One Last Scream

by Kevin O'Brien

  Karen took off her coat, but held on to it. “If we’re at all in the way, please, just let us know,” she told George.

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re a lifesaver, Karen.”

  Amelia bent down and pried Stephanie off George’s leg. The child clung to her now. Amelia looked so forlorn as she rocked Stephanie. “I’m sorry,” she whispered tearfully. “I’m so sorry, Steffie….”

  “Why are you sorry?” the child asked. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Amelia winced, and then she seemed to hug her young cousin even tighter.

  Watching them, Karen felt so horrible for Amelia and everyone in this house.

  George collected his daughter from her. “Amelia, sweetie, do you think you could talk to Jody?” he asked. “He won’t come out of his room. I’m really worried about him. Maybe he’ll talk to you.”

  Wiping her eyes, Amelia nodded, and then started through the living room toward a back hallway.

  “Jody’s my son,” George whispered to Karen. He stroked his daughter’s hair. They trailed after Amelia. “Five minutes after I told him the news about his mom, Jody ducked into his room and shut the door.”

  In the hallway, they stayed back and watched Amelia knock on the bedroom door.

  “He did the exact same thing a few months ago when his cousin died,” George explained. “Jody just worshiped Collin. He was holed up in his room for two whole days. I thought he’d miss the funeral. My wife had to leave his meals outside the door and even then, he hardly ate a thing. He only came out to go to the bathroom.” George’s voice cracked a little. “God, I don’t know what to do. It’s such an awful helpless feeling to know your child’s hurting….”

  Karen felt the same way watching Amelia. She wished there was something she could do to make the pain go away.

  Amelia knocked on Jody’s door again and called to her cousin, but he didn’t answer. “Jody? Please let me in,” she called. “I know how you feel, believe me….”

  “I’m sorry!” he replied in a strained, raspy voice. “I gotta be alone right now, Amelia. Could you go away, please?”

  Her head down, Amelia slinked away from his door. She looked at her uncle, and shrugged hopelessly. “Sorry, Uncle George,” she murmured. “Guess I’m just useless. I–I’m so tired. Would it be okay if I went to lie down for a while?”

  He nodded, and kissed her forehead. “Sure, sweetie, your bed’s all made down there.”

  Amelia gently patted Stephanie on the back, then wandered through the living room and foyer to a set of stairs leading to a lower level. Looking over her shoulder, she glanced at Karen, and then started down the steps.

  “Do you think maybe you could talk to him?”

  Karen turned at George and blinked. “You want me to talk to your son?”

  He shrugged. “Well, you’re a therapist. Maybe you’d have a better idea about the right thing to say….”

  “You know, I think we should just respect Jody’s need to be alone,” she whispered, touching his arm, “For a while, at least. If this is how he grieved for his cousin, then it’s what he knows. That’s how he got through it last time. Why don’t we give him until dinner’s ready, and try again? Okay?”

  He stared at her for a moment, then nodded. “I think you’re a very smart lady,” he said. “Thanks, Karen.”

  She smiled at him. “Well, um, I’ll go down and check on Amelia.”

  “Take a right at the bottom of the stairs. The guest room’s the first door on your left.”

  Downstairs, Karen paused in the large recreation room. It had a linoleum floor and high windows that didn’t let in much sunlight. There was a big-screen TV, a sectional sofa, and someone’s treadmill. Stashed in one corner were a bunch of toys, including a dollhouse. Karen draped her coat over a chair. She gazed at the collection of framed family photos on the wall. She figured the stylish, attractive redhead in the pictures was George’s murdered wife. There were also a few photos of Amelia with her family. Karen had been hearing about the Faradays for months, but this was her first actual look at them. She could see a resemblance between the sisters, Jenna and Ina. Studying the pictures of Mark Faraday, she wondered how that pleasant-looking, slightly dumpy man could have shot those two women and then himself. It was hard to comprehend that they were all dead now. In one night, Amelia had lost nearly all of her family-and in such a violent, heinous way.

