“Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s fine.” She waved him off and turned her attention to the coffeemaker. She was dressed in jeans and a formfitting long-sleeved shirt, and she stood barefoot on the hardwood floors. Her auburn hair was loose around her shoulders, and the sight of her, so natural and comfortable in her own home, drove thoughts of Lauren at him like a spear. There had been other women since Lauren, but not many, and he’d never lingered long enough to see one of them at home in the morning. Watching Danielle MacAlister go about making coffee was, in its own way, a more intimate moment than any he’d shared with a woman since Lauren died.
“Last night you wanted maps,” she said. “Do you still?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we can go downstairs and pick one out.”
He closed her laptop and came into the kitchen. “Why are you cooperating?”
She set the coffee to brew without answering, then watched it for a few seconds. When the pot began to fill, she turned back to him.
“You’ve been told that I wouldn’t, I take it?”
“That seems to be the family reputation.”
“It better be. The property is my family’s and there’s no small amount of liability risk with a cave. Your situation is the perfect example. If you’d died in there, someone might have sued us, even though you’d trespassed.”
“That explains your defensiveness. But I asked about your cooperation.”
She took a breath, pushed a stray strand of hair out of her eyes, and said, “Ridley Barnes talked to you.”
“Correct.”
“Ridley Barnes hasn’t talked to anyone in ten years.”
“You want to know what he says to me.”
“And why. Yes. If you bring Ridley a map and he sits down and looks at it and talks to you about the cave? About anything? My God, would I love to know what he has to say and why he’s decided to say it. It’s fascinating. He hasn’t spoken to anyone about Sarah, at least not as far as I know.”
“He speaks to Evan Borders.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“They exchanged calls the day I ended up in your cave. I found that interesting, to say the least.”
“Ridley talks to Evan.” She said it as if she were trying to believe it.
“At least that day. Did you know Evan?”
“Oh, yes. He’s very different now than he was back then.”
“How was he back then?”
“Funny. He was an entertainer. He liked to get you laughing, and he was good at it. That’s hard to remember now.”
“He wasn’t telling many knee-slappers when I met him, that’s for sure.”
“Evan is another casualty, in my opinion. He wasn’t killed, but whatever happened that night took what he was, what he could have been, and snatched that away. Then he became what the town probably expected him to be all along—like his father. One of those people who just seem destined for bad luck and trouble, you know? But when he was a kid…” She shook her head. “There’s a reason a girl like Sarah Martin ended up in that cave with him. You see him today, you wonder how it would be possible, because he seems…”
“Threatening,” Mark offered, and she nodded with what seemed to be real sorrow.
“He’s angry white trash now, right? That’s what people who don’t know him would say. Isn’t that what you’d say?”
Mark thought of the bins overflowing with Busch cans, of the rental house that was waiting on a teardown. “He’s trying to play the role, at least.”
“That’s my point. He was given a role, and it was given to him that night in the cave.”
Mark understood something about being given a role and about the way you could play a different one if you cared to try, but he didn’t want to argue with her. He was about to ask another question when he was interrupted by an electronic chime. Danielle leaned over and punched a button on an old-fashioned intercom screen that was mounted on the wall above the kitchen counter.
“Good morning, Cecil.”
“Miss MacAlister, I think that asshole from Florida came back.”
Danielle smiled at Mark, then pushed the talk button again. “I’m aware of this. He’s actually standing here with me now.”
There was a pause, but Cecil’s voice didn’t betray any less hostility when he spoke again. “I didn’t know he was on the property. From the snow, looks like he has been all night.”
“It’s under control, Cecil. Thanks.”
The intercom light blinked off. Mark nodded at it and said, “That’s connected to the garage?”
“Yes. And he has a radio.” She shook her head and poured coffee into two mugs and passed one to Mark. “He’s quite the watchdog, our Cecil. Always vigilant. Only took him twelve hours to notice your car.”
“Yet your father has paid to keep him here for ten years. Even Cecil seems confused by that.”
She drank some of the coffee without looking at him and said, “Let’s go downstairs and get your map.”
They were back in the unfinished basement room with the map-covered walls when Mark said, “Why do you still have this place? Why let it sit for a decade?”
“That wasn’t my choice. It will be soon enough, I’m afraid. My father isn’t well.”
“Will you sell it?”
“Absolutely.”
“So why hasn’t he?”
“He promised Diane Martin he would keep the cave closed,” she said. “That was when they were still speaking. Whatever they had, it fell apart fast after Sarah died. Selling Trapdoor would have made him feel like he was profiteering when he should be suffering, I think. So he put that gate up, put the locks on, and left it to sit like some sort of monument to the dead. Any thought of selling it ended completely when Diane overdosed. He never came back to Garrison when he heard that. Not once. I’m the only person in the family to have stepped onto this property in the past four years, and I wasn’t any more eager to do that than he was. For my family, Trapdoor became a very bad place, very fast. There’s nothing but a lot of regret here.”
She sat down on the old recliner, and dust rose from the cushions. She pulled the wooden handle on the side of the chair and the footrest rolled out with a protesting creak.
