The Pinocchio Syndrome

Home > Other > The Pinocchio Syndrome > Page 29
The Pinocchio Syndrome Page 29

by David Zeman


  The doctor shrugged. “I don’t see why not,” he said. “I’ll give you the addresses from my own file. But be gentle with them. They’re still in a lot of pain.”

  “I understand,” Karen said.

  That night Karen stood in a cubicle at the Sacred Heart nursing care facility in Waltham, Massachusetts. Beside her was an exhausted-looking woman in middle age named Glenda Christensen. In the bed before them lay the woman’s only daughter, Jane Christensen, who was one of the fourteen victims in Dr. Doering’s file.

  The girl lay in the rigidly decerebrate position of many long-term coma patients, her neck hyperextended, her hands flexed on the wrists. She was emaciated and ghostly pale. Her eyes were open and staring.

  “Just look at her,” the mother said. “She hasn’t moved a muscle in all these years. Except for a few spasms that the doctors told us are normal. She’s hardly opened her eyes in all that time.”

  Karen was silent, looking down at the girl. She was breathing on her own, but an IV was connected to her arm, apparently for nutrition.

  “Has she been here all that time?” Karen asked.

  The mother shook her head. “She was in Mass General at first. Then we put her in a nursing home near us, out in Lexington. Then my husband died. He didn’t leave me much. I couldn’t afford it out there anymore, so I had to look for another place. They took her in at Western Chronic Care, but after about a year they made us leave. I finally found out about Sacred Heart from a woman in our parish.”

  “And you’ve never spoken to your daughter in all this time?” Karen asked.

  “Spoken?” Mrs. Christensen smiled sadly. “I speak to her every day. I tell her my news, tell her how her brother is doing, and his wife and kids. I try to make believe she can hear me. I even read to her from the newspaper. But she’s never given the slightest sign she heard me. Not one sign.”

  Karen said, “Tell me again how it happened.”

  “She went out that night to meet her friend and go to the movies. They wanted to seeTerms of Endearment . She never came home.”

  She shook her head. “I made the mistake of going to see that movie later. I didn’t know whether she had actually seen it or not, that night. If she had, I wanted to see what she saw. It devastated me, because in the movie the daughter ended up dying in a bed with her mother looking down at her, just as I have to look down at Jane every day.”

  Karen nodded, looking at the ruined girl in the bed.

  “Did you try to find out where she had gone that night after the movie?” she asked.

  “Yes. But the police were no help. She was sick, you see. That was all there was to it. The police told me that without evidence of foul play it wasn’t their problem. Later my husband went to the theater and asked the ticket seller if she had seen Jane. The girl didn’t remember. I think Justine’s parents went further, because she was a missing person. But even for them the police wouldn’t do anything.”

  “Justine?” Karen asked.

  The mother turned to her. “Didn’t I say that? Justine was never heard from again. That’s why we were convinced something bad had happened to the girls. But the police refused to investigate. They listed Justine as a missing person, and that was that.”

  “What was her last name?” Karen asked.

  “Justine? Lawrence. Justine Lawrence.”

  “And you say her parents tried to find out more about what had happened?”

  “For a while, yes. But they weren’t successful. Then Mrs. Lawrence committed suicide. She didn’t leave a note, but I’ve always felt certain it was because of what happened to Justine. And the father, Mr. Lawrence, he’s a hopeless drunk now. He was an alcoholic even at the time, but he was well enough to work. After Justine disappeared and his wife killed herself, he fell apart. He doesn’t live here anymore. I don’t know where he is, to tell you the truth. We used to keep in touch, but then it just got too painful.”

  “Do you know where I might look for him?” Karen asked.

  The woman shook her head. “You could try his old neighbors. I don’t know. He was fired from his job, and then one day he just disappeared. He used to talk about going himself to find Justine, but he was too far gone to do anything like that. He was drinking himself to death, poor man.”

