The Ghost of Blackwood Lane

by Greg Enslen

  It would all be over, and maybe by some freak occurrence Vincent would be caught and tried for killing her, if he ended up being her executioner. If she killed herself, no one would have to go to jail, but if she could somehow arrange for him to kill her....

  Of course, if left to his own devices, he might kill her soon enough—she had never seen him as angry as he was last night.

  She tried not to think about the pile of burned paintings she’d seen this morning on the front lawn as she’d left to go walking—somehow, they looked even more pitiful in daylight.

  Her parents were gone now, and all she had left of them was that envelope from Texas. There was money waiting there for her, but it might as well be on the moon—or in California.

  And Chris was long gone—he’d surely forgotten all about her after so many years. He was probably happy and healthy out there in Sacramento, with a cute wife and two or three kids.

  She had his ring and nothing else. She doubted he would even remember her—if they were to somehow bump into each other in downtown O’Fallon, he’d probably not even recognize her.

  No one would miss her, and she took some comfort in that. There was nothing else to think about except the method. As she strolled through the fields and valleys near her husband’s home, she pondered on the best method to afford her sweet release.

  Chapter 44

  Dr. Myers caught himself leaning forward and reminded himself to control his body language.

  “The woman at Wood Bakery, she told my friend that I used to shop there with my mother,” the young man continued, staring at the ceiling. “The woman also told my friend Mike that Judy—”

  He broke off at the mention of a girl’s name, and then continued.

  “—that the girl in the picture used to work there. It was where we met. That and other details seem to be confirming each other.”

  Dr. Myers looked at the young man. There were a lot of facts coming out very quickly. It looked like he wasn’t going to be getting lunch any time soon.

  Not that it really mattered. This was a fascinating story, if it was true.

  He grabbed his notepad and scribbled down what he could remember and asked Gary to repeat what he could not remember, which he did without hesitation. Playing dumb, Myers also asked him to repeat more, and the young man obliged. So far, there were no cracks in the story.

  As he asked the questions, the young man reached into his jacket pocket and took out what looked like a large deck of cards. While Dr. Myers wrote, the young man took the cards out of the deck and shuffled through them, taking one at a time out and looking at it, then shuffling it back in. Dr. Myers ignored it for now.

  “Okay, just a couple of quick questions,” Dr. Myers continued. “Why would your stepmother send you the picture when she must’ve known it would upset you? If she knew about your suppressed memories, she could guess that seeing that picture would be traumatic. Why would she do that?”

  The boy looked away for a moment, glancing out the window. Dr. Myers felt his reluctance to answer.

  “Well, this is the crazy part of the whole story,” Gary began. “Crazy piled on top of more crazy. For the past few months, I’ve been having a series of nightmares about a woman. In each of the dreams, I see this woman being abused. The dreams have started to affect me, even when I’m awake—I can’t stop thinking about them.”

  Dr. Myers scribbled on his pad and nodded, keeping quiet.

  “About a week ago,” Gary continued. “I thought I remembered the man in the dream, but I couldn’t put a name to the face. I thought he might be someone I remembered from back here, so I drove to Sacramento to see my father and ask him about the man. He didn’t have any idea who I was talking about. My stepmother, who suspected the dreams might be of this girl, sent me the picture to jog my memory. It turns out that I’ve been dreaming about her,” he said, nodding at the picture on Myers’ desk.

  Dr. Myers nodded, understanding. “Well, that could be the memories starting to come through the blockage—it could be breaking down on its own, or Dr. Martin may have programmed the memory wall to break down after a given amount of time. Either way, if your memories are starting to seep back into your conscious mind, the dreams are a good place for them to show up first.”

  Gary nodded, thoughtful.

  “My father said that Dr. Martin gave him a set of words that would remove the blockage, but my father forgot them a long time ago. You say that the dreams might be my mind’s way of slowly reminding me of this woman?”

  “Certainly,” Dr. Myers agreed. “The mind is a strange construct, something we don’t understand well, even on the most basic level. There are reported cases of suppressed memories coming back spontaneously after a long time, but most of those are related to some kind of trauma or abuse. But those are things that the mind itself has suppressed to keep the person sane by literally ‘forgetting’ the horrible event. I’ve never heard of an intentional block lasting this long, or breaking down on its own.”

  “Is it possible?” Gary asked.

  Dr. Myers chuckled. “Who knows? We can send a little rover to drive around on the surface of Mars, but we still don’t know how language is stored in our own minds. We don’t know how you and I access our stored memories from all those little synapses in our head. Who’s to say what is or isn’t possible?”

  Gary nodded. “What’s causing the headaches?”

  “Well, assuming this is all true and you’re not just pulling my chain, the headaches would be your mind trying to keep you from remembering too much at once. The memories and the blockage are both parts of the same mind, making the whole thing very tricky. The memories want to come out, and the blockage is trying to hold them back. Your organic memory knows that if you remember everything all at once, it would probably shatter your mind and drive you insane.”

  Gary laughed. “Is that the clinical term? ‘Insane?’”

