Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “What happened?” I ask Gray over her head. “How did you get her back?”

  But then the room is filled with doctors and nurses. Gray takes Victory from me, and they stand by the window as I am poked and prodded.

  “How are you feeling, Annie?” asks the kind-faced Asian doctor. She is pretty and petite, with a light dusting of lavender on her eyelids, the blush of pink on her lips.

  “My chest feels heavy,” I say.

  “That’s the smoke inhalation,” she says, putting a stethoscope to my chest. “Breathe deeply for me.”

  “Smoke?” I ask after I’ve drawn and released a breath with difficulty.

  “From the fire,” she says, hand on my arm. “I’m afraid it will be a while before we know if the lung damage is permanent.”

  “I don’t remember,” I say, looking over at Gray, who offers me a smile. There’s something funny on his face, something worried, anxious. I know this look. It makes me feel suddenly very uneasy.

  “You will. Don’t worry,” says the doctor, patting my arm. “No rush. Let’s get you better first.”

  The next few hours pass in a blur of tests and examinations. I gather that I’ve inhaled smoke from a fire. But I don’t remember a fire. Whenever I ask questions, I receive strange, elliptical answers. Finally I’m given something to help me “relax.” I drift off. When I wake again, it is dark outside. A dim light beside my bed glows, and Gray is dozing in the bedside chair. I reach for him, and he startles at my touch, then leans into me and holds on hard.

  I tell him everything that’s happened, even though it hurts to talk so much—the men who were killed on the ship, Dax, my abduction, my father, my flight to Florida, the Angry Man, my confrontation with Marlowe. He listens, stays silent and focused on me. He lets everything tumble out of me without interruption.

  “Where’s Victory?” I say suddenly. “I don’t understand. How did you get her back?”

  “Annie—” says Gray, laying a hand on my head. But I’ve already interrupted him with another question.

  “When did you realize she was gone?”

  “Annie—”

  “Is she all right?” I ask, sitting up with effort. “I mean really all right. He wouldn’t have hurt her, I don’t think. Are Drew and Vivian okay?”

  “Everyone’s fine,” he says, getting up and sitting beside me on the bed, gently pushing me back against the pillows.

  “You must have been so worried,” I say, taking in the lines on his face, the circles under his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Annie, please,” he says then, in a tone that causes me to stop talking. “You have to listen to me.”

  I am gripping the sheet hard, and I’m suddenly aware that my whole body is rigid, as though I’m bracing myself for a fall. The expression on Gray’s face—furrowed brow, thin line of a mouth, eyes averted—tells me something is very wrong. I can’t even bring myself to ask what it is.

  He takes a deep breath, then, “Victory was never gone, Annie, never in danger. I sent her on a cruise with Drew and Vivian. She’s been with them all this time.”

  “No,” I say, feeling my chest tighten. I need desperately for him to understand and believe me. “Listen. Drew and Vivian were in on this. They helped Alan Parker. I think they believed they were helping me. But Parker took it too far. Then I had to save them by leading him to Marlowe.”

  Gray puts his head down and rubs his eyes before putting both hands on my shoulders and looking straight at me. “No, Annie. Nothing like that happened.”

  “Yes,” I say, getting angry now. “It did. Drew and Vivian kept this from you because they knew you’d never be a part of it.”

  He shakes his head slowly, keeping my gaze. “No,” he says gently.

  “Explain then how all those men died on that ship. And Dax—the one who tried to save me—what happened to him?”

  He shakes his head again, seems at a loss for words. There’s something like panic living in my chest. I hear a nurse laugh out in the hallway, and I am suddenly aware of the beeping and humming of a hundred machines designed to monitor and maintain life. Somewhere else on the floor, big-band music is playing, soft and tinny. My breathing feels ragged in my throat.

  “I saw them.”

  He takes my hand and looks at it, plays with the ring on my finger. “You never met the ship in Miami. You disappeared after the dive. You slipped the man who was supposed to take you to the boat.”

  I hear his words, but I can’t believe he’s saying them. He doesn’t believe me.

