by Mira Gibson
“I’d like you to get this prescription filled at the pharmacy in the lobby. I’d like to walk you over and help. And I’d like to see you take it.”
“I’m not wrong about this.”
“Please-”
“I need to talk. There’s more and I can’t handle it. There’s this man and I don’t know if I can trust him-”
“Gertrude,” he said sternly. “We will talk. We will. We can talk for the rest of the hour, but only if you take this prescription. I don’t want to scare you, but you’re showing signs of psychosis-”
Bursting to her feet, “What?” came shrill and horrified, flying from her throat.
“You’re still functioning, Gertrude,” he went on, his tone soft as a smile. “That’s the good news, but I can’t let you slip away. This is very important.”
She sat, digging her heels in.
“Do you suppose speaking with your parents might expel some of your fears?”
“I can’t talk to them,” she said sharply, though the knee-jerk reaction didn’t seem anchored in history, but rather a mist coating every cell in her body. Then an outpouring followed. “I won’t go near them. I tried. We tried. We practiced. It didn’t go as planned. It was a disaster. We were laughed at.”
“What are you talking about?”
She didn’t know. She only sensed it was true. And that it led up to her drinking in the bar that night, the frantic drive home, the swerving, the lake—the figure.
“The case I’m working. A ten year-old girl shot herself in the head, but it was a cover up. I heard the shot. July 2nd. Doris and I heard it driving home that night. I swerved the car when a figure stepped out into the road. What if it was the killer? What if it wasn’t an accident? It’s too perfect to be a coincidence. It happened right after Doris and I confronted our parents and I still don’t remember that confrontation, but Roberta is so similar to Doris I can’t help but use one to answer the other. It’s too identical to ignore.”
“And your supervisor assigned the case to you... why?”
“I’m not paranoid,” she stated when his tone had implied she was.
“But you’re forming a conspiracy.”
“Because it is.” She held her tongue before divulging the cult.
Slipping into deep thought in terrible timing to Dr. Hagstaff’s suspicion, as she wracked her brain for the best way to tie Peter King and his cult to Kevin Robinson’s disappearance and the subsequent bloodletting or murder as the case might soon be. Radon in his blood wouldn’t be enough to link it even if she could get a soil sample. As Jake had explained, radon was common in these parts. So what would connect the dots and incriminate the Kings? What could she do other than sit around reeling with maddening intuitions?
Suddenly, Dr. Hagstaff was holding her by the upper arm and urging her to her feet. “Come now, before the pharmacy closes.”
Dazed with strategies she knew wouldn’t amount to much should she execute them, Gertrude pondered relentlessly as she zombie-walked beside her doctor through the lobby where the pharmacy counter was tucked beyond the nurses station.
“Cup of water,” he said to the pharmacist, as he tapped two purple pills into Gertrude’s palm. She hadn’t even noticed him taking her hand. When the pharmacist placed a stout cup on the counter, as waxy as a dentist’s office, he told Gertrude chop-chop. “It’ll smooth the whole matter over and you’ll be able to see it for what it really is.”
His soothing encouragement had her hand floating up, palm rising to mouth, her other hand wrapping the cup, preparing to knock back the medication, but without thought she flung the pills away, and then she was jogging towards the exit as Dr. Hagstaff yelled after her, “I’m very worried about you, Gertrude!”
So was she.
More worried than she had ever been.
After jumping in her car, Gertrude drove with fever-pitch intensity through Laconia, gunning it and slamming on the brakes in manic alternation with the ebb and flow of traffic until the roads cleared rounding Lake Winnipesaukee. In a blur, her Audi spilled through the thickening forest, nearing the King’s house.
Zhana was flitting about on the porch as always when Gertrude pulled onto the grassy shoulder, spying her in the distance beyond the trees. A number of dead bushes, uprooted and on their sides, lay strewn across the front yard and Gertrude caught sight of dirt encrusted clothes bundled in their midst.
