by Zan, Koethi
Adele looked stunned, clearly recognizing my name immediately. I could only imagine the sorts of memories it must have conjured for her. She looked uncertain for a moment—but only for a moment—then calmly put her stack of books on the ground and leaned closer to me.
“Prove it,” she said testily.
I knew exactly how. I lifted up my shirt and rolled the top of my pants down slightly, so she could see the skin over my left hipbone. There, in red-scarred flesh, was the brand.
When she saw it, Adele swallowed hard, leaned over, and picked up her books quickly. I almost thought I saw a glint of fear in her eyes as they darted right and left. As if I were dragging that past around behind me physically, and Jack might be about to spring from my head, fully formed, like some sort of Greek god.
“Walk with me.” She moved fast and didn’t say anything for a while, her eyes fixed straight ahead. During my years of seclusion, I had lost some capacity for reading human expression, and I was feeling that loss acutely now. I couldn’t even begin to tell what she was thinking. But was it me? Or was there something about this woman that was impenetrable to anyone? Her face might as well have been cut from stone.
“How—how are you?” she finally said rather stiffly, without a single note of actual pity or compassion, as though she had only just remembered that she ought to indicate some small semblance of humanity.
Despite its utter lack of warmth, the question made me smile with relief. I knew this line of questioning by heart. It was really all anyone had asked me for years. I had all my lines memorized.
“Me? Oh, I’m fine. It was nothing ten years of therapy and self-induced seclusion couldn’t fix.”
“Really?” She turned to face me at that, suddenly interested. “No anxiety? No depression? No flashbacks or night sweats?”
I looked away from her, my pace slower now. “That’s not why I’m here. Don’t worry, I have a professional support system. I’ll live. Unlike Jennifer.”
She nodded, not taking her eyes off me, understanding perhaps that I was not fine at all, but not pushing me further.
“So what are you really doing here?”
“I want to find Jennifer’s body. I want to prove that Jack killed her, so he doesn’t get paroled.”
“Paroled? They’re going to parole Jack Derber?” For an instant she seemed genuinely shocked, and then she regained her composure.
“Maybe,” I replied. “I don’t know. I don’t want it to be possible. But I guess technically it is.”
Adele nodded, even as she looked off in the distance, thinking hard.
“That would be just about the worst thing in the world,” she finally said. “I would help you if I could. That man deserves to be locked away forever. But I don’t have any new information on him. I told the police what I knew back then.”
By now we were at the steps of the psychology building. She paused for a moment, then gestured for me to follow her in. It felt like my first real victory.
We made our way down the hall to her office. She didn’t say a word, and I followed obediently.
We sat down, she behind the desk and I on a small worn sofa across from her.
“Actually,” I began, “I’m not expecting you to remember anything more about the past. I mostly wanted to talk to you about his academic work. What he was studying at the time, his research. I have this idea that it could lead to something new. And I know you were his research assistant, and that your work now seems somehow … relevant.”
I wasn’t sure how that would go over. By now she was making me nervous. She just stared at me. Maybe she was thinking. Maybe she was willing me out of her office after all.
I glanced around the room to avoid meeting her eyes. The space was impossibly neat and orderly. The shelves were lined with titles in alphabetical order, and her notebooks were stacked and organized with color-coded tabs. It was mesmerizing in a way. Finally, she spoke.
“His research? I don’t think you’ll find anything there. His work was highly theoretical, and his subjects were varied. He covered a lot of ground, but I suppose he was careful not to study topics that might reveal his dark side. When he was arrested, he was in the process of designing a research study about sleep disorders. I worked with him on his last published paper, ‘Insomnia and Aging.’
“My own work is really not related to his at all, except you might say it developed in the direction it has because I’ve been trying to understand Jack Derber and others like him. I guess I sort of narrowly escaped something, and I want to understand exactly what that something was.”
We sat in silence for a few moments after that, while I tried to think of something else to ask and she rubbed her brow, lost in thought. I was disappointed. I’d hoped his published work would be more revealing, that he’d left us a clue there without meaning to. But maybe this was another dead end.
Just as I was beginning to feel hopeless again, she stood up and, with a quick glance out into the hall, closed her office door. She crossed her arms over her chest, almost defensively, I thought, and started talking, this time hesitantly, her back against the door.
“Listen, what I told you before is not entirely true. I might know something helpful.” She paused. She seemed to be struggling with her next words. “Through some of my academic research, I found out something about Jack. This may seem a little strange, but I’m wondering, how much do you think you can take?”
“What do you mean, ‘take’?” I was afraid of what she meant. I didn’t like where this was going.
“I mean, what kind of shape are you really in, and how badly do you want this? Because I do have one thought. I mean, if it will help keep him locked away. There’s a place I can show you.
“You see, my research is very field-oriented, based on the observation of subjects in their natural environments. I’ve been conducting a longitudinal, ethnographically-oriented study at a particular location for several years. And I discovered, quite accidentally, that this place has a connection with Jack Derber from long ago. There are things … there are people … I don’t know … it’s a long shot. But I suspect, knowing what I know about Jack, you are only looking at long shots.”
