“I’m thirsty,” she said.
He stood and went to the bathroom. She heard water. He returned with a plastic cup full of rusty brown water. He held it up to her lips.
After she took a drink, he said, “Do you remember me?”
She blinked. He seemed to get angry. She was afraid he would hit her.
“You don’t believe me. I’ll show you who you are,” he said. He set the cup down on the night stand, and sat next to her. He put his arm around her shoulders. She could smell his sour breath. He squeezed her, and she felt a brief pain as he pinched her. “Look.”
As if she’d been practicing for this all her young life, she said, “My name is Agnes Hatcher, I live in Empire, California. I get straight A’s.”
His eyes grew wide, and then he laughed. “Oh yes, sweet little one,” he said. “You’re hiding from me, I know you’re in there.”
He reached into his pocket and brought out a small, thin-bladed knife. He twisted her head so she was looking at the mirror that leaned against the low dresser.
(Remembering decades later, she thought she’d seen a flicker of it, of that other face.)
He brought the blade up to the edge of her forehead. It was almost a tickling pain as he began skinning her face. He whispered, “Bridey.”
She screamed, but he held her head tightly in place as he continued.
The screams echoed throughout the motel court, and the police were at the room within twenty minutes.
But by that time, the motel room was empty. Her abductor had already packed her into his car, and they were gone down a dirt road that led up into the mountains. It would be six years before she would see the light of day again.
Agnes Hatcher returned to consciousness, in the waiting room of Darden State, blood showering across her fingertips.
In her hands, cupped like a dark red bird,
24
Agnes was finished with the woman named Kuehl in less than two minutes. The woman had not had time to cry out, which was for the best. Unlike Donna Howe, the woman was dead, and very quickly.
Agnes Hatcher took the car keys from the woman’s pocket, and her pocketbook. The woman had a Ford Mustang keychain, with a small beeper for an alarm system; forty dollars in cash; one MasterCard. Pictures of husband, children. Driver’s license.
She glanced through the doors to the ward and saw the policeman speaking with one of the therapists.
She went to the double doors. She walked out through them as if she were just coming from a short visit to one of the mentally ill. She remembered a woman’s walk she had once noticed, a sort of rhythm to the way she walked. She could imitate that. In her mind, she pretended she was the woman, and then the walk came easy. No one would notice Agnes Hatcher. They would think it was this other woman, someone who walked with less confidence, with less direction. It took her less then three minutes to get to the staff parking lot. She passed no one on her way. It was the afternoon, and even with the police milling around, it was slow, and people were sleepy and inattentive. She held the alarm beeper high up, and pressed it twice. Two high-pitched beeps came from the left of the parking lot. She followed the sound to a blue-gray ‘89 Mustang. She got in, buckled her seatbelt, and put the key in the ignition.
She felt the blood against her skin. It had seeped through Donna Howe’s bulky dress.
It was warm like new milk.
She put the Mustang in reverse, and pulled out of the parking space.
A man in a suit, probably some kind of inspector, waved to her as if he knew her. He had a gray moustache, and very little hair. She thought she had seen him before once or twice.
She smiled and waved, wondering if he could see the blood on her chin. Not caring.
In her head, the one word that had fueled her in the loneliness of her captivity:
Destiny.
As she drove away, within the walls of D Ward at Darden State, she could not know that the second body was found.
She could not know that the police sealed the building within minutes.
Or that Rob Fallon had confessed that the woman named Agnes Hatcher was now hiding beneath the building, in the closed off underground chambers where once upon a time all the patients at Darden had been housed.
Agnes Hatcher knew none of this, but she was assured by her own feeling of her fate that she would reach the only man she had ever loved in time to prove to him that all she had ever done, she had done for him.
She had spent her life searching for him.
And now, they would be together.
Forever.
25
“She can’t get out, Trey,” Carly said. “Not with all those people around at Darden. How could she get out?”
Trey shrugged. “Any number of ways. I know her. That was her on the phone just now. With cops searching the place, all the psych techs and doctors are going to be somewhat disoriented. Some of the patients will be acting-out right now because of the commotion. No one is necessarily looking for her, or they’re assuming that she’s somewhere within the gates. To be honest, nobody really knows what she looks like. We’ve got pictures of her when she came in, but her face gets covered most of the time, and she’s been in ten years. She could have a disguise. Who knows with Hatcher? Instead of the Gorgon, she should’ve been called The Chameleon. I’ve seen her imitate people’s voices and mannerisms almost perfectly. She can be anyone she wants.”
“Call Jim. Find out what’s going on.”
“I just tried. The line’s busy. It’ll be busy for the next four hours. I might as well watch the news tonight, I’ll get more information on it than I would over the phone. My assumption is that they know she’s out now. The cops have probably shut down a few miles around Darden. If I were there, maybe I could do something. Maybe not. But I’m here. I’m on vacation. Damn it.”
Carly put her hand on top of her husband’s. She leaned against him. As if with some telepathy, he felt her warmth and love. He drew away from it. He felt cold inside.
