A Breath After Drowning

by Alice Blanchard

  “That’s not a worthy question.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He shrugged. “Why did I do it? Because nobody stopped me.”

  “That’s a lie. There’s a deeper reason.”

  “Are you trying to shrink me? Because it isn’t working.”

  “I want to know why you did it. I want to know why I’m going to die. Come on. Talk about your most fascinating subject—you.”

  He grinned. “Ya got me.”

  “How did it start?” She moved the ring back and forth— there was a one-inch-long cut in the tape now. Gradually, very gradually, she could feel it loosening. “I really want to know. What’s the reason?”

  “Does there have to be a reason?”

  “There’s always a reason.”

  He scowled. “You think you’re pretty self-aware. But I know you so much better than you know yourself. You haven’t done a very good job of self-discovery, Kate. You have a lot of work to do.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “Oh come on. I led you here. To this time and place.”

  “You led me?”

  “Like a mouse in a maze. It was so predictable.”

  She thought for a moment. “You mean Dr. Holley’s book? Patient J?”

  “I intended to get you to notice it at some point, but when you got lost and I invited you to stay at the cabin, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I left it right where you’d find it. And the next morning, you handed me your phone to put in my emergency contact details, remember? Never give your phone to anyone. They’re surprisingly easy to hack. I downloaded a couple of apps, and I’ve been tracking you ever since. Reading your texts, listening to your conversations. Tracking your GPS.”

  Kate sawed harder at the duct tape.

  “Those peanuts in your office? I bribed one of the cleaning crew. I thought it was a pretty good joke. Your patients are nuts. I enjoy my little misdirections. Did you notice all the other things that’ve gone missing over the years? Reading glasses, undergarments…”

  “Why?”

  “Whim.”

  She stared at him with revulsion and imagined her father’s body wrapped in a plastic shower curtain. She pictured Stigler slumped over the wheel, his skull like a burst water balloon.

  “I enjoy watching you try to figure things out, Kate. You keep looking for answers when they’re right in front of you.” He grinned. “I left a trail of breadcrumbs. You nibbled them up.”

  A thick fog cushioned her brain. Don’t stop what you’re doing. Stay focused. “So you led me every step of the way? How did you know I was going to look at the flashdrive? How did you know I’d tell my father about Stigler killing my mother?”

  He sighed with impatience. “Come on, Kate. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the flashdrive, and when you inevitably checked it out, I knew there was a high probability you’d tell your father about it. I had other plans in place in case you didn’t tell Bram about Stigler, but these things have a way of working themselves out.”

  A trickle of sweat curled down her forehead. “You left the peanuts at my grandparents’ farmhouse?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  “Why? What was the fucking point?”

  “When we talked about the killer’s motivation, you said it was all about power and control, and that’s true. But it’s also fun to confuse people. It amuses me. I know everything there is to know about the people of Blunt River. I like to mess with their heads. I’ve been to your grandparents’ farmhouse a handful of times. I was wondering when you’d venture out that way, but I had no idea you’d go there thinking your father was a serial killer.” He laughed. “I liked it when you called me ‘Dad.’”

  She stared at him in disbelief.

  “I wanted to tear you down, bit by bit,” he said. “You once bragged that you could handle it—that you worked at McLean Hospital, remember? Trust me. You aren’t prepared for this.”

  Her hands were covered in sweat. She momentarily lost her grip.

  “I’ve known you longer than you realize.”

  “What are you talking about?” she breathed. “We only met properly a week ago.”

  “I’ve known you since you were a baby. I’d sneak into your parents’ house late at night and watch you play in your crib. They kept the spare key under a flowerpot, imagine that? People are dumb. Sometimes I’d watch Julia sleep. She clung to her side of the mattress and got as far away from your father as possible. I stole little things—jewelry, books, letters. I killed her cat. She was already losing her grip. I like to think I helped.”

  Kate realized he was talking about the moon-shaped pendant. “So you stole my mother’s necklace and strangled Susie Gafford with it?”

