Salter, Anna C

by Fault lines

  I paused trying to figure out which way to go. I took a deep breath and started crawling slowly forward. I could barely hear him talking under Camille's wailing. I crawled forward, inches at a time, and looked all around the room. I could hear him, but I couldn't see him. I inched toward the closet, but stopped when I realized the voice wasn't coming from there.

  Finally, I got it. I really got it. I stood up and walked over to the lights and flipped them on. Camille didn't even notice. Keeter did, and she looked at me like maybe she'd finally found the source of the problem. I walked back into the living room and turned on the lights there. There wasn't anybody in either room, but the voice just kept going.

  I found the phone and called Adam at home. He answered immediately. "Adam," I said. "I'm at Camille's. Can you hear me?"

  "Barely," he said. Camille was sobbing and screaming. She was in a full-blown flashback and was begging the perp not to hurt her anymore.

  "I think you'd better get over here," I said. "I've figured out the problem. There's no perp here, but there is a voice. There is definitely a voice."

  "On my way," he said.

  I walked back into Camille's room. I wasn't going to look for the tape recorder. Everything was evidence now, and I knew enough to keep my mitts off. "Camille," I said, "it's Michael." I walked around the side of the bed farthest from Keeter and held out my hand. "Come on, we're leaving." It would have been easier if I could have shut the goddamn recording off.

  "Camille," I said, again. "It's Michael, we're leaving." She turned toward me. "Don't let him hurt me, please," she whimpered. "I won't," I said. In the distance I could hear the sirens starting.

  "We're leaving. Let's go."

  "But . . . he . . ."

  "You're not tied," I said loudly to drown out that incessant voice. "You don't have any tape on. It's over. Let's go. We're going over to Harvey's house." I held out my hand again.

  This time Camille slowly took it. She was half in this world and half in another. Keeter came around my side of the bed and looked at me suspiciously. No wonder she wasn't any help. What's a dog supposed to do with a tape recorder?

  Camille got up slowly, and I put my arm around her and walked her out of the room. Tears were running down her cheeks, and I could feel her shoulders heave with convulsive sobs, but she had stopped screaming. The whole thing reminded me of somebody Adam had walked out of a gym not so long ago —me.

  The voice got fainter as we moved through the living room. I opened the front door in time to see the red lights coming down the street. Adam lived a little farther out, and the police cars had beaten him in. Harvey came out of his house, and I asked him to take Camille to his house, I'd be right back. I walked back into Camille's house just as the police cars were pulling up. I just wanted to hear that voice one time without anybody screaming. I thought I knew it somehow. I walked into the bedroom and listened.

  Son-of-a-bitch, I thought, when I realized who it was. Son-of-a-bitch.

  22

  By the next day, it was all over. The police found the tape recorder that the son-of-a-bitch had hidden in the bed. It was not a simple business: It was attached to a device that caused it to start randomly and rewind automatically when the tape was over. Since Camille was the only one there, she was the only one who ever heard it.

  It was a custom job, not the kind of thing you could go out to Radio Shack and buy. It took a clever fellow to set it up for random play, but that was hardly a surprise. Willy was always a clever fellow.

  Adam put out an APB on Willy on the strength of my recognizing his voice. But since he could easily have hit the road by now —leaving me to wonder and Camille to suffer —we all knew it might take a while to track him down, if ever.

  Camille was staying at Harvey and his wife's house for a few days. She hadn't wanted to go back home alone, and Harvey and Lenore had gallantly offered her a place. I suspected they would shortly regret their kindness or impulsiveness. It is more than a little difficult to deal with someone suffering from PTSD, and Harvey didn't much like dogs.

  In the meantime the police were going to continue quietly watching Camille's house. Willy's equipment was there. Maybe he'd come back to check it or remove it or whatever.

  I had gone home shortly after Adam arrived. He knew about Willy getting out of prison, and he knew all about Camille, so there was nothing I had to tell him that night. I did have a whole lot more to tell him —Willy and the e-mail and the bugging of my office and all that. But it would be better, I thought, to tell him in the privacy of his office in the morning.

