by D. J. Palmer
Hospitals had security, so Ruby didn’t seem to mind that explanation. While Mitch was looking at his notes, readying his questions, the door to the therapy room—one he didn’t lock in case a guard needed access—flew open. Shock replaced surprise on Ruby’s face, a look that Mitch shared as his gaze traveled to the doorway and he made sense of what he saw there.
Darla, looking strong and sturdy as a tree trunk in her Edgewater greens, filled the doorframe to the therapy room with her substantial girth. Her face was a knot of rage, mouth twisted and snarled, hair wildly upended. She glared not at Mitch but at his patient, pressing her sizable hands against the doorframe, leaning her body into the room.
“You,” Darla said in a growl, pointing at Ruby. “You slept with him, you bitch!”
Mitch half expected the blast of adrenaline that hit him might have sent Ruby scurrying away to make room for Eve, but no, the sharp-edged voice that answered retained an English accent.
“What do you mean I slept with him? Who are you?”
“You know who I am,” said Darla. “Don’t play games with me, missy. I don’t care who you say you are. Penny, Eve, whatever—you’re a piece of shit whatever your name is.” Foamy spittle flew from Darla’s mouth. “You had sex with my Charlie and now I’m going to rip your head off.”
Darla removed her hand from the doorframe, and that’s when Mitch saw the knife. It was a crude weapon, long and thin like a needle—a shank, as it’s known in prison parlance, fashioned from scraps of metal that she’d acquired from who knows where.
Out of instinct, Mitch hit the panic button as he rose from his chair and came around the desk to confront Darla head on. The gap between them was now no more than seven feet, a distance she could travel in under a second. The sight of Darla’s eyes swimming with madness tightened Mitch’s chest in what he could only liken to a heart attack.
He managed to get out two words—“Darla” and “no”—before the full weight of her body crashed hard into his. Mitch saw the shank in Darla’s right hand come at his left side, the blade slightly stained with blood. Did she stab a guard to get here?
Swiveling at the waist, Mitch moved reflexively in the opposite direction of the knife attack. Thankfully, the shank caught a flap on the inside of Mitch’s tweed blazer, causing it to rip as he lost his balance. With the blade stuck in the coat fabric, the weapon pulled free from Darla’s grasp as Mitch fell to the floor. A sharp stab of pain blasted into his right shoulder, but it wasn’t severe enough to keep him out of the fight.
She may have called herself Eve in here, and had switched to Ruby before this attack, but in Mitch’s mind it was still Penny who Darla had come to kill. With one long stride, Darla stepped over Mitch to get to her target, who was slow to react because of the ketamine. In no time at all, she had her hands wrapped tightly around Penny’s throat, and Mitch heard the strangled sound that followed.
Momentum from Darla’s forward burst carried enough force to tip Penny’s chair backward. It balanced on two legs before it went over, and Penny went with it, Darla landing on top of her. Somehow, Penny managed to stay seated when she hit the floor, but with no leverage to wiggle free, Darla’s weight advantage kept her pinned in place. Strangled noises from Penny were quiet at first, but became increasingly desperate as Darla’s hands tightened around her throat.
Rolling onto his stomach, Mitch pushed to his hands and knees, getting off the floor with a grunt of effort. He needed only a single step to grab hold of Darla’s green uniform at the shoulders, bunching the fabric into two little balls as he pulled with all his might. She didn’t budge, so he let go with one hand to start hammering heavy blows against Darla’s back with a closed fist.
“He’s my husband … you had no right! No right to sleep with him. You whore! You bitch!”
“Darla,” Mitch screamed. “Stop!”
This began a desperate tug-of-war, Mitch pulling on Darla, Darla pulling in the other direction so she could keep her hands white-knuckled on Penny’s throat. Kicking wildly, bucking with her hips, Penny tried desperately to free herself, but to no avail. Darla came into this fight phenomenally strong, and rage had made her even more formidable. She was crazed, snapping her head back at Mitch with her teeth bared like the fangs of an angry dog. Penny could not hold on much longer.
