One Last Scream

by Kevin O'Brien

  Karen turned to Dwight, a tall, spry 85-year-old who was a bit of a know-it-all. Except for his slippers, he dressed as if ready for a round of golf, in a green cardigan sweater and plaid pants. Among those gawking at poor Peggy, he was the least likely to budge. “Dwight, we need you,” she said urgently. “Could you help me get these people to clear the way?”

  The old man relished being an authority figure. “All right, let’s give them some room here!” He kept clapping his hands and poking at his fellow residents’ shoulders and backs until they shuffled aside. Of the dozen or so spectators, two had walkers and one was in a wheelchair. Karen helped corral them down the hallway while the paramedics rushed into the TV room.

  In the middle of all the commotion, she saw a young brunette in a windbreaker emerging from a nurse’s station alcove down the corridor. Karen froze. “Amelia?” she called.

  The young woman glanced at her for a second, then hurried farther down the hallway. Karen started after her. “Amelia? Wait a minute!” She wondered why she was running away. Up ahead, the young woman ducked into a stairwell. The door was on a hydraulic spring, and still hadn’t closed all the way by the time Karen swung it open again. She heard footsteps echoing in the dim gray stairwell. The walls were cinder block, and the unpainted concrete steps went down to a lower level and then to the basement. Karen paused at the top of the stairs and peered over the banister. She could see a shadow moving on the steps below. “Amelia? Is that you?” she called.

  Karen rushed down the stairs, pausing only for a moment when she heard a door squeak open on the basement level. A mechanical, grinding noise suddenly resounded through the stairwell, probably from the boiler. She continued down the steps to the landing and pushed open the door. Karen found herself in a long, dim corridor. Two tall metal oxygen cylinders stood against the wall, along with a broken-down metal tray table on wheels. Someone had left an old rusty crowbar on top of it. Straight ahead, Karen saw the open door to the boiler room. She poked her head in. The room was huge, with a grated floor, a big old-fashioned boiler, a furnace, and a labyrinth of pipes and ducts. She didn’t see anyone. Most of the maintenance people went home at 2:00 P.M. on Saturdays.

  “Amelia?” she called, over the din from the boiler.

  Turning, she glanced back at the corridor. A set of double doors farther down the hall was gently swinging in and out. She would have noticed if they’d been moving before. Had someone just ducked into that room?

  Karen hadn’t been down here since Roseann had given her an employee tour of the place months ago. If memory served her right, there was a storage room beyond those swinging doors. Approaching them, she cautiously glanced over her shoulder at the passageway to another part of the basement. She didn’t see anyone, just two large bins full of dirty laundry.

  Karen pushed open the swinging doors, and stepped into the dark, cavernous room. The spotlights overhead seemed spaced too far apart, leaving several large, shadowy pockets amid the clutter. To Karen’s right was a graveyard of broken gurneys, metal tray tables and other hospital equipment. There were also about a dozen more tall oxygen cylinders.

  “Is someone in here?” she called. “Amelia? Can you hear me? It’s Karen.”

  She studied the rows of boxes to her left, some neatly stacked as high as five feet. But others had been torn open, revealing their contents: toilet paper rolls, lightbulbs, paper towels, soap bars, and cleaning supplies. One huge, open carton held bedpans that gleamed in the dim light. Still more boxes were opened and emptied, lying discarded on the floor.

  As Karen ventured deeper into the room, she wondered what the hell Amelia would be doing down here. And if it had indeed been Amelia she’d seen upstairs, why had she run away?

  Something crunched under her shoe. Karen stopped and gazed down at the thin shards of glass on the floor. Then she looked up toward the ceiling. The hanging spotlight above her was broken. She studied the line of spotlights; most of them had been shattered. No wonder there were so many dark areas in this cellar room. Someone had made it that way.

  “Who’s down here?” she called.

  Karen didn’t move for a moment. Her eyes scanned the rows upon rows of boxes, some sections engulfed in the shadows. About twenty feet away, she detected some movement amid the maze of cartons. Suddenly, a dark figure darted between the stacks.