  “And Justine was never found?” Karen asked.

  Mrs. Christensen shook her head. “I think she’s dead. I think whoever did this to Jane killed Justine.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Karen asked.

  The woman looked at her. “I feel it in my heart.”

  Karen wrote down a quick note in her shorthand.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “I can see what this has done to you.”

  The woman looked at her. “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “You’re not that far from Jane’s age. Is your mother living?”

  Karen shook her head. “No.”

  “I’m sorry. When I see a young woman like you, I feel so jealous. All the things Jane would have experienced, all the things she would have told me about in these fifteen years. I could have helped her. Or listened, anyway. Sometimes I think it would have been easier if she had died. To see her this way, every day . . .”

  Karen nodded. “It must be torture.” She touched the woman’s arm gently.

  Mrs. Christensen sighed, looking down at her daughter.

  “Has she ever spoken in all this time?” Karen asked.

  “Only in her sleep,” the mother said. “The first year she would mumble things while her eyes were open. Then she stopped.” She sighed. “I ask the nurses here to listen when they’re near her. But I don’t think they do anymore.”

  “Has she ever said words you could understand?” Karen asked.

  “A few times,” the mother said. “Nothing that made any sense, though. Just gibberish. Just raving. Something about a donkey . . .”

  With an effort of will Karen managed to put on an expression of neutral curiosity.

  “A donkey? What about a donkey?”

  “Nothing. Just donkey. It didn’t make any sense.”

  Karen made a note on her pad.

  “Does she still say it?”

  “She doesn’t say anything now.” The woman shook her head. “She was so beautiful. So bright. She had her whole life ahead of her.”

  “Mrs. Christensen, I’m going to try to learn what I can about this whole thing,” Karen said. “I’d appreciate a favor. If you remember anything else about what happened when Jane first got sick, please call me. And if she should say anything, or give you any sign of life, I hope you’ll let me know. Here’s my card. You can call my answering service anytime, day or night. I’ll write my home number and e-mail on the back.”

  She knew there wouldn’t be anything new. But she wanted to give the woman a small reason to go on hoping, to go on waiting.

  “Thank you for helping me,” she said.

  Mrs. Christensen gave her an empty look. “Don’t mention it,” she said. In her eyes Karen could see a world where thanks and help were no longer realities, where only pain existed.

  49

  —————

  Hamilton, Virginia

  April 2

  JUDD CAMPBELL sat in the office of his Chesapeake Bay home, talking to the head of the detective agency he had hired to find Susan. The clock on the desk said 2A .M., but Judd did not notice it. Nor did he care that he had awakened the detective with his call.

  “You can’t tell me that’s all you’ve got,” he said. “It’s been six days.”

  “There’s very little to go on, Mr. Campbell,” the detective said. “As far as we can tell, she intended to slip away unobserved.”

  The FBI had interviewed a neighbor of Susan’s in Georgetown who thought she saw a woman with curly brown hair driving Susan’s MG the day Susan disappeared. The woman knew the little car and was about to wave when she saw that the driver didn’t look like Susan.

  From this
the authorities deduced that Susan was in disguise when she left her house. Obviously she intended either to take a vacation from her well-known role as the visible wife of a United States senator—or to run away permanently.

  The FBI had finally found its way to the Hagerstown movie theater where Susan had seen the matinee ofRight of Way . Agents had put the two teenagers who worked at the theater under hypnosis. The boy remembered nothing, but the girl remembered an attractive curly-headed woman wearing tight jeans, a T-shirt, and a tiny leather jacket. She did not recognize the woman as Susan Campbell, but the height and weight were right.

  There the trail ended. Like the FBI and the other agencies, Judd’s detectives could find no evidence that Susan’s MG was followed on its route from Washington to the Green Lake cottage.

  “Can’t you do any better than that?” Judd asked angrily.

