by D. J. Palmer
“Hold on a second,” she said. “Got a little chill.”
She dunked her body, head included. Holding her breath, she stayed submerged for some time, her hair fluttering underwater like the tendrils of some great anemone. She surfaced, eyes still closed, and kept them that way.
“Can you hand me a towel,” she said to Mitch, who got one from a nearby rack. She dabbed at her eyes before opening them.
“So, Doc Mitch,” Ruby said cheerily. “Might you tell me what the hell is going on here?”
Mitch speculated that Ruby had fled Penny’s consciousness soon after the attack, making it a case of lost time for her. For reasons perplexing to Mitch, she’d reappeared, no explanation given, in this tub. Her tone suggested she wasn’t severely disoriented, shocked, or even upset by this turn of events, though Mitch suspected that was probably a mask for her true feelings. Elsewhere in Penny’s subconscious lurked fear and confusion, but letting Ruby and her world-be-dammed attitude come through was a bit like taking Tylenol for a fever—she was the perfect alter to suppress those troubling symptoms.
Mitch wondered if he simply could restart his efforts with Ruby.
“We were talking about your birth mother, Rachel Boyd,” he said. “Do you remember that?”
Ruby’s eyes squinted, probing her mind for that specific memory. She had a habit of twirling her hair, and spun a long, wet strand around her finger.
“Yeah, I remember,” she said, and Mitch sensed there was more behind it. Deeper memories, more painful ones, seemed suddenly within reach. He thought of getting his phone and setting it to record, fearing he might miss a chance to document something very un-Ruby-like—malevolence, evil, a psychotic break of some sort—but decided against it. A recording might make her think, and what he wanted from Ruby was to feel.
“What’s the last thing you remember, Ruby, the very last memory you have, before you and I were in that room discussing your plans to become a VSCO girl? Can you access that for me?”
Her face was a study of concentration, but there was sadness too, and it was impossible for Mitch not to feel her pain and frustration. She closed her eyes, gave a sigh, and stretched out her legs a bit longer in the steel tub.
“I don’t know,” she said with defeat in her voice. “It’s like a blank canvas … it’s like I wasn’t anywhere … like I didn’t exist. Is this amnesia? Do I have it? Is that why I’m in a hospital?”
“Yes,” Mitch said. “It’s something like that.”
“Then I can’t be of much help, I guess.” Ruby looked uncharacteristically irritated. “Was it a car accident? Did I bang my head? Oh, help me, was somebody hurt?” She gasped as if a memory had come to her. “Oh no … did somebody die?” She whispered, clearly hoping that it wasn’t true, “Did I kill someone?”
“Close your eyes,” Mitch encouraged. “Think about a car. Burgundy color, a Chevy Caprice. Do you know a car like that?”
Ruby’s eyes shuttered and she thought.
“That’s my dad’s car,” she said.
“Do you remember taking it without permission?”
“No.” She said it with confidence.
Mitch didn’t want to lead her, but Penny and Chloe had each referenced a book they were looking at that night, so perhaps mention of it might trigger a memory for Ruby as well. “Try this. Think long and hard about a book you may have been reading. The last book you remember reading.”
Ruby did as she was instructed.
“A book,” she said, making a delighted hmmmm sound as she gave her body a relaxed stretch. “Oh, yeah … that’s clear. I got it. It’s a book with water on the cover … boats … and water … but … I can’t think of the title.”
“Where were you when you were reading it?” Mitch asked.
Ruby shut her eyes tighter, a clear indication she was deep in thought, straining to recall.
“I’m … I’m not alone.”
The accent. Gone. Ruby gone. The voice that spoke was quiet and sleepy … dreamlike and tiny.
“It’s not good. Very bad.”
Mitch could feel his heart rev up. “What’s very bad?” he asked. “Can you tell me?”
“She’ll go to prison for what she did.”
“Who will? Who’ll go to prison?”
“A woman … no, Mommy … Mommy will go to prison if she doesn’t stop. She’ll go to prison.”
Mommy … a young girl’s word.
“Is Mommy’s name Rachel?” Mitch whispered, afraid anything louder might break this spell.
She nodded—whoever this was, Ruby, Penny, someone nodded—her eyes still closed.
“Yes … Rachel is my mommy … and my mommy is going to prison for a long, long time if she doesn’t do as she’s told.”
“Do what?”
“I heard them yelling … so mad at each other.”
“Who’s angry at her?”
Mitch was thinking of Grace and her conviction that someone else was involved in Rachel’s murder. He thought of the boyfriend, Vincent Rapino, who certainly had a past that included prison. Before he could press this young girl for additional information, she spoke in that quiet, trancelike voice.
“Topeka … West Virginia … Pasadena … Tucson…”
She then repeated the names of places she said before.