Next, the woman descended the steps with purpose, a canister of accelerant in her hand. As she circled the bushes, kicking them into a heaped pile, she squirted the accelerant, holding one hand over her nose and mouth. Then, dropping the can, she produced a matchbook and struck one, watching the tiny flame.
As soon as she let it slip from her fingers, the flame flickering in a downward twirl, the fumes ignited and the pile went up in a bonfire of smoke. Zhana seemed to stare at it vacantly, easing back and fanning tendrils of smoke from her eyes. Soon a pillar of black smoke rose and Gertrude, stepping cautiously out of her car, could smell the faint mix of chemicals and burning brush.
She kept hidden behind a tree at the edge of the driveway and observed Zhana hike up her waistband, while rounding back to the porch where she collected materials Gertrude couldn’t identify. Then after one last glance at the steady fire, she started off towards the back of the house, touching her thinning hair gently as she went.
The crackling fire masked Zhana’s footfall, but Gertrude sensed wherever she was going she wouldn't return for a while so Gertrude started for the fire in a swift jog, her beret jostling off-kilter atop her head.
As she neared the fire, molten heat wafted at her, causing her to break out in a hot sweat, but she jogged onward, easing along the side of the house. Cool air rushed at her from the lake, as she slipped into the shade.
Beyond the crisp divide where the backyard turned into the field, Zhana stomped through the tall grass, taking the very same route Gertrude had ventured days ago when she’d discovered the massacred deer.
Following after her, Gertrude trekked into the tall grass, keeping her distance without losing sight of the woman, who reminded her so much of her own mother that it scrambled her brain.
It wasn’t until Zhana bent over, momentarily vanishing from view to lift a steel door vertically into the air that Gertrude was suddenly struck by the fact of Charlie King’s absence. She’d never gotten a hold of Charlie. Zhana had indicated he wasn’t around so much anymore, and at the time Gertrude had pitied her, assuming her husband had abandoned the family. But now it seemed he hadn’t disappeared at all.
Was he hiding out underground?
If he was, there was no greater evidence of his guilt. Maybe the gun used to kill Maude was also tucked deep within those earthen walls where radon saturated the air.
From where she paused, watching Zhana through the wavering stems of grass, it seemed the woman was talking to someone below. Then she huffed, pivoting and easing down into the hole in a manner that led Gertrude to believe a ladder was the only way in or out.
Suddenly, the door fell flush against the ground.
Feeling pressed for time and thinking fast, she deduced that going after her would only put her in danger. Zhana had set those bushes aflame for a reason. She’d needed to burn those clothes, and as Gertrude jogged back towards the house, she only hoped whatever evidence they contained wouldn’t be charred beyond recognition.
Thick smoke billowed up from the fire and as Gertrude rounded it, scanning for the clothing she’d seen Zhana kick towards the pile, she caught sight of a boy spying her from the road. Then the fire spat embers, stealing her attention, and when she gazed back at where the boy had been standing, he was gone.
Angling her foot into the base of the fire where underpants were burning, she managed to hook the tip of her shoe and sweep them free, but as soon as she did, an army of spiders scurried out and she recoiled, shuffling back in horrified response.
Quickly, she wriggled her blazer off and used it to thwack the flames aw
ay until the garment was only searing. In the same manner she freed a tee shirt, another pair of underpants, and a journal that was buckled up with something tucked in its spine. She kicked at the journal, rolling it awkwardly until the flames extinguished and when she kneeled down to see what was causing the wedge, she found her DCYF identification card congealed between the pages.
Not wanting to linger, she placed the garments and the journal onto her blazer then wrapped it tight. Once it seemed secure enough to carry, she pulled her shoe off then her sock and rushed to the planters lining the porch where she grabbed fistful after fistful of dirt, shoving it into her sock with panicked thrusts and ignoring the plague of spiders undulating across the soil, all the while checking over her shoulder that Zhana and whoever else was in that hole weren’t coming back.
