Unseen

by Nancy Bush

  Gemma walked up the paint-chipped front steps to Dr. Rainfield’s door. She pushed the bell and experienced a kaleidoscope of warm memories: eating cookies and swinging her legs as she sat on a too tall chair; playing memory games with the doctor and beating him hands down; writing copiously in a red leather diary that he kept at his office.

  Red leather diary.

  She’d come here since she was a child. A young child. Jean hadn’t known what to do with a little girl who retreated into fantasy a great deal of the time and so she’d brought her to the doctor. Dr. Rainfield had played with her, had encouraged her to draw and color and express herself through art. Gemma had loved it. Had flourished. His attentions had almost put her back together again. Almost, but not quite. There were gaps.

  Gemma heard the labored steps of the doctor, coming to answer her knock. The door creaked open and gray, bushy eyebrows above sharp, equally gray eyes, stared back at her.

  “Well, hello, my dear,” he greeted her.

  “Hello, Dr. Rainfield. I called your answering service for an appointment, but I thought I’d stop by.”

  “Oh, yes. I meant to call you.” He opened the door wider.

  The aroma of canned chili met her as soon as she entered. It was early evening and she’d interrupted his dinner. “I didn’t realize you were in the middle of a meal.”

  He gave a short bark of laughter. “My dear, you’re a welcome distraction. How are you?” He gestured to a living room chair and Gemma perched on the end of it.

  Settling himself on the sofa, he regarded her carefully. And Gemma, although she’d had no intention of saying anything besides Where’s the red diary? found herself blurting out the events of the last couple of weeks as she knew them, finishing with, “Could I have run Edward Letton down? I don’t think so. Unless I’m two people, like a multiple personality or something,” she half-laughed.

  He gave her an intense look. “I always thought you were just trying to forget things you didn’t want to know and sometimes it took out pieces you wanted to remember, too.”

  His answer soothed her and a part of her relaxed. “Do you have a red leather diary? The one I wrote in?”

  “You mean your journal?”

  Gemma nodded, figuring they must be talking about the same thing.

  “You took that with you right before you left.”

  “Before I left?”

  “With that boyfriend of yours. You don’t remember?”

  “When I left with Nate,” she said.

  He almost smiled. “You’re fishing. Let me help. You wrote in the journal during your sessions. Or actually afterward, while you waited for your mother to pick you up. But you didn’t want to take it home. You didn’t think it would be—safe.”

  Gemma blinked. “My mother didn’t have any boundaries.”

  “True,” he admitted.

  “I didn’t want her to read my thoughts. I was afraid she’d use them to her advantage.”

  Rainfield’s brows lifted. He didn’t say it, but she knew he concurred with her. She saw that he had been a port in the storm for her. Jean LaPorte had loved her but it had been a love full of strings attached. Rainfield had been an objective listener and more of a father to her than her own out-of-his-element father, Peter.

  Gemma said suddenly, “She used you. As a kind of babysitter, tutor, svengali. But she also resented you for that. She resented Macie, too, for being my friend.”

  “She just wanted more from you than you could give.”

  “I ran off with Nate to get away from it all. But then I came back.” Gemma gazed at him seriously. “I’ve always had all these gaps?”

  “Little gaps.”

  “They feel pretty big now.”

  “You said you were in an auto accident. I’m no expert on head trauma, but it sounds like the problem’s been exacerbated by the crash. It’ll probably pass. What does your doctor say?”

  Gemma didn’t answer that Rainfield was the only doctor she was seeing. That her physical injuries hadn’t been examined since she left the hospital. But he understood nevertheless and he tsk-tsked her.

  “You should see someone.”

  “I’d like to see you,” she responded. “On a regular basis.”

  “Oh, child, I’m retired. My answering service is more to keep me in touch with old friends and old patients, but it’s just for friendship. I don’t see anyone anymore. My son’s taken over my practice. He has offices in Portland.” Rainfield climbed from the chair and Gemma got to her feet as well. He shuffled toward the kitchen, stopping just inside the open door. Out of Gemma’s vision, he reached for something, then returned with a card in his hand. “I’ll call him and tell him you’ll be making an appointment.”

