Killer's Cousin

by Nancy Werlin

  After school the next day, I went to the stacks of the public library and found a book on abnormal psychology. I located a list of the behaviors and symptoms often exhibited by those with a less-than-perfect grip on reality.

  Stress. I had been under considerable stress for a long time. Stress can put people over the edge, the book stated, using many words of multiple syllables.

  Paranoia. I had decided that Lily wanted something from me; maybe hated me; was out to get me; was capable of getting me. Was this a sane way to feel about an eleven-year-old girl?

  Guilt. I almost laughed. I was qualified to write the Five Books of Guilt.

  Visual hallucinations. This was a more reasonable explanation for those sightings of Kathy than believing in the shadow, in the ghost.

  Aural hallucinations. The humming. And then in Baltimore, Kathy had talked. Now, if it really was Kathy, why wouldn’t she have stayed in Cambridge where she belonged? The answer was obvious: Because she was a hallucination, my hallucination. When I moved, she—that is, it—moved also. Not to mention talked.

  Clearly, if I was insane, then I was getting worse. The hallucination had changed from a hum to a message. Perhaps it wouldn’t be long before the message changed—to something less benign. Like, for instance, Kill Lily.

  I remembered with stunning immediacy the rage that had descended on me the moment I saw Greg punch Emily, just before I threw myself toward him and—

  The heavy, thick, hardcover college edition of Abnormal Psychology began to slip away from me. I made a two-handed grab for the book and in the process slammed it shut, painfully, on my index finger.

  Right then, someone spoke in a muffled whisper from directly beside me. “Yaffe,” said Frank Delgado. “Thought that was you.” He began to ask me something.

  I hadn’t even heard him approach. My hands loosened. I turned my head to look at Frank, and he stopped saying whatever it was he was saying. His eyes went from my face down to the book, and he read the title. His eyebrows lifted; he gestured for me to give it to him. I didn’t even think of saying no. I flipped it back open and handed it over.

  I watched as Frank rapidly read the entire page, and the page before it, and the page after. I watched as he went back and considered the table of contents; the scope of the entire volume. Finally he looked up. “So, who’s nuts?” he asked.

  “Maybe me,” I said. As soon as the words were out I wanted to snatch them back. Time stopped. Frank blurred. The metal-grill floor of the stacks felt wobbly. I could sense the abyss at my feet; the bookshelves seemed, subtly, to shift away. For what felt like forever, I couldn’t breathe.

  Frank didn’t whisper. He said in his normal voice, “Nope.”

  That was all he said, but I heard him. I heard the certainty in his voice. I saw it in his face too. Air returned to the room. The floor was again solid, and I breathed. I tried to do it quietly. I kept on doing it.

  “Let’s go,” said Frank abruptly. Without waiting for me to agree, he headed out of the stacks. I followed him back into the reference room. He grabbed his coat and books from a table, where mine were also. We left the library.

  There’d been something of a thaw the last few days, so it wasn’t too cold outside. It was nearly dark, however. We paused at the base of the library steps, facing the park in which the library sat. “Wanna go over to the pizza place?” Frank offered. “Easier to talk with food.”

  I knew what he meant, but I shook my head. Was I really going to tell Frank what was going on with me? In the stacks a minute ago I had meant to, but now, outside in the lucid air, I wasn’t sure. A big part of me wanted to say, Just forget it. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t want …” Abruptly I reversed myself. “I don’t want anyone else to hear me.”

  Frank nodded. “Okay.” He settled down on a bench near the big granite slab that said EUCLID. Euclid, the man of logic: two points in a straight line, three points in a plane. I stood uneasily. I waited for Frank to say something. He didn’t.

  I wandered over to the other slabs. HOMER, VIRGIL. No help there, either. Odysseus and Aeneas were not frightened of eleven-year-old girls.

  Frank waited. I wandered back. I said, “Why don’t you think I’m nuts?”

  “People who’re nuts never doubt their own sanity.”

  “Yeah, the book said that.” I didn’t look at him. “But I still might qualify. Because I don’t really doubt mine.” And that was true. No matter what Abnormal Psychology said, no matter how many symptoms I exhibited, or what I had done, or what I knew myself capable of, no matter how close, or how wide, the abyss—that was true.