When she got to her car, she glanced up the road then down it, scanning for the boy. She’d seen him before on the night she’d left the Kings—his tight, mousy face ever burned into her memory. But he was nowhere so she set her blazer and dirt-swollen sock on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat and started off, but where specifically she didn’t yet know.
Chapter Twenty-One
A full week elapsed. Days spent dodging Harold McNeil and hiding behind Wendy at work became commonplace. Evenings with Roberta were a routine in keeping a level head—What would you like to eat? And her blunt reply, Anything, I’ll eat anything, when will it be ready? And the long, dark nights tossing and turning on the couch with Jake at the forefront of her mind started to feel familiar.
She hadn’t seen him, hadn’t heard from him, and didn’t dare ask Roberta for her take on the matter of his arrest or whether he would make bail—questions spreading through her thoughts like a virus.
She made efforts to be proactive. She drove to Grafton County and barged into Dartmouth-Hitchcock like a bat out of hell, waving underpants and soiled clothes, thwacking a dirt-plump sock on Ed Cohn’s desk, I’m Jake Livingston’s... (Friend? associate? almost-lover but he was arrested for statutory rape?) You matched Kevin Robinson’s blood? Can you pull DNA from these? But doing so left her in a state of paralyzing dread. What if Jake’s DNA was found on those articles? What if Roberta was right and Jake deserved to be incarcerated? What if the man she’d built up in her head didn’t match the reality? What if her perception of reality was so warped she didn't have a prayer of reconnecting to what was real?
Dr. Hagstaff’s stark concern nettled her. Psychosis. Had she merged Roberta and Doris so tightly that she couldn’t distinguish either? Was there no correlation at all between the girls, except for Gertrude’s distorted view of reality? Or was her instinct correct? Was Roberta a roadmap of all that Doris had survived? Did Roberta hold the key to her own past? And if she set that key in the lock and twisted, would it all be revealed to her—the reason she’d taken Doris in, the reason they’d driven to their parents house that night, the reason it had all gone south so hard and fast that she hadn’t been able to drink herself out of it? What was the ultimate reason she’d crashed into the lake that night?
Who did the shadowy figure belong to? If it had been the killer, why had that person stepped in front of her vehicle?
It was all connected, but the lines were so translucent she couldn’t trace them from one point to the next.
She arranged to have Doris exhumed, giving Cohn full authority to perform the necessary autopsy tests that might ferret out correlations. She requested the same tests on Maude King, the paperwork of which she forged, compulsively lying, compelled by a terrible intuition that the two dead girls had suffered the same fate.
In the evenings after Roberta retired to the bedroom Gertrude had once shared with her fidgeting sister—the blankets always too hot or cold, Doris shifting mercilessly from her side to her back to her stomach to her back again in fits of irritation designed to provoke Gertrude, Would you go to sleep already? and Doris’ snappish response, How old is this mattress? It’s completely sunken in! ...and her teasing reply, The Princess and the Pea—Gertrude read through the journal she’d recovered from Zhana’s bonfire.
The pages contained accounts in Roberta’s own hand, detailed to the point of grotesqueness, her sexual conquests and exploitations, all written with an air of comical detachment—His thing was bent like a boomerang, and He ate it but I could tell he didn’t like it, and He cried in the shower after, like what? Most men would kill to get in through the backdoor—as though the girl had zero awareness she was being used. Most entries included asides referencing her father, Charlie King—Watched like a hyena, and Beat the living shit out of me even though I did it, like what? and I'm only doing this shit so they don't take Maude down there.
Extrapolating, though she was loath to draw conclusions, Gertrude’s overall impression centered on Roberta’s anguish over the day the cult would begin to use her sister instead of her. Reading between the lines, Maude hadn’t been abused yet. The entries were dated through the day Gertrude had first shown up at the King’s house, so unless Charlie and Peter had managed to snatch Maude for their cultish rituals without Roberta knowing, the journal was evidence the youngest King had gone unscathed.
So why then had she been killed?
If they killed her, she didn’t die like the rest.