“True.” I was hopeful, despite my apprehensions.
“It’s Thursday. Unfortunately, tonight would be the best night. Hope you don’t have plans—otherwise you’d have to wait a week.” She took out her BlackBerry, her thumbs flying fast on the keypad. “If I give you an address, can you meet me there at midnight tonight? It’s a little … out of the way. And, frankly”—she looked up at me from behind her thick lashes, studying me as she spoke—“it’s going to scare the shit out of you. It might remind you a little of your trauma. But on the plus side,” she said brightly, “therapeutically, that might not be the worst thing for you.”
“What exactly is this place?” Whatever it was, I knew I wouldn’t like it. Plus, I didn’t go places at midnight. Period. Much less any place that had the potential to scare the shit out of me.
“It’s a club, a very special kind of club. I’ve been studying the psychological influences and effects of this … particular subculture. He used to go there.”
I breathed deeply. I could only imagine what sort of place Jack Derber would like. And what kind of subculture Adele would be studying, given her intellectual proclivities.
“Okay. A special club. I get the gist. But that really doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, therapeutically or otherwise.”
She put her BlackBerry down, leaned over her desk, looked me straight in the eyes, and nodded. She spoke slowly, with her voice pitched a little higher than usual, as if to a child.
“Okay, that’s completely fine. Maybe you are just not ready. I imagine it would be a hard place for you to go. I totally understand.”
It might have been my imagination, but I was pretty sure her voice had a hint of challenge in it. She was a psychology professor, after all, maybe not on the clinical side, but close enough to know some tricks of t
he trade. These psych types, they knew how to push your buttons.
My head started reeling. It was like hitting replay on some bad scene from my other life. Could I take a deeper cut, could I take more pain, could I save her? Jack’s face flashed in front of my eyes for just a second. Right now, even while he was locked up miles away, he was winning again. Once again I couldn’t take the pain, couldn’t take the fear. I turned to Adele, meeting her eyes, screwing up my courage even though my heart was pounding madly.
“What do I wear?”
She smiled, seeming almost proud of me. “Good. You’ve clearly made a lot of progress.” She looked me up and down, noting, I was sure, the sad state of my sartorial choices. “I’ll bring you something. It’s important to blend in there. The last thing we’d want to do is stand out in this crowd. And I guarantee you don’t own anything appropriate for this venue.”
CHAPTER 15
Late that night I sat in my car in the parking lot of the hotel, regretting my decision to go as powerfully as I’d ever regretted anything in my life. I was talking to myself out loud, fighting down the panic attack I could feel creeping up on me. For one thing, for the first time in years, I would have to drive at night. While it was true that Adele had offered to take me, I never got in the car with strangers. No matter what.
But if the driving in and of itself was not enough to push me over the edge, the “special” destination most surely was. At a minimum, it would be dark and crowded and, from the sound of things, filled with exactly the types of people I had spent my life trying to avoid.
I gripped the steering wheel and banged my head on it gently several times. I couldn’t believe Tracy was not here for this. This was exactly why I needed her to come, I told myself. This was her element. She probably went to this kind of place for fun.
I started feeling anger welling up in me. It reminded me of how I’d felt during the time just before my escape. I hadn’t examined it much in the cellar, I was so focused on my goal. But now, sitting alone in my rental car in a deserted parking lot, something dawned on me. Tracy had always made me feel guilty for everything I did back then. But really, I had borne the whole burden. For all the bossing around she had done, for all her leadership down in that cellar, she had never done anything productive to get us out of there. And I did. I did. And now all I ever felt was guilt about it.
Here I was, having a revelation, and Dr. Simmons was nowhere to be seen. To be fair, I knew she had tried to make that point subtly in sessions for years, but I had dismissed it. Yet here I was, facing perhaps the most terrifying situation I had encountered since my escape, and I was having a psychological breakthrough. Maybe Adele was right: therapeutically, this experience was good for me.
I sat up straight and pulled out of my wallet the photo of Jennifer I’d brought along. I opened the glove compartment, bent the end of the photo, and closed the compartment door on its edge. There. Jennifer before me, like an angel, to keep me going forward. I checked the rearview mirror and turned the key in the ignition. I am stronger than this, I told myself. These were the words that had gotten me through my escape, and they would get me through this, too.
I thought of Jennifer, as I looked at her face before me, and of how different everything would be if I could put her to rest. Maybe then I’d even be able to live a normal life, among other humans. Out of my apartment. In the real world.
I drove for nearly an hour along the winding back roads. Plenty of time to tick through the list of all the dangers of the situation. Before I even got to my destination, my car could break down, or I could have an accident here in the middle of nowhere. I checked my cell phone reception no fewer than four times. The bars were all there, but I wasn’t sure I could have explained to anyone where I was anyway. I considered pulling over and sending Jim a text, but I didn’t want him to know I was on the trail of something yet, if I even was.