  “So somebody else thinks you’re crazy?” He sounded entirely matter-of-fact.

  I shrugged. “Maybe.” I kicked EUCLID. I shoved my hands in my pockets. Then, rapidly, I told Frank the outline. Vic and Julia’s marriage problems; that their oldest daughter had died. Lily as go-between. Thanksgiving and the reconciliation. Lily’s behavior since; how she seemed to blame me. Raina, and how Lily had spied on us; on her parents. My confrontations with Vic and Julia. That Lily had erased the contents of my computer’s hard drive. What Lily had said when I confronted her: My parents think you’re crazy. The other things Lily had done. My most recent conversation with her parents, and how I had suddenly realized that maybe I looked crazy … that it was possible I was making things up … especially if you considered—and this was hard to say aloud, but I did—if you considered who I was. What I’d done.

  “You were acquitted,” Frank said after an uncomfortable minute. “It was an accident.” It was a statement, not a question. I gave him a statement back.

  “So what,” I said flatly. I looked right at him.

  And he nodded. He simply nodded, as if he understood exactly what I was trying to say. And I thought, Finally. Finally maybe there was someone I could tell the rest to—about the fear …

  But then Frank said, awkwardly, “Even that—even how you feel—seems sane to me. I … I’d like to think I’d feel the same way if … if it were me. And I don’t think you’re crazy. I believe you. I believe your cousin Lily is the one with a problem.”

  And with his words I remembered that I needed to talk about Lily. Not about me. About Lily. It took me a minute to get my mind back on track.

  “And I also think …,” said Frank carefully, when I didn’t respond.

  “What?” I prompted.

  “I think there’s something about this situation with Lily that you’re not telling me.” He paused. “More than one thing?”

  Of course he was right. I hadn’t told him about Kathy. About the humming shadow. He waited, completely calm, one hand idly tapping his knee. The stubble on his head bristled in the yellow ray of one of the streetlamps. I wondered if hearing would change his mind about my sanity.

  “Okay,” I said. “It has to do with the oldest daughter. The one who died. I live in her old place, in the attic …” I hesitated.

  “So what is it?” Frank grinned. “Hey, Mulder. You see her ghost or something?”

  I drew in a breath, and let it out slowly. He stopped grinning. He stared at me, and it was only then that I realized he’d been joking. Neither of us spoke for a minute. This time it was Frank, and not me, who broke the silence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, just tell me about it. There must be a rational explanation. I’d guess your cousin Lily is playing more pranks on you, maybe doing something with a flashlight. We’ll look at all the evidence and we’ll see what comes up. Okay?”

  Lily hadn’t been in Baltimore when I saw Kathy. Anger gripped me.

  “Thank you, Dr. Scully,” I said.

  He sat up straight. Pointed at me. “Hey, Yaffe, get real. You have a brain. Use it. This isn’t some stupid TV show about alien encounters and psychic phenomena—”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t. This happens to be my life.”

  “But wait—”

  “I gotta go,” I said. I don’t think I could have gotten a single other word out. />
  I walked away across the park. Behind me I heard Frank yell something at me—something like Go calm down, you moron. I tuned it right out. He didn’t sound angry, but I was. I was choking on rage. Rage and disappointment. I had really thought Frank would listen.

  I had even thought, for several minutes, that I could trust Frank with what was really gnawing at me. With the idea that had stolen into my mind a while earlier, without my noticing.

  The ghost was nothing. And if Frank couldn’t for an instant speculate about Kathy’s ghost, then he would not in a million years consider my idea—my hypothesis—my suspicion—my fear that … that—

  No. It was not an idea, or a hypothesis, or a suspicion. It was knowledge. Conviction.

  The things that mattered to Frank—rationality, evidence, proof—I had gone past them. I had made a non-Euclidean leap from point A to point X, and I was on another plane entirely where no one else could come.

  No one but Lily.

  I was David Bernard Yaffe. I had not meant to kill Emily. I had not meant even to hurt her. But I had, and now I lived forever with the abyss that separated me from people who didn’t know what it was like, to have killed. To be a killer.

