by Fault lines
"By accident," she said. "I told a guy I knew at a local service station that I was looking for a protection dog. I used to take my car there, and we were just talking one day while I had some work done on the car. I was getting ready to leave. I just couldn't stay in Boston anymore after the . . . Well, I kept thinking he knew where I lived and he'd come back. I hardly told anybody I was going. I was afraid he'd find out somehow."
"He," I knew, was always the perp. She never called him anything else. He was on her mind so much she always thought I knew whom she was talking about when she said "he."
"I had to have the car fixed. I didn't tell Chris what happened, but he probably figured something. I always took my car there so I knew him before, and afterward, I was a lot . . . different." Her eyes started filling up. There was always the ongoing grief for who she had been.
"You know," she said as the tears started, "I've lived alone since I was sixteen. I never had a problem. My mother was depressed all the time, and she drank. I could never get her to stop even though I tried all the time. I couldn't bring anybody home because Mom would be staggering around in her nightgown, and finally I just left. I put myself through school, and I did everything by myself. I told the other nurses it was ridiculous to need an escort to the parking lot. I just didn't know ... I never . . ."
Camille cried for a few minutes, and we were both silent. I had never met the woman she was describing, although something about Camille had always shone through the jumble of fear and anxiety that surrounded her. There was some core of all that she used to be still there, but it was very far away.
"Chris introduced you to the trainer?" I said softly. A part of me wanted to keep talking about her life before the cyclone, and today she could. But my anxiety about the perp being back was growing, and if he really was back, she might not have a life to talk about if I didn't find out more about how he was getting into her house.
"Chris called him and called me back to say I should talk to him. He thought he'd sell me a dog if I really wanted one. He said he wasn't a regular dealer, just a guy who had some dogs he rented out to service stations and places like that."
It didn't surprise me that it had been that easy to get a dog. While dealers are attuned to ethical issues around guard dogs, there is a whole other-world out there of macho types who own guard dogs or breed a few and who think everybody should have one. Some are survivalists or military wannabees or whatever.
"Did Chris use the guy's dogs in his service station at night?"
"Sure," she said. "That's how he knew him."
"Did Chris know Keeter?"
"I don't know," she said. "Why?"
I ignored the question. "Why was the trainer willing to give up a dog?" I asked. "He didn't usually sell them, did he? I mean, you said he wasn't a regular dealer?"
"No, I don't think so, but, well, Keeter wasn't behaving too well. Wait a minute. Chris did know her, because I remember him telling me I should think twice about getting her. He said she wasn't too stable. I forgot all about that. But the other guy said she just needed somebody with her. He said there was a difference in being alone all night in an empty building and being with an owner all the time."
"What was she doing that was so bad?"
"I don't know for sure," she said. "I think she was maybe a little too aggressive or something. I think Chris said she gave the clerk a hard time when he tried to open the store in the morning. Chris said he didn't have any trouble with her, but he couldn't be there every day. I don't care what she did," she said defiantly. "I had to have a dog, and nobody else would sell me one."
"Was she already trained as a seizure dog?" I said doubtfully.
"No, I took her in for training right after I got her. There was a training center in Manchester. Actually," she said sheepishly, "she didn't do that well. She didn't really graduate, but I needed a guard dog more than a seizure dog, so I kept her. I just tell people she's a seizure dog," she said looking down, "so they'll let her come with me. Otherwise, there're a lot of places that won't let her in, but she didn't really get her papers.
"She might do the right thing, I mean if I had a seizure, but she might not. The guy said she was unreliable."
I looked at Keeter again. Great. She was an unreliable guard dog who'd had a little training in seizures and was unreliable there too. What the hell would she do in an emergency? Who knew?
So where did all that leave us? The guy who sold her the dog was out as the perp. She hadn't met him before the attack, and it would be too much of a coincidence for her to meet him afterward. But Chris wasn't out. Chris was somebody whom Keeter knew and who could walk into a building that Keeter was guarding without her taking his throat out. That had been their relationship. Keeter guarded the gas station until Chris got there.
