The Always Anonymous Beast

by Lauren Wright Douglas

  Copyright© 1987 Lauren Wright Douglas

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Originally published by Naiad Press 1987

  First Edition Bella Books 2010

  Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

  Cover designer: Judy Fellows

  ISBN: 978-1-59493-246-5

  About the Author

  Lauren Wright Douglas was born in Canada in 1947. She grew up in a military family and spent part of her childhood in Europe. As a child she enjoyed telling stories to friends, and began to write poetry and fiction at age nine. After graduating from college in Canada, she taught high school English and Physical Education, was a French translator, a newspaper editor, and a financial advisor. Lauren has published 10 novels, one of which, NINTH LIFE, won the Lambda Literary Award and she is at work on an 11th book. She lives on the Oregon coast.

  For my beasts

  Jealousy cannot forget for all her sakes...

  Her holy unholy hours with the always anonymous beast.

  Dylan Thomas

  Monday

  Chapter One

  “I’m being blackmailed,” she told me. Direct, right to the point, just as in her television interviews.

  We stood together at the seawall at Victoria’s inner harbor on a gusty afternoon in April. The sky was pearl grey, the sea pewter, and only a thin smear of lemon light on the horizon indicated that the sun had not forgotten us entirely. Spring in the Pacific Northwest is an iffy season.

  I decided to let her talk. Oh, I knew who she was all right—I recognized her as soon as she got out of her car and came walking toward me. Even with her attempt at a disguise—oversized dark glasses, beige raincoat buttoned up to her throat—hers was not a face you would forget. Along with half the population of Victoria, I saw it every night, anchoring the six o’clock news. To my credit, I didn’t say, “Gee, aren’t you... ?” Instead, I waited.

  She took off her dark glasses and turned to face me. Her eyes were moss green and troubled. I tried a reassuring smile. No response. Maybe she needed prompting after all.

  “So, tell me about it,” I urged.

  “Dammit, I’m trying,” she said in obvious distress. She gave me a look that I knew well, albeit vicariously. It was a look reserved for corrupt union leaders, double-talking politicians, and child molesters. I cringed just a little.

  “How do I know you can help?” she asked me.

  “How do you know I can’t? You haven’t told me a thing.”

  “What I mean is ...” She chewed her lip.

  “What you mean is, you’ve never heard of me, you haven’t the faintest idea about what I really do or if I’m any good at it, and besides, where’s my luxuriously appointed office?”

  It worked. She smiled. Just a little.

  “Who recommended me to you?”

  “My attorney. Virginia Silver.”

  “Well, do you trust her?”

  “Oh, yes. Unqualifiedly.”

  “Well, that’s a start, anyway.” I sighed. “As for the rest, what I do is simple. I try to help people. People who get caught in messes and don’t know how to get out. People who the system can’t help.” Seeing the skepticism on her face, I added, “And I don’t do it for nothing. I’m no Good Samaritan.”

  She nodded a little, as if this made sense. Economics usually does. “What is your fee?” she wanted to know.

  “I charge two hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses. I need a thousand up front. When I’m finished you’ll get a report and a statement from me detailing how I spent your money.”

  She thought this over. “All right.”

  “Now, as for whether I’m any good at what I do, you should ask Virginia. And I don’t have an office. I work at home. For obvious reasons I prefer not to meet clients there. So we meet somewhere else.”

  She nodded again.

  “So, why don’t you briefly tell me what you need me to do, and I’ll briefly tell you if I think I can do it.”

  She smiled again, a trifle weakly, then let out the breath she had been holding. “As I said, someone is blackmailing me. Well, trying to.”

  “Trying to?”

  “I haven’t paid any money yet.”

  “Good. Go on.”

  “He said he’d call Monday night.”

  Monday night—tonight? She did believe in living dangerously. “What time and where?”

  “Eight o’clock. I’ll give you the address.”

  “So what does this guy have on you?”

  She looked angry. “Letters.”

  “Written by you?”

  “Yes.”

  “To whom?”

  She actually flinched. “To another woman.”

  “Has she heard from the blackmailers? Your lover?”

  She flinched again, and I suddenly realized that she was bitterly ashamed of her involvement with this other woman. I felt sorry for her—that, of course, was part of the blackmailer’s hold over her. “Yes, we’ve both heard from him. Despite the fact that we have unlisted numbers. We both got the same note, telling us what he had. Then a phone call saying he’d call tonight.”

  I sighed. “This may sound silly, but have you considered going to the police?”

  She skewered me with that accusing look. “Yes, it sounds silly.”

  “All right. And you’re very sure you can’t afford the publicity? Scandals die down pretty fast. Even scandals like this. In a week no one will even remember who you had an affair with, let alone care.”

  There was that look again.

  “Okay, okay,” I capitulated. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Get the letters back. Make him leave me—us, alone.” She shrugged. “If you can’t, we’ll have to pay, I suppose.”

  “No,” I told her.

  “No?”

  “Don’t even think about paying. Blackmailers are bloodsuckers. He’ll drain you. And not only of money. There are other things to lose, too.”

