The Memory Watcher - A Psychological Thriller

by Minka Kent

  “Why did you put me in here?” My words are animalistic in my throat, and I reach for my hair. It’s knotted and tangled. My stomach grumbles, and the sky outside my slit of a window is black.

  I feel small. Helpless. Alone.

  “You’re awake,” she says with a jovial smile. “Wonderful.”

  “Why am I locked up? I don’t understand.” I try not to cry, but it’s nearly impossible when you’re being treated like a caged animal. A criminal.

  “Sweetheart, you lost control in my office,” she says gently. “You were banging your head on the wall and screaming and you blacked out. We had to call an ambulance. You were committed because you were a danger to yourself and others. I hope you can understand, it’s only protocol. You won’t be here forever, I promise.”

  She steps into the room then stands aside, allowing a man to follow. Our eyes lock, and my heart stops. The taste of red pepper flakes on my tongue and the feeling of trying to breathe through a wet washcloth comes back to me in sensory memory form. The closet. The one with the lock on the outside of the door and a burned out lightbulb. The threat of a red hot cigarette lighter. A urine soaked mattress. My childhood floods back to me all at once, and I’m going to be sick.

  I need to sit down.

  “Sarah,” a man with familiar brown eyes says. I recognize him now. He is my brother, and his name is Travis. “My god, look at you.”

  He moves toward me and I flinch, drawing into myself and stumbling backward toward the bed.

  “Hold on, Travis,” Dr. Whitmore says, extending her arm. There’s a pen in her hand and her eyes are on me. “She hasn’t seen you in a very long time. You’ll need to keep that in mind.”

  “Sarah,” he says, and my name feels familiar coming from his voice. His eyes look older than I remember, wrinkly at the sides, and he has less hair than before. It’s thinning and darker now. He wears faded, ripped-up jeans and a dirty t-shirt with a mechanic shop logo across the front. His fingertips are black, oil-stained.

  I can’t recall the last time I saw my brother, but I know it’s been years. My memories are fragmented, but when I look at him, my body trembles and I want to throw up.

  He’s not a good person, that much I remember.

  “Sarah, we’ve missed you so much. Mom and Dad have been worried sick about you,” he says with a breathy smile. He stares at me like he’s staring at a ghost, like I’m transparent and he’s trying to wrap his head around the fact that he finally found me again. “We thought you were . . .”

  I close my eyes and feel his weight over mine. I feel his fingers around my neck, pressing until I blacked out. I remember the closet with the lock. I remember the names and the punishments and the humiliation in front of all his friends.

  But it isn’t Travis who’s hurting me. It’s our older brother, Adam.

  I close my eyes and I’m transported.

  Travis is watching. Laughing. Pointing. His hands don’t torture me, but he’s just as guilty because he never tries to stop it.

  I’m crying, begging him for help as Adam pushes me to the brink of death for his own sociopathic amusement.

  Travis does nothing.

  And when it’s over, his eyes are dead, and Adam threatens us both.

  And it never stops.

  All I ever wanted was to escape, even if I could only escape in my mind.

  Dr. Whitmore watches me tremble and then turns to Travis. “I think we should try this again, when she’s feeling more . . . herself. This may be too much for her.”

  She directs her attention to me.

  “Sarah, your parents will be here soon,” she says. “And when you’re feeling better, there’ll be a detective here from the Stamford PD who would like to ask you a few questions about Autumn Carpenter. I won’t let him talk to you until you’re ready. I just wanted to let you know.”

  Pieces of memory float back to me like little flecks of dust. I think I can remember her now. She was pretty; blonde hair and blue eyes. And insecure. Privileged. Clingy. I was her only friend.

  And I think I killed her.

  Yes …

  I remember now.

  I held her under the water. We were walking the beach adjacent to her parent’s Hamptons beach home. It was midnight and the sky was starless with a sliver of moon. It happened so fast. She was complaining about the things she was always complaining about when I lunged at her from behind, my hands around her neck, and held her beneath me, my weight sinking into her. I was shocked at how little she struggled. It was almost as if she wanted it, welcomed it. When she stopped moving, I pushed her further out from the shore and she floated away so peacefully, her body beckoned by gentle waves.

  She wanted to die anyway.

  She’d written it in her journal a hundred times.

  The one she made me read because she felt I was the only one who truly understood her, the only one who paid attention.

  I’m on my bed, the room spinning, and then I feel my body swaying. I’m rocking back and forth, my knees pulled against my chest. My eyes close tight.

  “Get him away from me,” I whisper, ignoring everything else she said. I feel like I could drown from the weight of Travis’ presence and his familiar gaping stare. My eyes squeeze harder. When I open them, they’re still standing there, staring. “Now!”

  My scream echoes, bouncing off the cinder blocks and filling the small cell that contains me. Dr. Whitmore scrambles toward the door, pulling Travis with her. A male orderly stands in the hall, keeping his eyes on me as the doctor whispers something to my brother and pulls him out of the way.

  “Get me out of here!” I scream. My voice feels as if it’s outside of me.

