by Tom Savage
He sat back on the couch and thought for a moment before answering. How had she done this? How had she managed to get him involved before he’d even agreed to take the case? He and his wife were leaving in a week for a long-awaited vacation in Europe.
Oh, well, it hardly mattered: he was involved now. Extraordinary woman. . . .
“All right,” he said, leaning forward again. “Here’s what we know. Refresh my memory if I leave out anything pertinent.”
Margaret sat there gazing out at her garden, watching the shadows lengthen from late afternoon to dusk, listening as the doctor recounted the story. Now and then she supplied a detail, but mostly she remained silent.
Margarets sister, Madeleine, fifteen years her junior, had married a man named Bert Petersen when she was nineteen. He was a twenty-year-old Merchant Marine she’d met at a dance, big and handsome and friendly, and Margaret had thought him entirely unsuitable. A poor boy marrying a rich girl. A poor boy who hadn’t even gone to college. A laborer. But Madeleine had always had a streak in her that her sister found rather perverse: she shunned the rich men of her acquaintance, dismissing them as soft, self-absorbed, boring. True enough, Margaret supposed now, and Bert was certainly handsome, with a definite strength that could only be described as masculine. Madeleine had been immediately, overwhelmingly attracted. Margaret wondered if she would so quickly disapprove of him now, but she had been younger then. At any rate, her low opinion of him had changed a year later, when the child was born.
The young family lived in Islip, Long Island, not too far from Margaret, who had never remarried. She saw a great deal of Madeleine and Bert, often staying in their house or going out with them in their little sailboat. Margaret forgave her brother-in-law for stealing away her only sister, and everyone doted on the beautiful child.
Doting on her was probably mistake number one, according to Margaret. Even before the events that destroyed her family, the little girl had shown signs of being terribly spoiled. She screamed and cried when she didn’t get her way, and she frequently flew into destructive rages. Bert was away with his business more often than not, and when he was around he paid scant attention to his daughter. Madeleine was much firmer with the child, and the child obviously resented it. She had announced to Margaret on more than one occasion that she hated her mommy. She would sit on the front steps of the house for hours, waiting for her father to return from his long trips. When he at last arrived, the girl would follow him everywhere.
Madeleine remained stoic about her daughter’s obvious favoritism. She insisted to Margaret, smiling, that it was a passing phase. She cheerfully went about the business of disciplining her daughter, and the child loudly went about the business of resisting.
Margaret, however, was ecstatic. In addition to her sister, she now had a young brother-in-law who seemed to like her and a niece whom she adored. She became part of an extended family, and they were her world.
That world came to an abrupt end late one rainy September night in Islip, when the child was six years old. Bert was away, and Madeleine and her daughter were alone in the house. . . .
At this point in the story, Margaret covered her eyes with her hand and held her breath. Dr. Stein, noticing this, skipped over the events of the robbery and murder of Madeleine Petersen and the subsequent fate of her grieving husband.
It hardly mattered. The facts, such as they were, were available from police and media reports of the time. The robber, who had been terrorizing the town, leaving several homes bare and three people dead—four, if you counted Bert—was never brought to justice.
There was really no point in going into all of it now: this was the blank space in his sessions with the young woman, anyway. She apparently had no memory of the night in question or of the next week, which she spent in the hospital. Neither had she, in her conversations with the doctor, once mentioned her father’s apparent suicide some six months later. All she seemed to recall were the dreams that had plagued the rest of her childhood, horrible dreams of an enormous black figure with a knife coming toward her. A large black man, or someone wearing a black stocking mask.
Dr. Stein had offered to help her confront the past, four years ago, in the wake of her own suicide attempt. She had refused hypnosis, refused to discuss it at all.
Now, seeing the worry on Margaret Barclay’s face, he continued the recapitulation.