  Karen gasped. It looked like a man in black clothes, with a stocking cap on his head. She hadn’t seen his face; he’d moved too quickly.

  Her heart was racing, and she started to back up toward the double doors. She thought she heard something-a faint murmuring.

  “Do it now!” a woman whispered urgently. “Get her!”

  Karen turned around and ran for the exit as fast as she could. Flinging open the double doors, she retreated down the basement hallway. As she reached the metal table by the stairwell, she paused and glanced over her shoulder. The storage room doors were still swinging in and out. But no one had come out after her.

  She noticed once again the rusty crowbar on top of the table and snatched it up. She took a minute to catch her breath. With her gaze riveted on the swinging doors, Karen reached into her purse for her cell phone.

  She had Roseann’s number on speed dial. Her friend answered after two rings: “Sandpoint View, this is Roseann.”

  “Ro, it’s Karen,” she said, still trying to get her breath.

  “Where did you disappear to? One minute, you’re with me working crowd control, and the next-”

  “I’m in the basement,” Karen cut in. “I followed someone down here. I can’t explain right now. But could you send Lamar down?” Lamar was an orderly around thirty years old, one of the sweetest guys Karen knew. But he also had a linebacker’s build, a shaved head, and an ugly scar on his handsome face. With his formidable looks, Lamar would have made a good bodyguard. And that was what Karen needed right now, because she’d made up her mind to go back into that storage room.

  “Tell Lamar I’m by the door to stairwell C, right across from the boiler room. And could you tell him to hurry, please?”

  Karen clicked off the line, and stashed the phone back in her purse. She kept her eyes on the double doors, now motionless. She clutched the crowbar tightly in her fist, and waited.

  “Are you going to call the police?” Lamar asked.

  He’d given Karen his white orderly jacket to keep her warm, and she felt so small wrapped in it. They stood by a set of concrete steps leading down to a fire door to the convalescent home’s basement. The old door, with chicken wire crisscrossed in the fogged window, had had a fire alarm attached to the inside lever. But someone had managed to dislodge the mechanism. Karen and Lamar had found the door half open during their search of the storage room. Five overhead lights had been broken-and recently, too. Using Karen’s cell, Lamar had phoned Marco, the head of maintenance. Marco had been in the storage area shortly before going home at 2:00 P.M. According to him, all the lights down there had been working fine three hours ago.

  The outside stairwell to the basement was nearly hidden behind a row of bushes on the side of the long, two-story, beige brick building. But from where Karen stood, she had a clear view of the parking lot. The black Cadillac wasn’t there anymore.

  Lamar nudged her. “So, are you going to call the police, Karen?” He spoke with a very crisp Jamaican accent.

  Frowning, she shook her head. Even with her old connections on the force, she’d sound pretty stupid trying to explain what had happened. She’d followed someone down to the basement, to the storage room. She’d seen a man, but couldn’t really describe him. She’d heard a woman whispering to him. It had sounded like they’d planned to attack her or kill her-she couldn’t be sure. And oh, yes, one more thing: the young woman she’d followed down to the basement was a client, and a friend of hers.

  “So, do you think you might have a stalker?” Lamar asked.

  “I–I’m not sure,” she said, shrugging. She was thinking about last Saturday, when she’d s
potted someone who looked like Amelia in the corridor outside her dad’s room.

  “It’s almost dinnertime,” Lamar said, gently taking her arm. He led the way through a break in the bushes to the parking lot. “They’ll need me back inside. Will you be okay?”

  She gave him his jacket back. “Yes. Thank you, Lamar. I’m sorry to drag you down to the basement for nothing.”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t for nothing, Karen, not after what they did to the lights and the door. I think you were being set up. You watch out for yourself, okay? I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. You’re one of the nicest people here.”

  “Well, thank you, Lamar,” she said. “Thanks very much.”

  Biting her lip, Karen watched him lumber away toward the side door. She thought she’d been set up, too. But why?

  It was getting dark out, and colder. Shivering, Karen glanced at her watch: 5:05. Poor Jessie had been waiting for her for fifteen minutes. While in the basement with Lamar, Karen had phoned Dr. Chang’s office. Apparently, Jessie was all right.