And the fact that Chris knew Camille before the attack fit. A lot of attackers know their victims casually. That's how they target them. Camille wouldn't have recognized him. She had told me the perp had been wearing a ski mask, and somebody wouldn't recognize their grandmother if she were wearing one of those things.
But wouldn't Camille have recognized Chris's voice if she knew him? Maybe, maybe not. People who are abducted are so frightened they hardly recognize their own voices, and Camille had only known him slightly.
If Chris were the perp, what a stroke of luck he had. Camille comes in, and he gets to gloat over how horrible she looks. Then she tells him she wants a guard dog, and he puts her on to one who knows him and who won't react if he walks in on her turf.
But I didn't know Chris was the one. For one thing, he had warned her against Keeter. Still, whoever it was, one thing was for sure: Keeter wasn't perp-proof. There were people who could get into the house without her raising a fuss —her trainer and Chris, for starters. Not to mention that everybody who knew Keeter had rated her as unreliable.
"Did Chris know where you were going?" I asked.
She thought a minute. 'T don't think he knew exactly. I told him I was going to New England. No, wait, I remember him saying he used to live in Vermont, and we started talking about it, so I think I did tell him the general area. Why do you ask?"
Uh-oh. I needed to talk to Adam right away. This might not be a job for a therapist after all. If there was a perp outside her head and not inside it, it was strictly a job for the police. I had zero expertise in catching perps.
But that, of course, was what Adam had been telling me all along about Willy. Willy was surely outside my head as well as inside it. But this was different, I reasoned. It made sense for me to turn Camille's case over to Adam and not mine. Unfortunately, the voice in my head failed me when I tried to think why.
Well, shit, just face it. This was different because it wasn't me. This was about Camille. And she didn't sleep with Adam, and she didn't have a crazy, prickly, porcupine thing about her boundaries, and most of all, maybe, she wasn't Mama's child.
There was that other thing too. I knew I couldn't tolerate Adam's rescuing me twice. I'd resent hell out of him for it. Mama's child. Unfortunately, I was truly Mama's child.
I got some paper from Camille and wrote out a couple of permission forms. Camille had had a so-so experience with the Boston police after the attack. One officer had been pretty sensitive to her confused state, and the other had pushed her to give all the details. When she couldn't—she dissociated when she tried to talk about it—he had been impatient with her and finally left.
Some progress has been made in twenty years of feminists harping about the way rape victims are treated. Cops no longer routinely hook victims up to lie detector tests, and some places even have women cops do much of the interviewing. But the truth is, there are far more rapes than women cops available to interview victims, and old attitudes still die hard. Camille's experience with the police had been better than that of most rape victims in a big city environment.
And, in all fairness, Camille would have been impossible to interview. She was found nude, in a dog kennel. She was disso
ciative and couldn't talk about what happened without losing it and becoming completely incoherent. Cops are oriented toward catching perps, and Camille wouldn't have been any help at all. They would have had a nasty crime on their hands with an eyewitness who was useless to them. I could see a cop getting frustrated with that.
I told Camille what I had in mind and she agreed. She still saw the police as a help, and she didn't mind my bringing Adam in or contacting the two police who had investigated the attack before. But she never would have called them on her own. The perp loomed too large in her mind. She didn't think anybody could stop him.
I left uneasily. If Camille was in danger, I didn't like to leave her there, not even with Keeter, since Keeter wasn't proving to be too helpful on this one. But even if Keeter did know Chris, I reminded myself, and Chris was the perp, that didn't mean she would let him attack Camille. Camille was her owner now, and Chris had never been. She had been trained to let Chris into a building she was guarding, but she had never been trained to let him attack her handler.
And all training aside, there was the business of Keeter's genes. A Rottweiler had protect-your-owner written into its DNA.