  “And no one named Dax has ever worked for me, Annie.”

  My heart monitor is beeping fast—107, 108, 109. I hold out my arms so he can see the black-and-blue marks on my body from my struggle on the ship.

  “How did I get all these marks?”

  He rubs my arms tenderly. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know what happened to you out there. But you never made it to the ship that was waiting for you. I’ve been frantic looking for you since you got away from your escort. Finally I got a call from the police in the jurisdiction of Frank Geary’s farmhouse. They found you unconscious from smoke inhalation in the barn. The whole place was on fire. It’s been deserted for years. Locals think it’s haunted. Some kids out there on a dare saw it burning and called the police.”

  “Burning.”

  “You set it on fire.”

  “No,” I say. “I killed Marlowe Geary. And then—” And then what? I find I don’t remember. I remember a flash of white before my eyes as Marlowe lay bleeding.

  “Did they find his body?” I ask. “He was disfigured, injured. He walked with a cane.”

  “No, Annie. You were alone there. There was no body.”

  “But he wasn’t at the farm,” I say quickly. “He was in a trailer far out in the woods. No one else in the world knew about it but me. That’s why they needed me. Don’t you see?”

  Gray looks stricken, grips my hand. “It’s okay, Annie.”

  “Alan Parker must have arranged for his body to be removed,” I say. I realize then, because of the sad, frightened look on Gray’s face, that everything I’m saying sounds like the ravings of a madwoman.

  “You don’t believe me,” I say, feeling the crushing weight of despair.

  He puts his hand on my hair and rubs the back of my neck, brings his face close to mine. I wrap my arms around the wide expanse of his shoulders.

  “I believe that you believe it,” he whispers. I hold on to him, rest my head against him.

  “My father,” I say, trying again but sounding desperate. “He’s the one who figured out where Marlowe was hiding.”

  He holds on to me tighter. “Your father said someone broke in to his tattoo shop and went through his albums of old tattoos. He found the book with the photograph of Marlowe’s tattoo open on the desk. He called me right away.”

  “No,” I say. I pull away from Gray and force him to look into my face. “He helped me get back to Florida. A friend of his had a private plane.”

  Gray doesn’t say anything. He just hangs his head again. And I start to weep.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I ask him. I feel so weak suddenly, so dizzy. My chest and throat ache with each sob. Gray reaches for me, and I cling to him.

  “It’s okay, Annie,” he says, those words coiling around me like a snake. “It’s going to be okay.”

  A psychotic break, the doctor says, brought on by the return of all the traumatic memories of my past—a reaction to the desire to merge the two parts of myself, the light and the dark, and maybe even a thirst for revenge against the person who laid waste to my childhood and to my life. All of it a fantasy my unhealthy mind created to make itself whole again. Where was I during the weeks I was missing? How did I get myself to that farm in the middle of Florida? No one knows.

  My new doctor—a pretty blonde with a slight British accent and pouty lips—says she thinks that the germ for this fantasy took root when I saw my mother on television and heard about Grie
f Intervention Services. Something about their message of facing my fears resonated deeply, and I concocted an elaborate scenario in which I could do just that—flee the false life I’d constructed, pursue the man who I’d always believed was pursuing me, face him down and kill him. This fantasy lay dormant, a kind of psychological escape hatch—the items I kept in my box spring, the contact information for Oscar, my touchstones. My doctor thinks that it was the recent murder so heavily covered in the news, a murder that took place just miles from Frank Geary’s horse farm, that caused my recent spate of panic attacks. And when I learned from Vivian that they’d lied about Marlowe’s body, this knowledge set off the final chain reaction in my brain.

  “The death of Annie Powers, leading to a journey and a battle where you had to fight your way back to Marlowe and destroy him to save your daughter,” she says in the quiet, thoughtful manner she has. “Only in this way did you believe you could reclaim Ophelia, save her from Marlowe as no one else was able. Only once you’d done this could you save your daughter.”