  Gemma looked down at the card. Dr. Tremaine Rainfield’s offices were in downtown Portland. She didn’t want to drive to Portland. She didn’t want to make the trip, and she didn’t want to see someone else. She also still didn’t have a driver’s license, and she felt she was flirting with disaster every time she got behind the wheel. But she didn’t disclose these thoughts, just let him think what he would.

  “So, I was in possession of the journal last,” she said as he walked her to the door.

  “I don’t think you gave it to Nate.”

  “Me, neither.” Nate Dorrell had turned abusive over time. She recognized that he had simply been an escape route, though at the time she’d convinced herself that her decision to leave Quarry with him had been wrapped up in feelings of everlasting love, joy, and desire.

  “Call Tremaine,” he said, nodding at the card in her hand. “But you can stop by anytime, if you’d like.”

  If you need a friend, was what he meant.

  Gemma smiled and wished him good-bye. She needed more than a friend. A lot more.

  The patrol car was practically still moving as Will jumped from behind the wheel and ran to his own front door. It was ajar about six inches and he had a moment of dread before he heard his mom tunelessly humming from somewhere inside.

  He found her in the kitchen. She’d discovered a bag of store-bought cookies from God-knew-when from the cupboard he used as a pantry, and was happily munching away. He hoped she didn’t break a tooth.

  “Hi, Mom. I don’t see your car,” he said. “You said it’s in a ditch?”

  “I’m not supposed to drive.” She raised her brows and gave him a look that said he was a naughty boy for denying her.

  Dementia sufferers had little or no logic and reasoning. Nevertheless, Will tried to remind her of their earlier conversation. “You told me your car was in a ditch.”

  “Yes, I think it is.”

  “But you didn’t drive it here.”

  “Didn’t I?” She furrowed her brow.

  “It’s not outside and it’s not anywhere around the neighborhood.” As Will had driven into the suburban/rural area, he’d kept an eye out for any sign of her white Chevy Impala.

  “Oh, I think Noreen took it.”

  “Where is Noreen?” Will demanded.

  “She dropped me off and took the car to the shop.”

  As if on cue, Will’s cell phone rang and he saw the Caller ID was from the woman in question. “Where are you?” he barked into the phone, ignoring the niceties.

  “I had to get the car in,” Noreen responded, sounding surprised and a little hurt by his tone. “Your mom backed it out of the driveway into the ditch. Did she tell you? I’m getting a rental to drive her in and will be back to pick her up, probably within the hour.”

  “I wasn’t home when you dropped my mother off,” he said through his teeth.

  “You didn’t get your mom’s call?”

  “She called me from inside my house.”

  Noreen made a strangled sound, directed at herself. “She said she’d talked to you and you were home! I was going to walk her inside, but she waved me off and I wanted to get the car in…oh, golly…is everything okay?”

  “She’s here. I’m here. Everything’s fine. W
e’ll see you when you get here.”

  He snapped his phone shut, half mad at Noreen, half at himself. He didn’t know what to do about his mother. There were no easy answers.

  She was staring at him, picking up on his controlled anger if not the reason for it. “Was that Dylan?” she asked, and Will just stared at her, flummoxed all over again.

  “Mom, Dylan’s dead. He’s been gone a long time.”

  “Oh? I thought I just talked to him.”

  Will could practically count the seconds elapsing inside his head. He told himself to get over it. There was no need to rush. Noreen would return and then he could be on his way.

  His mom took another jaw-breaking bite of the cookie. He winced at the sound of her teeth clacking and grinding.

  “Do you want me to make dinner?” she asked, as if the idea had just popped into her head.

  She hadn’t made a meal in a decade.

  “Why don’t you sit down at the table,” Will suggested, forcing himself to be patient. He pulled out a chair for her. “I’ll make…peanut butter sandwiches.”