For once I used the car phone. I have a prejudice against car phones, but I had finally bought one when Adam threatened to give me one if I didn't. I had explained my prejudice to him—buy a car phone, and the next step is a phone in the shower, and soon there is no time you aren't connected to the world. I didn't like being connected to it as much as I was, and I surely wasn't looking for more—but he hadn't been impressed.
He just said he had a prejudice too, a thing about friends of his who routinely confronted sex offenders riding around alone without car phones, not thinking for one second about whom they were dealing with. What was I going to do, he had asked, if I were followed and run off the road —look for a pa^^ phone?
I didn't like using it, but I wanted to be able to say enough alarming stuff to the dispatcher that she would track Adam down if he wasn't there, and I didn't want to do that in front of Camille. But I was in luck. He was there and free, and she put me through to him. I told him I had a client with a problem that might be outside her head rather than inside, and I needed to talk to him about it. He said to come on in.
He was writing something when I walked through the open door of his office. "Hi," I said softly.
He looked up and smiled. "Come on in," he said and pulled up a chair for me. The smile didn't go away when he sat back down, and for a moment I remembered how I loved to touch the smile creases in the corners of his eyes with my fingertips. I knew all the planes and creases of his face by touch.
For a moment there was silence, and the atmosphere started to pick up a charge. I remembered Hawaii and the feel of the sand on my bare back. I remembered my loft and the moon shining through the skylight across his bare chest. I remembered his fingers sliding between ... I looked at him. I saw the look in his eye and knew he was remembering something too, whatever it was.
"Don't start," I said.
Adam didn't speak.
"I'm here on business," I said.
Adam still didn't speak.
"Look, if you're going to — " But Adam interrupted.
"Michael," he said, "I haven't said anything."
"Oh," I said. "That's right. . . . Never mind."
How could this man discombobulate me like that? I shouldn't let myself get in the same room with him.
"Just projection," I said, sighing. "I'm talking to myself."
"Keep talking," he said.
"Never mind," I replied.
I started to tell him about Camille. Adam didn't seem to be paying that much attention—whether he admitted it or not, he had a look in his eyes I knew pretty well —until I started talking about why I was no longer sure she was having flashbacks. A lot of cops would have dismissed what I said —I had zero for hard evidence—but Adam wasn't a lot of cops.
He got very focused, and wherever he had been, he wasn't anymore. I told him about Chris, and he got even more interested. He knew as well as I did that sadists could and did return. If there was a way to get around Keeter, then what Camille was saying wasn't all that improbable.
"How sure are you?" he said, finally.
"That they're not flashbacks? I don't know. They just don't sound like flashbacks. How do you have a flashback to something that never happened? I guess I'd have to say pretty sure."
"How do you know she isn't making it up?"
"The whole thing? From the beginning? As in Munescheusen? Oh, I'd stake a lot on that. You can't fake the way she was in the hospital. Pupils dilated, shallow, rapid breathing, skin color changes. She was in a full-blown panic attack."
"Crazy?"
"Crazy? As in paranoid? And has panic attacks because she believes what she says?" Actually, I hadn't even thought about it, but it didn't sound right.
"I don't know. The content of her delusions isn't right. I don't know why, but paranoids all have the same kinds of delusions: People are broadcasting through their teeth; aliens have planted a transmitter in their skulls. This isn't anything like any paranoid delusion I've ever seen."
"Yeah, but they do have a thing about people going after them."
"True," I had to admit. "I guess I can't rule it out completely, but I don't buy it. I'd have to think about why." I paused while I tried to figure out why I was so sure it wasn't paranoia.
"Paranoids have this suspicious way about them," I said finally. "They check your office. They decide you're one of them. They keep looking for hidden recorders. I don't get any of that from Camille.