  She is excited by her own theory; I can tell by the way she leans forward and looks at me with bright, wide eyes. “You never believed he was dead. We don’t, you know, we can’t really unless we see a body. That’s why we have funerals, to convince ourselves that death is real, that people have truly gone. Our instincts tell us that people can’t die; they can’t just be here one moment and then gone the next. Your family convinced you against your instincts. When you learned about their lies, you were sure that you’d been right all along. Marlowe’s threats from long ago lived in your subconscious. This was the trigger that brought on the whole episode.”

  I don’t argue with her. I know that arguing only makes me seem insane.

  “My guess is that even though this has been a traumatic event for you, you feel better than you have in years. Am I right?”

  She is right. The ugliness that Marlowe brought into my life has been cleansed. I may have let him into my mother’s house, allowed him to slash through everything like a straight razor, but in the end I stood and defeated him. He is—finally—dead.

  “It’s interesting, though, that he was injured, disfigured when you confronted him,” she says, musing. “It’s as if his influence over you had already started to weaken. All you had to do was deliver the final blow.”

  I nod, slowly, thoughtfully. “I think you’re right.”

  If she detects a lack of sincerity in my voice, she doesn’t say so. She scribbles something in her pad. I can tell she finds me an interesting case.

  How easily it’s all explained away. Simon Briggs: He was a predator who discovered somehow that Ophelia still lived. He didn’t work for anyone else, and he needed money. He’d come back to blackmail us, knowing we had to keep my identity a secret. Who killed him? Of course we know it was Gray. As far as the police are concerned, it could have been any of a number of his enemies or dissatisfied clients. When you live a life like Briggs’s, there’s almost no other way to die than beneath a bridge with a bullet in your brain.

  What about poor Dr. Brown? Authorities were just about to catch up with the unlicensed doctor. He was facing fines and jail time. He packed up his office and fled. He’d done it before, in New York and California. What I saw? Well…we can’t put much stock in that, can we? And who might have killed him? An angry patient, maybe—who knows what kind of associations a man like that might have?

  The stalker on the beach could have been Briggs laying the groundwork for his blackmail by unsettling me. Or perhaps it was just my imagination. I saw an innocent stranger walking in the grass, and my sick brain did the rest. The necklace I claimed to have found. No one ever saw it but me, and it is gone. The other half heart, which I kept all these years, is also gone from its velvet box under my mattress. This leads my doctor and everyone else to believe that I never found another necklace on the beach.

  “It was a symbol for you, an important one,” the doctor explains. “You were halved by Marlowe, separated from your true self. By thinking you’d found the other part of your necklace, you were committing yourself to a journey back to wholeness.”

  My doctor is very pleased with this theory.

  But my mother did in fact die just over a year ago in a drunk-driving accident for which she was responsible. So how was it that, in my fantasy, Marlowe relayed this information? I must have heard about it somehow, possibly read it on the Internet and, unable to accept it, pushed it deep down into my psyche. It resurfaced with all the other demons during my last episode.

  And, finally, Grief Intervention Services, what about them? Just a grief-and victim-counseling organization known for such controversial techniques as hypnosis, immersion therapy, and other unconventional practices like forcing victims to return to the scene of their trauma, visiting their assailants in prison, watching executions—certainly not involving abduction, torture, murder, and such. And yes, it was founded and run until recently by Alan Parker, father of Melissa, husband of Janet. But he’s been living out of the country for several years, battling cancer, far too unwell to travel. Another piece of information I must have absorbed during my obsessive Internet searches and filed away for inclusion in the daddy of all psychotic episodes.

  The good news is that my new doctor does not think I’m truly mentally ill—as in chronically or permanently. She doesn’t feel I have a chemical imbalance, something that will need to be treated with medication for the rest of my life. She believes that I am suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder that started the night I watched Janet Parker kill Frank Geary. The horrors I witnessed during my time with Marlowe deepened my trauma. The adoption of a false identity and my desire to be rid of Ophelia only made things worse. She believes that if I had turned myself over to the police, faced whatever punishment might have been doled out, sought therapy, and tried to move forward in my life as Ophelia March—I would have suffered less in the aftermath.