  There were photos of Collin Faraday, too. From the way Amelia talked about her dead brother, Karen had expected him to have been this stunningly handsome, golden-haired teenager. Instead, he just seemed like a normal, nice-looking kid with a goofy smile.

  “My brother’s death wasn’t an accident. I know it wasn’t,” Amelia had told her during their first session. “Because I killed him.”

  Karen remembered staring at her, and wondering exactly what she’d meant.

  “I promised myself I wouldn’t mention anything about it,” Amelia had said, squirming on Karen’s sofa. “It’s too soon to drop a bombshell like that on you. And now the session’s almost over. Jesus. Please, tell me you’ll see me again, Karen. I trust you, and I can’t keep this to myself any longer. Please, don’t send me away-”

  “It’s okay, I’m listening,” Karen had said calmly. “We’ve got time.” She wasn’t one of those clock-watching therapists. If a patient was in the middle of something important, she never cut them off because of time. In this instance, she luckily hadn’t scheduled any other sessions that afternoon, so Karen could go on for another hour or so if it meant understanding Amelia Faraday better. Already, she wanted to help and protect this girl.

  “What do you mean, you killed him?” Karen asked as gently as possible. “Can you talk about it?”

  Amelia nodded. “I was at a Booze Busters retreat in Port Townsend,” she replied, sniffling. “Six of us took an RV there for the weekend and camped out. But I had this premonition about Collin the whole weekend, all these feelings of hatred for him that I can’t explain. I kept thinking about how I would kill him, and it was crazy. I didn’t want that to happen. I couldn’t have meant it. I didn’t even want to think about it. I loved my brother. He was the sweetest guy….” She started sobbing again. “I’m sorry.”

  “Take your time.”

  Amelia wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. “I must have blacked out, because all I have are fragments of what happened.”

  Fragments again, Karen thought. She scribbled the word down in her notes.

  “I was standing on the dock in our backyard with Collin,” Amelia explained. “Our house is up in Bellingham-on Lake Whatcom. I hit him with a board or something-a piece of plank, I think. He just-just looked at me, stunned, and-and an awful gash started to open up on his forehead. He let out this garbled, frail cry….” Wincing, she shook her head. “God, it was this weird, warble-type of sound, almost inhuman. And then he toppled off the dock into the water.

  “I don’t remember anything else. It’s like I lost nearly everything from that afternoon, because the next thing I knew, I was waking up from a nap in the RV in Port Townsend-and it was dinnertime. But I had those images in my head. It’s how come I knew about Collin before anyone else. I tried to call my folks and tell them something had happened, but they were spending the weekend at their cabin, and the cell phone service is lousy out there-”

  “There was no one else staying with Collin?” Karen asked.

  Amelia shook her head. “He was alone in the house for the weekend. Before my folks left, I teased him about how he’d be raiding the booze cabinet, watching porn, and having a big party while they were gone. He had a friend coming over that afternoon. He’s the one who found him. When Collin didn’t answer the door, his buddy went around to the back and saw him floating by the dock. His sleeve had gotten caught on something. They figured he’d had too much to drink, then fallen off the dock, and hit his head on some pilings. Turned out he had alcohol in his system. And maybe that’s true, but he didn’t die the way
they think.”

  Karen squinted at her. “Have you talked to anyone about this?”

  Amelia sighed. “Just my Aunt Ina. She said I was crazy with grief, and that I shouldn’t repeat it to anyone. It would just upset people even more.”

  “You said you were with people from Booze Busters that weekend,” Karen pointed out. “How did you manage to break away from the camp, then drive to Bellingham and back without them noticing? It’s at least a hundred miles and a ferry ride each way. You’d have been gone the entire afternoon.”

  Amelia seemed to shrink into the corner of Karen’s sofa. She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know how I got there. But I remember what happened. And a neighbor saw me there, too. The police determined Collin must have died around two or three o’clock that Saturday afternoon. Our neighbor, Mrs. Ormsby, said she saw me hosing down our dock around that time. But because I was supposed to be gone the whole weekend, no one really believed her. She’s an old woman. They figured she was senile or just wanted some attention. Mrs. Ormsby later said she might have been mistaken. But I don’t think she was.”