  Dr. Myers smiled at him. “People step over the line into insanity all the time—you’ve read about seemingly ‘normal’ people who kill their families and commit suicide. You hear the neighbors on TV saying something like ‘he was such a nice guy, so quiet.’ There are a thousand reasons for someone to break from sanity, and there are a thousand ways that insane people deal with their own psychotic tendencies. But the mind is a powerful construct, and it adapts to serve the body, to preserve the entity it is commanding.”

  Dr. Myers watched the young man closely, gauging his reaction to Myers’s standard ‘everyone is a little crazy’ speech, which he used often to gauge the mental state of many people that came through his door. Some people got defensive, some got angry or belligerent—this young man simply accepted the explanation, moving on to his next question without hesitation.

  It was the first real sign that the young man truly believed these things were occurring to him. Dr. Myers made a note of it.

  Myers decided to press the issue and continue down the same path. Sometimes the only way to force a breakthrough was through confrontation—it wasn’t the best clinical method, but this boy looked like he could bolt out the door at any moment, and Myers wanted a couple of answers.

  “Ted Bundy was famously normal,” Dr. Myers continued. “Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference. Bundy masked his insanity very well, and blended in. In one case, a group of people were searching for him after he’d escaped from a Colorado jail, and he managed to convince one of his pursuers that he was not Ted Bundy.”

  The young man was quiet.

  “Do you remember that story last year,” Dr. Myers continued, “about that man who travelled the country in a white van, killing people from coast to coast? It was a disturbing story. He was a true serial killer, not like those you see in the movies; he was a sociopath, but the man was so successful because he could suppress his anger and his emotions and act normally whenever he wanted to. He was a chameleon, changing into whatever the situation required. ”

  Gary smiled. “I hope you’re not comparing
me to Ted Bundy.”

  Dr. Myers shook his head. “Of course not.

  “Do you think you’re crazy?” Dr. Myers asked, another standard diagnostic question.

  Gary looked at the ceiling, quiet. “I don’t know, Dr. Myers. I don’t think so, but when the headaches come, I lose control of myself. And I smell cigarette smoke, whatever that means. Does that mean I’m crazy?”

  Dr. Myers shook his head. “Of course not.

  “Then why can’t I say her name?” Gary continued. “Or mine? Even in my head?”

  “That’s your mind trying to protect itself. You’ll need some time before you can start thinking of yourself in a different way, or start remembering this girl—don’t forget it was a deliberate act, suppressing those memories. Do you know why they did that?”

  “Yes, my father used to work for the Luciano family, and he testified against him in Federal Court ten years ago. I didn’t care, and I didn’t want to enter the witness protection program or leave my fiancé, the girl in the picture, so I fought it.”

  Dr. Myers nodded—he had heard snippets of this story in his years in O’Fallon.

  “Supposedly,” Gary continued, “I jeopardized the case to the point where it was either hypnotize me temporarily or physically remove me from the state. My mother had been killed in a car bombing, and that convinced my father that he had to testify and then get us away. The hypnosis was supposed to be temporary, but he told my stepmother later that there never seemed to be a good and safe time to reveal to me my true name or allow me to remember...the girl. There was still a contract out on my father’s life, a contract I’m pretty sure still exists. The memories stayed suppressed until I started having these dreams.”

  It was all too much for the doctor to write down, but he scribbled as fast as he could. His secretary Nadine would have a fun time trying to follow his chicken-scratching.

  The young man waited patiently, going back to flipping through his cards until Myers was finished scribbling.

  “What are those?” Myers asked.

  The young man looked down at the cards and then smiled, as if realizing what he was doing. “Oh, these are tarot cards—lately I’ve been very interested in palm reading and crystals. The tarot cards supposedly predict the future,” Gary said sheepishly.

  Dr. Myers nodded. “That makes sense—your mind is looking for answers. It’s like a talisman for you.”

  “What’s that?” Gary asked.

  “A talisman is an object of supernatural or mystical power. In this context, your talisman is some object that gives you comfort, allowing your mind to relax. The fact that the cards hold an almost supernatural power for you is even better—do they give you comfort?”

  Gary looked at the cards. Dr. Myers could tell he was thinking about it for the first time.

  “Yes,” the young man said. “I guess they do.”

  “Then I see nothing wrong with them.”

  Gary nodded, putting the cards away. “So what do I do now? I found out where the girl and her new husband live, and I want to see her. Something in me tells me she’s in trouble. I know it’s not the smart thing to do, but….

  Dr. Myers shook his head.

  “If you see her, the first thing your mind will do is shut down. You’ll pass out, or worse. For now, I think you need to rest, here in my office or back at your hotel. We need to explore the entire story, from beginning to end, and then you and I will deal with how to best handle the future.”

  Gary looked at him, and the doctor finally understood what was happening here—the boy wasn’t looking for a cure.

  He was looking for a direction.

  The boy was obviously worried. Did he think his dreams of the girl’s abuse were somehow true? Did he believe that the dreams could be some type of precognitive cry for help from the girl? That would explain his restless....

  “I can’t do that, Doctor,” Gary said quietly.