  She beamed at him. “That sounds wonderful.”

  He slapped peanut butter on bread in a controlled fury as his mother sat down at the table and began babbling on about Dylan. He closed his eyes. His brother was more real to her than the son who’d survived. Damn disease. It had robbed him of her. Robbed him of his only living relative, as his father had died when Will was just a child, from heart problems.

  His anger hadn’t abated by the time Noreen arrived to collect his mother. She apologized profusely and Will nodded in curt response. Her negligence would not likely be repeated and that, at least, was something.

  As he drove toward Gemma’s house, he tried to put his anger aside but it just kept growing, morphing, aiming itself at Gemma herself. She’d run down Edward Letton, and though the prick deserved to die, in Will’s biased opinion, it was not her choice to make. Vigilantism was a crime. Killing was a crime. She’d come back to the hospital with the intention of killing Letton and only hadn’t because…she’d seen he was on his last legs and there was no need.

  Her intention was what mattered. She’d intended to end Letton’s life. He wouldn’t be the last. Maybe he wasn’t even the first…

  That thought gave him pause. Will made a mental note to check other pedophile deaths in the area.

  But in any case, it didn’t matter how attractive she was. And it didn’t matter that he understood, and even sympathized with, her motives, she had to be stopped.

  Will set his jaw and his resolve.

  Gemma tore through the books in her bedroom but there was no diary to be found. She wandered down to the den but knew she would never have left the journal where it could be discovered by her mother. She glanced at all the books on the shelves but the only red ones she saw were paperbacks, and her journal was leather.

  She thought she heard something on her porch and she flew to the front door and flung it open. The darkening evening sky met her, along with a breeze that skittered shriveled leaves across the wood flooring and sent them piling into the corners.

  No mysterious message. No one seeing into her soul.

  Returning to the kitchen, she fixed herself a meal of cheese, crackers, and apple slices and asked herself if she was ever going to purchase any groceries. She’d enjoyed Sally Van Kamp’s chicken casserole, and now had to return the dish—a face-to-face she wasn’t looking forward to—but she really needed to stock her shelves. The trouble was, shopping wasn’t high on her priority list and she only thought about it when she returned home alone, and by then she had no interest in going out again.

  She was munching her last cracker when she was struck by a thought. Dusting off her hands, she climbed the stairs to the attic, which was filled with dust-covered boxes and cobwebs. After surveying the piles of stuff, she hauled open several boxes and found household paraphernalia—old knickknacks, vases, pictures—the kind of various and sundry items that fill garage sales every weekend, but no journal.

  She returned downstairs and retreated to Jean’s—now her—office. Lost in thought, she didn’t immediately notice the two messages on her voice mail, but finally she saw them. The first was an imperious message from Davinia Noack demanding to have a reading; the second was from someone who merely breathed hard into the phone. She listened to them both again. The breather didn’t terrorize her, if that’s what it was meant to do. Instead, it sounded like someone was just trying to get up the courage to say something.

  “Little Tim,” she said aloud. That was probably it. She didn’t want to think it might be whoever had left the note on her front porch.

  Pushing that thought aside, she glanced at the bookshelves again. No red journals. Her eyes traveled over the spines of the volumes as her mind tripped down its own path. This room had been her office for months, now. Why wouldn’t she keep her journal here? If she still possessed it, she would put it here, wouldn’t she? Pull it out from its hiding place and put it on the shelves? She was sure she would.

  So, where was it?

  The answer was so obvious her gaze was stuck on the journal itself long before she jumped up to pull it down. Its spine was black and there was no writing on it. She pulled it out and saw that the book’s front and back leather was blood red.

  Thoughts swarmed and her heart pounded as she flipped back the cover. In a child’s scrawl she read: Gemma Jean LaPorte. Her mother had bestowed her own name on her as a middle name. Originally, she’d wanted to change Gemma’s first name to Jean, but Gemma hadn’t responded well to the change, so Jean had become the middle one.

