He gave his mother a pained look. “Not like this.”
19
The doctor glared at the two women with disdain, but finally lowered the shotgun. “What do you want?”
The women looked at each other. They took a few steps forward. “We need to talk to you.”
Reluctantly, Rief raised the shotgun up and laid it over his shoulder. “Not here. Inside.” He climbed the steps to the porch and opened the door. Looking back, he saw the two women take a deep breath and follow him up the wide steps.
In all the excitement, Mary had forgotten how crisp it was outside until they walked into the small log cabin. In the corner was a woodstove, glowing orange inside. Next to it was a small, clean kitchen with a wooden table near the window. On their left was a larger sitting area with a hallway leading to the rear. The A-frame ceiling rose high above their heads.
Rief motioned the women to a couch against the wall and took a seat in front of them. He kept the gun laying across his lap. The angry look on his face was replaced by one of distrust.
“How did you find me?” he asked.
“From a doctor at the hospital, Dr. Bailey. He said you used to go fishing together a long time ago.” She barely finished the sentence when Rief spoke again.
“What are your names?”
Mary leaned forward. “My name is Mary Creece and this is Sue Bales. Like I said, we’re from Los Angeles.”
Rief stared at Sue for a long time before turning back. “What are you doing here?”
“We’re looking for you,” Mary answered. “You are Dr. Rief?”
He gave her a subtle, reluctant nod.
“We’re hoping you can help us.”
He didn’t say anything, so Sue retrieved something from her jacket pocket, unfolded it, and laid it down on the rectangular coffee table between them. She softly slapped it in place to add effect. “Recognize this?” she asked. It was the page from the medical journal containing the case Rief had documented.
“Where did you get that?”
“From a friend,” Sue replied. “A collector. Very few of those journals are around anymore.”
He didn’t respond.
Mary leaned forward. “We want to talk to you about Dan Taylor. The patient you submitted this case about.”
A look of grief passed through the doctor’s eyes. “Daniel Taylor is dead.”
“We know that,” said Sue. “But we’re hoping you know something that we don’t.”
“We have a young man in the hospital,” added Mary, “a kid, who has symptoms very similar to what you described in 1982. He’s in ICU right now, and we’re afraid he’s not going to make it out. We’re praying you can help us.”
They watched Rief reach forward and pick up the sheet of paper. He held it up with a look of painful recognition. After a few minutes, he silently put it back down on the table. “Daniel was just a kid too.”
“We know you tried to save him,” Mary offered.
He almost smirked. “Do you?” He shook his head with a sigh and leaned back in his chair. “I couldn’t save him. I tried. But it happened too fast. His body . . . just . . . kept getting weaker. There was nothing I could do.”
Mary looked at him curiously. “How fast?”
He shrugged. “Less than a month.”
“Oh, my God,” she whispered under her breath.
“He was in a car accident,” Rief continued. “He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and his head hit the windshield. Initially, it looked like a concussion but he seemed to recover well enough.”
Mary leaned forward. “The symptoms you documented; when did they begin?”
“Not immediately. In the beginning, Daniel said he was okay and I believed him. But then he told me he had started seeing things. It was only days later.”
“What things did he see?”
Rief didn’t answer. He gazed past them as the pain flooded back. “I didn’t believe him. I thought he was just a little delusional, that it was remnants of the shock from the accident. It takes time for shock to wear off.” He looked back at them. “I told Daniel he just needed to give it time. Give it time, I told him. That was exactly what he didn’t have.
“I kept thinking he’d be okay until he showed up in the emergency room one night. His roommate said he found him unconscious and barely breathing.” Rief glanced absently to the floor. “I sat with him that whole night, cursing myself for not listening more closely to what he’d said.”
Mary lowered her voice. “Did he wake up?”
“Yes,” Rief answered, his head still down. “Yes, he did. And that time I listened! The frequency of the visions had increased, and he couldn’t stop them. I was able to help but only a little. It quickly became evident that all I could really do was temporarily slow the problem.”
Mary’s eyes flashed a look of hope. “You slowed it down? How?”
Rief sighed. “Valium. Whatever was happening in Daniel’s head was taking a deadly toll on his body. By keeping him slightly sedated, the trauma to his body was less severe. It looked like it was working. Until it stopped.” Rief returned his gaze to Mary. “When the Valium was no longer effective, the physical trauma got even worse. As if somehow the drug accelerated the trauma. I didn’t know what to do. I called everyone I knew, but their ideas were no better. That’s when I submitted my review article to that journal out of desperation. By then I was praying for a miracle, hoping someone had seen it before.”
“Did anyone answer you?”
“It didn’t matter,” Rief replied dryly. “Daniel Taylor fell into a coma and died a week later, before the article was ever published.”
“I don’t understand,” Mary said, puzzled. “How could Valium make it worse; it’s a sedative more than anything else.”
