“I’m not sure what we think yet,” Lukaszewski answered. “Write down the name of your date, including her contact information. Do you know of anyone Madison might have been seeing?”
“No. I hardly knew her. She comes into the place where I work sometimes and puts the moves on me. I don’t even know her friends’ names.” He pulled a ragged notebook out of his backpack and jotted down the information, then tore off the sheet and passed it to them.
Lukaszewski slipped him a card. “We’ll get back to you. Call us if you think of anything.” The detectives turned to leave.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Johnstone said. “There was this guy that always hung around when they were there.”
“They?” Brian asked.
“Madison and the other girl, the one she hung with; I don’t remember her name. I don’t know the guy’s name either. He hangs out at the restaurant sometimes and he usually leaves when they do. I only noticed because he’s kind of weird.”
“Weird strange or weird scary?”
“I don’t know. He wears a hoodie pulled up over his head, and he’s always alone. I think he’s about the same age as the girls. Sometimes he mumbles to himself.”
Not much to go on, Brian thought.
“Can you describe him?”
“I never got a good look at his face.”
“Next time you see him, get a name and call me,” Lukaszewski said.
Johnstone stuck Lukaszewski’s card in his pocket and ambled away, slowly picking up his earlier swagger.
“One down,” Lukaszewski added. “And unless we want to interview every freakin’ kid at that party, let’s hope the girl tripped on her nightgown.”
Chapter 11
I can’t move. Once more, the paralysis is upon me like a lead blanket. I’m helpless, my limbs frozen in place. My fear becomes terror. Something’s different this time; I can’t see my room or my furniture. There is no presence clinging to me, but even without it, I am caught in a blind panic.
I moan in an effort to waken myself. It doesn’t work. Taking a deep breath calms me enough to realize I’m lying on my kitchen floor in front of the stove. How did I get here? I vaguely recall being in the screened porch. I must have fallen asleep there, but why am I in the kitchen? Like my bedroom in past paralysis experiences, the room is in shadow, small rays of light drifting in from between the plants in the bay window above the sink.
When I managed to regain consciousness, I was reclining on the sofa in the porch exactly where I’d been when I’d fallen asleep. I had a dark memory of lying on the floor in the kitchen, and my displacement to another room felt as threatening as the night visitor. Had he been there, unknown to me? Had he moved me while I slept?
I had an appointment with my doctor tomorrow; I was looking forward to the relief of sleeping pills. I was having a terrible time focusing on any one thing. So much had happened in the last few days: the explosion, seeing Carter, being near the scene of a possible murder. Carter and I had given our brief statements to the police and then repeated them once more to the detective who arrived, the same one who’d been at my house the morning after the explosion. We left the scene as soon as we could get away.
Carter offered to stay with me, but I turned him down. I wanted to get my life back on track, and I couldn’t do that with old feelings for my ex-husband appealing to my loneliness.
I returned to Lisa Rayburn’s office the day after I saw the doctor. Before we even sat down, she gave me the information about the support group. “The group had five members originally, but recently two left.” She must have seen my concern. “Oh, no,” she added. “They moved out of state; their leaving had nothing to do with the group.
“The group meets once a week in the evening, and they’d love to have you join them. If you like, I’ll call and set it up, or you can call the therapist yourself. His name is Robert Bernstein. He may want to see you before your first meeting, and I know he’ll require a note from your doctor verifying that your problem isn’t physical.” She handed me one of his business cards, then looked at me expectantly.
I blurted, “I’m glad you were able to get me in again before I joined them.” I told her about my meeting with Carter, the inheritance, and the incident with the girl who found her friend at the bottom of the steps. Lisa’s expression never changed, and she didn’t speak until I got it all out, including that I had received a clean bill of health, along with a prescription for sleeping pills, from my doctor. My sleep issues weren’t health related.
“You’ve had quite a week. Is there one of these things in particular you want to talk about?” she asked.
Was there? I knew in my heart what I should be discussing with her, but, for some reason, it was a subject I wasn’t ready to share.
She sensed my hesitation. “Why don’t you tell me about your ex-husband? How did it feel to be with him again?”
That I could handle. “It seemed odd at first. I was glad we met, though. I realized I did the right thing by divorcing him.”
“Gemma, tell me about your divorce. What went wrong in your marriage?”
There were so many things I needed to talk about, but how my marriage had ended wasn’t one of them. But so many things are woven together in one’s psyche; maybe I couldn’t get to an answer for one compartment of my mind without opening the other chambers. I took a deep breath, wishing I were stretched out on the chaise in the corner of the room with my eyes shut.
After I concluded the tale of my marriage’s demise and the part my career as an escort played in it, I ended by telling her about last week. How I had turned Carter down when he offered to stay with me after we talked to the police.
Lisa offered me a cup of tea. I gratefully accepted, happy to have a break from my lengthy discourse. I rose from the chair and stood at the window. The view of the lake displayed a lovely autumn scene: oak trees, waving rushes lining the shoreline, a lone sailboat gliding along the surface of the lake.