  An orderly charges in the room with a syringe in hand and another comes to pin my thrashing arms and legs, and Travis watches the way he always did. He couldn’t wipe the amusement from his face if he tried. A third orderly rushes past them, pinning my opposite arm down until I feel a sharp poke and then . . .

  …nothingness.

  Sixty-Two

  Daphne

  “Can I help you?” I climb out of my car and stride across my driveway toward the unmarked cop car currently blocking my garage stall.

  A tall man with thick, dirty blond hair takes heavy footsteps in my direction, his hands on his hips and a badge hanging around his neck.

  Swallowing the ball in my throat, I say, “If you’re looking for my husband, he’s at the office. He’ll be home after five, though I’d appreciate if you met with him when the kids aren’t around.”

  “Are you Daphne McMullen?”

  “Yes.” I straighten my posture.

  “You got a minute?”

  My gaze moves toward the trunk of my SUV. “I have groceries in the back that need unloading, and I’ve got an appointment in an hour across town.”

  He bites his lower lip, squinting at me, and his forehead is lined in wrinkles. “You’re going to have to cancel the appointment, ma’am.”

  “Care to tell me what’s going on, detective?”

  “I’m sure you’re aware of the investigation into the homicide of Marnie Gotlieb,” he says.

  I nod. “It’s all you hear about anymore on the news. That poor girl.”

  “And I’m sure you’re aware of your husband’s relationship with the deceased,” he says. “At least that’s what he said when he came in the other day.”

  Exhaling, I glance away. “I’m not sure what her death has to do with me. Graham and I have had our fair share of struggles, which we’re still sorting out. Marriages take work, you know.”

  “Well aware, ma’am. Been through a couple of them myself.” He chuckles, like we’re friends, and then his expression fades. “Anyway, we just need you to come down for some questions.”

  Checking my watch, I sigh. “How long do you think it’ll take? I’ve got to pick the kids up from school by three.”

  “It’s going to be a while,” he says. “Might want to call your husband and have him do the carpo
oling today.”

  “Is there any way we could do this in the morning? Tomorrow is completely free for me, and I’d be all yours.” I smile, moving toward the trunk to start hauling in groceries.

  “I’m sorry. We’re going to need you to come in now.”

  Our nosiest neighbor, Mrs. Keller, walks by with her miniature apricot poodle, staring and mouth hardened into a disapproving frown, probably wondering why some strange man is hassling me in my own driveway.

  How embarrassing.

  Across the street, I catch a hint of a shadow behind a moving curtain.

  They’re all watching, waiting for me to be carted off in handcuffs in the back of his car because it would make for one hell of a story at Bunco this weekend.

  “Is this a requirement?” I chuckle. “Is this how it usually works?”

  “Look, ma’am, you need to come with me.” He’s growing impatient, forcing a hard breath through his nostrils and stepping toward me. His hands move to his backside, and he slowly retrieves a pair of shiny silver cuffs, moving carefully as if he fully expects me to run from him.

  I laugh.

  “This is a joke, right? You’re kidding me.” My arms are weighed with grocery bags, and I’d give anything, anything, right now to go back to my perfectly boring life with my two-timing husband and my non-minding children.

  He shakes his head. “Drop the bags, please.”

  “Don’t do this.” There’s a whine in my voice that I can’t help. I feel them all watching; the entire neighborhood. I’m sure they’re snapping photos and sending texts and making calls. And tomorrow my children will be teased at school because someone else’s mommy saw their mommy taken away in a police car.

  “Daphne, I didn’t want to do this here,” he says. I lower the bags to the pavement, lip trembling and knees buckling. “But since you’re unwilling to cooperate.”

  He slips the handcuffs around my wrists. They’re cold and weighty, and he tightens them until the metal digs into my bones.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what this is about.” I’ll deny.

  Deny, deny, deny. My answers will be nothing but “I don’t knows” and “I don’t remembers,” and as soon as I get a hold of Graham, I’ll have him send in the best defense attorney money can buy.

  I didn’t kill Marnie.

  “You’re being charged with murder,” he speaks like we’re talking about the weather, about the St. Louis Cards, about donuts. “You hired Mitch Illingworth to execute the intentional overdose of Marnie Gotlieb. The guy he hired to do the job was booked this afternoon on unrelated charges and gave a full confession and any evidence he could provide.”

  My jaw hangs. Fucking Mitchell. Fucking drug dealers.

  He sold me out.

  And of course he would.

  I was just some rich bitch with deep pockets, and the jackass he hired was just some street thug trying to get off on better charges than the ones he was facing.

  Still, I’ll deny.

  I don’t deserve to rot for this.

  I was only a woman, trying to keep herself together the only way she could, and I did what I had to do because it was the only way to end all of this: I destroyed the only source of Graham’s happiness because she destroyed the only source of mine.

  Sixty-Three

  Autumn

  “What are you here for?” A girl with long legs and a Cover Girl smile and green eyes that sparkle takes the spot next to me in the TV room one Friday morning in September. I haven’t seen her before, so she must be new.

  I don’t tell her a thing. I smile and turn my attention back toward the morning news. Some man in a black suit is rambling on about the weather, and I hope I get a chance to go outside this morning before it rains.