  She pulled out her cell phone again, and dialed Amelia’s cell number. After two rings, she got a recording.

  “Amelia, this is Karen,” she said, after the beep. “It’s a little after five, and I’m wondering where you are right now. Can you call me as soon as you get this? We need to talk. Thanks.”

  She clicked off the line, and then shoved the phone back inside her purse. She wondered if she’d called that number twenty-five minutes ago while down in that gloomy basement storage room alone, would she have heard a cell phone ringing?

  She remembered something Amelia had told her during their first session. She’d said, as a child, she used to talk to herself in the mirror a lot. She’d tried to make a joke of it. “So what do you make of that? Early signs of a split personality?”

  Karen wondered if Amelia would claim to have had one of her blackouts this afternoon. Would she only remember fragments of this incident, too?

  She thought she knew Amelia. She’d believed her incapable of killing anyone. She’d been certain about that.

  But now Karen wasn’t sure of anything.

  “I was sitting there with my blouse off in your Dr. Chang’s examining room for twenty-five minutes and for absolutely no reason, except maybe because I’m the youngest female patient he’s had since he started working there. If that isn’t pathetic, I don’t know what is.”

  Karen kept checking the rearview mirror while Jessie, in the passenger seat, explained how her emergency checkup had been a total waste of time. Karen needed convincing that Jessie was all right. She also needed to make sure an old black Cadillac with a bent antenna wasn’t following them. But she couldn’t make out much in the rearview mirror beyond a string of glaring headlights behind her on Twenty-fourth Avenue.

  She’d decided not to tell Jessie about the incident in the basement. No need to put any more stress or strain on her. At the same time, she hated to think she might be leading a pair of potential killers to Jessie’s home in the Beacon Hill district.

  “You know, I don’t like leaving you alone,” Karen said, eyes on the road. “I mean, what if you have another spell in the middle of the night?”

  “I highly doubt I’ll be wrapping my arms around another 170-pound man and repeatedly lifting him off his feet tonight. But if I end up doing that, the fella and I would like a little privacy, please.” She chuckled and waved away Karen’s concern. “Quit worrying. There’s nothing wrong with me except I’m old as the hills and big as a house.”

  “Sure you haven’t been overworking yourself at the McMillans’?” Karen asked. Jessie had babysat, cooked, and cleaned at George’s house three days during the past week.

  “Oh, it’s been a breeze. Those kids are so sweet. And Amelia’s been there practically every day, and she helps out a lot. By the way, I’ve been putting in a good word for you now and then with Gorgeous George. Just planting the seed for when he’s ready to start dating again.”

  “You’re wasting your time, Jess. George doesn’t like me much. He thinks I’m a busybody.”

  “Oh, phooey, where did you get that idea?”

  Karen said nothing. She briefly checked the rearview mirror again.

  She hadn’t seen George since the funeral three days ago, where she’d given him a brief, polite hello. Before that, he’d distractedly nodded and waved at her-while on the phone-when she’d stopped by his house on Sunday morning to drive Amelia to the West Seattle Precinct. Amelia’s much-dreaded interview with the police had turned out to be rather benign.

  They’d talked with her for only forty-five minutes. They hadn’t asked about her premonition, and hadn’t seemed very interested in where she was at the time of the shootings. The questioning had focused mostly on her family, especially her father, and his behavior during the last few months.

  Since then, Amelia had phoned Karen every day, sometimes even twice a day. Karen always took the calls, and tried to reassure her that she’d survive this. Amelia never mentioned whether or not she still felt responsible for the deaths of her parents and her aunt. But Karen knew it was an issue. They would work on it during their next scheduled session on Monday.

  In the meantime, Karen reviewed her notes from several of Amelia’s past sessions. She wondered about the origins of her nightmares and those memory fragments, some of which were eerily real. Amelia herself had joked she might have a split personality. But genuine cases of multiple personality disorder were very rare, and all the textbooks pointed out the dangers of misdiagnosing a patient as having MPD. Just the suggestion of it could make certain susceptible patients splinter off into several versions of themselves, worsening their problems, and delaying any kind of real treatment.