He frowned. “Well, I don’t think it actually made it worse. I think instead it masked the problem. More specifically, it gave the impression his physical symptoms were normalizing, when in reality they were getting worse. Much worse.”
The room fell silent, and Mary shook her head in disbelief. “Are you telling us there’s nothing we can do to stop this? That Evan’s just going to die?”
Rief glanced from Mary to Sue, then sighed. “Look, I don’t know what your kid has, but if it’s the same thing, then yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
Mary was incredulous. “There has to be something we can do.”
“If there is, I don’t know what it is,” Rief said, shaking his head. “Maybe you can stall it longer than I did. I’ve lived all these years with the realization that I only sped up Daniel’s death. Perhaps if I’d given him something more specific, like Prozac or another antipsychotic, it would have helped. It’s a question I’ve asked myself a million times.”
Sue looked at Mary, who was staring back at her with a raised eyebrow.
Rief watched them and thought for a moment. “Has this boy Evan taken any drugs yet?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Good, don’t let him. Keep him clean. It might buy you enough time to learn something new. Whatever you do, don’t put any drugs in him.”
20
Shannon Mayer sat hunched forward, her face down on her desk. Her hands, crossed, lay over her head, while tears rolled off her cheeks and onto the polished wood. She couldn’t hold it together anymore. She had reached the end of her rope.
Shannon had come into the office in a desperate attempt to maintain the veneer of confidence she had worn at work over the last eighteen months. Wearing that mask had allowed her, at the least, to function, but with each passing day, it hid less and less. And now, she couldn’t even manage that. It was over. She was breaking down.
She couldn’t hear the footsteps in the hall over the sound of her sobbing and was startled when the doorknob on her office door began to turn. She heard the loud click and bar
ely had time to lift her head from the desk before the door opened. Shannon sat up and wiped her face as the last person she ever expected walked into the room. It was Evan’s mother, Connie Nash.
Shannon peered at the woman through blurry eyes, and almost leapt from her chair. She quickly came around her desk but was stopped when the woman silently held up her hand.
She watched Connie step to the side and was utterly stunned when Evan came through the door next, leaning heavily on Tania’s shoulder. When they got far enough inside, Connie let the door go and it quietly closed behind them.
Shannon stared at Evan standing weakly before her, visibly struggling to remain erect. It took her a few tries before she could form the words to speak to him.
“Evan,” she whispered. “What on earth?”
Tania kept an arm around Evan’s waist as his mother stepped back in to support him from the other side. With an arm around each of his escorts, Evan smiled meekly at Dr. Mayer.
“He wouldn’t let me tell you he was coming,” Tania said, in apology.
Shannon looked at Tania then turned back to Evan, trying to understand. She began to cry again. “My God, you’re all right!”
Connie Nash forced herself to refrain from making the snide remark that she was thinking.
Even in his weakened condition, Evan looked at Shannon with concern. “Are you okay?”
“Are you?” She almost scolded. Her chastising tone was quickly followed by a sense of guilt. “I’m so sorry, Evan. I am so sorry!”
“It’s not your fault,” he said quietly, as his mother and Tania helped him down onto the large couch. His breathing was shallow and labored. “I thought I could handle it,” he said. “But it happened too fast.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Shannon stepped forward in front of him. “The important thing is you’re alive.”
Evan nodded slowly. “I know. But I think I know what to do next time.”
Next time? Shannon stared at him, startled. What did he just say? She turned to his mother, who was glaring bitterly at her.
“What?”
Evan pushed his hands against the couch and adjusted his position with a grimace. “I think I know how to keep it under control.”
“What in the world are you talking about!”
Evan took a deep breath and looked up at her. “We have to do it again.”
She couldn’t believe her ears. She glanced back at his mother, who continued to grit her teeth in silence. “E-Evan,” Shannon stammered. “Are you crazy? There is no way in hell we’re going to do that again. You almost didn’t—”
“We have to!” he said louder, interrupting her. He looked into her eyes, trying to hide some of his exhaustion.
“My God, why?”
“Because I think your daughter Ellie is alive.”
21
Sam Roa stood confidently in his new sweater vest and slacks, scanning the kitchen and dining room. Everything had been carefully wiped clean and boxed up. The counters and shelves were as clean as he had ever seen them. No traces.
The living room was the same. The old couch and upholstered chair had been vacuumed and wrapped in plastic. Everything else had been boxed and stacked along the wall or thrown out long ago. Every surface in the house had been wiped down thoroughly with Lysol. No germs, no dust, and especially no fingerprints.
It was almost time and he was ready. He had chosen the smallest church in town and given them the story he’d practiced. He was leaving the area, moving south to take care of his dying sister, and wanted to donate his property to a church that could use it. And with things being such a hardship, he chose to leave most of his things behind for the church to sell for the proceeds. It was his way of giving back to the community that he cherished so much.
Of course, it was also a way to confuse the authorities with regard to any evidence he might have missed. A fingerprint, an address, a bill, anything that might indicate where he may have gone would hopefully be distributed well enough to prevent any investigation—even as unlikely as that was to occur—from turning up any useful information too soon.