  I didn't relish the exchange —I had promised to tell Adam if Willy contacted me, and I hadn't done it—but I was too damn tired to get into it in the middle of the night. Tomorrow, I decided. I would tell him tomorrow. That would still be in time to head off Carlotta and in plenty of time for whatever help it would give in catching Willy.

  But when morning came, I hung around for a while. I would tell him; I had to. But first I needed a little time to recharge my own batteries.

  I made some coffee and headed for the deck. It was a crisp spring morning, and I put on the bathrobe Carlotta had given me for Christmas. It was made from Turkish terry cloth and was luxuriously thick and soft. It wasn't the sort of thing I would ever have bought for m^^self: mostly I sleep in T-shirts and avoid single-purpose items like the plague.

  But Carlotta had known me better than I knew myself It was a licking-your-wounds robe, and I frequently had wounds to lick. It was the thing to wear when you missed the big shot at the buzzer, when you lost the case you should have won, or when a kid you fought for went back to an abusing parent — although there wasn't enough terry cloth in the world to help that. It was what I instinctively reached for today, when I had to face the fact that coming to see me had made Camille worse.

  Camille had come into my life with active PTSD from running into one of nature's little aberrations: a full-blown, card-carrying, soul-dead sadist. She had been in awful shape, but not nearly as bad as she was now. If she hadn't met me, Willy would never have stalked her and harassed her and she would never have had the many flashbacks he had caused. She had deteriorated to the max, and that wouldn't have happened without his help. And the problem was, he would never have crossed her threshold if she hadn't crossed mine.

  If I tried to tell Carlotta or Adam how miserable I felt about bringing Camille a gift like Willy—not that I was going to —all I'd get back was that it wasn't my fault. As if that helped. People are dolts, myself included.

  For years, I hadn't understood why rape victims kept insisting it was their fault. If they hadn't been walking down the street at seven o'clock at night, if they hadn't worn a skirt above the knee, if they hadn't been wearing high heels, it never would have happened.

  I finally got it. What would I rather believe — that I had some control and could keep it from happening again by changing a hemline? Or that it could happen anytime, anyplace, no matter what I did? Helplessness is never a plus.

  And I also felt helpless. I was helpless in this case. I had never intended to let Willy loose on Camille. I hadn't even realized it was a possibility. And that just made everything worse. If they didn't catch Willy, he would inflict a sense of helplessness on me I'd have trouble living with. He could come back and do something—something new and nasty —to anyone I knew, anyone I cared about, anyone I treated.

  I really did have to talk to Adam. Maybe he could figure out some clue from Willy's e-mail, about how he got access to my office. If there was anything at all in Willy's behavior that would help catch him, I needed to be sure Adam had it. If Adam didn't catch Willy, sooner or later Willy would strip away any sense of efficacy I had. And I didn't even want to think about the amount of destruction he'd leave in his wake.

  I got up reluctantly. There was something soothing in th(i robe and the stream and the sunlight, and the rest of the day wasn't going to measure up. I'd have to call Adam from the office and arrange a time to talk about this. Ne
cessary but painful. There was the small issue of betraying his trust by lying to him. But first, Camille was coming in, and I had to get there in time to sweep the room for bugs before she came.

  I drove in preoccupied with the strange way things work. Hemingway was no fool. Nobody is an island no matter how much they want to be. What would it take? I had moved to an isolated house in the country, given up on any kind of normal social life, thrown away most of my possessions, and I was still a sitting duck.

  I knew what it took. You had to not give a shit about any other human being if you wanted to be invulnerable to the kind of thing Willy had pulled. Son-of-a-bitch had just set the price higher than I could pay.