  “Like I said, that was a rookie mistake.”

  She could feel her thoughts spinning out of control. Stay focused.

  “I’ve been over every inch of that house. I know where your mother kept her birth control pills. I know where your father stashed his porn. I know where you kept your razor blades, Kate. I saw the wad of bubblegum under your sister’s bed long before you did. I know more about your family than you do. I know everything there is to know about you.”

  Kate stared at him.

  “This is what you’re dealing with. This is who I am.” He looked at her with dead eyes. “Cue the applause.”

  “Why?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Why not?” he said defiantly.

  Kate’s eyes burned as she resumed her desperate task. The tear was two inches long, and the duct tape beginning to loosen around her sweaty wrists. He had watched her sleep. He took her things. “This is all about my mother, isn’t that right? It’s why you framed Henry Blackwood and William Stigler. Because they slept with her. That’s why you killed my father.”

  Palmer shrugged. “You’re the psychiatrist. You tell me.”

  “You hated that she slept with other men. You were obsessed with her.”

  “I loved her,” he confessed. “And she betrayed me.”

  “How? Tell me what happened.”

  “We went to school together. I’ve known her since she was a skinny, ugly little thing. She was supposed to be mine. But she threw it all away.”

  “So you killed her?”

  “No, no, no. You’re missing the whole point. I didn’t kill her. Stigler did. He was drunk, he was jealous, and she provoked him. She was very good at that. He followed her down to the river and killed her, and then he covered it up. It only took me twenty-two years to get even with the son of a bitch.”

  She stared at him. “So this was all about revenge?”

  “Why does that confuse you?”

  She scissored through the duct tape with frantic little motions. Almost there.

  “Your mother had a rare kind of beauty, a special quality… but she threw it all away. She treated herself like dirt. Half the men in town were crazy about her. I was fourteen when she took pity on me. We slept together a couple times before she dumped me. She was fickle that way. She ended up marrying your father, God knows why. You’d think being a doctor was better than being a rock star. Anyway. He took what was mine. So I took what was his—his daughter, his peace of mind. People should pay for their actions.”

  She felt a sharp pang as she spotted a road sign—they were in Piscataquis County, heading north. Twisting through the mountains. The road was narrow and curving. It had stopped snowing, and she could see down into the valley, a vast expanse of old-growth forests and lakes.

  “So you killed Savannah to get even with my father—and with Blackwood, once you realized he was her biological father, even if he clearly never did?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the other girls?” Kate asked. “How did you choose them?”

  “I convinced Stigler’s research associate to give me the names of the study subjects. It was easy. He was a drug addict, so I blackmailed him.”

  “Once you had the names, there must’ve been h
undreds of girls to choose from, right?”

  “In every instance, I had to wait for the opportunity to present itself.”

  “Meaning… you had to wait until it was safe to abduct them?”

  “And the timing had to sync up with Stigler’s out-of-town trips.”

  Kate nodded. “In order to bury the bodies on his property without anyone noticing? And that’s where the police are going to find the four missing girls—in his backyard?”

  “Asphyxiated. Heads shaved.”

  “Why would you shave some of the victims’ heads, and not others?” she asked. “You told me Susie Gafford and the two suicides only had small pieces of hair cut off.”

  “I can control myself when necessary, so long as I get a little of what I need. It would have been pretty dumb to go to the trouble of staging suicides only to attract attention with matching buzz cuts.”

  “And you built this case over years… How did you know you could pull it off?”

  “I’ve developed a knack for predicting behavior.”

  “In my profession, they call that grandiosity.”

  “It’s a small town, Kate. Small minds. After years of observation you know how people will act. On the other hand, sometimes you can predict the behavior of a complete stranger. All you have to do is find out their daily habits—a few days’ stakeout will often suffice. What time she leaves the house in the morning, how hastily she departs, how icy her porch steps are. Especially after you’ve hosed them down. Sorry about your mother-in-law. That was unfortunate.”