There was little for Mitch to use as a weapon. While the shank was in sight, he wanted to keep it out of play. If something went wrong, Mitch feared, someone, probably himself, would end up on the business end of that blade. Best he could do was to pull as hard as he could, get himself back on the floor, and hope that Darla came with him. Where are the damn guards?
With a loud grunt, Mitch drove his legs into the ground and essentially threw himself backward with all his might. His plan worked. Sort of. He landed on his back, and Darla’s back landed on him. Her crushing weight made it nearly impossible to breathe, though Mitch’s arms were free, and soon he had one of them wrapped around Darla’s neck.
He had a passing thought that this was the exact hold he planned to tell the guards in his seminar not to use on a patient. In a life-and-death struggle, he was seeing firsthand that rules were things to be forgotten.
Darla tried to bite Mitch’s arm, but given the odd angle, she couldn’t latch on. Instead she kicked frantically as Mitch tightened his hold. His hope was that she’d lose consciousness before she lost her life. Fortunately, it was a race that needed no winner, as a crush of correction officers finally burst into the room. They swarmed Darla, ripped her off Mitch, grunting orders that were difficult to hear in the sudden cacophonous din.
In a furious cluster of motion, the security team had Darla facedown on the floor. A female guard sat on her back, pinning her to the ground with her knees. Another guard delivered blows to Darla’s head as she futilely resisted efforts to wrench her arms behind her back.
Mitch heard a hiss as someone fired pepper spray point blank into Darla’s face. The room quickly filled with a terrible stench that made his eyes water and his stomach do loops. Clambering past guards who continued to fill the tight quarters, Mitch grabbed hold of Penny, whom he found curled in a ball on the floor near her chair. With a grunt of effort, he managed to pull her out into the hallway, away from the poisonous air. There, he checked her pulse. A little rapid and weak, but steady. She was probably more in shock than anything else.
Strobe lights flashed. Guards were everywhere now. Sirens continued to blare, but they failed to drown out Darla’s screams.
“She slept with Charlie! She screwed my husband!”
A thought came to Mitch, several really. Are Darla’s meds off? Is she even taking them? Something felt wrong about the attack. Why Penny? Was it just a coincidence that Darla previously targeted Grace, or … was it something else?
CHAPTER 33
BUTTERY LATE-AFTERNOON LIGHT FILTERED through the tall office windows, casting a glow on Whitmore’s tight expression. Seated around the conference table in her spacious office were Mitch, Grace, and Greg Navarro.
After Grace got the call from Mitch about Penny, she rushed to Edgewater, phoning Navarro on the way. To his credit, Navarro dropped everything to join this emergency meeting with Whitmore at the facility she oversaw. He was there to deal with the legal fallout from the attempt on Penny’s life, while Grace’s concerns were those of a mother.
“Can I visit her?” Grace asked Whitmore in an anxious voice.
“By ‘her,’ you mean … Eve? Because Eve is back again, not Penny, not—” Whitmore looked down at her notes. “Not Ruby. And no. I’m afraid you can’t. Your daughter’s fine, I promise, but she’s still in the ER and visitors are not allowed.”
Grace exchanged a glance with Mitch, recalling the day they’d met and he knowingly broke that rule. “She’s a bit banged up, from what I understand,” Whitmore added, “but no serious injury. I was just on the phone with Dr. Bouvier and got a full update on her condition. As you know, Darla stabbed a corrections officer on her way to the therapy
room, and he is not doing nearly as well. He’s in the ICU at Regent’s Hospital, and it’s touch and go.”
“I’m sorry to hear,” said Grace, feeling sick to her stomach that somebody else connected to her daughter, no matter how tangentially, had been put in a perilous situation.
“Thank you,” said Whitmore, who seemed deeply affected by the tragic event. “I’ll make sure to keep Mitch apprised of his situation.”
Navarro spoke up. “Grace had told me about her encounter with Darla, and I thought the name sounded familiar. So, I checked my files, and sure enough, a lawyer from my office was her public defender way back when. I remember him complaining from time to time that she was challenging to work with, but never violent. What provoked the attack, does anyone know? And where did Darla get a weapon?”
Putting his pen to his legal pad, Navarro appeared ready to jot down some answers. Whitmore nodded to Mitch, as if to give permission to reveal something of consequence.