  Acquittal had nothing to do with it. I was a killer. And I knew in my gut when I met another of my kind. Until then, I had refused to see it. I hadn’t wanted to know the truth. But the knowledge had been there, somewhere in me, for a long, long time. Guilt knows guilt.

  Like knows like.

  Lily had killed Kathy.

  I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why. And there was not a chance in the world anyone would believe me. Lily had been seven years old.

  Nonetheless, I knew. And, like any textbook-case maniac, like Fox Mulder with his precious files filled with alien encounters, I was utterly convinced of my sanity.

  I drove back to the Shaughnessy house, climbed to the attic, nuked a frozen dinner in the microwave, did some homework, and found that Lily had short-sheeted the bed again. I remade it, and then lay in it for several hours. Thinking.

  But getting nowhere.

  CHAPTER 29

  I made it through the rest of that week. Went to school. Said a subdued hello to Raina a couple of times on the front porch. Spent a lot of time aimlessly surfing the Net at the public library. Thoroughly ignored Frank Delgado, who gave up after his third attempt to talk to me. “Fine. Whatever,” he said, and walked away.

  The guerrilla attacks from Lily continued. I knew she was trying to goad me into a response that would get me kicked out of her parents’ house. I was determined not to give it to her. But it was hard. And I also knew that even if I did absolutely nothing, Lily would find some way to make her parents believe I had. It was just a matter of time before they threw me out.

  I needed to talk to her.

  I didn’t want to talk to her.

  I was afraid to talk to her.

  Partly to calm myself, I bought a chain lock, borrowed Vic’s tools from the basement, and installed the chain on the inside of the door to the attic one afternoon when nobody else was around. It would at least ensure that Lily couldn’t come up while I was there. But there was no way to keep her out at other times. Not without installing a new lock on the outside, which I didn’t dare do.

  I tried to work out how Lily might have killed Kathy. How had she made Kathy drink the cleaning solvent? How—

  Glass all over the bathroom floor. Lily’s knees cut. Lily trying to pull Kathy out. Kathy …

  Kathy smiling at me, when I was seven and Lily was a newborn.

  Emily, so angry at Greg. Emily … No! Kathy.

  Kathy.

  One afternoon I took a petty revenge. I had stopped at Tower Records earlier, and when I found that only Lily and I were in the house, I put Talking Heads into the boom box, programmed the track I wanted, and cranked the volume.

  Psycho killer, crooned David Byrne. Qu’est-ce que c’est? Run run run run run run awayyyyyy. I played it at eardrum-breaking level. It wasn’t just revenge. I wanted her to know I knew. I wondered if that would change things, somehow.

  My ears rang when I finally turned it off. I put the CD back in its case, and looked around for somewhere to hide it from Lily. In the end I tried shoving it into the back of a tall corner kitchen cupboard, behind a stack of plates. And as I did so, I felt the CD case bump up against something. I reached in and encountered a large, booklike, but oddly soft object. I moved the saucers and pulled the object out. It was a scrapbook.

  There was a little dust on the surface. I brushed it off absently, and then opened the book. Happy 18th Birthday! said the first page. The words had been written in a glittery gold ink on black paper. I recognized Julia’s meticulous handwriting. Beneath the message was glued a photograph of a tiny baby, diapered rump in the air, with a yellow bow somehow affixed to scanty red hair. And under the picture it said: Kathleen Dawn Shaughnessy: This Is Your Life!

  I took the scrapbook over to the sofa and sat down with it.

  There was nothing unusual about the contents. Kathy’s baby bracelet from the hospital; infant photos. Then Kathy the toddler: on Santa’s lap; cuddling with a younger, glowing Julia; ripping into birthday presents with a little party hat on her head. Kathy a bit older, in front of the house with a plastic shovel, like Lily after her, “helping” Vic clear the walk. I turned the pages and watched Kathy grow up, examined her report cards and school photos. There were some athletic certificates. Lots of pictures of her dancing.

  The awkward adolescent phase: pictures of Kathy sullen or wearing too much makeup inexpertly applied, her body too thin in one photo, her face bulging in another. Thirteen, fourteen. A picture of her in her school uniform: short skirt, tight sweater. Defiant eyes. For the first time I saw a faint facial resemblance to Lily. It made me suddenly aware that there were no pictures of Lily in the scrapbook.