“You know this was the first place I ever made out with a boy? Not kissed, I’d been kissed before, but I mean really…you follow.”
“I follow the mechanics, sure. I don’t follow why you’re talking about them.”
“It felt terrible. Not the make-out session, that’s not what I mean. At that age, you don’t know what feels good yet.”
“Then why’d it feel terrible?”
“You’re a detective,” she said.
“That’s right. But apparently not a very good one, because I don’t know why we’re talking about this.”
“Do some detecting, then,” she said. “Why does a girl feel terrible for kissing a boy?”
Beside them the furnace kicked on and the exposed ductwork above began to hum. Mark looked at her and said, “Evan Borders?”
“You are a detective.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“When he was dating Sarah?”
“Yes.”
“You were competing for him?”
“Oh, no. I had no interest in Evan. He was a sweet kid, cute and funny, but he was Sarah’s.”
“So you kissed him…”
“To hurt her,” Danielle said. “I wanted to really hurt her, you know? In the worst possible way.”
“Why?”
“Because I was seventeen years old and my father couldn’t keep it in his pants and he was getting married again and Sarah was delighted about it. She was just thrilled. She’d talk about it all the time, she’d write me notes, send these cute little messages all with the same theme: we were going to be sisters. But I didn’t want to be her sister. I wanted to be her friend, and I wanted my father back with my mother. She was so clueless about that, so obtuse
, and it drove me crazy. I wanted to punish her. And what’s the best way for one teenage girl to punish another?”
“Through her boyfriend.”
“There you go. I knew it was an awful thing to do, of course. That was the point. I was trying to be awful. Because she needed to be punished, you know, for daring to act as if it were a good thing that my father was marrying her mother. For daring to want to be my sister.”
She wiped at her eyes again. “That was the last weekend I was here. I went back to Louisville two days later, feeling very self-righteous about what I’d done, about teaching that little bitch a lesson. But that’s all it was, understand? A lesson. A temporary thing. I’d see her again in a few weeks, and we’d get over it. Of course we’d get over it, because we were seventeen years old and we’d be family for the rest of our lives, right? The rest of our lives. It would be a footnote by the time we were twenty, something we laughed about by the time we were forty.”
She put the footrest down and got out of the chair, returned to the file cabinet, opened it again, removed a photograph, and handed it to him. There were nine teenagers pictured, four boys in T-shirts and five girls in tank tops that said Trapdoor Caverns. They were standing in front of the entrance to the cave, everybody smiling, the sun on their faces. In the back row, Evan Borders looked relaxed and charming, a kid ready to cruise through the world. Just in front of him, kneeling with their hands on their slim, tan thighs, were Sarah Martin and Danielle MacAlister. Their heads were close together, their smiles wide. Sarah was just a few weeks away from another photo shoot, this one in the county morgue.
“Look at those eyes,” Danielle whispered. “She had eyes that shone. Eyes that belonged to some pop love song. And when Evan came by? Her eyes took on a luminescence when he passed through. She was always smiling too. Immune to the petty and melodramatic things that you’d get between kids. Because she was trying to show her maturity that summer. Trying to act older to impress Evan. To impress me. I can’t lie about that. She looked up to me, and I knew that. How awful then that I was the one who was petty and melodramatic. I was the child to her. My God, her father had died a few years earlier, and I was so dramatic about a divorce that I wanted to punish Sarah? How awful is that?”
She stepped away from Mark and sat back down on the ancient, creaking recliner. The day was young but she looked as if she wanted it to come to an end already. The question Mark asked then wasn’t a detective’s question at all.
“What was the last thing you said to her?”
She looked at him with surprise. “Why does that matter?”
“Don’t you remember? I think most people do when they lose someone. Or if they don’t, they come up with something. They need to remember, whether it’s accurate or not.”
Her chest swelled with a deep breath, and then she said, “I told her that she’d never be my sister, and I hoped she was classy enough not to take my family’s last name for her own.” She managed to say it without looking away from Mark, but it was evident that the statement was a bloodletting.
“You were right,” she said. “People remember. I wish that I didn’t, though. What was the last thing you said to your wife?”
“Told her that I loved her.”
“Do you know what I would give to be able to say that same thing?” Danielle asked, and Mark looked away.
They were quiet for a few moments. Danielle sat in the recliner and gazed around the room as if she didn’t recognize it.
“You asked why we let this place sit,” she said. “Understand now? Trapdoor seemed so pure once, seemed so magical. Right up until my father proposed to Diane Martin. And do you know what? Diane was lovely. She was a lovely woman, and her daughter was the same, and I knew that. Even when I went out of my way to hurt her, I knew that. I just wanted to be allowed to be angry about it. He was my father, and he’d left my mother, and I was entitled to my anger, and Sarah didn’t get it. But my anger wasn’t supposed to last. I understood that even then. The fight would pass, and we’d be fine. We were seventeen. You get another chance then, always.”