“We found a note tucked inside the Bible Darla carries around with her,” Mitch began. “The Bible was on her bed. I had to take a picture of the actual note because it’s evidence now.”
Mitch got his phone out, opened his Photos app, cleared his throat, and began to read.
“‘Darla, sorry to tell but Penny Francone calls herself Eve slept with Charles.’” Mitch paused, looked up, and flicked his gaze from Grace to Navarro. “That’s the grammar, not quite correct, I know.” He continued to read. “‘I saw pictures. Can’t get to show you’—written with the letter U,” he clarified, “‘but they were doing it. You should do something about it.’”
Mitch handed his phone to Navarro, who showed a look of surprise, his arched eyebrows cresting even higher on a broad forehead.
“It’s written in blue crayon,” he said.
Navarro passed the phone to Grace.
“Like a child’s handwriting,” said Grace, making careful study of the image before handing the phone back to Mitch.
“Any idea who wrote it?” inquired Navarro. “Ms. Whitmore, does Penny have enemies here? Obviously, somebody was trying to incite Darla to violence, and I strongly suspect she hasn’t made her stance about Charles a secret.”
“We’re trying to figure that out right now,” Whitmore replied. “But you three are the closest to her. Has Penny talked to you about any threats she’s received recently, any confrontations with somebody? Anything, anyone we don’t know about?”
“Not off the top of my head,” said Mitch.
“What about the weapon, the knife?” asked Grace. “Where did Darla get it?”
“We’re not sure at the moment,” Whitmore confessed. “We’re in the early stages of the investigation. We’re not even sure how Darla knew where Penny would be.”
“Maybe someone was feeding her information,” Mitch suggested. “A guard perhaps? CO Blackwood jumps to mind … I reported him for excessive force that day when Eve switched to Penny. Did he get reprimanded?”
Whitmore appeared to be in thought.
“Oh yeah … suspended three days without pay,” she recalled from memory following that brief bout of silence. “Lost out on a promotion as a result.”
“Nothing like a punch to the pocketbook to inspire revenge,” Navarro said.
“It’s an interesting angle,” Whitmore agreed. “Easy enough for us to explore. But typically these conflicts are escalated between the guests, not the guards. Any chance that Penny is an instigator, Mitch?”
“Eve can be confrontational, no doubt, but I haven’t been here long enough to know if she’s acquired a lot of adversaries amongst her peers,” Mitch said.
“I’ll put that question right back to you, Dr. Whitmore,” said Grace. “Who the hell did my daughter piss off?” She didn’t mean to come across harshly, but it had been a heck of a day.
Whitmore returned a tight-lipped smile, but did not appear aggrieved. “I suppose we have a lot of potential suspects, don’t we?” she said.
“How are we going to keep Penny safe?” Grace wanted to know. “Where’s Darla now?”
“At present, Darla is confined to a room for twenty-two hours a day,” Whitmore said. “And she’ll be moved to a secure adjustment unit soon enough. So, back to Penny. Is she the type to push someone hard enough to want to do her in? The more personalities, the more chances there are to rub someone the wrong way, I suppose. She upsets someone and that someone uses Darla as a proxy, a weapon so to speak.”
“Could be,” said Mitch. “There’s a potential here that she doesn’t have DID, but rather a complex presentation of an antisocial personality disorder with a disregard for right and wrong, compulsive lying, arrogance, superiority complex—I could go on.”
“If that’s the case, I’m less inclined to put much focus on CO Blackwood,” Whitmore replied.
“That day in the interview room, Penny told us she was a very bad girl—well, Chloe did,” Navarro reminded everyone. “Maybe she was talking about this other alter of hers, the one with the chaotic personality state Mitch was hoping to reach. Could be that’s the alter who upset Darla.”
Grace, who thought she’d have been inured to the harsh realities of her daughter’s condition by now, inwardly cringed at the black-and-white terms Navarro used to articulate the situation.
“Got it,” Whitmore said. “So right now, all we know is Darla got a note that caused all sorts of problems.”
“That note…” Navarro spoke softly, as if talking to himself. “Does anyone find it interesting it was written in crayon?” he asked.
