the Double Bind (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

"No. I thought she might be lying about her mother. I almost expected her mom to pick up."

  "But she didn't."

  "That's right."

  "So she might really be in the hospital."

  "Maybe," Talia said, and then she beelined for Laurel's bedroom. He followed her.

  "What are you looking for?" he asked. "Anything specific?"

  "Not really."

  He wanted to do something, but he felt it would be a violation to open Laurel's drawers. And so he was standing uselessly in the doorway with his hands on his hips when she waved her index finger in the air and opened Laurel's closet. She rolled onto the floor a piece of black American Tourister luggage, the biggest size an airline might allow in the overhead bin. "This is interesting: She didn't take her suitcase. She doesn't expect to be gone very long."

  Then she opened the bottom drawer of the dresser in the bedroom and started pulling aside Laurel's sweaters. She held up her roommate's checkbook and flipped to the last page of the register. "She didn't take this, either," she said.

  "Then do we know for certain she's really left?" he asked.

  "No," she said slowly, seeming to consider this possibility. "Maybe we don't." Then they stood there, more like helpless children than young adults, completely unsure what they should or could do next.

  KATHERINE MAGUIRE'S meeting with the BEDS development committee had been long and hard and had left her on the verge of despair. The number of people--men and women and families--approaching the shelter was climbing, just as the federal government had slashed programs so severely that they were going to lose $145,000 in the coming year. They were likely to lose as well at least 740 housing subsidies, the result of the government evisceration of the HUD program that provided them. And the cost of oil in the coming winter was expected to skyrocket.

  She sat back in her chair after hanging up the phone with the shelter's city attorney and decided that she probably wouldn't like this woman from Long Island if they ever met face-to-face. Pamela Buchanan Marshfield certainly wasn't a guardian angel, descending upon the shelter when it was most in need. She was only making this offer now because her attempts to bully the group had failed. But the timing? Remarkable. It was as if she had known. Katherine had returned from the development committee meeting wondering how they could possibly raise enough money in the short term from the private sector to replace what they were losing in government support. And then, out of the blue, there came this offer from her lawyer.

  The BEDS attorney, Chris Fricke, had assured Katherine that the municipality would sell the Crocker collection to the shelter for a dollar, which would then allow them to give it to the Long Island woman. After, of course, she had made her donation. One hundred thousand dollars.

  Katherine understood that initially Laurel would be furious. The young social worker would feel personally betrayed, and she would insist that the organization was doing exactly the opposite of what one of their clients would have wanted. But Katherine thought that eventually she would come around. After all, half the time Bobbie himself hadn't known what he wanted. And she had to believe that Bobbie would have been happy to see BEDS making so much money off his work. He would have been thrilled!

  Moreover, it was certainly in Laurel's best interest to get her away from those photographs. Even if this wealthy dowager hadn't offered to make this contribution to the shelter, Katherine was planning to insist that Laurel turn over the materials and give up on the project. She'd done enough. She'd done more than enough. It was time to let it go.

  Of course, Katherine wasn't sure how to tell her this. Or how even to get the photos back. It was while she had been on the phone with Chris Fricke, simultaneously going through the papers that had appeared on her desk like mushrooms in a wet summer, that she had found the note Laurel had left: Apparently, her young caseworker had gone home to care for her mother.

  At least that was what she had written.

  PATIENT 29873

  Clearly sees far more in the photos than is there. The snapshots, too. Tomorrow I need to examine the collection--all the images--and explore this avenue further.

  Patient still writing six and seven hours a day in those notebooks.

  From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,

  attending psychiatrist,

  Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  LAUREL KNEW they were looking for her. She knew they were all looking for her. She finally had to shut off her cell phone when she wasn't calling the prison or the Department of Crime Victim Services, because it never ceased ringing. Eventually, they would stop trying her and they would phone her mother. That was clear. And that would be fine, because her mother was in Italy. But would they finally try to reach her sister? Talia certainly might. And if her roommate reached Carol, they would all realize that she had lied to them, and they would grow convinced beyond doubt--her family, too--that she was losing her grip. Without even meaning to assist Pamela Marshfield, they would help the old crone. They would find her and they would confiscate the photographs. Bobbie's photographs. Her photographs. They would give them to the woman.

  And so she understood how little time she had. Consequently, she checked into a motel outside of Burlington, where she showered and washed her hair for the first time in days. She bought a new blouse and new slacks. She wore perfume. She donned sunglasses so no one could see she'd been crying. Again.

  Then she was back in her car, shuttling between the different bureaucracies in Burlington and Waterbury to expedite her hearing with Dan Corbett. She had been told at first that it would take days to set it up--perhaps even weeks--but she was persistent, and then she got lucky. She got a surprise. It seemed that Corbett had written her a letter of apology. He had begun the mandatory sex offender counseling program the year before, and as a part of his victim empathy group he was required to pen a note to the person he had injured that expressed his remorse. Usually, the victims never saw these letters, because they wanted nothing to do with their assailants. But here was Laurel, so desperate to see him that she wanted to come to the prison in person. And she would read whatever it was he had written.