Carly let go of him. She sighed. “She’s four hours’ away, surrounded by cops, and she’s probably more than a little disoriented. This is probably the safest place we could be right now.”
“Maybe you’re right. It just has me in knots, what happened. And how the hell did she get this number? What—did she attack Jim? Did she get this from the weekly log? How did she know where to find me?”
Carly raised her eyebrows. “Well, there’s not a lot we can do right now. I know. Let’s go for a walk, okay? Down to the beach.” She stood up and went over to the dresser. She opened the top drawer and withdrew a pair of sweatpants. She slipped into these, and tossed him a pair of khakis.
The world outside, the path down the hillside, all of it was nearly silent against the sound of crashing waves out on the rocks. Because the fourth of July was coming up, banners had been unfurled throughout Avalon proclaiming the upcoming fireworks display on the water. Since it was still early in the week, day tourists were lined up along the docks, waiting to board the boats back to the mainland. The sun had gone beyond the far hills, but was still fairly high in the sky, casting a halo over the small town. Everything in it seemed peaceful and lazy. Carly walked ahead, wrapping her pouch around her waist, wearing flip-flops and sweatpants and that great tee-shirt. The smell in the air was vaguely dusty, not as clean as the earlier part of the day, brought by a slight wind from the hills. Trey took it all in at a breath: vacation, he told himself. Vacation. He slipped on his sandals, the Birkenstocks that Carly had given him for his birthday five weeks before, holding onto an old section of wooden fence for support.
“Wait up,” he said.
She turned about, smiling. The sunlight created an aura around her. She drew the small instamatic from her pouch, and snapped his picture quickly, as if afraid he would lose his expression in the next second. “Gotcha!” She cried out. She pivoted to the right, and took a picture of the harbor below.
Picture this: a beautiful happy woman, a w
ife and mother and social worker, caring, loving. With husband and kids. A family. Everything in the world at our feet. Life good for us. And I still can’t enjoy any of this. Not completely. Trey feigned a smile, but it slipped when he caught up with his wife.
She didn’t seem to notice. She took a deep, luxurious breath. “What is that? Hibiscus and—maybe gardenia? Mmm...let’s just junk everything and move here.” She grabbed his arm, shaking it. “Wake up, wake up. I want the happy-go-lucky guy back who I married. I know he’s in there somewhere.”
Trey pulled away from her, and then gave her a sideways hug. His forehead furrowed with worry. “If only I’d been there. I could’ve done something. I know more about Hatcher than the others do.”
Carly, sounding slightly exasperated, said, “That doesn’t matter. They’ll find her inside the gates somewhere. It’ll take six men, but they’ll get her tied down again.”
Wearily, he said, “I don’t know.”
“This job is driving you nuts, Trey. Don’t let it.”
Something in the tone of her voice disturbed him.
“I’m not going to hold it in anymore,” she said.
“Hold what in?”
“This is hard for me to say.”
A minute passed, and it worried him, the way she was acting, the look on her face. They were almost all the way down the path, to the main road. Somehow, he knew what she was going to say.
He touched his fingers to his own lips. He pointed off to some scrub brush on the other side of one of the row of small cottages.
A doe stood still, watching them also.
Then, it ran off into the underbrush.
“I’d like to wish the world away,” he whispered, kissing her. When he drew back from Carly, it seemed as if his unhappy mood had been passed to her. Her face was etched with concern.
“You have to leave your job, Trey,” she said.
It barely came as a shock to him, this previously unspoken demand. Yet, she looked guilty, as if keeping from saying these words was tantamount to cheating on him or abandoning him.
“Trey, I mean it. Not just think about quitting, but actually just do it. You have to leave your job because I don’t want you like this ever again. And you’re like this all the time. Almost relaxed, almost here with me and the kids, but not completely. You’re always part there, and it consumes you. I can’t manage with half a husband, and I won’t let the kids have half a father. You need to get out.” Carly had never been this direct about her anger over his work. It had always come out in little jokes, or a graveyard humor about the tragedies and near-misses at Darden. Now, she even looked cross. Sometimes, Trey had trouble keeping things in perspective, and it got the dog up in him to be told what to do—to leave his job, not nudged, not asked, not manipulated into leaving it, but to be directly told to leave it.
Then, he calmed down. He felt like a man defeated. She was right. He had to leave his work at Darden.
“It’s funny,” he began. “You get into a place like that when you’re young and you think you can make a difference. You think you can actually save someone. But you can’t. Not just at Darden, but anywhere. My dad was wrong. He always told me you could save someone if you kept yourself strong and prepared, but you can’t. You can only save yourself.”
“Oh, Trey,” Carly said. “It’s not that melodramatic. You can do all kinds of things. It’s just I don’t want our children to lose their father because he’s too tied up in the lives of criminals. I don’t want to lose you, either. We need our life. That place is too dangerous, and you’re too sensitive. I know you’re good at your work, but you need to get more out of life than just work.”
