by D. J. Palmer
We nodded like we did, but I’m not sure that was true. I mean, I got the concept of a compartment where you put your stuff, in this case your personalities, but that’s about it.
“For Penny to get on with life, to be fully functioning, she needed to create those compartments in her mind. It allowed her to escape those painful feelings, to hide from the trauma mentally when she couldn’t do it physically.”
“So what happened to her?” Ryan asked. You may think Ryan’s always against you, Penny, but I can attest that on that day he was scared, confused, and cared for you deeply.
Dr. Cross looked to Mom, unsure how much to share. Mom spoke up.
“It’s possible that Rachel, Penny’s birth mother, hurt her, abused her in some way. We don’t know for certain, but it would have taken place before she came to live with us.” Mom waited to let that sink in before she went on.
“We don’t know what Penny’s life with Rachel was like. So there’s reason to think it wasn’t a safe environment for a child. But the good news is that with Dr. Cross’s help, we can work on integrating the different parts of Penny’s personality into a whole again.”
That was a very informative session, to say the least. Since then, I’ve bolstered my knowledge about DID. Yes, there’s a chance you have it, but I keep coming back to the idea that you’ve been playing us, Penny. Your alters, all of it—it’s just a game to you, a built-in excuse to do exactly as you wish. It explains everything, doesn’t it?
Who invited this boy to our house? Not me.
Who hit Ryan with a rock? Not me.
Who took Dad’s car? Not me.
Who killed Rachel Boyd? Not me.
Ever heard the excuse “the devil made me do it”? Well, what if you’re the devil?
These are hard questions, and I guess Dr. Mitch is going to try to find some answers. He’s going to play detective. If he can unearth an alter who couldn’t understand that killing Rachel was wrong, or maybe one who couldn’t conform to the law, then I guess you’ll be found not guilty by reason of mental defect. Not sure the legal ramifications of revenge—if some alter of yours felt aggrieved for abuse you may have suffered at Rachel’s hand, would that make you not guilty because you snapped? That’s a question for Navarro, I suppose. In some ways, he’s a detective on your case, same as Dr. Mitch.
I think about the best detectives from the movies. Jake Gittes from Chinatown … Hercule Poirot … Marge Gunderson from Fargo … they examined every angle, not just the obvious. They followed logical paths and illogical ones alike. So, if you have DID, and DID is thought to occur from childhood trauma, then we should be looking at your childhood to give us a motivation for your crime. That’s what I’m thinking. But we don’t know anything about your life before you came to us, so that means the next best place to check is with your birth mother, Rachel Boyd.
Of course, Rachel can no longer speak for herself. But I’ve a friend at Emerson, someone who knows her way around a computer, who might be able to speak for her.
CHAPTER 30
MARIA DESCENZA LIVED WITH her mother, Barbara, on a cul-de-sac at the end of a hilly rise. The backyard offered an unobstructed view of Swampscott’s famed Civil War monument, and beyond that loomed the ocean. The house where Maria lived was far too big for a family of two, but two were all that remained after Maria’s brothers had gone off to college. Her father, Bill, had left Barbara for a younger man, which at least was a little less of a cliché.
According to town gossip, Barbara had no intention of selling the property, as it would have meant splitting the profits—if any—with her ex. The house and landscape both appeared to be in a severe state of disrepair, with patches of bare dirt the size of a pitcher’s mound on the lawn and the remaining green consumed with clover. The front steps were in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint, and the side of the tool shed looked like the worst yard sale ever, with the only items for purchase being coils of old hose, a rusted grill, some random buckets, and a blue wheelbarrow with one wheel missing.
Over the years, Arthur and Grace had made friends with the parents of most of Ryan and Jack’s friends, but such was not the case with the Descenzas. Barbara was a bit hard to take in big doses, always complaining about some injustice she’d suffered. She played the role of the aggrieved party with Oscar-like caliber.