  “We’ve talked to everybody who lives at the lake,” the detective said. “Unfortunately most of the cottages were empty. The caretaker was there in his own place, but he was asleep at the time. It turns out the fellow has a drinking problem. He’s plastered most of the time. None of the other neighbors saw the MG.”

  “I’m paying you to find her,” Judd said. “What are you doing now?”

  “The routine missing-person stuff is best left to the government agencies,” the detective said. “They have the manpower to scour the country for her. Our best bet is to follow up angles they don’t want to pursue.”

  “Like what?” Judd asked.

  “Runaway is one,” the detective said. “Suppose she set all this up in order to give us the impression she was abducted. That would mean she had a game plan starting at the cottage. She intended to leave the MG there and vanish without a trace. If that’s what happened, she had to have another vehicle or a plan for transportation from the cottage to wherever she was headed. I have men working specifically on that angle.”

  “What have they learned?” Judd asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “They’re not going to,” Judd said. “That’s a dead end.”

  Judd did not believe that Susan had plotted her own disappearance. She would not abandon Michael. She would stay at her post no matter how frightened she was.

  “We have to pursue it anyway,” the detective said. “Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did. Anything is possible, sir.”

  “Anything?”

  “She could be in league with your son’s political enemies. She might have run away in order to hurt the administration. Don’t reject ideas like this out of hand. Believe me, stranger things have happened. And this is an unusual year. There are pressures . . .”

  Judd sighed. “I don’t believe it. That’s not Susan.”

  There was a silence. The detective was tired and irritable. This was the fourth or fifth time Judd had awakened him in the wee hours. Judd was a hard man to work for. He kibitzed at every opportunity, and there was a nasty, accusing edge to his questions, as though the professionals he had hired did not know how to do their jobs. A typical executive, Judd had a need to give orders, to kick ass. He didn’t know how to sit back and let the detectives do their work.

  “Then again,” the detective went on patiently, “there is always the possibility that two unrelated things happened. First she ran away, and then she was abducted. That sort of scenario.”

  “Abducted by who?” Judd asked.

  “Somebody who had nothing to do with the reason why she left town in disguise. Possibly even somebody who didn’t know who they were abducting. Anything is possible.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” Judd asked.

  “I don’t believe anything. I’m not committed to anything. I just want to find out what happened.”

  Judd hung up without saying good-bye. He went down to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of ale, and sat down in the dark living room looking out at the moonlit waves.

  He was out of control emotionally, and he knew it. In some imponderable way the torch of his late wife Margery had been passed to Susan. When Susan came into the family it was as though Judd had an opportunity to make up for Margery’s loss. He had made sure Susan felt accepted by the family. After all, she needed a home after her own family splintered. But more than that, the Campbells needed her. Judd needed her.

  Throughout this menacing year Judd had been essentially unmoved by what was happening in the political world. The deaths of Everhardt and Stillman played into the hands of his ambition for Michael. He was sorry they were gone, that was all. He never felt the events of the winter as a danger. Not really.

  But that was before Susan disappeared. Now Judd Campbell’s entire world was menaced. He had to get Susan home. If she was in danger, he had to save her. She might as well have been his own wife, or his daughter. He simply had to get her back.

  A voice startled him.

  “Dad?” It was Ingrid, standing in the doorway in her nightgown.

  Judd gave her a sour nod. It was impossible to be up and around in the wee hours without her knowing about it. Her ears were even sharper than Margery’s had been. And she was constantly hovering over him, urging him to sleep, not to upset himself.

  But tonight, moved by a pitying impulse, she did not reproach him. She came forward to put her hand on his shoulder. “I could make you a toddy,” she said.

  “No, thanks, dear.” Judd squeezed her hand. “I’m fine.”

  She sat down in the chair opposite the couch. The waves thumped outside the windows in the darkness. The only light in the room came from the little lamp on the piano. Susan was the only one in the family who played. She picked her way through Mozart sonatas sometimes, and the easier pieces by Beethoven and Schumann. At Judd’s request she had learned arrangements of some of his favorite songs, including the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and the Gershwin classic “Love Is Here to Stay.”

