“Not in ‘52 it wasn’t. That thing was a beaut. I chopped off the fenders, outfitted it with a souped-up engine and bigger tires, and painted it fire engine red.”
“So long ago,” Elizabeth said. “I was a nine-year-old in pigtails that year. Now look at me.”
“Elizabeth, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re still very young. You’re beautiful. You’re talented. You have a brilliant career ahead of you. Anyone who has gone through what you have experienced would have fallen a lot harder than you have. I think you’re extraordinarily resilient, very brave, and very strong.”
“Thank you. I’m glad someone has faith in me. I never doubted my own sanity until I came here. Having blackouts does not mean a person is insane. Things have happened the past few days that don’t make very much sense to me. Strange things. I can’t seem to be able to distinguish between reality and illusion. You know, I think Dr. Abernathy hypnotized me today.”
“You think?”
“Yes, it was the strangest thing. It didn’t occur to me until it was over that that was what happened. I was upset about the rocks falling on me and Bobby while we were coming up the stairs from the beach. I was furious with Bobby for denying that he saw someone push the rocks down on us. I was certain that’s what really happened, but by the time I came out of Dr. Abernathy’s office I wasn’t so sure anymore, and I wasn’t angry at Bobby anymore, either.”
“He didn’t tell you he was going to hypnotize you or ask your permission?”
“No.”
“That sounds unethical to me.” Bryce frowned.
Elizabeth shrugged. “I’m not upset. I suppose it was the right thing to do. I was out of control and whatever he did to me calmed me right down. Things are so strange here I can’t seem to make sense of anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Little things that don’t seem to add up. I shouldn’t even tell you this. You’ll think I’m insane.”
“I know you’re insane,” Bryce leaned toward her with a conspiratorial smile. “I’m surprised the men in white coats haven’t come after you by now. But that’s beside the point.”
Elizabeth laughed with him, and then she said: “I think someone is doing their best to try to frighten me.”
Bryce studied her face. “What do you mean?”
“Someone has been putting things in my room.”
“What kind of things?”
“The day I arrived I found a book on Black Magic, in my suitcase of all places. Then yesterday afternoon Dakota and I were emptying out the drawers in my old bedroom to move my things to my new room and we found this thing in the top drawer. She said it was a voodoo doll.”
“With pins sticking out of it?” Bryce made another of his crazy faces.
“I’m serious, Bryce. It’s not funny. It scared me to death.”
“You actually found a voodoo doll in your dresser?”
“Yes.”
“Any ideas about who put it there?”
“I don’t know, Jewel maybe. But I don’t have any concrete evidence. She gives me the creeps.”
“How is that?”
“She tries to touch me and she makes little innuendoes. I think she’s a lesbian.”
“Get out of here.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against lesbians. My best friends, Camilla and Diane, are lesbians. I guess I just don’t like the way she insinuates that I am too.”
“She’s using voodoo to lure you into her web?” Bryce made spidery, crawling motions with his fingers.
“Would you stop?”
“Sorry.”
“The voodoo doll wasn’t of me.”
“Then who?”
“Joan.”
“Joan Monaghan?”
“Yes. Someone cut some of her hair and put it on the doll, and stuck pins in at the wrists, right where she had sliced her wrists. It was very crudely made, really vile and evil looking.”
“What did Abernathy have to say about it?”
“He doesn’t know about it.”
“You didn’t tell him?”
“Dakota took the doll, just so I wouldn’t have to look at it. We were going to show it to him later. I meant to talk to him during therapy but I forgot about it.”
“He hypnotized you.”
“It just didn’t seem important. But now it does.”
“If you ask me whoever is doing this isn’t just sick, they’re dangerous. If I were you I’d want to get to the bottom of it.”
“Between my blackouts, and being here, and all the things that have happened I’m confused, very confused. My mind races from one thing to another. I’m trying to put together a puzzle but I don’t have the right pieces. And last night, that book that Dakota was reading about Roland de Winter and his little secret society…what if it’s true that Roland de Winter was up here celebrating Black Mass? Don’t you suppose those kinds of bad vibes could linger in the atmosphere of a place? I mean, what if he was committing ritual sacrifice, like the way my husband was murdered, and what if the two were somehow related?”
“I think you’re letting your imagination get the best of you.”
“Don’t look at me like that. I know this sounds crazy. You’re the only person here I can trust.”
Elizabeth gazed past Bryce to an old house on a cliff that jutted out toward the ocean, perhaps two miles away as the gull flies. She realized it was La Casa del Mar, looking forever sad and lonely on its little perch above the ocean.