They kept walking, and as Trey glanced down the hillside, he thought he saw the kids down below, near one of the ice cream parlors. Where was Jenny?
“Carly, is that Terry and Mark?”
She looked across the thin slice of the main drag that she could see clearly. “Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”
“Jenny’s not with them,” he said.
“I’m sure she’s around there somewhere. Don’t panic.”
“We’re paying her to stay right with them.”
“Enough.” Carly stopped in her tracks. “Nothing is going to happen to them here. See what that place has done to you? You think everywhere is like that ward. Well, it’s not. Trey, you always go off like this, as if the worst thing’s going to happen, as if everything has to be a life and death situation.”
He could tell that she wished she hadn’t said those words. Not exactly in that way. Not those words.
Life and death.
The white flash in the dark morning.
The gun.
The shadow against the dark.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
They didn’t even have to talk about it directly. They never had.
It had happened, and then it was over.
A year ago, almost. The man had been released from Darden State because some loopy psychiatrist believed that he was “cured,” but Trey had known better. The man was a sociopath named Wilson. And Wilson had told the others on his ward that if he ever got out, he’d hunt down anyone who had ever hurt him, including Trey. Trey had one nightmare after the next about Wilson, what he had seen Wilson do to people, from the autopsy photographs of the family in Long Beach. Trey bought a gun and then spent three months at a target range in San Bernardino learning how to shoot it.
And then, one morning.
When it was still dark.
The noise in the kitchen.
The fear, creeping up the back of Trey’s neck.
Knowing that Teresa’s room was near the kitchen.
Knowing that Wilson was loose and out to get revenge.
Trey went, shivering, with the gun, down the hall, through the living room.
In the dark.
Someone was at the backdoor. By the kitchen.
In the dark morning.
Trey stood in the doorway to the kitchen.
The morning light was purple.
The shadow against the dark was the exact shape of Wilson.
Trey could never be sure that he didn’t rewrite his memory. Still, he felt even then that he knew that it wasn’t Wilson, but he didn’t care, because this was an intruder in his house.
He couldn’t even remember actually drawing the trigger back.
All he remembered was the white flash in the dark.
And then, with the light on, seeing the man.
Where the bullet entered.
Trey began jogging down the path on the island, past the summer cottages, past the Zane Grey Hotel, not towards his children, but away from the memory. He had managed to stop thinking about it for four days straight and now it was back. It had him. He could hear Carly calling for him, but he had to run. He had to do something to get the memory out of his head.
He stopped at the bottom of the road, glancing back.
Carly was walking slowly down the hill.
He felt a gulf between them, as sure as if they’d just had a fight. And the blasted thing for him was that he knew it was not her fault. He knew that he was the one to blame for being panic stricken and paranoid and overly-protective and wary and...frightened. He sat down on the edge of the road, curbside, his head in his hands.
He waited for his wife.
The first words out of her mouth were: “It’s been a year. The guy was breaking in. Nobody thought you did anything wrong.”
He didn’t look up at her. He knew it was a lie. He knew that he had been what one of the policemen had called “trigger-happy.” He knew that he shouldn’t have shot the gun. He knew he shouldn’t have done anything other than perhaps call the police to come around and check out the noise at his kitchen sliding glass doors.
But he was afraid. Not just of some released lunatic who had sworn a vendetta out on him. But afraid of anything that might test his courage. Afraid of anyone who might suggest that he wasn’t the strong
man he pretended to be to the outside world.
“Trey,” Carly said, as if from some great distance, as if she was on the opposite end of the world from him. “Are you all right?”
Luckily, she didn’t mention the tears. He didn’t want to acknowledge them himself.
She squatted down in front of him, touching his shoulder with her right hand. “It’s about that man, isn’t it?”
Trey nodded.
They didn’t say anything.
After several minutes, he got up and dusted himself off.
“It’s going to be hours ‘til sunset,” he said. “I wish I was at work right now. I think I could help. Let’s go find the kids.”
26
Mark whispered, “She’s gonna get in trouble if mom
and Dad find out.”
He stood in his sister’s shadow while she bought a corn dog. She loved corn dogs, and Mark liked salt water taffy, which Teresa was also buying for him. When she had the corn dog in her fist, she passed him four wrapped up pieces of taffy.
“I don’t care if she ever finds us again,” Teresa said in what Mark thought of as her haughty princess voice. “She’s a rhymes with rich.”
“Witch?” Mark asked, not quite getting it. He opened a wrapper and popped a taffy into his mouth. “What do you think she’s doing down there?” He pointed to the alley between shops. He didn’t look down it, because it grossed him out to see Jenny and that boy together. What they were doing.
“Mom says it’s called canoodling, and it’s something that grown ups do. Only not on company time, and Daddy’s paying her a lot to be with us. Even though I’m too old to need a sitter.” Teresa took Mark by the hand and led him over to the arcade. “I’ve got six quarters left. I’ll give you three and I keep three. I want to play Street Fighter.”
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 7