  I got out of the car and reluctantly took off the fanny pack. As long as Willy was out there I still wanted to wear it nonstop, but I had a few rules about guns. I never took one into my office because I saw children there. Children and guns are a bad combination. I had counseled adults who had dead children because they had hidden their guns in one locked drawer and their bullets in a different one and their kids still got into them. I put the fanny pack in the trunk and closed it, feeling nude and vulnerable without it.

  I walked in, took the bug detector out of the drawer, and scanned the room with renewed vigor. The last thing I wanted to do at this point was to tip Willy off that we knew what he was up to. But again I found nothing, nothing, and more nothing.

  I looked at the scanner. There was one possibility I hadn't even thought about. What if the damn thing was broken?

  Oh, Jesus, what a mess that would be. I sat down and tried to think. There were other possibilities. I hadn't heard from Willy since the e-mail about that lying little twerp. For all I knew, he could be a thousand miles away. He'd scared the bejesus out of me and left his little device with Camille. No doubt he had hung around to savor her deterioration for a while, but for how long? I really didn't have any way of knowing if he was even still around. Playing a few minutes at a time, a few times a day, his recorder would run for weeks without needing new batteries.

  The scanner could be working fine. Willy could just be gone.

  That, of course, was the worst-case scenario I had been mulling over all morning. He could be running blitzkrieg campaigns, wreaking havoc and then disappearing. If he stayed away for months or years until everything died down, he could resurface safely and start all over again. If he kept doing that, he could make me miserable for years and years without getting caught. Or worse, he could lull me into thinking all he was going to do was harass me.

  As I remembered, Alexander the Great did something like that with some elephants once upon a time. He had marched up and down the river at random times in the night until the enemy quit even getting up to see the parade. Then one night he crossed the river.

  I stared at the phone. I should call Adam. I had left myself enough time to go by and talk to Adam. This was harder than I thought. Maybe betraying Adam's trust was kind of a big deal to me, and I had well and truly done that. Who said you couldn't develop new skills in your forties. First, lying, now procrastination. Pretty soon I'd be into passive aggression — which had always eluded me before.

  The phone rang, and I jumped. If it was anybody but Adam I was going to be relieved.

  "Michael, do you have time to see us today?"

  "Lorraine?" Lorraine was a single mom with three small boys. She tended only to call in a crisis, and then she needed to be seen that second. In between, there was no point in setting appointments: She canceled and failed to show and left messages that everything was fine.

  In Lorraine's world, problems were ignored until they couldn't be. I'd made my peace with the fact that I wasn't going to change her disorganized and sometimes abusive parenting st^de, but maybe I could keep the situation as stable as possible — at least I could try to keep her from killing any of her offspring.

  As if reading my mind, Lorraine added, "So help me, God, I'm going to kill the little bastard this time."

  "How about right now?" I said looking at my watch. Camille wasn't due for an hour, and Lorraine didn't live far.

  "The sooner the better," she said and hung up.

  Thank you, Lorraine. It was a short reprieve, but maybe it would give me time to figure out why I was so upset about fessing up to Adam. And it was a situation where I would have postponed talking to him even if I had wanted to.

  To my surprise, Lorraine showed up with her eldest, six-year-old Daniel, in tow. Usually it was Damion, her two-year-old, or Donald, her three-year-old, who had fought or broken something or disappeared or whatever. Lorraine was one of those moms who thought it was cute to start all her children's names with the same letter.

  "He's a goddamn pervert," she said, completely ignoring Daniel, who looked more dejected than I had ever seen him. He had reluctantly followed his mother into the waiting room and stood by the door as if ready to bolt.

  "Whoa," I said. "Let's let Daniel sit here in the waiting room and play for a minute while we talk." This was not a mother I wanted to see with the child. Lorraine's idea of talking to her child was to heap emotional abuse on his head. "But one thing I know," I said looking at Daniel. "Daniel is not a pervert."