“Have you mentioned any of this to Abernathy?”
“No. The minute I mentioned witchcraft during our initial session he started defending the idea that witchcraft is a pagan religion.”
“Do you think he could be involved?”
Elizabeth’s eyes shot wide open. “Dr. Abernathy? Practicing witchcraft?”
“That’s not what I meant, although if there is anything to all these little incidents as you say, the book on Black Magic, the voodoo doll, couldn’t he be as much a suspect as anyone else?”
Elizabeth sipped at her wine and nibbled on a bit of cheese. “Anything is possible.”
“What if he is the one who planted the book and the voodoo doll, as part of his bizarre notions about therapy, like a psychological version of shock treatment?”
Elizabeth was silent as she considered this new angle.
“Maybe. I just can’t shake the feeling that all these things are targeted at me. I know, Joan took her own life and that was bound to happen whether she met me or not, but I was the one who found her. I feel like that was a set up. And I swear to God that I saw that pentagram in her blood on the bathroom walls. Just like –“
“Just like when your husband was murdered.”
“Yes.”
Bryce placed his hand on her bare shoulder at the back of her neck. It felt good to be touched. The muscles of his thumb and forefinger pressed against the tension at the base of her neck. He rubbed gently. Elizabeth responded to his touch, pushing against his hands. He took the cue to move behind her and put both hands on her shoulders, rubbing and exerting pressure against her tense muscles.
“Wow, you are really stressed out. Are you on anything?”
“No. I don’t even smoke grass.”
“That’s not what I meant. What kind of drugs has Abernathy been giving you?”
“Nothing, really. He gave me a sedative the night Joan killed herself. Other than that just Morphenol.”
“You’re taking that stuff?”
“Yes. Shouldn’t I be?”
Bryce was silent for a moment. Elizabeth could not see his face to gauge his reaction. He said, “How’s that working out for you?”
“I don’t know. It’s weird. I keep having strange little flashes, memories or flashbacks from my dreams or from real life. I can’t tell which is which. Between the Morphenol and the séance last night and the hypnosis this afternoon I feel so strange, like I’ve landed on the other side of the Looking Glass.”
�
�It sounds to me like you’ve been smoking loco weed. Either that or somebody has slipped you some electric Kool-aid.”
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“Not really. If I were you I’d give some serious thought to this Morphenol stuff before taking any more of it. It may have more to do with these feelings of disassociation than you realize. You just don’t know what it will do to you.”
“That’s pretty much what Chet said. He doesn’t think very highly of Dr. Abernathy at all. In fact, he seems downright hostile toward him. He’s got this theory that Abernathy learned his methods from Nazi scientists or something.”
Bryce smirked. “That doesn’t surprise me. If there’s anyone you should steer clear of, it’s Chet Hargrove.”
“Why do you say that?”
“For one thing there’s that cockamamie story he keeps telling about how he’s an astronaut.”
“Do you mean he isn’t?”
“Of course not. He’s a lounge singer from Vegas.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“Cross my heart.”
Elizabeth had to let this sink in for a moment.
She said, “Why did you hit him?”
“That’s just what I’m talking about. Talk about a paranoid schizophrenic. He was mad because I beat him three games in a row at tennis and he stumbled and fell on his way back up the steps from the tennis courts, fell right on that pretty face of his. That’s how he got that shiner.”
“And the fire?”
“What fire?”
“He told me he’s a pyromaniac. He apologized to me for setting a fire in my room last night. He said that was why you hit him.”
“I told you the guy is crazy.”
“But Bryce, the thing is, I knew about the fire, I saw it or dreamed it or something before Chet told me about it.”
Bryce stopped massaging her neck for a moment. “Wait. What? Start over from the beginning.”
Elizabeth went through it again, the smell of smoke and the overwhelming sense that something was burning when she woke up that morning, then seeing Chet’s black eye and his apology for setting the fire when she talked to him this afternoon.
“I wonder if it’s something that hasn’t happened yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“What if what I experience this morning was like a premonition or something?”
At that moment it became a very real possibility. What if these disparate feelings and images weren’t fitting together because some events hadn’t happened yet? What if the future and the past were somehow being mixed together here in the present? Was that another facet of the Morphenol experience or was this something altogether different?
“I guess if there’s a fire at the house tonight we’ll find out,” Bryce said.
“Don’t say that. What if it were to come true?”
“Then at least we’ll know you’re actually onto something and not just shooting blanks. Maybe you should be at one of those centers for psychic phenomena with electrodes hooked up to your head.”
“That doesn’t sound any better than this place,” Elizabeth said. “I was petrified about coming to this clinic.”