After handing me the tea, Lisa didn’t comment on what I had told her, which I expected was how therapists worked, trying to draw you out rather than give their own opinion of what you revealed. Uncomfortable with the silence, I told her about my latest sleep paralysis episode, how I had experienced being in my kitchen, not where I’d fallen asleep.
“Why do you think the paralysis is just as frightening without the feeling that someone’s there with you, holding you down?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I had asked myself that repeatedly. “While I was lying on the kitchen floor it felt like… I was dead or something, like I had no control over my own body. I had no idea how I had gotten there. I feel frightened even talking about it now.”
Lisa appeared to be taking in every detail, although she didn’t take notes. “Gemma, there’s usually a reason for the feeling of a presence holding onto you. Often, it’s invoked by feelings about a person or possibly the memory of a person. We need to explore those. I think the displacement you experienced with this latest episode represents your feelings of being helpless to control what’s been happening to you.
“Keep a small notebook on your nightstand,” she advised. “The next time you experience the paralysis, as soon as you awaken, write down exactly what you were feeling and thinking about when you fell asleep. Write every detail you can remember from the time the paralysis started and how you managed to pull out of it. You may gain some valuable insights.”
I wanted to object and tell her she was wrong. I didn’t think it possible that a mere memory of a person from my past could cause the night visitor to terrify me, but I was paying her to help me; it would be foolish not to do what she suggested. “I can do that,” I answered.
“I hope you’ll consider joining the support group. I believe sharing with the others and hearing their experiences might help to resolve some of your tension.”
In my desperation
, I would agree to try anything. “Can I still come to see you?” I liked Lisa Rayburn. I felt like she understood me in a way no one else ever had.
“Why don’t you see how it goes with the group? Go to a meeting or two, and if you still feel you need more time with me, we’ll set something up. We have some time left now. Why don’t you tell me more about when you worked for the escort service? It seemed like you had more to say about it.”
The woman had to be a mind reader. “I don’t like to talk about it. No one ever believes it wasn’t a call-girl setup. It wasn’t.”
“So none of the girls, yourself included, had sex with the clients?”
“I never saw the other girls. The only one I ever met was the one who told me about the escort service in the first place. She was a fellow student; she told me she didn’t.”
“And you?”
I had to tell her. “A few times, but only with men I was attracted to. And I never took money from them.”
“Gemma, I can’t help but suspect there might be a tie of some kind between your night visitor episodes and your escort days. You say you have no feelings of guilt about it, but maybe you had a bad experience with someone?”
There had been no “bad” experiences, at least not the abusive kind she hinted at; no one had ever been violent. I sighed, my memories spiraling into a past I wanted to forget. “You’re right. There was something—but it was worse than a traumatic experience—I fell in love with a client.”
Lisa’s face registered no surprise at my admission. “Tell me why you describe it as a bad experience.”
I sighed and looked out over Pewaukee Lake. If only I could be there on a sailboat, carefree, and enjoying the day. I had never told anyone but Norman about Taylor, and I hadn’t told him everything.
How to start? I struggled with it for a moment before I realized that in a psychologist’s office there were no right or wrong ways to tell a story.
“I got a call from the escort service for a daytime engagement, which surprised me since those hardly ever happened. When I was advised to dress for a trip to an amusement park, I had no idea what to expect. I had never heard of anything like that. My ‘date’ picked me up in front of a coffee shop near the university driving a small white sports car with the convertible top down. His eyes were the first thing I noticed about him, dark hazel with thick, long lashes like a woman’s. They were always laughing and his love of life was contagious.”
As I told her about him, I felt like I was back in the day, the sun shining, and a soft breeze tickling my bare legs. “He looked so happy to see me, like we were old friends, and I wasn’t paid company. Rather than step out and open the door, he reached his hand out to me. I jumped in and took the seat next to him. He introduced himself as Buddy. It wasn’t until our third date that he admitted his real name was Taylor.
“As we drove off, he said, ‘I bet no one’s ever taken you to Great America.’
I laughed when he said that, but I knew by ‘no one’ he meant my engagements through the service. I had never been to Six Flags Great America, had never experienced all the rides, the shows, and the food it offered. My father owned a small jewelry store, and my mother kept books for him so they rarely had time for family outings.”
Lost in my memories, it became difficult to stay in the moment. “He told me he grew up being groomed to become part of his father’s business. Even as a child, he took the role seriously, rarely leaving his studies and training for such frivolities as amusement parks. Playing football in high school had been the one exception because his father was an avid football fan.
“He admitted having a girlfriend who was at her family’s summer home until the end of August. They were engaged to be married when he finished law school. That’s why he called the service. It was a beautiful day, and he wanted to do something fun without anyone knowing he was spending time with another woman.”
I was nearly twenty-one years old that day, yet I had more fun at the amusement park with Taylor in one day than I remembered ever having as a kid.