  I’ve been immersed in intensive talk therapy for the last several weeks. They tell me I have some kind of branch of dissociative personality disorder. It’s rare and it needs to be studied more. It isn’t textbook, they tell me. They want to send me to Portland, Maine to speak to some world-renowned psychologist as soon as I’m better.

  I don’t know when I’ll be “better” or what that entails. So far I’ve woken every morning as Sarah, though I’m told I have an alter ego named Autumn.

  I don’t know Autumn. I don’t know what it’s like to be her, but they tell me I lived as her for at least the last seven years, so she must have been pretty great. They tell me I hide behind her personality as a defense mechanism, as a way to forget the trauma. Dr. Whitmore says I need to face the trauma head on. It’s the only way to overcome any of this.

  I don’t know how this is going to go or how long it’ll take me to “face the trauma head on,” but I do know that I hate being Sarah. Sarah is nervous and boring and anxious and her mind wanders all day every day, and she isn’t happy. She doesn’t know who she is or what she wants, all she knows is she doesn’t want to be Sarah.

  The girl next to me is rambling, talking a mile a minute. She’s pretty and she seems nice, if not excessively chatty, but compared to everyone else in here, she seems relatively “normal.” And I could use a friend. It’s lonely in here.

  “I’m Kerrigan,” she says, extending her hand. “Like the figure skater from the nineties. Nancy Kerrigan?”

  I offer a polite smile. I’ve never heard of “Nancy Kerrigan” before.

  Kerrigan smiles more than I’ve ever seen anyone smile in my entire life. She seems happy and chipper, overly so, and I have no idea why she’s here. I’m guessing she’s manic. Off her meds. Needing to get stabilized.

  But I like her. Or I think I could.

  She’s talking about nail polish now, asking if I’d be interested in doing each other’s nails later. She’s dying for a manicure and she’s terrible at painting with her left hand. Also, she could use a friend, she tells me. No one wants to talk to her so far, and she thinks I seem nice.

  “Want to be friends?” She laughs, but she’s serious.

  “Sure,” I say.

  Kerrigan tells me she’s twenty-three, and she’s an aspiring actress. She’s been an extra in several Broadway productions, and she once had three lines in a production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.

  The news flicks to the next story.

  A local woman has been indicted on murder charges after having hired someone to kill her husband’s mistress via drug overdose. They have three children. The husband, a local businessman, is said to be devastated. The woman is facing life in prison with no chance of parole.

  They show the woman dressed in orange, her hands cuffed behind her back as she stands before a judge. She’s very beautiful, but she shows no emotion. Her expression is ice cold, and then they flash to a family portrait from better times. They have two girls and a boy and the photo shows them in front of an enormous Christmas tree, grinning ear to ear with a background full of beautifully wrapped presents.

  I feel bad for them, my gut punched the same way it gets when I see one of those animal shelter commercials. They seem like any other family next door, relatable and functional, only they’re the picture perfect version.

  The anchor moves on to the next story, the demolition and relocation of a local youth shelter, and Kerrigan’s still talking.

  “As soon as I get out of here, I’m moving to California,” she says. “LA. That’s where all the good acting jobs are. Broadway is for the assholes who take themselves way too seriously. They think they’re classically trained, but they’re just a bunch of poor wannabes waiting for a big break that’s never going to happen.”

  I laugh for the first time in weeks. I like the way she thinks. And I love her brutal honestly.

  “The cool thing about LA, too, is that everybody reinvents themselves out there. You can give yourself a new name, a new persona, and nobody bats an eye. They even have personality coaches, can you believe that? Anyway, I’m ditching New York and hitching a ride to warmer winters and palm trees.”

  In a blink of an eye, I picture myself in LA with Ker
rigan, laughing and drinking and leaving all of this bullshit behind.

  “You can be anyone you want to be out there,” she says, bouncing giddily in her seat and twirling her long blonde hair.

  “Mind if I join you?” I ask.

  “Oh, my god, are you kidding? I would love it! We can be roomies!”

  “All right, it’s settled. As soon as we’re out of here, I’m coming with you.”

  Kerrigan wraps her arms around me, squeezing tight. “We’re going to have so much fun.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  Coming Soon

  THE THINNEST AIR

  Everybody knew her.

  Until no one did.

  The living, breathing clichés that suffocated Genevieve Andrew’s life were only outnumbered by the ocean of secrets that drowned her. Doting mother of two, dutiful wife of a retired professional quarterback, and non-discriminating animal rescuer, Genevieve was the cornerstone of the chocolate box mountain community she called home.

  But when she failed to return from her Sunday afternoon grocery run, the town was turned upside down in search of the upstanding woman everyone knew would never abandon her responsibilities.

  Or would she?

  When the ones closest to her begin searching for the truth, they begin to wonder if they ever really knew Genevieve at all.

  And how it was possible for her to disappear into the thinnest air.

  Receive an email when THE THINNEST air releases!

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you so, so much to my beta readers, A, C, K, and M. This book was a monster of a project to tackle, and you all so generously offered your assistance, brutal honesty, encouragement, and valuable feedback. This book would not be what it is now if it weren’t for you.