Even better was the agreement that the church would bulldoze his old house and begin construction of a larger, modernized hall for its congregation. With the large plot of land, the church would have more than enough space to create the house of worship it had always longed for. They were deeply grateful for the donation, which Roa privately dismissed. What was far more valuable to him was the church’s agreement to bulldoze the site immediately after he left. In fact, it was especially important since Roa’s house had one unique attribute. With Southern California’s notoriously warm weather, very few houses had what his did: one of the only full basements in the entire county.
Roa took one more satisfied look and then strode down the hall to a large metal door. He quietly opened it and peered down the dimly lit stairs. Closing the door behind him, he descended to the bottom and noted how eerie the empty basement now looked. The old gas heater stood solemnly in the corner, set off by the gray concrete floor and walls all around. He reflected on how much time he’d spent down there. After all, nothing dampened sound quite as well as good old-fashioned concrete.
Roa turned and approached the only door in the room that led to the second half of the basement, which was entirely closed off from the rest. Next to the door a flat monitor was mounted on the wall. He turned the monitor on. He would soon have to disassemble and remove it, as it was one of the few key things he absolutely could not allow the church, or anyone else, to discover.
The monitor lit up and displayed the room on the other side of the thick wall. It had no windows and just the single large door, outside of which Roa now stood. The room also had a low-light camera, which was wired to his monitor.
Inside the room, Ellie Mayer sat quietly in the corner. She played with her small doll, bouncing it lightly on her lap and quietly whispering to it as she played with its blonde hair. It wasn’t something an eight-year-old would normally play with, but she had few choices.
The young girl was dressed in new clothes, and her brown hair was tied back into a ponytail with a pink elastic band.
Behind Ellie, against the clean white wall, was a twin-sized bed frame and mattress. A small white and pink dresser stood beside the bed. Not far from the bed was a small toilet and sink. A thick multi-colored rug dressed the cold, tiled floor and several more toys and books were gathered in the corner. It was all that was left after the man had removed almost everything else.
Roa watched her for a long time, as he always did, until she eventually set the doll aside and picked up one of the other toys, a brown stuffed dog. It was nice finally seeing her enjoy herself. For a long time, she had fought back, constantly screaming and throwing fits. He’d visited her several times every day without fail, but she had wanted nothing to do with him. The first year was hard for both of them but things did eventually subside. Of course, it was only recently that she had actually begun talking to him.
In fact, she’d talked to him more in the last two months than in the entire first year with him. She had even begun calling him by his first name. It filled Roa with a deep optimism for what he was about to do.
Ellie continued playing nonchalantly with her dog, waiting. Finally, she heard the familiar creaking of the wooden stairs, which told her he was headed back up. He didn’t know, but there were some things she could hear through the walls. After detecting the faint sound of the door closing at the top, she put the stuffed animal down and picked up a pail of blocks. She carefully slid her hand down the inside and pulled up what was hidden at the bottom.
Upstairs, Roa traveled down the hallway toward the back of the house. He paused, then decisively pushed a door open and stepped inside a small room. The largest wall was completely covered with photographs, from different angles and places, but all of the same person. They were the last things to rem
ove and burn.
He stared at the wall absently, going through the details in his head. Had he missed anything? He’d signed the donation papers for the house. The car was being donated to another charity, and the electricity would be shut off in twenty-four hours. The passports, reservations, clothes, and traveler’s checks were all ready.
Eighteen months had been an agonizingly long wait, but he couldn’t risk being spotted until Ellie’s face had long faded from the public’s memory. And now, not only would she cooperate, but with her recent turnaround regarding him, his original plan was beginning to shift altogether.
They were hours away.
22
Shannon Mayer’s face turned ashen. Her legs suddenly wobbled and gave out, and she fell to the floor. Tania gasped and jumped to her side. She bent down and wrapped an arm around Shannon, just in time to prevent the rest of her body from falling to the carpet.
“Dr. Mayer! Are you all right? Did you faint?”
Shannon, still on her knees, swayed back and forth. She was staring deliriously at Evan.
Tania, still clutching Shannon, realized what Evan had just said. “Ellie’s alive?”
Evan turned to Tania. “I think so.” He looked worriedly at Shannon, who was staring at him in shock. “I saw her but only for a second. I have to go back.”
Evan’s mother watched Shannon struggle to steady herself, even with Tania’s help, and finally Connie knelt down to help them. She was reluctantly losing her anger toward Shannon, beginning to see the woman not as some kind of monster, but as a mother who had been put through an emotional torture that few could understand.
Evan watched Shannon, still on her knees, eyes fixed, and blinking repeatedly. “Dr. Mayer, are you okay?”
Did she hear correctly what he had said?
Yes, Shannon had heard. His words were still ringing in her ears. The very words for which she had prayed every single day. Ellie is alive.
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