And she hadn’t. Maude had been shot in the head. The others had undergone torturous disfigurement, their faces torn off, their blood saturated with radon indicating weeks or months held underground. For a ten year-old girl presumably not in the throes of ritual cult abuse, she’d died a grisly death that in no way, shape, or form resembled those of her predecessors or contemporaries.
In fact, those that had been killed were strictly those perpetrating the actual abuse. As Roberta had hinted and Wanda had corroborated, the cult members were pedophiles eager for a guise, which Satanism provided. Gertrude had found no evidence of other children having been killed.
But she shied from considering the cult’s innocence with regard to Maude King.
The DCYF was a battleground of anxiety on Monday morning. After a long weekend catering to Roberta, her clothing needs, her petulant dietary demands—A club sandwich! followed by Gertrude’s confusion, But you said no meat, and her teenaged eye roll, Like mozzarella and spinach, and her conclusion, That’s a mozzarella sandwich, and Roberta’s exasperation, That’s what I said! which was so like her exchanges with Doris that Gertrude had accidentally used the wrong name on more than one occasion—Gertrude drifted into the office determined to keep her head down, as she tried to shake the onslaught of Roberta's bizarrely misplaced sexual behavior, which had plagued their week together—Roberta dripping wet, stalking into the kitchen where she was pouring iced tea, Gertrude startling to find the girl buck-naked and creeping up behind her; and then Roberta, naked and coiling strangely around her little boyfriend Quinton, who kept sneaking in through the bedroom window, Gertrude gasping at the sight of them, stuttering, scrambling to break it up without looking at them.
Harry barked her name as soon as she ducked into her cubicle.
“Can it wait? I have a lot of paperwork.”
“Now, Gerty.”
As soon as he disappeared into his office, leaving the door wide open for her, she felt the incredible weight of the stress she was under.
Wendy peered down at her over the top of their cubicle wall, her eyes batting wide and scared.
Rather than soliciting her friend's impression of Harry's mood to gain a heads up, Gertrude avoided her gaze by collecting her notepad and a pen, and then padded into her boss' office, cowering every step of the way.
“Sit,” he said then quickly revised his order with, “close the door.”
She did then sat in the chair in front of his desk, which was no less cluttered with case files and reports than the last time she’d had the misfortune of being trapped here.
Whatever subject he planned on broaching required him to rub his eyes and pull at his ruddy cheek with his thick fingers before diving in and it made
her anticipate receiving additional cases and all the pressure that would come with them.
“I didn’t realize you filed for temporary custody,” he began.
Tensing in her chair, she held her breath for his, but, and prayed that what followed would be no worse than a warning.
“So Roberta is living with you?”
“She’s doing very well.”
“So I’ve read,” he said, granting her a favorable wince, which he quickly took back, adding, “but those reports were written by you.”
“They’re still accurate,” she said, meaning to assure him.
“It’s unorthodox, but not unheard of,” he offered. "But that's not why I asked you in here." He grimaced at her as though he wasn't quite sure what he'd do with her. “Eli Hagstaff gave me a call.”
Harry studied her as the statement washed over Gertrude whose smile turned to stone.
To perhaps alleviate her worry, he said, “Your position’s not in jeopardy. But Hagstaff voiced some concerns that I would be remiss to ignore.”
“I’m fit,” she asserted. “She can’t stay at the King’s.”
“Gerty-"
Her tone went shrill, as she asserted, "I’ve taken her in.”
“Your doctor explained you refused some medication,” he went on, setting the stage for his justification.
“I’ll sue,” she blurted out. “My God, he’s violated every shred of doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“Which is waved if the patient is a lethal danger to herself or others,” he pointed out, but the statement only pitched Gertrude into wild offense.
“I haven’t tried to kill myself! I’d never harm Roberta!”
For one shining moment, Harry appeared to curate his words carefully, but when he spoke there was no sign he’d succeeded. “Psychosis is a serious, very serious diagnosis-”
“I’m not psychotic!”
“People with untreated mental health issues cannot be foster guardians, Gertrude, we have strict rules against it.”