  And then, suddenly, a stunningly beautiful girl, blazing out of the center of a slightly out-of-focus photo taken at a party. Kathy was laughing, holding a glass aloft in a toast to the camera, her cheek pressed against that of another girl. At Rebecca’s Sweet 16th, said the caption. A few other items: ticket stubs from a New Year’s Eve Aerosmith concert; a pressed flower from a corsage; a receipt from a clothing store with a shocking total amount on it, circled in red with an exclamation point. Group snapshots with friends: parties, a couple of formal prom photos. An entire page of high-school graduation poses.

  Then blank black pages.

  I looked up. I half expected to find Kathy’s ghost once more sitting beside me. But she wasn’t there; I heard no humming, couldn’t feel her presence. And, oddly, it was Julia of whom the scrapbook made me most aware. I imagined her collecting all those items carefully, perhaps even rescuing things from the trash. I didn’t like Julia; I didn’t much want to feel pity for her. But I did.

  I wondered what I should do with the scrapbook. Bring it downstairs, leave it there for them? Just give it to Vic and say I’d found it? What would Lily think if I brought them the scrapbook? Would it hurt her? It might hurt all of them; there were still no photos of Kathy downstairs. Part of me liked the thought of hurting them. They had hurt me.

  I flipped through the remaining empty pages of the scrapbook, and found something else. Stuffed between the last page and the back cover was a college blue book, carefully labeled Anthro 104. Prof. Farris. Midterm exam. Kathleen Shaughnessy. Idly, I opened it; the first page contained a straightforward attempt to answer an essay question. Kathy had successfully filled one page with vague, rambling comments about adulthood rites in various tribal cultures. But on the second, she faltered. “… and I don’t care,” she’d written in suddenly dark, sprawling print. “What possible difference does it make? You’re a jerk, anyway. You should throw out that tie. You’re so boring, everyone just dies. Dies dies dies. What if I leave right now? What if I just get right up and walk out in the middle of this test? What would you think of that? What would everyone else think?” And that was all.


  I wondered if she actually had walked out of that midterm, if I was looking at the last piece of work she’d done before quitting college. There was no way to tell. Maybe she had finished that particular test. Maybe she’d gotten another blue book, rewritten her essay in it, completed the exam, and turned it in. Slogged on. That was what I would have done. Was doing.

  But I knew it wasn’t what Kathy had done. I closed the blue book, replaced it in the scrapbook, and tossed the whole thing onto the coffee table. And then I could hear Kathy’s voice, once more. Humming, at first. Then, Help Lily, it whispered, inevitably. Help Lily.

  I looked around but didn’t see her. Still, the voice continued. And, finally, I answered out loud. “No,” I said to the air, to the attic. “I can’t. Kathy, don’t you see? I have nothing for Lily. I have nothing for anyone. I can’t help.”

  There was silence for only a second or two. Then the humming began again. It had a frenzied quality.

  I put my hands over my ears. “No!” I shouted.

  Then all the noise did stop.

  CHAPTER 30

  The next day, I came back to the most alarming Lily-trick yet. Nothing.

  At first I couldn’t believe it. I did my usual fast circuit of the attic apartment, and couldn’t spot anything wrong. Previously this had merely meant that Lily was being subtle. So I did a second and then a third circuit, checking the contents of drawers, all the electrical appliances, and even shaking out the books I’d left lying around. My anxiety increased with every item that Lily had left untouched. I knew something, somewhere, had to be wrong. I remembered the time Lily had put a rubber band on the spray faucet in the kitchen sink—I hadn’t discovered that one until I turned on the faucet and got water full in the chest. But at that time I hadn’t known how and where to look. I hadn’t fully understood how Lily’s mind worked.

  Still … nothing. I stood in the middle of the apartment an hour later, having torn it apart myself in my increasing frustration, and I regarded the chaos. Shelves pulled away from the walls, clothing pulled out of drawers and dumped on the floor, my computer doggedly running redundant loops of virus scans. I could taste the acid panic at the back of my throat.