  Of course I agree. I agree with everything they say. I do what I must to survive in my life as it is. I adapt, as I always have.

  Because I’m so agreeable, I’m allowed to go home to my family. I will not face arson charges for Frank Geary’s farm. Technically, it belonged to me, anyway. This is one of the reasons my new doctor thinks I burned it down—because it was the last link to Frank and Marlowe Geary.

  “Fire is very cleansing,” she says. She’s right. I am glad that the farm’s a pile of ash. I hope someone levels the whole place and builds a mall on it.

  I have agreed to let the county sell the property and keep the proceeds. In exchange, they will not bring any charges against me. It has all been very cordial.

  Likewise, Ophelia March will not be charged for her association to Marlowe Geary’s crimes. Because we crossed so many state lines and Marlowe committed multiple murders, it is a federal matter. So far no one at the FBI or the federal prosecutor’s office is sufficiently motivated to bring charges against me. I am widely regarded as a victim, not as an accomplice. I am generally pitied, not reviled. So far the information about Ophelia’s survival has managed not to make headline news. For this I am grateful, though I wonder if it is only a matter of time.

  And somehow, with Drew and Gray’s connections, the identity theft of the real Annie has gone away as well. It’s all quite seamless.

  I return to the quiet, empty days of my life. Ella comes every morning to be with me after Victory has gone to school. I talk to her about everything. She listens in a way that Gray cannot. He feels a certain anxiety, a need to fix and control, to comfort and soothe, especially regarding events he believes happened only in my mind. This is not what I need. I need an ear, someone to hear and understand that the things that happened have meaning and significance to me—whether they happened in my head or not. Ella seems to understand this. She is a patient and interested listener, not unlike my doctor.

  “Do I call you Annie or Ophelia?” Ella wants to know this morning as we enjoy coffee on the pool deck. We lie on bright beach towels sprea
d over the wide, comfortable lounge chairs. The air is warm with a light breeze. Over whispering waves, gulls screech, fighting in the air over a fish one of them has caught. I have been home for three weeks.

  “I think Annie, you know?” I say. I have given this some thought, of course. “I decided I’m going to change my name to Annie Ophelia Powers. I’m not that girl anymore. But she’s still a part of who I am.”

  She nods her understanding. “You know what, Annie?” she says, giving me a smile. “You seem well. Better than you’ve ever been. More solid, centered.”

  “Whole,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  Marlowe Geary is dead. I shot him and watched as the life drained from him. Finally, I rescued Ophelia. She is safe. She has a home and a family who loves her. I don’t say any of this. There’s no point.

  We sit in silence for a while, sipping coffee. In the kitchen I hear the new maid and nanny, a young woman named Brigit drop a glass; it shatters on the tile. She is someone Gray hired when Esperanza quit. She is cool where Esperanza was warm, thin where Esperanza was curvaceous, quiet where Esperanza was exuberant. She’s not bad, just different. I’ve wanted to call Esperanza, but apparently she has gone back to Mexico to care for her dying mother; there is no phone in her home there. She promised Gray to come back after her mother’s passing. I am afraid that she has left because of me. Victory misses her very much, and so do I. But in a way my daughter and I are closer for her absence.

  I go in to see if Brigit is okay. She is, just flustered and apologetic. I try to put her at ease and think again how much we miss Esperanza.

  When I return, Ella is reading the paper.

  “Did you hear what happened to the police detective who was here that night?” she says.

  “Ray Harrison?”

  “Yeah.”

  I don’t know if she knows about how he blackmailed us, and I can’t decide whether I should get into all that with her. I haven’t thought about him in a while. I remember our last encounter outside the pool where I took my diving lessons, how his conversation led me to Vivian, who told me about Marlowe’s body. She claims that she never said anything about Dr. Brown or made any cryptic statements like, “That’s what they told me to say.” She was fooled by him like everybody else, she claims. Needless to say, our relationship has cooled. She is nervous and uncomfortable around me. We keep up appearances for Victory’s sake. Drew has avoided me altogether.