She tucked her feet beneath her so she was sitting curled up on the oversize chair, and she cried without making much of a sound. He didn’t say a word, because he understood. She needed to weep for Sarah, for her father, for Evan Borders, for an unspoiled summer that had been swallowed by darkness. To weep not for the way things had once been but for the way things had been supposed to go and did not. People believed that they were haunted by bad memories, but that wasn’t the truth. The most sinister hauntings were from unrealized futures.
Mark watched her and wondered why he hadn’t told her the truth. Because it was none of her damned business, that’s why.
Then why’d you ask her?
What he’d told her wasn’t a lie. He had said the words into the phone, whether they’d been heard or not. Maybe they had been. How could he know?
You know.
Of course he did. Don’t embarrass me with this shit. For so long, he’d known what he’d meant—his wife was willingly pursuing a fraud’s foolishness. He had known that without question, because it was the truth and the truth didn’t require questioning. Then Jeff London provided his addendum, and the old truth remained but another emerged beside it: Lauren had gone to Cassadaga to protect him. To cover for his weaknesses.
She told me you wouldn’t do the interview well because you wouldn’t think the woman had any credibility, Jeff had said. That you’d scorn her, and if there was anything legitimate, you’d overlook it.
Mark went to the wall and removed the tape from the last map Ridley Barnes had drawn, the one from the summer of Sarah Martin’s death.
“Are you going to see Ridley?” Danielle asked.
“Maybe. First I’ve got another stop to make. We’ll see how it goes.”
43
The dog that looked like a fox was back in the yard when he pulled in. It kept its distance but watched him with total focus and a regal stance, like some sort of mythical guardian. He was wary of it as he walked to the porch, but the dog let him pass without a sound. It felt like the animal had made a conscious decision, one that could easily have gone another way.
Julianne Grossman answered the door and said, “You look better. You’ve slept.”
“I’m going to need you to prove yourself to me,” Mark said.
“I gave you the recorder. You’ve got everything you need.”
“Not enough to prove that Ridley’s confession was anything close to legitimate.”
“I thought that was irrelevant to you. That you—to be absolutely clear—didn’t care.”
Mark said, “I can’t get at the truth of Ridley in an hour. I should be able to with you.”
It could have been a confusing statement, but she followed. “You want to be hypnotized?”
Mark nodded.
“This will tell you, what, whether I’m a fraud?”
“Whether I should believe that video confession of Ridley’s was anything close to legitimate.”
“It won’t tell you that,” she said. “You’ll learn about yourself, not about me. But I get your point nonetheless.”
“You’re from here,” Mark said. “Not Garrison, but close by. How did you come to do what you do? It’s a strange profession for an honest person to pursue.”
“You’re very wrong about that. There are many honest hypnotists. Some frauds, sure. But I suspect there are fewer frauds in hypnosis than there are in banking or real estate. And I’m quite confident there are more in politics.”
“How did you come to do what you do?” he repeated.
“My older sister struggled with alcoholism. Badly. She turned to a hypnotist, and everyone else thought she had lost her mind and was throwing away money. It worked. I was fascinated by that. I’d seen the wreckage of her life, and the idea that this thing had worked, and so effectively…it fascinated me. I read; I studied. I took classes.” She paused, and her eyes drifted, which was unusual for her.
“There was another reason too.”
“What was that?”
She refocused on him. “There are always skeptics. Every day, I meet someone who doesn’t believe in me. In what I do. People like you. The personal challenge of that, the emotional challenge? I’ve learned to embrace it. Now, I could provide references, you could interview people about me to your heart’s content, you could go out and do your fact-checking work, but that’s not going to mean anything to you, is it? You need to feel things to believe in them. Every skeptic must. You put faith only in your own judgments, your own experiences.”
He thought of his mother with the dyed braids and brown contacts and self-tanning lotion, dream catchers scattered about.
“Yes, I put more stock in my judgment than in anyone else’s.”
She nodded. “That’s an issue you’re going to need to work on for the long haul, isn’t it? But no matter. We can conduct trance. I think if we—”
“We’ll conduct it just like Ridley’s confession.” Mark held out his phone. “We’re going to record it with this, not your equipment. And we’re going after memories, just like you did with him.”
“What memories, Mark?”
“How I got in that cave.”
She gave another of those measured, steady nods, but he could see intrigue in her eyes. “All right. We can do that. Come on in.”
He stepped over the threshold.
“Take the couch, please,” she said, and then she pulled a straight-backed chair close to him. He sat on the couch and tried to look relaxed, indifferent, crossing one leg over the other and folding his arms over his chest. She reached out and tapped his ankle.
“Let’s try a different posture. Something not so defensive. You’re guarding yourself.”
He put both feet flat on the floor and moved his hands to his sides and was amazed at how instantly vulnerable he felt.
“You’re going to have to be receptive,” she said. “Your pursuit right now seems to be due to sheer skepticism. You want me to prove that I can hypnotize you. I’d encourage you to think deeper. A stage hypnotist could hypnotize you, but it wouldn’t mean that person would be able to ascertain anything of value in working with Ridley Barnes. You want to get at your memories of that day, correct? The day you were hurt.”
Last Words Page 27