  Dr. Myers nodded. “You believe that the dreams are true, don’t you? Are you thinking you’re somehow connected to her mind, seeing through her eyes?”

  “I don’t know, Doc,” the young man said. “But I have to find her and make sure she’s okay. As long as I know that, I can spend the next ten years in therapy, trying to get my head on straight. But first, I need to know she’s okay. Everything else is secondary. What can I do to mitigate the headaches?”

  He was determined, Dr. Myers saw. Of course, if he truly thought the girl was in jeopardy, he would want to go to her.

  “Gary, you need to listen to me,” Dr. Myers cautioned. “The headaches are going to get worse as long as your mind fights the memories. You need to calm down and relax and try to handle your pain. And you need to slowly repeat to yourself, your true name and the name of the girl. If you start doing that, you’ll find the headaches may decrease in intensity. You just need to get used to the idea before your mind will completely accept it.”

  Gary nodded, getting up. “Thank you for all your help, Doc. If this turns out for the better, I promise to come back and see you before I leave for Los Angeles.” He turned toward the door, but Myers stood and pushed it shut.

  “Gary, you can’t go to her,” Dr. Myers said. “If you see her, you’ll collapse or pass out. It could seriously damage your mind. That isn’t going to help her. Is that what you want?”

  Gary’s eyes came up, and he stared at Myers intently.

  “I have to know she’s okay.”

  Myers nodded and his hand came slowly off the door.

  “Good luck. And come see me before you leave town.” Dr. Myers pulled the door open for Gary and, at the same time, fished a business card out of his shirt pocket.

  “Call me, anytime, day or night, if you need help.”

  Gary smiled and took the card, thanking him again. As Myers watched, Gary collected his friend, who nodded curtly at the doctor and smiled warmly at Nadine, and they walked out together. They climbed into a rental car with Missouri tags and drove away.

  Dr. Myers had no idea what to think about all of this.

  He went back into his office, closed the door, and spent the next half hour rewriting all of his notes. It was a fascinating tale—he tried to remember all the details, filling in a few of the places with speculation on the boy’s mental condition.

  Dr. Myers was so engrossed in the story that he forgot all about lunch.

  Chapter 45

  Blackwood Lane wound through the hills and fields north and east of O’Fallon, but Gary and Mike found the Luciano home with no trouble. There was a mailbox marking the house from the road, and Mike turned the car into the long driveway and slowly approached the house.

  The two-story farmhouse with an attached garage sat by itself, both surrounded by a large, well-kept yard. To one side, a hundred yards from the house, stood a barn-like structure, an outbuilding between the house and the field that fronted Blackwood Lane. Two broken-down cars rested in the sun in front of the barn like tired dogs.

  Mike parked in front of the house and they climbed out—it didn’t look like anybody was home.

  They walked up to the front door and Gary rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. Mike knocked on the door and leaned over, peeking into the windows, but he saw no one inside. He could see the living room and a kitchen beyond, but there wasn’t anyone here.

  Mike tried the door and found it was unlocked. After a glance at Gary, he eased the door open.

  The interior looked like any other home—a living room filled with furniture and pictures. There were stairs leading up to the second floor. Gary peeked inside as well, but they both seemed unsure of whether or not they should enter.

  “Hello?” Mike called loudly, making Gary start. “Is anyone here?”

  There was no response. After a long moment, Gary punched Mike hard on the shoulder and stepped off the porch.

  “Ow, what was that for?” Mike asked as he continued to look around the living room from the threshold.

  “You scared me, yelling like that
,” he heard Gary say from behind him.

  Mike called again but heard nothing—everything looked perfectly normal, with nothing out of place. He pulled the front door shut again.

  “Wow,” he heard Gary say from behind him.

  Mike turned around and looked at Gary, who was holding up what looked like a burned piece of newspaper.

  “What is it?” Mike asked.

  Gary turned it around for Mike to see.

  “I found this in the yard,” Gary said. “Couldn’t you smell it? Something burnt—it’s a painting.”

  It looked like a mess—Mike could make out something along the bottom that looked like water, and along one side was a tall blob of white and black. The rest was unrecognizable.

  “Who burns a painting?” Mike asked.

  “It’s an ocean scene,” Gary said, pointing. “There are waves, and a beach, and up here on the right, there’s a....”

  Gary looked at him, his face white.

  “It’s a lighthouse. Like Point Vincenté, where I looked at the photograph for the first time.”

  Mike looked, but he didn’t see it—there was something there that might be a lighthouse, but the paint was smeared badly. “I don’t know, Gary. It could be anything.”

  “No, no. That’s a lighthouse. Jud—she must’ve painted this.”

  Mike looked at his friend. “Now, don’t go there. You don’t know....”

  Gary shook his head. “I know, Mike. Sorry. It’s just that...it feels right. It feels like she painted this. I can tell, just like I could tell when we pulled up here that she wasn’t here. I don’t know how I know, but I do.”

  Gary looked around, looking back out at Blackwood Lane and the trees on either side of the road.

  Mike shook his head.

  “Well, you’re right about her not being here. What else should we do?”

  After a long minute of silence, Gary shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said, and walked back to the car.

  Chapter 46