  Karen leaned forward in her seat. “But she must have been wrong, Amelia. Don’t you see? Your friends would have noticed if you’d left the campsite-”

  “I know, I know,” she cried. Her whole body was shaking. “But I have these-these pieces of memory that tell me I killed him. When I’m alone in bed at night, I can still hear him making that strange, horrible sound after I hit him with the plank. I still hear Collin dying.”

  Karen let her cry it out. “There are a lot of explanations for what you were feeling-for these sensory fragments,” she said finally. “It doesn’t mean you killed your brother, Amelia. Your sudden rage toward him, that’s not entirely uncommon. I’ve heard many stories from people who suddenly, for no good reason, became irritable or distant with a loved one-only to lose them within a few days of this inexplicable anger. Even when the death is unexpected, our extrasensory perception can sometimes kick in and start to protect us from the impending loss.”

  Curled up in the corner of the sofa, Amelia gave her a slightly skeptical look. But at least she’d stopped crying.

  “You said that you and Collin were close,” Karen went on. “Often with family members and loved ones, we can sense when something is wrong-even if that loved one is over a hundred miles away. We can still pick up a frequency that there’s trouble. Maybe you just tapped into Collin’s frequency. Maybe you have a bit of ESP.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Amelia murmured, still eyeing her dubiously.

  “Well, it makes a lot more sense than the notion that you traveled over two hundred miles without ever really leaving your campsite in Port Townsend. Doesn’t it?”

  Amelia sighed and then reached for her bottle of water.

  “I’ve just met you, Amelia,” she continued. “But you don’t seem like a murderer to me. And what would your motive be, anyway? You loved your brother. As for that neighbor woman who saw you, why do you still believe her even after she recanted what she said? No one else believed her, but you did. Why do you want to take the blame?”

  Karen remembered going on like that for a few more minutes, until Amelia had started to calm down. She’d made her promise to go back to Booze Busters, and they’d agreed to meet twice a week.

  That had been four months ago. Karen didn’t need to hear bits of a flashback in which Amelia’s biological mother asked if someone had touched her “down there” to presume she’d been abused in some way as a young child. All the classic attributions of child abuse were there in the 19-year-old: her low self-esteem, nightmares, flashbacks, lost time, and her assuming guilt for just about everything.

  A perfect example of this was Amelia’s episode with her boyfriend, Shane, and how quickly Amelia had assumed she’d done something wrong when he said he’d seen her in that car with another man. Amelia had gone and gotten herself tested, because she’d automatically figured herself guilty of infidelity. It never seemed to have occurred to her that Shane might have been mistaken.

  There were a lot of problems they worked on over the next four months. And in that time, Karen felt a special bond forming with this young woman who depended on her so much. She was more like Amelia’s big sister than her therapist.

  Amelia had kept her promise and went back to Booze Busters. And though things still got a little rocky with Shane from time to time, they continued to see each other. Her grades were improving at school. Mark and Jenna Faraday had both e-mailed Karen to tell her what a wonderful job she’d been doing with Amelia. Her whole outlook has improved 100 percent since she started seeing you, Jenna Faraday had written.

  Karen e-mailed back and thanked them. She’d been tempted to ask the Faradays to reconsider hiring a private detective to look into what had happened to Amelia’s biological parents. But she’d left that up to Amelia instead. Amelia was nineteen, and old enough to discuss it with her parents herself. Unfortunately, for the last two months, Amelia had been procrastinating. She admitted she was afraid. “It’s not so much I’m worried about having been abused or anything like that,” she’d said. “I’m just scared that I might have done something really, really horrible.”

  “Well, you were only four, Amelia,” Karen had replied. “You couldn’t have done anything that awful. Except for Damien in The Omen, how many totally evil four-year-olds do you know? We need to explore this time period in your life.”

  Amelia’s problems couldn’t be completely treated until they knew what had happened to her as a child.