  Why not? she thought. She already knew better than anyone what had occurred up in Underhill. Perhaps his note would reveal something about his childhood. Whether he had ever had a father in his life. How he had wound up on that dirt road seven years ago. How Bobbie Crocker had.

  Perhaps, she told Dan Corbett's prison therapist on the phone, her willingness to receive this letter would help the man with his own healing. His own recovery. His own eventual return to the world.

  She didn't quite believe that, of course.

  Moreover, she never wanted Dan Corbett returned to the world: She wanted him kept right where he was.

  But she was going to say what she needed to expedite that hearing. Nothing else mattered with the clock ticking ever more quickly, and ever more people behind her.

  MONDAY AFTERNOON, Whit heard the sounds of a small crowd gathering in the apartment across the hall. It was a little before three. He opened the door, and there was Talia talking to a pair of women older than either of them in the hallway.

  "Hello, Whit," Talia said sarcastically. "Care to help me dissuade these two lovely ladies from ransacking my apartment?"

  One of the women shot Whit a dart with her eyes, and quickly he extended his hand to her. Talia introduced her as a city attorney named Chris. The second woman, Katherine, was Laurel's boss at the shelter. Talia said the two of them were hoping that Laurel had left the prints she had made from Bobbie Crocker's negatives behind in the apartment.

  "I told them," Talia was saying, "there's no way they're here. We went through this place just a few hours ago. And after Laurel's little episode on Saturday, I'm quite sure she's hidden them somewhere. I said we might find some lingerie that will leave us all a little embarrassed. But we won't find the photos."

  "Talia, we don't want to ransack your apartment," said Katherine.
"You know that. But how do you know for sure the photos aren't here? I've seen them, I know what we're looking for."

  "So do I. And it seems to me you're more worried about those photos than you are about Laurel."

  "You know that's not true. Of course I'm worried about Laurel. We all are."

  The attorney nodded earnestly and then said, "But those photos are worth an enormous sum of money to BEDS right now. We can't let anything happen to them. That's the reason we're here. What if Laurel..."

  This was too much for Whit: "What if Laurel what?"

  The woman rolled her head on her shoulders and made a wide-eyed, eyebrows arched, you-never-know sort of face.

  "You really don't get it," he said. "Laurel would never do anything to those photos. They're her life right now."

  Katherine placed her fingers gently on his elbow to pacify him. He restrained himself from shaking them off. "I love Laurel. She's like a daughter to me. Someday I hope she's running the shelter. That's how much I care for her and respect her and trust her. But she's in trouble right now. Something about this mad dash home doesn't quite ring true. At the same time, I have a woman willing to make a humongous donation to the shelter if we give her the photos--almost enough to cover what we're going to lose in government support this year. That is one hell of a nice Band-Aid."

  "You mean all you have to do is turn over a person's life's work," Talia said mordantly.

  "First of all, it isn't his life's work. It's a few hundred images, tops. Bobbie would probably want us to hand it over given the money we've been offered. Bobbie loved what the shelter stood for and what we did. He would want to make sure it remained solvent."

  "And what of Laurel?" asked Whit. "What of the work she's put in?"

  "They're not her photographs. She has no right to them. Besides," she said, and here she paused for a moment, as if trying to find the correct words. Finally: "Besides, if I'd known she would take this all so...so seriously, I would never have let her near them."

  "Still, don't you think this is an awfully scary quid pro quo? A very bad precedent?" he continued.

  "Here's what I see. I have a friend who is losing her grip over some photos she probably shouldn't have, and I have a benefactor who wants them badly. A hundred thousand dollars badly. I'm sorry, Whit. I'm sorry, Talia. But this is a no-brainer."

  Talia shrugged and motioned the two women inside the apartment. "Go ahead," she said. "But you won't find them."

  And she was right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  LAUREL HAD NEVER been to the prison before. Never driven the long, two-lane road surrounded on both sides by nothing but farmland that led from Saint Albans to the correctional facility. Never noticed that coils of concertina wire have anvil-shaped razors--because, of course, she had never seen the wire up close. She saw that the prison's squat cinder-block buildings stretched out like the spikes on an asterisk. The asphalt basketball court had a wire fence and a wire roof. She saw the remains of two massive gardens on the other side of the walls, one for that summer's vegetables and one for flowers. The vegetable garden was easily a couple of acres: The long rows of tomato cages alone must have stretched the length of a tractor trailer truck. The woman with her, the woman who was driving, told her as they parked that the inmates grew enough vegetables here to feed the prison through the summer and fall. She admitted to Laurel that she honestly didn't know what they did with all those flowers. She was from the Department of Crime Victim Services, and she was with Laurel because the social worker from BEDS was going to see her own perp.

  That was the term this woman named Margot Ann kept using. Perp.