  Ingrid looked at her father. He was showing signs of old age. He napped more these days than he had in the past. He forgot things. When he thought no one was looking he would lapse into an attitude of exhausted passivity that was like a distant harbinger of the nursing home. Only when his flashing eyes were open, and his sharp tongue was lashing those around him, did he still seem youthful.

  Ingrid had sacrificed her life for him. And, of course, for Michael and Stewart and Susan. She did not regret it. She had known as a young girl that something about romance simply didn’t appeal to her. It wasn’t that she disliked men, or liked women. It was that she felt nothing for anyone outside her family. It felt natural for her to remain within it and devote herself to nurturing and protecting it. She was a hybrid creature, part matriarch and part big sister, not cut out for the marriage bed.

  “Dad,” she said.

  Judd emerged from his reverie to look at her. His despair was written all over his face.

  “Dad, we’ll get her back.”

  “Yes,” Judd said. “Yes, we will.”

  There was a silence.

  Ingrid said, “Remember that night, after Mom’s funeral, when you and I were sitting up? We couldn’t sleep, and we met right here in this room, just like tonight. And then Michael came in, and Stewie. Michael hadn’t gone back to school yet, and Stewie was spending the night.”

  “We were so wide awake that we ended up making chowder at four in the morning,” Judd said. “Your mother’s recipe.”

  “We even laughed at what we were doing,” Ingrid said. “God, we were crazy that night.”

  Judd nodded, smiling. “That’s what grief can do.”

  “That was the last night we were all together, as a family,” Ingrid said. “We’ve never been in a room together since. The four of us, I mean. You and me and Michael and Stew.”

  Judd’s smile faded. It was true. In the years after Margery’s death his conflict with Stewart had become a permanent rift. The loss of Margery had hardened Judd, made him less tolerant and perhaps less wise. He had driven Stewart away.

  “But after Susan cam
e,” Ingrid said, “we felt like a family again. Didn’t we?”

  He looked at Ingrid. He smiled. “Yes. Susan brought all that back.”

  Their smiles were clouded, for they both knew that Susan might never come back. If she didn’t come back, that would be the second end of the Campbell family. Judd’s heart constricted at the thought.

  “I wonder if Mike is burning the midnight oil like we are tonight,” Ingrid said, to change the subject. Michael was in Georgetown.

  Judd shrugged. “With a house full of federal agents? I wouldn’t sleep a wink.”

  “He’s a good sleeper,” Ingrid said. “The only really good sleeper in the family.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Judd was wondering what terrible thoughts must be weaving their way into his son’s dreams this night. Michael’s love for Susan was strong. His dread must be consuming, unbearable.

  Ingrid stood up. “Turn the light off when you come up,” she said.

  “I will.” Judd was grateful to Ingrid for not hovering over him. For the first time since this vigil began, it occurred to him to wonder what it was doing to her.

  But he didn’t ask. Time had circumscribed their roles. Ingrid was the rock, the foundation. No one ever asked her what she was feeling.

  He watched her pad out of the room in her ugly slippers, an aging woman whose body had never known the touch of a man. She was a slave to the role she had chosen for herself in life. There was nothing to be done for her, nothing to be said.

  He sat in the silence, staring into space. This vigil felt for all the world like a continuation of that long-ago vigil over Margery. He had no desire to sleep. Every moment he remained awake was like a hand outstretched to Susan, wherever she was. Every moment asleep was a small betrayal of her.

  He moved to the battered old couch and lay down without turning out the light. It was on these cushions that, long ago, he used to lie with his head in Margery’s lap.

  A few minutes later he turned on his side. His eyes closed. The thing that passed for sleep in this tortured time came slowly over him. His breathing grew deeper, its rhythm matching the thump of the waves.

 

‹ Prev