  Still, multiple personality disorder could have caused Amelia’s blackouts, her lost time. Maybe it could also explain why Amelia had been at the rest home today, luring her down to that basement storage room. Lamar had said she was being set up, but for what? Her murder? Was Amelia the host to another personality that was killing everyone close to her?

  It started to drizzle, and Karen switched on the windshield wipers. “Jessie, I need your opinion,” she said, eyes on the road. “I have a client who says she’s seeing and feeling things that are happening miles and miles away to people in her family-”

  “Are you talking about Amelia?”

  “A client,” Karen said, knowing she wasn’t fooling Jessie for a second. “Anyway, what do you think of that? Do you believe in ESP or telepathy?”

  She was waiting for Jessie to respond with one of those alternative words for bullshit only people over sixty used nowadays: hogwash, balderdash, or bunk.

  “I believe in it,” Jessie said, after a moment. “If we’re talking about picking up signals and pain from other people, then I say, yes, definitely, especially if you’re close to that other person. I’m a believer now. When my Andy was so sick, I felt every pain he had. Sometimes I’d even wake up in the middle of the night with the pain. And I knew it was Andy, suffering.”

  Karen glanced over at Jessie. The headlights, raindrops, and windshield wipers cast shadows across her careworn face. Andy was her son, who had died at age twenty-nine back in 1993.

  “He was in Chicago and I was in Seattle. Yet, I felt what he was feeling. If I was sick to my stomach one evening, sure enough, I’d hear the next day that he’d been throwing up half the night. If I had a headache or a dizzy spell, that’s what he was having. I’ve never felt so physically sick and horrible as I did his last week, when he was in the hospice. I was there with him, and for a while, I thought I was going to die there, too.”

  Jessie let out a sad, little laugh. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but did I ever tell you that Andy still visits me every Christmas? It was his favorite time of year, you know. When he was younger, he used to go crazy decorating the house for Christmas. If it were up to him, he would have put a Christmas tree in every room. That Christmas after he died, my daughter, Megan,
and my granddaughter, Josie, were staying with me. Josie was five at the time. I was about to go to bed when I heard her talking to someone. So I stepped into Andy’s bedroom, where she was sleeping and almost walked into…something that fluttered away, like a bird. It was the weirdest thing. I can’t describe it; it was like a ball of air that whirled around and disappeared. For a minute there, I thought I was going nuts. I asked Josie what was happening. And she said, ‘I was just dreaming about Uncle Andy, Grandma.’

  “Something like that has happened every Christmas since,” Jessie continued. “It can be a weird little coincidence, or just this overwhelming feeling, and I know Andy’s there. It’s funny. Even though I know he’s going to show up somehow, he still manages to sneak up on me when I’m not expecting him. So, anyway, I’m no expert on telepathy and ESP and that sort of stuff. But I do know for a fact there are forces out there that keep us connected to the people we love, even after we’ve lost them.”

  Karen nodded pensively. She could see Jessie’s block up ahead.

  “So tell Amelia if she’s feeling a connection to someone who has died recently, and she’s seeing things, well, she’s not really all that crazy, at least, no crazier than yours truly.”

  “I didn’t say it was Amelia, remember?” Karen felt obliged to say.

  “Oh, yes, that’s right,” Jessie replied, deadpan.

  She turned down Jessie’s block, and checked the rearview mirror again. No one seemed to be following them. Despite Jessie’s protests that she was double-parked and getting wet in the rain, Karen walked her to her front door. She made Jessie promise to call if she felt dizzy or short of breath. Jessie assured her that she’d be fine.

  But Karen was worried about leaving Jessie alone, and it wasn’t just because of her little spell earlier, scary as that had been. No, it was because of the other scare Karen had experienced, in the rest home’s basement. Whoever had come after her might decide to go after Jessie.

  “Listen,” she said. “I don’t want to worry you, but I read in the Post-Intelligencer there have been some robberies in this neighborhood. So lock your doors tonight, and set the alarm.” It was a fib about the robberies, but she wanted Jessie to take precautions.