  Rifling gently through the pages, Gemma sat down in the squeaking desk chair. With the journal in her hands, it felt as if she’d always possessed it. Apparently she had, as it was on the shelf big as you please. She just hadn’t remembered.

  Catching some passages, her memories flooded back as if someone had lifted a gate. She suspected Dr. Rainfield was right, that the accident had done the most damage to her memory. Whatever problems she’d possessed since she was a child weren’t as bad as she’d feared. As she read blocks of text she remembered everything fully.

  And it gave her back her past.

  Thank you, Dr. Rainfield, for making me keep this.

  The journal started when Gemma was about six, with Gemma drawing pictures and writing their names below the images: CAT, DOG, HORSE, CAMPFIRE, MASK. She examined the picture of the mask. It looked like a square with strings. Not much of a Halloween mask, if that’s what it was supposed to be.

  Going further, she breezed over the years until high school, then remembered, with enough embarrassment to feel heat enter her cheeks, that she’d had a horrible crush on one of the Dunleavy boys. Jerome. Everyone called him Rome. But he’d been completely oblivious to Gemma’s feelings, thank God. He’d gone to work with his older brother Kevin, and they shared a business interest in the PickAxe, Quarry’s local bar and tavern. Kevin also shared his parents’ resentment of Gemma’s family over property rights. Though the property lines had been long established, the Dunleavys seemed to feel they’d been gypped in the final decision of who owned what and how much. Jean had ignored them, and Peter, quiet and reserved as he was most of the time, had warned Gemma to stay away from the lot of them. He felt they were small-minded, mean-spirited, and always felt slighted. Gemma had listened to this with half an ear because she knew Rome Dunleavy wasn’t like that at all.

  Rome was engaged, she realized suddenly. To a woman Gemma didn’t know. They were planning to build on the other side of the Quarry and would, in effect, be Gemma’s neighbors.

  Gemma flipped a few more pages and encountered Nate Dorrell. Now, with the clarity of hindsight, she saw that she’d jumped to Nate from her hero-worship of Rome Dunleavy. She’d graduated from high school and taken off with Nate as he joined the army. She’d lived in a one-room apartment just off base, and just barely made ends meet working at another diner. Now she closed her eyes and remembered the s
mells and sounds: the dull surf, the constant stream of traffic, the exhaust, the briny fog, the tolling bell that rang the dinner hour at a nearby halfway house for sometime criminals.

  She recalled sex with Nate. Hard, fast, selfish. It wasn’t long before she was rethinking how much she wanted to have sex at all, but it didn’t matter. If he wanted it, it was on. For a long time she told herself she loved him and that was enough to keep the myth going. Eventually, she grew strong enough to say no.

  Here her memory jumped. She couldn’t quite recall the events of their breakup, but it hadn’t been pretty. It might have even been physical.

  Gemma thumbed to the end of the journal. She’d made a couple of last entries concerning her feelings about reading the future for Jean’s clients. Her final entry was a question: When are you going to take matters into your own hands?

  Her blood chilled. Maybe she already had.

  Bang, bang, bang!

  The journal flew from her fingers, the noise surprised her so much. Gemma scrambled to pick it up, her pulse fluttering. Someone was at the front door. Someone impatient.

  She set the journal on the desk, drew a calming breath, then headed for the door, unlatching it and swinging it open.

  Detective Will Tanninger waited on the other side.

  “Detective,” she murmured, feeling her anxiety ratchet up another notch or two.

  “Ms. LaPorte.”

  His voice was cool. Cold. Gemma felt a tingle of fear skitter down her spine. Something had happened. Something had changed.

  “What is it?” she asked, as she stood back and he entered the room.

  “You went to the hospital yesterday.”

  Her eyes widened. “No…I was in Quarry.”

  “You went to Letton’s room. You talked my guard into leaving and then you entered the room intending to kill him.”

  The detective looked hard as granite. His face was sharp planes and thin lips. He was angry. Angry at her. It was such a change from the quiet, if intense, man she’d met earlier that she hardly knew what to do or say. “I don’t think so.”