you?” I asked.
“Oh no. She was careful about that.”
“And he wouldn’t believe you?”
“No.” She smiled again. “He said he didn’t.”
“Mmmmaah,” came a sound from the bed.
“Nick Parrish believed you, didn’t he?” I asked.
She nodded, looking over at him again. “Same thing happened in his house when he was a kid. Except his old lady went after him, left his little sister alone.”
“So you went down to Mr. Parrish’s house and told him what was happening?”
She shook her head.
“No?”
“No. I really didn’t know him then. It wasn’t until later, when I saw him watching the house. He remembered my mother, because she looked like his mom, but she was too young. He came back to see her when she was a little older.”
“Mmmmaah!” he said.
“He was so good to me. And he had such . . . such power! He understood me. I knew it from the first time I saw him watching the house — before that night Jason told you about. I saw him. I was the only one who had ever been smart enough to see him before he knew he was being watched. No one had ever been able to sneak up on him. He was impressed.”
“Mmmaaah,” he said again.
“He was ready to make his move to fame. I helped him. It was exciting.”
All day, in my thoughts of her, I had tried to see her as she was, not the way I wanted her to be. Not to see her as the victim she had been in my mind for so many years, but as the killer’s helper. “How could she lend her aid to him?” I had asked myself again and again, thinking of Parrish’s victims, their grieving families and friends — not just her own mother, but her younger brother among them. That she had been abused might explain her anger toward Julia and a great deal more, but with that one phrase, “it was exciting,” she once again became alien to me. Whatever pity I felt for the child she had been, the young woman was someone I could not begin to truly understand.
I stepped back from her.
“How did you help him?” I asked.
“I told him where she was going that afternoon.”
“And you were there when he killed her?”
She shook her head. “He wouldn’t let me watch that one. But he showed me photos, later, after he saw that I was worthy.”
“Worthy?” She didn’t seem to hear or care about my revulsion.
“He’s never had another disciple,” she said proudly. “I’m the first. I told him I would make sure the world would know about him.”
“With my unwitting help,” I said bitterly.
“He made the plans, of course, but who would have known about him without me? I was the one who kept everyone afraid, who made them want to go to the mountains.”
“So that we could see the trophies of his kills.”
“You never would have known about him if we hadn’t planned for you to write about my mother’s death, would you?”
“Maybe not,” I said, suddenly tired.
“That’s why he buried her in her own place. I’ve seen it.”
“What on earth would attract you to someone like him? Knowing what he was capable of doing—”
“Exactly! I knew what he was capable of. I could see his power. Even now — can’t you see? He will get stronger. He’ll be back. That’s what he’s trying to tell me. That I’m his moth, that the flame still burns.”
“You’re a moth? I guess you are. Moths are blinded by their fascinations, right? They fly too close to the flame, right? You’re burning now and you can’t even smell the smoke on your wings.”
“You’ll regret saying that someday,” she said.
“He’s not going to get better, Gillian. That was a lie. He’s going to spend the rest of his life like this.”
“No! You’re lying now!”
“I think you know I’m not. Look at him. He’s empty,” I said. “Just like you are.”
She stared at him in horror.
“You can’t empathize with anyone, can you? Of all the things your mother destroyed in you—”
“Who cares?” she said. “I take care of myself.”
“All that time, I thought you were being stoic — you aren’t stoic, you’re heartless.”
“Whatever.” She lowered her head on to her hands. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“You can’t pity anyone, can you? Not even him.”
She bent over, and I thought perhaps she really wasn’t feeling well. But then she calmly reached beneath her skirt in a most unladylike fashion and removed a revolver. She stood as she pointed it straight at me. If she heard the commotion outside the room, where one gun after another was suddenly being trained on her, she gave no sign of it.
“Am I the one who misled you?” I asked. “Or did the all-powerful Nicky?”
“Mmmaah!”
She spun toward Parrish. I tackled her from behind. We went sprawling onto the floor, crashing into chairs. The gun went off, a deafening sound that kept me from hearing anything for a moment.
We were in a dog pile within seconds — and someone in a uniform had wrestled the gun away from her.
The air was full of the smell of gunpowder, and I felt a strong pair of hands helping me to my feet.
“Are you all right?” Frank asked.
“Yes.”