“I don’t think we missed a ride or a game in the entire park. We ate French fries, pizza slices, ice cream bars, and corn dogs. His energy and excitement were contagious; I had never met anyone like him. When we talked, he listened to me as if I were the most important person in his world.” I paused, remembering.
Lisa finally said, “Go on.”
What I had felt that day was nearly impossible to describe. “While I was with him, part of me felt like the child I had never been, and the other part a woman desiring a man for the first time. I had dated, even had a boyfriend or two, but I had never felt emotionally connected to any of them. I fell in love with Taylor that very day.”
I remembered how he held me close on the rides and took my hand in his the rest of the time. That first date, so like a fairy tale that remembering it still filled me with desire for him, lived on in my unconscious. It was no wonder that no one else had been able to live up to his memory.
Sadly, I couldn’t even call it a date. I had been bought and paid for. But recalling that detail robs me of its magic.
Chapter 12
TJ fixed supper for Richard. It had been a while since they had eaten together and she sometimes wondered if he was getting weary of her, only staying with her because he was attached to JR. Or maybe that was only in her imagination, her need for independence pushing the blame for her own doubts onto him.
As soon as he arrived, she told him about Gemma Rosenthal hiring her to find out about Norman Teschler’s home blowing up. Before he could comment on her taking the job, she quickly described her trip to the fire inspector’s office. “Guy didn’t give me squat. Should have handled him different.”
He kissed her on the cheek as he slipped out of his suit jacket. “You sell yourself short, my love. You know the guy couldn’t tell you anything even if he wanted to.”
My love. He had just started using the term of affection, which she interpreted as a step up from the “babe” he was fond of using. He picked up JR, hugging him until he giggled, struggling to be put down. TJ reminded herself how lucky she was to have Richard with her. They had broken up for a few months when she and Lisa Rayburn were on a mission to find out why abused women were disappearing in Milwaukee County. She had turned to Jeff Denison, whose wife had just gone missing, and they became friends during the search for a killer. Their friendship turned physical on New Year’s Eve, shortly after TJ realized who was responsible for the disappearances and had known there was no way to prove it.
All her energies at the time had been on a quest for the killer, not on Richard, and he had moved on with another woman. After Jeff was killed, it seemed natural that she and Richard would gravitate back to one another. Amazingly, there had been no regrets when they discovered she was pregnant with Jeff’s child. Before JR was born, he had even asked her if she wanted to get married, but she hadn’t been ready for such a big step. Now she had conflicting feelings, wondering if she had been too hasty while at the same time hating to give up her independence. At least Richard hadn’t questioned her taking the case.
The next morning after Richard left, she spent time playing with JR, then put him down for a nap and went downstairs to the office with the baby monitor in her pocket. Her security business had no official hours yet. It had been slow getting started, and TJ had been okay with that for months. She wanted to be there for her son as much as possible when he was so small. But lately, she was getting bored with security work and itched to be doing something more meaningful. Gemma’s case—if it even turned out not to be a case—could make all the difference.
Her trip to the Wauwatosa police department hadn’t been helpful. The detective in charge of the fire didn’t tell her any more than the fire inspector had. She knew something else had been going on; the atmosphere in the room had a buzz, like an interesting case had just popped. Now she scoured the
pages of the local paper, looking for anything new or sensational. Nothing. About to give up, the phone rang. Probably her sister, Janeen, who called TJ daily.
Yup. “Guess what? I’m getting a new kid—a baby.” Janeen had recently opened her own daycare business. She took care of two toddlers, one JR’s age and a two-year-old too young for preschool. Her own kids, Jazz and Lonnie, were in school all day now.
“That’s great. Boy or girl?” TJ knew Janeen loved babies.
“Come to think of it, I didn’t ask. It’s a baby, doesn’t matter. The woman has two other kids that the grandma takes care of, but she told her daughter she couldn’t handle a baby. She’s bringing the baby here so she can go back to work.”
“Let me guess,” TJ said, “you’re givin’ her a great deal.” Janeen’s silence answered the question. “Hey, no big deal. You love babies, and they’re not a lot of work if you get one like JR.”
“Yeah, I can’t wait. It’ll be a week or two, though. She just had the baby a few days ago. Oh, and she’s a cop. Right by you in Tosa.”
TJ tilted back in her chair and grinned. It was just what she needed—an in with a Tosa cop. Hopefully she would be nothing like Brian Haymaker.
Chapter 13
With the prescription sleeping pills finally in my medicine cabinet, I enjoyed a few nights of uninterrupted sleep, and been tempted to cancel the group therapy session. Being honest with myself, though, I had to admit Lisa Rayburn was right; there could be an underlying cause for my sleep demons that I hadn’t been able to figure out.
I had been having second thoughts about telling Lisa the story of my secret love affair with Taylor Harcourt. Discussing it brought back all the old memories. I needed to force myself back to the reality of the present and take care of more pressing things like my work and what to do about Norman’s property.
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