  And she was not about to let Laurel go alone. Margot Ann was even taller than Laurel, her black hair was just starting to gray, and she wore it boyishly short. Originally, she was from Jackson, Mississippi: Hence, she said, the use of two first names instead of one. She had met her husband, a native Vermonter, overseas when they had both been in the National Guard. She helped coach the girls' basketball team at the high school in her community, although her own children were all boys and spent most of the time in the winter on their snowboards. She had shared much of her life with Laurel on the drive to Saint Albans. Laurel guessed this was supposed to make her feel more comfortable, more at ease. They had done all their prep work the day before. In theory--and Margot Ann said theories meant little in a clarification hearing like this--she and Margot Ann would meet with Dan Corbett for perhaps half an hour. She would ask the questions about his father and his grandfather that interested her, and he would share with her the letter he had written. But it wouldn't be simple. Not logistically, not emotionally. Laurel understood. Now, lulled by Margot Ann's conversational drone, she felt oddly airy in the passenger seat of the woman's Corolla, as if she were suspended on a Styrofoam noodle in the swimming pool back in West Egg, a little girl half in and half out of the water.

  At the prison's main entrance, she and Margot Ann gave up their keys and their pens and their cell phones. They gave up their vials of pepper spray. (Margot Ann, Laurel saw, carried one, too.) They were met by the facility's superintendent and a correctional officer who would escort them to the room where the small hearing would be held, but who wouldn't actually join them for it. The officer would wait just outside the room's glass door, but there would only be four of them present in the hearing: Margot Ann, Dan Corbett's therapist, the victim and the...perp.

  There is that four-letter word again, Laurel thought, as she surveyed the metal detector in the small, spare lobby. Perp. It almost sounded like one of the names Corbett and Russell Richard Hagen had called her that day on the dirt road in the woods.

  Inside the prison, she learned that the facility's myriad metal doors were opened and closed electronically by a correctional officer with a gun in a booth: He was surrounded by cinder-block walls and bulletproof glass, and he could see the doors throughout the building on closed-circuit television monitors inside his cubicle. From there, he pushed the buttons that slid steel bolts back and forth across the entire prison. Guards would radio to him which door they wanted opened: "One door." "Two door." "Three door." "J"--meaning the door to the J-wing, the pod with the sex offenders. That's where they were going. The sex offenders had their own wing because the rest of the prisoners detested them. The correctional officer who was accompanying Laurel and Margot Ann said that only last week he had broken up a fight between two inmates because one had wrongly accused the other of being a sex offender.

  Apparently, the therapist she was about to meet had spent much of yesterday preparing Dan Corbett for Laurel. His rights mattered, too.

  THEY SAT IN A square room with orange walls and a single window that looked out upon a small, dark courtyard. There were drawings that inmates had made taped to the walls--kites and children and spaceships--and Laurel wondered if they were a part of the therapy. Four chairs had been placed in a spacious circle, and she was seated in the one closest to the door. Dan Corbett would be seated across from her, a good six or seven feet away. His therapist would sit beside him; Margot Ann would sit next to her. A correctional officer would be watching them through the glass door.

  Laurel had brought select photos with her, and she busied herself while she waited for the inmate to be escorted into the room by arranging and rearranging the key ones in her lap. There was the old snapshot of Bobbie and Pamela. The photographs Bobbie had taken years later of the house in East Egg. One of Gatsby's estate. The pair of her on the dirt road in Underhill.

  She wasn't sure in what order she would reveal them. It might depend upon whether this prisoner was Bobbie's son, or whether that distinction belonged to the convicted murderer in Montana. Margot Ann kept reminding her that Dan Corbett was not going to be a physical threat to her, but she wouldn't be surprised if he was still a psychological viper. He had been in counseling now for a year and a half, said Margot Ann, but she understood he was still the sort who could turn on her in a moment. And while they could prevent him from touching
her, Corbett might say wounding, hurtful things before they could silence him. She hoped he wouldn't: After all, he had written that letter expressing his remorse. But Laurel should never lose sight of what he had done seven years ago.

  "You okay?" asked Margot Ann finally.

  "Uh-huh," she mumbled.

  "Good." She gazed for a moment at the images in Laurel's lap. Then she continued, "So, you think Corbett's father may have taken those?"

  "I think so. I hope so."

  "Why?"

  "Because I would rather believe the man who had taken them was related to Corbett than Hagen."

  "And, I presume, because you don't want to go to Butte."

  "For many reasons. Yes."

  "But you would?"

  "I believe so," Laurel said.

  "Is that you?" asked Margot Ann. She gestured with her finger at one of the pictures of the girl on the mountain bike.

  "Yes," she said. It still surprised her that it had taken her so long to admit this to herself. To admit it out loud. Of course that girl was her. Who else could it be?

  THE FIRST THING Laurel noticed when Dan Corbett was ushered into the room--and she noticed it instantly--was the tattoo. There it was, the devil's skull on his neck. The fangs. Her eyes slid down the arms of his navy blue jumpsuit to his wrists, just to be sure there was no barbed-wire bracelet in purple ink, too. There wasn't. She took some comfort in this, but she knew she should be careful: Dan Corbett had tried to rape her. And while he may not have murdered that woman in Montana, something about him had nonetheless scared the hell out of Bobbie Crocker.