Finally, I arrived. I saw a driveway cut into the road, with no signs or markings other than a small, barely noticeable metal post with a yellow reflector, just as Adele had described. I pulled in and drove for about a mile up a hill along a crudely rutted dirt drive. I felt panic rising up inside me again. This activity did not meet my standards for careful behavior. What if this was a trap? What if there was nothing out here but empty woods, where anything could happen? What if somehow this Adele person was in league with Jack Derber? It occurred to me that I knew very little about her and was relying on what I thought of as our shared history together, some kind of bond that she may not have felt at all. And yet I had let her lead me down this path.
When I finally rounded the bend in the road, I saw to my relief a club of some kind, complete with other patrons. Fifteen or twenty cars filled out a gravel lot at the edge of the woods. How likely was it that they were all in league with Jack Derber? Not very, I decided. I pulled into the space farthest from the door, breaking my usual rule. I wanted to keep some distance from this particular destination for a few minutes longer. Three spaces over, in a sporty red Mazda, Adele was waiting for me as she’d said she would be.
At first she didn’t notice me, and I thought again that there was time to turn back. I sat still in the driver’s seat, an icy chill tingling up my body. I looked out at the darkness, something I usually shut out tightly with the heavy white linen curtains of my apartment. Now it surrounded my car, seeming to penetrate the glass of the windshield, coming in to suffocate me slowly. I was in it, of it. It wouldn’t let me go. I was struggling to breathe as I tried to block out the steady pounding reverberating in my head. I couldn’t tell if it was the beating of my heart or the music from the club thudding in the background.
Just then Adele noticed me sitting there. She opened her door and made her way over to my window. She looked at me, puzzled, and gestured for me to get out of the car, but I couldn’t move. I rolled down the window about an inch instead. The air coming in helped clear my head, and slowly I started breathing again.
“Come on out,” she said, looking at me with something approaching concern. I must have looked like hell. “I have something for you to change into.”
Adele was wearing a full-body black vinyl catsuit, and her hair was pulled back tightly into a bun. Dominatrix, I thought. How fitting.
Her voice brought me to my senses at least. She hovered over me, looking at me expectantly. I took a final deep breath and opened the car door, grabbing my cell phone as I got out.
She handed me a rather heavy shopping bag. I could feel through the plastic that these were no ordinary clothes, and my suspicions were confirmed as I peered into the bag at a pile of high-gloss black leather. Even though I had anticipated it, when faced with the reality of entering some kind of fetish bar, my heart pounded violently and my knees went weak.
Adele was studying my face.
“Look, I know you’re scared, and I know that, after your experience, this is going to be hard for you. But it will be worth it. I’m going to show you something the cops never knew about.” She took a deep breath and continued.
“For years I regretted not telling anyone about Jack’s connection to this place. At the time I had convinced myself it wasn’t relevant. The truth is, I hadn’t wanted to get myself into trouble. I hadn’t wanted my parents to know what I was studying in college, since they were footing the bill. And in my mind, I had told the cops all they really needed to know anyway. Everything they asked about at least. He was convicted, after all. No harm, no foul, right? But now, well, you’re not the cops, and there’s no tuition to pay, and … I know how you must have suffered. About your friend. And if it will help keep him in there …” she trailed off.
Her words indicated compassion, though I still couldn’t read it in her eyes. But on the surface at least, she did seem to want to help me. I could only imagine too that, somewhere in there, she had to be afraid of Jack Derber getting out almost as much as I was. She had his office, after all, and his chaired position. He might not like coming home to that.
“So
tell me about this place.” I had barely dared to look over at it yet. When I finally got the nerve to glance that way, it didn’t exactly set me at ease. It was a low-slung, windowless building, with gritty, bare cinder-block walls and a flat, rusted metal roof. No way did this structure meet fire code. A fluorescent orange sign over the door blinked out the words THE VAULT. Charming.
“Well, for starters,” began Adele, “I should explain that it’s BDSM. Do you know what that means?”
“BD …?”
“Bondage-Discipline, Sado-Masochism. Not as bad as it sounds. Real BDSM has rules. Very, very strict rules. First and foremost it is based on consent. Jack never really got that part. He kept breaking the rules. So much so that they banned him from coming here eventually. It simply didn’t excite him when he had permission. That’s probably why he—he—took you and the others.”
“This is not making me feel better about going in there.”
“It should. My point is that absolutely nothing will happen to you in that club without your consent. Nothing. No one will even touch you without your explicit permission. I’ve been coming here for years for my fieldwork, and no one has ever laid a hand on me.”
I couldn’t help staring at her in her vinyl getup. I could understand why they left her alone. She looked pretty damn intimidating.
“Okay, but if they kicked Jack out of there, why do I need to go in at all? What good will it do me?”
“This is the one place where you can meet people who knew Jack. Really knew him. This is the only way to reach that layer the police never could. Members of this club have been coming here for many years. It’s the only one of its kind within a hundred miles; everyone in that circle comes through here eventually.”
“I guess that’s what scares me—who are these people?” I said it with some disgust, but then stopped myself, wondering if Adele wasn’t really one of them after all. How long could you study these types, going in and out among them, dressing like them, immersing yourself in it, without participating in some way? I struggled for the right terminology before asking my next question: “What do they want out of this … lifestyle?”