Even before the arrest and darker truths about Maria had come to light, people tended to keep their distance from the Descenzas. There was something off about the family, as though they didn’t want to integrate, and were happy just occupying space, taking up land and water, without being an active part of the neighborhood.
Maria, with her witchy ways, was hardly a perfect match for Penny, but for a while, with Penny’s social life dismal as it was, Maria was a godsend. Only now, after much time and heartache, did Grace understand it wasn’t that Penny had befriended Maria—it was Eve who sought out Maria’s dark energy. Apart, the girls were probably harmless, but together, dangerous chemistry took place.
Grace had come to the Descenza house with a faint hope that she might reach Barbara, help her see the flaw in Maria’s alibi, and consider the possibility that Maria might well have been at Rachel Boyd’s with Penny on that terrible night—and that Penny could end up paying the price of this deception with her freedom.
It was easy for Grace to put herself in Barbara’s shoes, imagining what she would do if someone came at her with accusations about her daughter. Of course she’d defend Penny to the end, but later, in the quiet moments after the dust settled, she’d ask questions of herself, and if she didn’t like the answers … well, maybe, just maybe, she’d do something about it.
It was Barbara who answered the door. The green top she wore and matching tight pants called attention to the considerable weight she’d gained since Grace last saw her. Her skin was sallow and wrinkled, eyes drooping. She ran a sun-spotted hand through her short, wiry hair before her gaze hardened. All in all, Barbara looked tired, drained of life. Even though her daughter would be testifying for the prosecution—the girls’ past crimes being relevant to this new case—Grace could not help but feel some empathy toward her.
“Hello, Barbara,” Grace said.
“Grace,” she answered coolly. “What are you doing here?”
“I just need a minute of your time.”
From the kitchen, Grace heard Maria’s familiar voice echo down the hall. “Is that the pizza? I’m starving.”
Grace suppressed all reaction. She would have to check the receipts, but something told her the promised pizza was coming from her restaurant. All that empathy fled on the spot. How dare she! This twisted girl who had, at a minimum, led her daughter astray and quite conceivably, for the thrill of the kill, might have set her up to take the fall for Rachel’s murder—she had no business eating her food.
Grace heard clomping footsteps, and Maria soon appeared in the hallway, dressed like she’d come from a funeral, looking like it had been her own. Her skin was colorless, and her eyes were ringed with so much makeup it was as if two black moons were peering out from behind a pale cloud.
“Hello, Maria,” Grace said.
Maria hovered at the end of the hallway, arms sliding into the same defensive posture her mother had adopted.
“What’s she doing here?” Maria asked. “Is Eve all right? Did something happen to her?”
Grace didn’t bother correcting her. Of course Maria would think of Penny as Eve.
“I don’t know about that,” said Barbara. “I just know you shouldn’t be here, Grace.”
“I only need a minute of your time … alone, if I may,” Grace answered calmly.
Barbara glanced back at Maria. “What you say to me, you can say to her.”
“Very well,” said Grace. “May I come in?”
She peered beyond Barbara into the dark hallway. She could smell the dust and stale, trapped air. Somewhere exotic incense was burning. It was a home without joy, and even if the shades hadn’t been drawn,
Grace doubted sunlight could brighten the gloom.
“We can talk here,” Barbara said, placing one hand on the doorframe, as if Grace might try to force her way inside.
“As you wish,” Grace said. “I’ll get right to it then. There’s a possibility that Penny is innocent. She’s working with a new doctor, and her memory is slowly starting to come back. Either she was hiding in Rachel’s house at the time of the murder, or she was present but threatened physically, scared for her life if she interfered in any way.”
Maria came storming down the hall, feet stomping, worry creasing her near-flawless skin.
“So? What’s that got to do with us?” Maria asked.
“I think you may know something,” said Grace.
“Are you saying I did it?” Maria’s death stare said it was possible.
“I’m asking for the truth,” Grace said. She peered up at the second-floor window—which she knew looked into Maria’s bedroom—and at the lattice entwined with ivy, which Maria could have easily descended without Barbara’s knowledge.