I heard someone reading her rights to her. I turned to look. As they marched her off to the elevator, she looked back at me. She gave me that same pleading stare that had haunted me for four years.
The one that had fooled me for four years.
“Don’t do that to yourself,” Ben said, walking up to us.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t blame yourself.”
I didn’t answer — a woman officer came into the room just then to take the wire off me. She started telling me what a great job I had done; Frank, watching my face, told her — in his polite way — to hurry up and take the equipment and leave me alone.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked when she left.
I nodded.
“How about you, Ben?” he asked.
“Not so great at the moment,” he said.
“One of us is lying,” I said. “I think it’s me.”
Parrish gurgled.
I walked over and looked down into his face. His eyes were bright with something like laughter.
“Don’t take too much joy in that, Nicky. I’ll get over whatever is bothering me.”
His face twitched.
“Ten years from now, when you’re still staring at the ceiling, wishing you were dead — or maybe just wishing someone would come in and scratch your nose for you — I want you to remember what I did on behalf of your victims. I saved your life.”
“Mmmaah! Mmmaaaahh!”
“So long, Nicky. I hope you live to be a hundred.”
62
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, MIDNIGHT
The Roof of the Wrigley Building
Three weeks later, I was up on the roof of the Express at midnight, looking out at the city. I was still working part-time, odd hours. I had canceled several of my appointments with Jo Robinson and told John not to hassle Wrigley about changing my hours.
I liked the slow shifts, I told him. They weren’t really slow; I had a lot to catch up on.
That was true — but I never seemed to get around to catching up.
There was a restlessness in me. I found myself looking at the travel section instead of reading my mail. I started looking at real estate ads, too. I wondered if I could talk Frank into moving somewhere else, doing something else for a living.
Frank would listen to my suggestions, say, “That’s a possibility, but maybe this isn’t a good time to make that kind of decision.”
I don’t like to think of what might have happened to me in those weeks if I hadn’t been married to Frank Harriman. He didn’t push or nag; he spoiled me rotten. I guess I needed a little spoiling. With him, I felt as if there were no secrets that couldn’t be told, no fears that couldn’t be voiced. There were evenings of confid
ing in him; they kept me from losing whatever balance I had.
The days consisted of routines of avoidance. I knew I couldn’t continue treading on the surface of life, knew that I needed to dive back in. Easy to say.
Up on the roof that night, the autumn breezes were warm. “Mild Santa Ana conditions,” the weather forecasters called it. That meant that the smog was blown away by desert winds, the days were a little too hot, but most people wouldn’t feel as crazy as a true red wind would make them. It meant the view was better than usual. I could see Catalina, the distant lights of Avalon.
I should go back down to my desk and work, I thought, taking another long pull from my water bottle. But that would mean being indoors. Didn’t want to be indoors, not just yet.
I heard the access door open and tensed. Probably just Jerry or Livy, maybe Leonard. Jerry and Leonard always greeted me with the same joke — each would say that he was just making sure I hadn’t jumped. Livy never said that, but I think she was more certain that I wouldn’t end up on the pavement in front of the building. Not my style. I refuse to do anything that will force anyone else to use a hose to clean up my departure.
Tonight’s visitor to my aerie rounded the corner — I was surprised to see Ben Sheridan.
“Up late, Professor?” I said when he came nearer.
“Up high. Mind if we move a little farther away from the edge?”
“Not at all. Come have a seat at Café Kelly. We no longer feature helicopter floor shows, but the water is fine.”
“Sounds good to me.”
We sat down and propped our feet up, both original and replacement models.
“You owe me something,” he said, taking a drink of water.
“I haven’t forgotten. If you really want to hear it, I’ll tell it.”
“Yes, I do,” he said.
So I told him what had happened in the mountains that morning, when Parrish had threatened Bingle and shoved my face into the mud, and chased me through the woods.
“My God,” he said when I had finished. “Jesus, I wish I could have helped you. I feel terrible about it. If you hadn’t been worrying about keeping him away from me, you wouldn’t have even been near him. And I know you were worn out because of—”
“Stop it! If you want the truth, that’s the reason I never told you about what Parrish did that morning. I knew you’d feel this ridiculous sense of guilt, as if you could have done anything about it, as if it were your fault that it happened, instead of Parrish’s.”