  She shuddered. “Well, can you help?” She chewed her lip again, a nervous gesture no one ever saw on the air.

  “It is the sort of thing I do,” I said cautiously. “I have helped people in similar situations. But we’d have to get a few things straight.” I tried to look authoritative. “You’d have to do what I tell you.”

  She nodded.

  “And I have to meet your lover. I need to talk to both of you.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “All right,” she said, a little tentatively. I could tell this was not a threesome she was anticipating.

  “And last, if we blow it, if I try and fail, then you have to give me your word that you’ll consider—just consider—disclosure of whatever is in the letters. Your disclosure. Your initiative. Go public. Put it in the papers. Call a press conference. Rent a skywriting plane. In short, beat the blackmailer to it.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “All right, I’ll consider it. And if those are all your terms, I agree to them.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. Write me a check and let’s get started. Oh, better give me your address, too.”

  She fished a leather-bound checkbook and a gold Cross pen out of her purse. “To whom do I make this payable?” she asked.

  “To me. Caitlin Reece.”

  “I’m Val Frazier,” she said, handing me my advance, and a slip of paper with her address written on it.

  “I know,” I told her, putting the check in my windbreaker pocket. I held out my hand. A l
ittle hesitantly, she took it. We shook.

  She raised an eyebrow. “That’s it?” she asked. “No contract? Don’t I have to sign something?”

  I smiled. “This isn’t the movies. I told you the terms of my employment. You agreed. I took your money. Now I’m working for you.”

  That seemed to cheer her a little. “Thank God someone is,” she said. She put on her dark glasses and turned up the collar of her raincoat. “Now what?”

  “I’ll come over just before eight. We’ll take it from there.”

  As she was leaving, I asked the question. “Why me? There are plenty of people who do this kind of thing. Some are even quite good at it.”

  She turned back to look at me, inscrutable behind the dark glasses. “Part of it was Virginia’s recommendation. I was told you’re one of those who are very good at it.”

  “And the other part?”

  “You’re...you’re...”

  Comprehension dawned. I decided to help her out. We might have stood there all afternoon while she choked on the word. “I’m a lesbian,” I said. “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” she replied faintly, then turned and fled to the sanctuary of her car.

  Chapter Two

  After I watched Val’s white Porsche wheel out of the parking lot, I zipped my windbreaker a little higher and turned back to study the sea. Usually it inspired me—love it in all its moods—but after my talk with Val I felt irritable and depressed. Her inability to accept the fact that she loved (or had loved) another woman boded ill not only for this case but for Val personally. I tried my best to direct my speculation to the job ahead of me, but found myself wondering how Val had ever gotten involved with another woman, given her inability to even say the world lesbian. Would her lover be equally ill at ease? I supposed that in Val’s job a certain amount of circumspection and discretion was necessary, but surely one’s private life was one’s own.

  I recalled my own years of obfuscating the truth—the years I spent in law school and in the Crown Prosecutor’s office—and felt a twinge of sympathy. I’d had precious little time to pursue romance, but still, the necessary lies were extremely tedious. I recalled being irked at the need to deceive my classmates or colleagues about who my dates really were, but I was never ashamed of the fact that I loved women. And I certainly never felt guilty. Now thank heavens, life was infinitely easier. I had to answer to no one.

  But Val? I shrugged. Her personal life, like mine, was her own business. She was entitled to make as huge a mess of it as she wanted. I had been hired to retrieve the letters. Nothing more. But still, Val’s attitude and the case were inextricably intertwined. Val’s guilt not only gave the blackmailer a handle on her professional life, but it gave him power over her personal life as well. I sighed. Even if I got the letters back, thereby assuring Val that no one at the television station would ever know The Horrible Truth, the blackmailer would still have an edge. He would still know what she perceived to be a shameful secret. If he were thwarted in his financial demands, he might well, out of pure cussedness, phone any of her friends and plant this germ of suspicion. Did Val want to live with that threat hanging over her head? I couldn’t have borne it. And what did she intend to do after the case was over? Scuttle back into her closet and nail the door shut?

  A sudden urge to do something came over me. I looked at my watch. Not even four o’clock. Plenty of time.

  It took me a few laps of the health club’s pool to work up a good rhythm. Then I released my mind, to go where it would. After a few moments of aimless wandering, it returned, stubborn as a badger, to root out the question I had asked myself earlier: what made me think I could help Val. Or, more precisely: what made me think I could help Val.

  As little as three years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to. I would have been as baffled and frustrated as Val. As most people. But that was before Marc Bergeron, Jan Principal, and Texada Island.

  At thirty-five, I had been a wreck. Washed-up, burned-out, and ready to pack it in. Seven years of working in the criminal justice system had just about finished me. Had I stayed, the Crown Prosecutor’s office would surely have been my grave. I had seen one too many leering rapists, grinning child molesters, and smirking muggers elude justice. Marc Bergeron was the straw that broke this camel’s back, and almost drove me over the line into madness. To understand that, however, you’d have to know a little bit about my mother’s family.