After the incidents with her parents, the girl had been brought here to live, and Margaret had legally adopted her. Even then she was willful and rebellious. Recurring nightmares. Disruptive in classrooms: by the age of sixteen, she’d been in and out of more schools than Margaret could remember. Fighting with other children, especially those who knew about her parents and teased her. Children could be so cruel. One bad time at a convent school with a nun, who required brief hospitalization after the girl attacked her.
Then, when she was sixteen, something happened to change her, quiet her down. She was getting ready to leave for boarding school in upstate New York at the time, the school from which she would graduate a year later. For reasons unknown to her aunt, she suddenly became very serious and applied herself to her schoolwork. She improved her relationship with Margaret. For the next three years, her world was relatively sane.
Upon coming of age, she inherited a great deal of money. Not as much as it might have been: after his wife’s death, Bert had gone on a six-month tear of drinking and gambling before meeting his own fate. By the time he was through, at least half of his wife’s fortune was gone. Still, his daughter’s inheritance was considerable.
One year later, at the age of nineteen, the girl went crazy again. It was more insidious this time, more overwhelming. She was in the middle of her second semester at Nassau Community College. Living with Margaret in this house, commuting to classes, doing quite well in all respects. Margaret had grown used to having the girl with her, to their sharing meals, planning weekends, talking together long into the night.
One sunny April day, the girl announced to her aunt that she was quitting school and going off to see the world. She’d bought a plane ticket to Hawaii and was leaving the next morning.
Nothing Margaret said could dissuade her: she took off the next day for Honolulu. She phoned the minute she was once again on solid ground, knowing as she did that Margaret was fearful of her flying and would stop worrying only when she knew her niece was no longer airborne.
Dr. Stein consulted his notes and resumed, “About a year and a half after her disappearance to Hawaii, you received a call from the San Francisco police.”
Margaret sat rigid, her fingers gripping the arms of her chair.
“Yes,” she said after a moment. “She’d been living there for some fifteen months, with a group of hippies she’d met in Hawaii. In some communal house in Haight-Ashbury. The house had been raided for drugs and several of its occupants arrested, including the man with whom she’d become involved. Some sort of singer, and twice her age. One of the men in the house was a police plant, or whatever they’re called. He told them that my niece was not involved in selling drugs, but that she was—she was an addict. The police found her home address and called me.
“They sent her home with a detective I hired to escort her. She was ill. She weighed about eighty-five pounds when she arrived. I knew nothing about these things, about heroin and cocaine and what have you. With the help of the family doctor, I put her in a clinic here on Long Island. She was there for four months. As soon as they’d let me, I went to see her every day. She was miserable, sorry for what she’d done with her life. It was an awful time for her, for both of us—”
Dr. Stein raised his hand to stop her. There was no need for her to go on: he knew the rest. In addition to her other problems, the girl had been two months pregnant. Margaret, on the advice of doctors and going against her every belief, had consented to what they called termination of pregnancy. An abortion. But she agreed with the experts that it would be impossible for her niece to carry the child to ter
m, under the circumstances.
When the girl was released from the clinic, she expressed a desire to complete her interrupted education. She wasn’t yet sure what she wanted to do, exactly, but she wanted to go back to college. The best college possible. She studied diligently and scored high on her SATs, and Margaret promptly used every contact and old family friend to get her into Harvard. It took a while to arrange, but finally, at the age of twenty-two, the girl went to Boston.
Once again, it lasted only two semesters. She flunked most of her courses, and the dean Margaret spoke with reported a history of absence from classes and inattention. Disaffected: that was the word the woman used. The girl didn’t seem to care about anything. Furthermore, the dean informed her, there were rumors that the girl was carrying on with a married professor, a man twice her age, notorious as a libertine. Margaret, fearing the reappearance of drugs, had the girl brought home.
Forty-eight hours after her arrival in the house, Margaret found her on the floor of the upstairs bathroom, the empty pill bottle lying next to her. A doctor in Boston, unaware of her history, had prescribed Seconal for her nightmare-induced insomnia. The figure in the black mask had apparently returned.