“She made a drawing,” Grace continued. “It wasn’t Penny, it was her alter, Chloe, who drew it. She drew a toaster on fire and said that something burned up, but ‘she’—I guess Rachel—‘didn’t go away.’
“‘Burned it up.’ Do you know what that means? I believe it’s a message to you, or about you.”
Maria glared at Grace indignantly from her safe perch behind her mother. “Just because I’ve lit a few fires, you think I’m a murderer?”
“I really don’t think you should be here making insinuations,” Barbara said scornfully. “We’re on the witness list. We’re not supposed to talk about the case, especially with you.”
“But there’s new information here, Barbara,” Grace said, invoking her name with hopes it might also evoke some sympathy. “We don’t have all the facts.”
“Don’t have the facts?” Maria said, feeling brave enough to poke her head over her mother’s thick shoulder to confront Grace. “Blood all over Penny … a knife in her hand. I think there’s plenty of facts, and I had nothing … nothing to do with it.”
Penny now, Grace noted.
She wasn’t about to bring up the vile murder fantasies and hit list Maria had been a part of, nor was she about to make any more accusations. She’d come here with one purpose and one purpose only—to plant a seed of doubt in Barbara’s mind.
“I’m just wondering if there’s more to this story than we know,” Grace said.
“What are you getting at?” Barbara snarled, her face going red with anger. “Are you saying Maria was lying to me, to the police?”
Grace returned an oh come on kind of look.
“If she said she was home in bed, sick, then she was home,” Barbara insisted.
“I just want you to give it some consideration. Think back to that night. Maria, I’m not saying you committed the crime, but maybe you were with Penny. Did you see something? Did someone intimidate you?”
“You’re intimidating me,” Maria clapped back.
Grace had a second theory she was willing to consider: that it had been Maria’s head someone threatened to stuff into a bucket full of ammonia, not Rachel’s, and that someone could have been Vincent Rapino. With Penny in prison, Maria had good reason to keep her mouth shut—at the risk of having Vince or one of his cronies shut it for her. Why Vince had let both girls live was an open question.
Grace’s other theory, of course, was that she was currently asking questions of a killer.
“The prosecutor told us not to talk to anybody about the case,” Barbara said.
“Barbara, these questions need answers.”
“And you got them. Now, I’m asking you to go, Grace.”
Grace and Barbara had something of a high noon moment during a lengthy stare down.
“Please,” Grace said, her voice pleading, her chest growing heavy. “Ask your daughter the hard questions, make sure you have the full story. Penny’s life is at stake.”
“I’m sorry,” Barbara said. “You’ve been through a lot. But don’t come back here. You’re not welcome.” She removed her hand from the door and gently closed it. Grace could hear the lock click into place.
As Grace made her way to her car, she spied another vehicle coming down the road, this one with a Big Frank’s custom car topper on the roof. She flagged down the driver, a high school student named Pete who’d been working for them for a year. Pete came to a stop a hundred feet from the Descenzas’ house and rolled down the window.
“Hi, Ms. Francone,” he said in a cheerful voice.
“Is that order for 38 Outlook Road?” she asked.
“Yeah, Barbara Descenza,” Pete answered.
“She canceled,” Grace said. “Bring the pizza to a friend’s house, any friend you want.”
Pete said a friendly good-bye, rolled up his car window, put the vehicle in reverse, and drove away.
CHAPTER 31
MITCH WAITED IN THE therapy room, his iPhone camera ready for recording, and used the time between appointments to study the picture Chloe had made. If there were any connections to infer from a child’s drawing of a house, a toaster on fire, and Rachel dead in a basement alongside a jug of ammonia, they weren’t evident to him. Grace had confirmed they didn’t have a tire swing at the house in Swampscott, so that image, along with the rest of the drawing, probably had come from the same place—Penny’s imagination.