  Kate struggled to grasp what he was saying.

  “James was becoming an annoyance,” Palmer explained. “But easy to predict that he’d abandon you in favor of mommy dearest. On the other hand, I didn’t predict you’d drive up to your grandfather’s house today. I just ran with it. And you thinking Bram might be the killer was a wildcard.”

  Kate sagged. She had a sudden heartbreaking vision of Nikki hanging in her parents’ house. “Did you kill Nikki McCormack?”

  “How else was I supposed to get your attention, Kate? You ignored all my letters. I had to orchestrate our meeting at the funeral somehow.”

  “And you’ve been following me around for years?” she said. “Why not just kill me?” Her voice was shrill, but Palmer didn’t respond. Kate choked back a sob. “Did you kill Nelly, too?”

  “No. But there’s no mystery about who did: Derrick Ward’s a brutal man.”

  “Who are you to speak of brutal men?”

  “I wasn’t always this way. I was an obedient child. But your mother changed me. I loved her, and she mocked me for it. There were hundreds of girls in Stigler’s study—why did I choose only nine? Julia had a thing for Eddie Gafford. She flirted with Emera Mason’s father. I could go on.”

  “So everything goes back to my mother?” Kate exclaimed. “It’s her fault?”

  Palmer shrugged. “None of us is innocent.”

  “She never did anything to you.”

  “She shamed me.”

  Kate tried to keep her voice even. “I don’t believe she made you who you are. Something happened, something that made you turn a corner. So what was it, Palmer? What allowed the pre-existing psychopathy to bloom?”

  Palmer raised an eyebrow. “You want a convenient story? Fine. My father was a beat cop in Manchester. Same shift for years, noon to midnight. Everybody knew him, and they relied on him to keep the neighborhood safe. But at home he was a mean bastard, who beat up me and my mom. He left us when I was six, and after that, Mom fell apart. Looking back, there was always something beneath the surface, but Dad kept it in check with his fists. Once he was gone she became paranoid, she smoked and drank and watched TV for hours. She went for long walks and came back with grass clinging to her ankles. I suspected she went down to the train tracks, that she was thinking of throwing herself in front of the train.

  “Gradually she became more unhinged.” Palmer smiled crookedly at Kate in the rearview mirror. “You’d have recognized the signs. She became like Julia. The house was filthy. One day I found her kneeling on the kitchen floor, picking up grains of spilled oatmeal, sobbing. Another time she became convinced her face was lopsided. She spent hours staring at herself in the mirror. That’s when she started buying dolls from Goodwill. She said their faces were perfect. Soon our house was full of them. At first they scared the daylights out of me—they never moved, they never spoke. But I grew to like them for that very reason.

  “Every day after school, I’d come home and Mom would be playing with her dolls. She painted their faces and cut their hair. One day, she attacked me with a pair of scissors. She stabbed me sixteen times—luckily she didn’t hit anything vital. Then she sat on my chest and cut off my hair, even my eyebrows. She claimed that I brought lice into the house, and they were eating her brains out. After that they put her away, but the doctors never made her right. Treatment back then was brutal—hydrotherapy, lobotomy, meds that gave her the shakes. She died in an asylum.” He shrugged. “That’s the end of my story.”

  They were traveling in the foothills along the western slope of a mountain. Tight and winding curves. Sharp drop-offs on either side of the road.

  “Once you enter the darkness,” he said, “the darkness enters you.”

  A trickle of sweat curled down Kate’s cheek.

  “A dead person smells almost sweet,” he went on, “like rotting fruit. Once you carry a dead person in your arms, she’s always with you.”

  Kate’s heart fluttered. She sawed at the tape. Almost there. Keep going.

  “You’re a psychiatrist. What do you think I suffer from? Persecutory delusions? Narcissistic personality disorder? Or just plain old ordinary psychopathy?”

  She paused, breathing hard. “You want the truth?”