The paramedics arrived just in time.
That was when Dr. Stein first met her. Margaret’s friend Elizabeth, better known as Bitsy, knew his wife. He came here to the house, as Margaret was unwilling to let the young woman go out by herself.
He remembered the day clearly: his arrival in this house and its odd sense of silence, of shadowy darkness. The polite formality of this handsome woman as she introduced him to her niece.
He’d been struck by the girl’s beauty, and by her air of tragedy. There was something intense about her that reminded him of the Greek plays he’d read in college. They talked for weeks about her parents, her recurring nightmares, her lost child, and her impotent rage, which so often resulted in erratic behavior and unhappiness. He explained to her the particulars of manic-depressive psychosis. He suggested further hospitalization. No, she insisted, she would take charge of her life without more doctors, and certainly without more drugs. After two months, she stopped seeing him.
He spoke to Margaret, but there was nothing they could do, short of having the girl declared incompetent and forcing her to receive treatment. This Margaret refused to do.
Her condition gradually improved. All else aside, he now reflected, the girl was a survivor. She calmed down, took a part-time job at a local clothing store, and began acting classes in the City. She occasionally saw another young woman, one she’d met in the clinic. This girl’s name was Juana, and she was the first real friend Margaret’s niece had ever had. Margaret did not care for the loud, vulgar young woman, but she appreciated Juana’s steadying influence.
By the time Juana married her boyfriend—apparently some sort of petty criminal—and moved to his hometown in Florida, the girl seemed to have become calmer than she’d ever been. She went to visit her friend in Jacksonville the next year, when Juana’s baby was born. She’d become a friendly, caring, normal human being, or so Margaret had thought.
Then, recently, the old patterns had surfaced again. About three months ago, the girl had quit her job and taken off for the West Indies, returning with a new shade of hair and a disturbing, feverish sense of purpose. She’d thrown herself into the acting classes as never before. Then, three weeks ago, she’d announced that she was going to Florida.
Margaret had assumed she was going to visit her friend, but Juana’s name was never mentioned. It had seemed to Margaret that her niece might very well be on the verge of another manic disappearance. Bitsy—again—had come through, putting her in touch with Yakimadoro Investigations.
Then, two days ago, Dr. Stein had received another urgent call from the woman in Glen Cove.
It was now early evening, and he would have to leave soon. His wife was expecting him for dinner.
They regarded each other across the coffee table as he thought back over all his previous visits to this house. The sessions with the girl had all taken place here, in the living room. He looked down at the folder next to him, the sketchy details of a troubled life.
The figure in the mask. The aura of Greek tragedy. The love of puzzles: anagrams and word games. The desire to become someone else: hair dye and false identities and acting lessons. The episodes of mania, followed by near-catatonic depression. The two instances—ten years ago, when she was sixteen, and again three years ago—when she had lapsed into some odd condition of serenity, even euphoria. The drugs, the abortion, the attempted suicide. Affairs with much older, usually married, men. Over all, her reticence: her fiercely guarded privacy, her unwillingness to communicate with her aunt, with him, with anyone. She was apparently repeating an elaborate pattern, over and over. She wasn’t hopeless, wasn’t incompetent—not yet. Find the pattern, find the solution. He would have to do something nobody had yet done.
He would have to invade her privacy.
He glanced over at the staircase, then stood up and faced her. “Would you take me upstairs, please, Margaret? I’ve never been up there. I want to see her bedroom.”
She asked no questions. Without a word, she rose from her chair and led the way up the stairs and down the hall. She opened the door, switched on the light, and stood just inside the doorway, watching as he walked past her and into the room.
Blue. It was his first, overwhelming impression. The walls, the bedspread, the rug next to the bed, the curtains at the large window on the far wall. Deep, clear blue. The color of the sky and of water. The color that was said to be best, psychologically, for interior decoration, with its calming, soothing effect. He stared around at the blue, wondering if it had done the room’s occupant the slightest bit of good.