  Now Karen stared at a framed photo of Jenna and Mark Faraday. They stood on a dock in sporty summer clothes with their arms around each other. The beautiful lake glistened in the background. Karen wondered if it was the same spot where their son had been killed. If so, the photo certainly must have been taken before that tragedy, at a happier time. How could they have known what would occur there? And just a few months later, they would be dead, too.

  With a long sigh, Karen started toward the first door on the left. According to George’s directions, it was the guest room. The door was closed. Karen was about to knock, but hesitated. She heard Amelia murmuring something. Karen couldn’t tell if she was awake-or talking in her sleep.

  “No,” Amelia said in a hushed tone. “You really don’t want that to happen. You don’t mean it. You mustn’t even think that.”

  “Yes, well, thank you,” George said into the cordless phone. He sat at the breakfast table with Stephanie in his lap. “I’ll be here-waiting. Good-bye.”

  Dazed, he clicked off the phone. “That was the police,” he said to Jessie.

  Hovering over the stove with a fork in her hand, she gave him an expectant look.

  “They’re coming over to ask me some questions. Could I ask you or Karen to stick around and keep an eye on the kids until the cops leave? They’ll probably want to talk to Amelia, too. I figure my study’s the best place.” He glanced down at Stephanie and resituated her in his lap.

  Jessie nodded. “No sweat. I can stay here as long as you need me.”

  He reached back for his wallet. “I’d like to pay you something for all your-”

  “Your money’s no good here tonight, no sir,” Jessie said. “If you need someone to cook, clean, and babysit after today, I’ll gladly take your dough. But tonight, you put that wallet away.”

  Following her instructions, George worked up a smile. “I don’t know you very well, Jessie. But I have a feeling you’re a gem.”

  She grinned at him, and then her gaze shifted to Stephanie. “Hey, sweetheart, could you help me fix dinner?”

  Warily staring back at her, Stephanie shifted in his lap.

  “Oh, c’mon, what do you say? Help me out. Stir the sauce for me, okay?”

  “’Kay,” Stephanie murmured, scooting off her father’s lap.

  Jessie pulled out one of the chairs from the breakfast table and put a bowl full of the sauce mixture on it. She gave Stephanie a plastic spoon. Geor
ge watched his daughter, with a determined look on her face, stirring the concoction.

  He felt a tightness in his throat. George told himself he wasn’t going to break down in front of her, not when she’d just stopped crying herself.

  He thought about the police, now on their way. They’d have all sorts of questions about the Faradays’ personal problems, their deep, dirty secrets. They’d want to know what had driven Mark Faraday to snap and do such violent, horrific things.

  George would have to tell them how Mark and Jenna’s marriage had suffered in the wake of Collin’s death. Still, he’d never imagined his brother-in-law as the type of man who could harm anyone intentionally. Then again, not too long ago, he’d never imagined Mark as the type of man who would sleep with his wife’s sister, either.

  Should he admit that to the police? God, he didn’t want to go into that with them. Still, he wondered if Ina and Mark’s indiscretion had anything to do with what had happened last night. George couldn’t begin to guess what had been going through Mark’s head when he’d picked up that gun and started shooting.

  The three of them were dead. Couldn’t people just leave them alone?

  No. The media coverage would be crazy. What a scoop: the love triangle behind the bloody murders. The scandal might blow over by the time Stephanie was old enough to understand what people were gossiping about. But poor Jody-all his friends would know his mother had screwed his uncle just two months before the guy shot her, his wife, and then himself.

  Part of him was so mad at Ina right now for doing this to her family and herself. The irony was she’d always been so concerned with keeping up appearances and impressing people. How would Ina have felt if she knew her sad little affair would become public knowledge?

  Maybe he could strike a deal with the police to leave the more delicate matters out of the newspapers. It was worth a try. He really didn’t have much of a choice.

  He thought about Amelia, napping downstairs. Telling the police about Ina and Mark meant telling Amelia, too. And God only knew how that already fragile girl would take it.