  He shrugged. “Give it your best shot.”

  “I think you’re sick and tired of playing games. You want to show the world who you really are and what you’ve accomplished. You want to brag a little.”

  His face twitched. “I’ve done all the bragging I care to.”

  She softened her tone. “You’re damaged, and maybe you can’t be cured. But you can change. You can stop any time you want.”

  “Kate.” Palmer laughed. “That’s so transparent.”

  “Talk to me. I’m not going anywhere.”

  He let the silence stretch.

  “You know what you are. But I’m sensing you want to change that.” She was lying—he would never change. She was stalling for time. Her fingers were busy. She could feel pins and needles in her hands as she worked the ring back and forth in a sawing motion. “You must be tired of playing games with people who don’t realize what you’ve done. But in a world where everyone else is stupid, doesn’t it get boring?”

  “That’s why you’re here. I’m not done with you yet.” He raised an eyebrow. “And isn’t that the real question? What I’m going to do with you?”

  She nodded slowly.

  “So? Spit it out, Kate. Quit beating around the bush.”

  She swallowed hard. “What are you going to do to me?”

  He smiled broadly. “I don’t know yet. That’s the beauty of it. But you belong to me now.”

  She had no emotions left to bargain with. She felt her resistance melting, like flesh melting off bone.

  Then in one swift motion, she ripped the duct tape off her wrists, unbuckled her seatbelt, reached forward, and grabbed Palmer by the neck. She squeezed tight. His hands left the wheel and he slammed on the brakes. He lost control of the vehicle.

  There was the smell of burning rubber as they slewed across the road and plunged down an embankment, dropping through the snowy woods, bumping over ditches and overgrown trails until they hit a stand of trees.

  The collision was explosive. Glass shattered. Kate flew forward into the front seat as the airbags burst open like rotten watermelons. She felt her face colliding with plastic and trapped air, and then… nothing.

  59

  KA
TE HEARD A SOFT ticking sound and opened her eyes, only vaguely aware of where she was. She saw the world through a fuzzy lens. Fear burned through her. The Jeep had collided with a huge evergreen tree, now bent at an angle, the bark stripped off and the trunk split. The vehicle was upright but leaning at a steep angle. The front end was crumpled, and the windshield had shattered.

  Steam. Smoke. She stirred in her seat, and pieces of glass shifted off her lap. Shattered glass fell out of her hair. A chilly breeze blew across her face. The driver’s side door was flung open, and Palmer was gone. She looked outside into the whiteness and couldn’t find him anywhere.

  She tried to open her door, but of course it was locked. She started to pull herself into the front of the car to get out of the driver’s door, but her legs and ankles were still bound together. The glove compartment had popped open, flinging its contents into the back seat. Kate rummaged through the debris—road maps, spare change, sunglasses, a greasy red bandana. She wrapped the bandana around her hand for protection, selected the biggest piece of glass she could find, and then used it to cut the duct tape off her legs and ankles. Moments later she was free.

  Kate crawled across the front seat and propelled herself through the open driver’s door. She dropped onto the ground and landed on unsteady legs in the knee-deep snow, where she struggled for balance and surveyed the scene. They had plunged thirty feet down the side of the mountain before slamming into the tree. Steam wafted from the mangled Jeep; the impact had ripped the metal apart like gossamer. One of the rear doors was torn off its hinges and the hubcaps were missing. Gasoline leaked from the undercarriage, and the smell filled the air. The trunk had sprung open, leaving a debris field in the snow—suitcases, jumper cables, an ice scraper, bags of road salt, a spare tire, a snow shovel.

  Kate heard a low groan and turned. Palmer was lying face down in the snow about fifteen feet away. He wasn’t moving. Clots of blood had frozen on his skin and in his hair. One of his arms was twisted behind him, perhaps broken. She tensed, ready to run. She would have to climb back up the mountainside at a fairly steep angle, unless she could find a switchback trail through the dense cedars and firs.