Whitmore seemed indifferent. “Access to our computers and printers is more limited than our art supplies,” she said.
“I suppose,” said Navarro, who inhaled deeply as he sank into thought. “It’s just a bit coincidental, isn’t it?”
“Are you talking about the drawing Chloe made?” Grace asked him.
Navarro nodded. “Mitch reached one of Penny’s alters and she makes a picture using crayons, and then this note shows up, done in blue crayon, and—” He shrugged. “And I don’t know … just a coincidence, I guess.”
Grace read the troubled expression on Mitch’s face.
“That’s an interesting point,” he said.
“How so?” asked Grace, shifting uneasily in her seat.
“Chloe could be lingering … I think there’s this leaking of one alter into another that might be taking place,” Mitch said.
“The bleed thing you told me about?” asked Grace.
“Yes, that … we can call it consciousness leaking for lack of a better term. It’s possible that Chloe didn’t completely go away, that she’s still present in Penny’s subconscious.”
“What’s the significance of that to the note?” Grace wanted to know.
“I don’t have proof, of course, so it’s all conjecture at this point, but it’s conceivable that Penny herself wrote the note and gave it to Darla, or rather slipped it into her Bible so she’d find it later.”
Wonderment sparked on Whitmore’s face. “Are you saying that Penny wrote a note that would obviously incite Darla? Why in the world would she do that?”
Navarro pursed his lips and Grace could almost see his thoughts flickering.
“Guilt,” Mitch said. “She has a guilty conscience—bad girl, right? She knows what she did, knows it was wrong, and she’s trying to punish herself for it. Penny knew when she’d be in the therapy room. She could have easily dropped Darla plenty of hints.”
Whitmore looked at Mitch, aghast. “Are you suggesting that Penny wanted Darla to come after her?”
Grace keyed in on Mitch’s hesitancy.
“Maybe not come after,” he said, following a weighty silence. “What Greg said might not be far-fetched. Penny’s guilty conscience is surfacing, perhaps even from the work I’m doing with her, and she gave Darla the note not to get punished, but as something of a suicide attempt.”
CHAPTER 34
GRACE AND ANNIE WERE bone-tired but not about to giv
e up. They had spent the day locked in a stuffy back room at Navarro’s law office, much to Ryan’s continued displeasure, sifting through the cartons of evidence that included depositions, her daughter’s fingerprints, DNA analysis, printouts of the twisted correspondence between Eve and Maria, police logs, and a slew of paperwork.
Grace found herself in one of her darkest moments. The crime scene photos she came across in a folder, along with disturbing pictures of Penny after her arrest, were gruesome, and for all the hours spent searching, she’d found nothing that might bolster the defense. Now it appeared her daughter may have become suicidal, as well.
“Eve protects,” Grace said to Annie. “That’s just what she does. I don’t see her wanting any harm to come to Penny.”
“But it’s not just Eve anymore,” Annie reminded her, taking the contrarian position for discussion’s sake, as she so often did. She’d been properly debriefed and knew all the theories being bandied about. “Mitch is accessing her other alters, so she might be picking up those thoughts.”
Grace shuffled some papers back into a folder with a harrumph that announced her refusal to accept that possibility.
“It’s that guard Blackwood, the one who nearly clubbed Penny to death,” Grace said, slipping into a scowl. “I know it. Can’t prove it, but I’m not going to stop looking.”
Annie smiled and went back to work. “If Blackwood knew how tenacious you can be, I doubt he’d get much sleep,” she said.
As far as Grace was concerned, her effort for Penny was what any devoted mother would do, but not everyone saw it that way. One misguided friend had recently made an unfortunate remark from which the friendship never fully recovered. She said, speaking in all seriousness, “At least it wasn’t one of your biological children facing a lifetime in prison.”
Grace didn’t know how to respond. She didn’t give birth to Penny, that was true, but DNA was hardly the only way to encode parental love. The stability and love Grace and Arthur gave Penny had transformed this cherished child’s life—and theirs in the process. Thinking of her family seated around the dinner table—Jack, Ryan, Penny, and Arthur, all together—gave Grace a deep sense of satisfaction, a knowledge that her family had become complete out of choice and love.