  Daniel looked slightly relieved. Jesus, the self-fulfilling prophecies people lay on their children. I gathered up some Play-Doh and Magic Markers and paper and set Daniel up in the waiting room. I smiled at him. "Your mama is upset," I said, "and she says things that aren't true when she's upset. I know you're not a pervert"—whatever Daniel thought that was. "Let me talk with her for a few minutes, and we'll figure things out." I walked back into my office and closed the door calmly. Lorraine was sitting on the couch, looking so angry she was one step short of one of her fits-of-screaming-rage attacks.

  "Goddamn it, Michael," she said. "Every time I try to do something nice for them, they spoil it. They've broken every fucking toy they own. So why do I bother? Don't think my son-of-a-bitching father ever bought a goddamn thing for me. But do they appreciate a thing I do? I was so pleased he hadn't broken this one. What a joke!"

  She reached into a bag and brought out something that looked like a miniature radar dish attached to a handle that looked like a joystick. There were wires hanging down and earphones. She threw it on the couch.

  "Slow down," I said sitting down very slowly. I move slowly and I talk slowly when people are upset. People respond to body English more than they know. The temptation is almost overwhelming to match their agitated tempo, but that just makes things worse. "I don't have a clue what you're talking about, but one thing I know for sure, if you keep calling Daniel a pervert, sooner or later he's going to believe you."

  "So it's my fault if he turns into a pervert?" she said. "Why is everything always my fault?" Lorraine sounded like a petulant eight-year-old, which in some ways she was.

  "Lorraine, calm down," I said gently. "All I'm saying is your children listen to you more than you know. Tell the truth. Somewhere in your soul, don't you still believe you're what your father said you were?"

  "What's that got to do with it?" she said.

  "Everything," I said. "Do you want Daniel to carry around the idea he's a pervert? No matter what he's done, he's still six years old, for Christ's sake."

  "He's a six-year-old pervert," she said. "You know, they suck me in every time. I should have known. Do you know why he hadn't broken this toy? Do you know why? Because he'd discovered he could peep on the neighbors with it, that's why."

  "Peep on the neighbors?" I said, surprised. It was certainly a new behavior for Daniel, as far as I knew.

  "Yes, peep on the neighbors. You know how our houses are so close—well, you don't, but if my neighbor sneezes I get a cold. Anyway, Daniel's window is just a few feet from our neighbor's bedroom window."

  "And he was peeping on him?"

  "Yes, he was. I came in to check on him. To tell you the truth, he was too quiet. Usually, he's calling me every two seconds. He wants water. He wants a story. He has to go to the bathroom. He
's scared. He acts just like a big baby. But the last few nights, he's gone to bed just like that. No water, no nothing.

  "The first couple of nights I was so tired, I was just grateful. I mean, Damion and Donald were still up every two seconds, so it wasn't like I got to sit down. Then I began to wonder.

  Daniel hadn't seemed sick, but I started thinking maybe he was. I went in to check on him, and there he was, sitting at the window in the dark, peeping on the neighbors."

  "Lorraine, let me ask you some questions, okay? To try and sort out what's going on. Have you ever caught Daniel doing anything sexual?"

  "Sure. He used to put his bottle on his you-know-what and rock on it when he went to sleep."

  "When he was a toddler, right?"

  "Well, he hasn't had one since then."

  "Most kids play with themselves."

  "Not mine."

  "You've got to trust me a little bit, Lorraine. There's a big difference in kids doing things you don't like and being a pervert. Does Daniel play with himself around other children or in school or anything like that?"

  "Oh, no. I'd have beat the shit out of him if he'd done anything like that."

  "Has he done anything sexual with other kids that you know about?"

  "My God, no."

  "Has anything happened, anything at all to make you concerned about Daniel and sex?"

  "You mean before this?"

  "Yes."

  "No, but this is bad enough."

  "Actually, to be honest with you —and I say this knowing you'll find it hard to believe —it isn't."

  "It isn't? This isn't bad enough? What are you talking about? If the neighbors had caught him, he could have been arrested."

  "Not at six, he couldn't. Lorraine, kids are curious about sex. You may not like it, but it's true. Weren't you? Don't you remember being curious about sex as a kid?"