  The Llewelyns are a spooky bunch. My mother’s two older sisters were as nutty as pecan groves. I remember my Aunt Fiona in particular. She was in her mid-fifties when madness overcame her, and the most appalling feature of it was the way it changed her physically. The summer I was twelve was the last time I ever saw her. She had changed from being a tall, stately, well-groomed, handsome woman to a stooped, wild-haired witch. A hag. God, only a few centuries ago she would have been burned at the stake. But the neighbors in the little town where my mother’s family lived all accepted the fact that half of the Llewelyn womenfolk were destined to be wacko. Never the menfolk—which as a twelve-year-old I thought vastly unfair. Still do. Only the women. Dat ole X chromosome.

  One evening as we all sat at dinner, Aunt Fee pouring coffee over her potatoes and humming something in a minor key, looked across the table at me and declared in her harpy voice: “You’ve got it, too.”

  My brother snickered, and I surreptitiously kicked him.

  “Got what, Aunt Fee?” I was a polite child, so I asked the question. But my heart had already descended into my Keds. I knew perfectly well what she was talking about.

  She ignored me, and looked at my sniggering brother. “You don’t,” she said summarily. “Your sort never does. Your heads are too thick.” And that was the end of the discussion. Until later that night.

  Unable to sleep, I had crept downstairs for a glass of cold milk. And had run smack into Aunt Fiona sitting on a straight-backed chair in front of the open cellar door.

  “Aunt Fee,” I said, as soon as my heart stopped beating double time. “What are you doing here?” I knew my Uncle Daffyd had a hard time keeping track of my aunt, and I wondered if I should try to usher her upstairs to bed.

  “Waiting,” she told me.

  “For what?”

  She turned to look at me, and the expression on her face made my heart turn over. She wasn’t crazy at all, at least not for those few moments. She smiled. “Caitlin,” she said, evidently pleased to see me.

  “Yes, Aunt Fee. But what are you waiting for?” I wanted to know.

  She looked at me as if I, not she, were the crazy person here. “Why, for the Dark Lady, of course.” She pointed to the Stygian depths of the cellar. “She’ll come, sooner or later. And I’ll be here.” She clasped her hands over her breast and began to rock a little.

  Scared to death, I asked the question. “What does she want, Aunt Fee?”

  But my aunt had slid back down into madness again, and was unable — or unwilling — to answer. Finally I left her there, after first making sure that all the doors were locked.

  The following winter Aunt Fiona died. And the specter of the Dark Lady began to haunt me. I began to have nightmares in which a tall figure clad in black burst out of some gloomy cave in search of me. And although I ran, I knew she would get me sooner or later. Just like she’d gotten Aunt Fee.

  Well, she didn’t, of course. And gradually the obsession left me. I stopped dreaming about dark ladies in the basement and got on with my life. But I wondered from time to time—was there something horrible lurking in my brain, ticking away like a time bomb? And why did it drive its possessors mad, turning them into gibbering idiots? It was all too melodramatic for me.

  “It,” of course, was a kind of rudimentary clairvoyance. And I finally just stopped worrying. There was nothing else to do. If I had it, I’d have to think of it as a sense, like vision, or touch. It certainly couldn’t be gotten rid of. Maybe it could even be useful, I told myself. If it appears, just accept it—don’t let it turn your brain
to jelly as it had Fiona’s.

  So I made an accommodation with it. And a vow. It wasn’t going to get me. I was going to be a lawyer, damn it, not a gypsy fortune teller. I told no one about my family’s ability to “know” things before they had happened. Who wants to be thought weirder than they are?

  It was another twenty-three years before I found that I had “it.” And, as I said, I have Marc Bergeron to thank for the revelation.

  You may remember the Bergeron case. The media had a field day with it. It started with the disappearance of little Annie Graves. It was her birthday. Her sixth birthday. Her dad had let her ride her newly painted bike to the local Seven-Eleven for a popsicle. A massive search operation was begun, but to no avail. It was as if the little girl had vanished into thin air. Four days later a Parksville cop stopped a man for speeding, and noticed that the left front fender of the car was slightly scratched and bore a smear of pink Dayglo paint. Annie’s bike had been pink. The cop quite properly detained the man and called for assistance. Marc Bergeron was taken to Parksville police headquarters and questioned. He denied any knowledge of how the pink paint had gotten on his car. When an arrest (but no conviction) for child molestation was found on his record, he was taken into custody.

  Fortunately, Annie’s dad still had the spray paint can he had used. The paint on Bergeron’s car matched the paint in the can. Officers were sent to Bergeron’s house, but found nothing.

  It was then the afternoon of the fourth day since Annie’s disappearance. Bergeron’s camper and boat, parked in his yard, had been searched, neighbors, friends, and co-workers questioned. Bergeron’s locker at the garage where he worked as a mechanic had been opened, as had the trunks of the cars awaiting repair. Nothing. Time and tempers were growing short.

  And through it all Bergeron smirked. With his previous arrest inadmissible in court, I could see him slipping away from us as the hours ticked away and we were unable to locate Annie, the bicycle, or anything else to conclusively tie the two of them together. We did not have a case. Of course, everyone hoped Annie would be found alive; however, in our hearts we knew she was dead. But what had he done with her? And where was the damned bicycle?