He went over to the window and looked out. It was twilight now, and he could barely make out the dark shape of the tall tree just beyond the pane. The lights of the house next door winked through the leaves and branches.
There were several furnishings in dark brown wood: a bedside table that held an alarm clock, a blue-shaded lamp, and a blue telephone; a large bureau next to the window (he pulled open all the drawers, which contained clothing); a hope chest at the foot of the bed, filled with sheets, blankets, and an eiderdown comforter. But the side of the room that most interested him had three bookshelves running nearly the entire length of the wall, with an old-fashioned mahogany writing desk beneath them.
The two upper shelves contained a wild assortment, a mélange of seemingly unrelated literature: novels, plays, poetry. Robert Frost and James Michener and Agatha Christie, Hawthorne, Delderfield, Anne Tyler, the Brontës. Toni Morrison leaned against Jackie Collins, who propped up Mary Renault. Anthologies of playwrights: Williams, Shaw, Chekhov, Neil Simon. No rhyme or reason; a wide range of moods.
The bottom shelf, just above the desk, was a different matter entirely. It was her reference shelf, the permanent collection. The Random House Encyclopedia; Webster’s Ninth; Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting; the complete works of Shakespeare; Roget, Bartlett. The Bible, King James version. At the extreme right end was a comprehensive collection of the principal Greek dramatists: Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Aristophanes.
The last book on the shelf was a hardcover with a shiny new black dust jacket. Dr. Stein reached for this and pulled it down. On the front of the jacket was the beautiful, familiar painting of Perseus riding the winged Pegasus, his bow at the ready. A recent edition of what was obviously an old favorite. He nodded, smiling: it was an old favorite of his as well.
Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.
As Margaret watched in silence, he opened the volume and riffed through the pages.
She had used a yellow marker to highlight passages.
He looked up from the book and met the gaze of the woman in the doorway.
“Diana,” he said. “What was the other alias?”
“Selena,” Margaret told him. “Selena Chase.”
He nodded. Then he close
d the book and held it up. “Mind if I borrow this?”
Margaret shrugged. “Whatever.”
Then he turned his attention to the desk. It was an old piece, what used to be called an escritoire. There was a slanted lid in front that swung down to become the writing surface itself. Inside, there were little drawers and shelves and pigeonholes. He saw pens and blue stationery—pale blue, the color of her eyes—with her name and address engraved in royal blue at the top of each sheet. Old envelopes were shoved into every possible cranny: letters from Margaret and Juana, bills, checks, tax information.
He replaced the lid. No, what he was looking for was not there: he hadn’t really expected to find it. She would have taken it with her. A diary, if she kept one, was something she would use every day.
He was about to turn away and leave the room when his attention was arrested by something he hadn’t noticed before. There, under the slanted lid, at the bottom of the desk, above the legs, was a large drawer, which he tried and found to be locked.
He pointed at it and turned to Margaret. “What’s in there?”
She came up beside him and looked down at it, shaking her head. “I have no idea. I’m not accustomed to going through people’s things. Then again, I’ve never had my telephone tapped, either, to say nothing of engaging detectives to spy on her. She’s got me doing a lot of things I would never normally consider.”
He nodded, knowing that she was thinking about the abortion.
“Well, you’re about to do one more. Where’s the key, do you know?”
“No. It would be a little skeleton thing, if I remember correctly. This desk was my mother’s.”
He reopened the lid and searched briefly through the drawers and pigeonholes. “Nope. She probably has it with her. There’s something in this drawer that she doesn’t want anybody to see. . .
He reached in his back pocket for his wallet. He selected a thin, sturdy plastic credit card and slipped it into the crack at the top of the drawer, just above the keyhole. He wiggled it for a moment. With a small click, the drawer slid open.