"But it's all the more reason to check with the original cops on the case. I can't say it's impossible. But I'd say if the original incident happened like she said, there's not a lot of reason to think she's making this one up." I knew that was where Adam would start anyway. He'd want to get the original crime reports and find out how far the Boston cops had gotten on solving the case.
"Now, Michael, don't get upset. False Memory Syndrome?"
I rolled my eyes. "Adam, we've gone through this. The false memory zealots have zero —and I do mean zero —evidence there is any such thing. And there is a whole lot of evidence — as in tons —that there isn't. But even if you were a died-in-the-wool false memory crazy, you wouldn't apply it to this case. This is out-of-family-stranger attack. Not exactly the kind of case that's a candidate for the false memory bullshit.
"Besides, I really don't think the issue is going to be the original attack. I have a feeling Boston will confirm that she was found just like she said. I think the issue is going to be whether that attack did something to her so profound that this guy is back only in her head. Even by the backlash's reckoning, that wouldn't be a false memory issue."
"I'll check it out," he said, "and call you."
I gave him what I had. Bit by bit, I had gotten little pieces of what happened from Camille. She knew the exact date that she had been abducted, and, of course, she knew the name of the hospital where she had worked. She wasn't as sure where she had been found. Everything immediately after the attack was hazy, but she remembered one of the detective's names very clearly. She had dissociated by focusing on his name badge when he was hassling her.
I left reluctantly; I just felt like hanging around. A part of me wanted to say, "So your lover is a porcupine. So?" Maybe I wanted to say, "All right, so you could find a less prickly lover. But could they hit the jumper from the corner?" Maybe most of all I wanted to just say, "Dinner?" But I didn't say any of it. I just said, "See ya." I figured he knew what I meant. No sense in belaboring things.
On the way out I thought about it. Once in a while I used to pick up those books that said things like "Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus." They always made me feel like I was from Pluto. I didn't seem to fit.
Things were fine up until fifth grade. Then all the other girls started sitting on the rocks at recess and combing their hair. Boring, boring, and more boring. I couldn't cope with the roc
ks, so I played tight end on the football team. Needless to say, there weren't a lot of other girls playing.
I knew what I was doing. I was rationalizing the fact that it would kill me to sit down and talk to Adam about our relationship. Some part of me knew I should, but I just didn't want to. And Adam was only slightly better than I was at that sort of thing. Although, come to think of it, when a hard-nosed police chief was better than I was at talking about feelings, it could be I was pretty far out there. Well, somebody had to hold down one end of a continuum. Otherwise the normal curve wouldn't work.
I glanced at my watch. I was running a little late for Marv. As in hours late. It was getting on in the afternoon, and late afternoon is prime time for therapists to see clients. Adults work and kids go to school, so the late afternoon hours are usually the busiest.
Marvin was booked, his secretary told me when I arrived. That didn't surprise me, but the note on my desk did. "I'm seeing clients till eight. Please don't come over to the house afterward or any time during the weekend. I don't really want to talk on the phone about this either. I think it best to wait until Monday and talk to you at work. Could we meet early Monday? Name a time and I'll reschedule whatever I have to. Give the message to Rochelle."
Don't come over to the house? Name a time and he will reschedule? Reschedule a client for the sake of a meeting? That just didn't happen. Don't call. Something pretty serious was going on, but I couldn't think of any scenario that would have Marv telling me not to come by the house to talk about it. Did he have a lover I didn't know about who didn't want company? Domestic problems?
But Marv didn't have a lover except for his paintings — I was pretty sure of that—and try as I might, I couldn't think of a single painting that would object to my dropping by.
And Lord, it could not be, no, it could not be somehow that Ginger was staying at his house. Even if Marv had a psychotic break, he wouldn't permit such a thing ... I hoped. I reminded myself of the numerous times I'd been in cases where people were astonished at some of the things their friends or family members had done. Nobel prizewinners and rock stars molested kids. Presidents of universities made obscene phone calls. And every one of those people had other people who loved them and absolutely could not believe they would do such a thing.