Navarro didn’t think the drawing was helpful for the DID case, but Grace thought otherwise. She remained adamant that the smoking toaster, coupled with what Chloe had said about “burning it up,” made Maria, a known pyromaniac, not only a person of interest but quite possibly the one responsible for Rachel’s death.
“Maria wrote about murder, about killing, about hiding bodies and getting away with it, as much as Penny did,” Grace had said to him on her way out of Edgewater that day. “She deserves a closer look, especially now.”
Where Grace saw connections, Mitch saw symbols. Chloe, who had presented as a young girl, was probably taught that ammonia was poison. Many of the stories and fairy tales Mitch had read to Adam as a young boy had poisons in them. It could be the jug of yellow liquid stood for death in a child’s eyes, as poison was something a young person like Chloe could grasp.
Had Penny got the ammonia idea from Chloe through the subconscious bleeding of one alter into another? He thought there was a fascinating paper he could write on the subject of consciousness leaks between alters. He wondered if Penny was aware of these leaks and plugged the holes. At yesterday’s therapy session with Eve, he had tried to trigger another switch—either back to Chloe using the crayons again or a strong ammonia scent to see if that would get Penny back—but those efforts had gone nowhere.
Mitch had extensive experience with treating a wide range of conditions in adolescent psychology. He’d written several peer-reviewed papers, even one on dissociative identity disorder, but for all his skills and background, he could not seem to break through Penny’s defenses.
Best way to beat a good defense, Mitch knew, was to use a better offense.
From a canvas workbag, he withdrew a small white plastic bottle of a nasal-injected medicine. Spinning the dispenser around in his hand, Mitch reviewed the tiny print on the label, trying not to think of Grace out there chasing down leads (or more likely ghosts).
He felt a spurt of anger at himself for the fantasy Grace had latched onto; one he’d had a hand in helping bring about. He had nothing, no proof that the reveals from Penny or Chloe were anything other than an elaborate fantasy—in other words, something Dr. Palumbo would argue that a person with borderline personality disorder might construct to distract and deflect blame.
Someone with professional credentials as impressive as Palumbo’s would take the witness stand and state that Penny suffered from a severe antisocial personality disorder, and the alters were an excuse to behave as she wished and nothing more. With testimony like that, Mitch had no doubt
an experienced attorney would be able to convince a jury that this young woman was a psychotic killer, through and through, and had ended Rachel’s life brutally, intentionally, and with total awareness of her actions.
“Intentional” was the word Mitch turned over and over in his head. He didn’t see Penny as a true psychopath—someone without empathy, guilt, conscience, or remorse—but which of her alters either couldn’t resist the urge to kill or didn’t think killing was wrong?
None of them was the answer he kept coming back to. They’d all pass the MPC test with flying colors, which left him with one disturbing possibility: she was faking DID and Palumbo was right. The thought gave Mitch a pounding headache. After rubbing his temples, then his tired eyes, he picked up the vial once more.
Will this work?
Not only did he feel a great responsibility to help Penny avoid a lifetime in a max security prison, he felt a tremendous burden to aid Grace as well. He had a full slate of patients to attend to, other cases to manage, but no question about it—Penny now occupied an outsized portion of his gray matter. And Mitch was pretty sure he knew why.
Guilt.
Mitch felt that personal connection to Grace’s suffering and guilt that she said she felt for him. He also blamed himself for Adam’s struggles in a way similar to how Grace reproached herself for Penny’s. For those reasons alone he wanted more than anything to ease her pain. Even so, Mitch had grave doubts that he could help Penny—or Adam, for that matter.
The latest news from Clean Start was really no news. Adam was in recovery, again; going to meetings, again; doing group therapy, again—and chances were this was another ride on the opioid merry-go-round. That had been something Caitlyn did not want to hear when Mitch made that exact point on a phone call with her the other night.
“Have some faith, Mitch,” she had said. “You of all people know there’s no magic pill for this; no off switch he can just flick. I wish there was, but there isn’t. So this is all we get, okay?”