“You did look a little green around the gills when I met you out in the parking lot the first day. You didn’t even laugh at my jokes about this being a lunatic asylum.”
“I have a good reason for that. Don’t tell anyone this…I’d be embarrassed to have it get around. My mother died in a mental hospital. I know what goes on in those places and it scares me to death.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I only mention it as a way of explaining my fear of mental hospitals. My mother and I were never close. What about your mother?”
“What about my mother?” Elizabeth heard the change in his tone of voice. She turned to look at him, but his eyes were downcast.
“Are you close to her?”
“Closer than I care to be.”
“That doesn’t sound too good.”
“She’s an overbearing woman. She’s manipulative, controlling, judgmental, and vindictive. Should I go on? I’m sure you know the type. She belongs in an institution, that’s for certain.”
“What an awful thing to say.”
“You wouldn’t think so if you knew her.”
“But she raised you, didn’t she? I’m sure she did the best she could.”
“So what? My father died when I was young. I’ve heard he was a great man. He left us a great deal of money, so Mom never had to work and she was able to raise me in the best way possible, which was at a distance. I was in boarding schools by the time I was twelve, which was fine with me. My mother went through a succession of marriages. None of the men showed any interest in me, so I never really had a father. And when she was married the only thing that interested her was them. It was like I didn’t even exist. My mother is a very unhappy woman and I supposed all she ever wanted was some man who could give her happiness.”
“How many times has she been married?”
“Three? Four? Who knows? I’ve lost count. Look, my mother is the last thing I want to talk about. Maybe it’s time we headed back to the clinic.”
“Bryce, I’m sorry if I –“
“Don’t.” He cut her off in a way that made her feel worse.
Elizabeth helped Bryce gather up the remains of the picnic, throwing the leftover food out for the gulls and other animals to eat.
“Thank you, Bryce,” she said as they approached the car. “I’m glad you had the foresight to get me out of the house.”
His anger seemed to have passed. “I’m glad you came,” he said.
She craned her neck and kissed him quickly on the cheek, but the moment she pulled away his hand took hold of the back of her neck and he pulled her face toward his. His mouth met hers. His kiss was strong, but not aggressive, and ended all too soon. She wished she could roll time back twenty minutes and make love to him right there on the rocks over looking the ocean.
He opened her car door and she slipped inside, remembering to buckle her seat belt before the car took off with a screech of tires and a cloud of dust.
Elizabeth closed her eyes against the rush of wind that whipped around the windshield. She felt so calm, relaxed.
She opened her eyes and managed to cry out just as the car veered to the right. Bryce slammed on the brakes. Elizabeth screamed. The Lamborghini slid to a precarious halt near the edge of the cliff.
The black goat standing in the middle of the road bleated at them, turned its head, and sauntered across the road.
Chapter Eleven
Elizabeth slammed the car door and stalked across the driveway toward La Casa del Mar.
“It was just a goat,” said Bryce as he hurried after her. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”
“Because it was a fucking goat for God’s sake!”
“It could have been someone’s pet. Maybe it wandered up into the hills from the vineyard.” Bryce trying to reason with her only made her anger boil harder.
“It didn’t just wander up the hill. That goat has been following me all day.”
“Jesus, would you calm down?”
“Don’t tell me to clam down. You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”
Bryce caught up with her and grabbed her by the arm. “All I’ve heard is a lot of screaming and swearing.”
“Let go of me or I will scream,” she snapped.
Bryce took his hands away and lifted them in front of him, palms up. “I don’t understand why you’re so angry. I’m the one who should be angry. Screaming like that you almost managed to get us both killed.”
Elizabeth let out a crazy laugh and pushed against the front door of the house. In another minute she would collapse into a fit of screaming and it wouldn’t be pretty.
“Elizabeth, talk to me.”
“Fuck off.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and reaching past her, opened the door to the house. Elizabeth
stormed inside the house and ran up the stairs, slamming the door to her bedroom. She caught sight of herself in the mirror above the dresser. Her face was red and stung with tears. Good God, I’m acting like a two year old. She threw herself on the bed. Pulling a pillow to her face she screamed into as loud and as hard as she could. The madness was too much for her. She sat up on the bed and pulled off her sandals and hurled one after the other against the wall. Where were Dr. Abernathy and his sedatives when she needed one? Her breathing came in ragged gasps. She knew she had to calm down before she made herself sick. She got up and went into the bathroom, turning on the spigot and letting cold water spill into the sink. She cupped her hands and threw the cold water on her face, drinking it, and splashing more on her face again.
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