“Michigan … Florida … Key West…”
And with each name she hit the side of the tub with her hand, like the tapping he’d heard in the 911 call.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Mitch got out his phone and quickly typed in the new locations she’d listed off, as well as the ones from before.
What do they have in common? he wondered. What’s the link?
He remembered other names she’d recited.
Alabama … Alaska … Chicago …
Were these places she’d visited? Places Rachel wanted to go?
Before Mitch could ask her any more questions, another howl came down the hall, more animal than human. Whatever was happening to the poor patient Dr. Bouvier had been treating in the ER didn’t sound good. The girl in the tub looked as though she’d been roused cruelly from a deep sleep. She stared at Mitch, eyes unblinking like a pair of headlights. He saw her body tense up and then relax. For a moment, she looked as if she were seeing right through him to the wall behind. A shift was taking place, he could see it, could feel a change of energy in the room. A moment later, the harsh look was back, and he knew.
She cocked her head at Mitch and said in a chiding way, “Watching me take a bath, Doctor? Think there may be a few lines being crossed, don’t you?” She sent Mitch a wink to go with her haughty smile.
“Hello, Eve,” Mitch said, feeling flustered at having lost the opportunity to speak to Ruby for longer. He didn’t show his disappointment though. She wasn’t the only one who had masks for her feelings. “Long time no see.”
CHAPTER 38
OF ALL OF YOUR alters, I have to say Ruby is my favorite. It feels a bit like a betrayal of sorts, like I’d rather she was my sister than you, Penny, but I guess in a way she is my sister. I mean the diagnosis of DID might be controversial, but the symptoms sure are real, so I suppose that makes Ruby real, too. Here’s a question though, one I still can’t answer. Is Ruby like a metaphor for some emotional state, or is she truly an autonomous person capable of her own willful action? Capable even of murder?
Film directors use metaphor in their work all the time. I, Robot (a solid action flick, I’d say, starring Will Smith, a solid action actor) is a metaphor for how the technology we depend upon might one day be used to annihilate us. Another, Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray film about a self-centered TV reporter who lives the same day over and over again until he becomes a charitable person, is actually a metaphor for Buddhist enlightenment. Professor Warren Brown graciously pointed that out to me in one of his lectures. I’m guessing Ruby is a metaphor for living the unburdened life, but is she also a life force unto herself?
She’d always appear at times wh
en you needed a confidence boost to come out of your shell and have a bit of fun that didn’t require Eve’s dark energy for protection. Anything slightly unsettling could summon Ruby, like the time you worked up the nerve to ride your first loop roller coaster.
“That was absolute genius!” you exclaimed, your face aglow when we disembarked the Flashback ride at Six Flags. It took a lot of encouraging on my part to get you on that roller coaster, and nobody expected it would be Ruby who got off. But sometime between the steep ascent and the stomach-churning final loop, Ruby appeared. I remember bursting out laughing when I heard you talk.
“What’s your problem?” you asked in your Ruby voice, and sent me a nasty look before socking me in the shoulder.
“Nothing,” I said, still chuckling. “You’re the best, Ruby. That’s all.”
“Well, you’re not so shabby yourself, I suppose,” you offered in return. “But let’s not ruin a brilliant ride by getting all mushy, shall we?”
Brilliant.
That’s you, Ruby, absolutely, utterly brilliant.
I hope some of Ruby, most of her actually, can stick around if you ever become integrated into one personality. She’s a blast, that one.
She also knows something about the night of the murder, doesn’t she? Something she’s not telling us.
But what do we know?
There’s the million-dollar question, and unfortunately, the answer is: not much. We know the name Chloe came from your life before us. Chloe was your twin sister who tragically died at birth, and that’s certainly going to get featured in my film. Though I have to be careful not to turn it into a soap opera or a made-for-TV movie. Cue the da da dun dramatic music!
I don’t know if Chloe is some kind of subconscious channeling, a weird little psychic link, or if you simply needed a name to use and you remembered Rachel talking about your dead sister. After all this time and effort to sort things out, I feel no closer to any answers about you, or that night.
Why would Rachel go to prison?
That’s what you told Dr. Mitch in the bathtub at Edgewater, and that’s what Mom relayed back to me.
I don’t see how this new information fits in with all the other strange things you’ve said, or how any of it helps Dr. Mitch prove in court that you were in a psychotic state at the time of the killing. But it may mean something? There has to be some kind of connection.
Then there are those places you keep going on about, places I know you’ve never visited with us:
Alabama … Alaska … Pasadena … Tucson …
We vacationed at the water park on the Cape, never in Arizona. Did Rachel bring you to those places? I know your birth mom was into drugs, that she’d been arrested on a distribution charge, so is that what this is all about, Penny? Drugs? Are these places she took you to pick up narcotics? Was that the reason she got in touch with you, to use you as a drug mule? Did you go to her house that night expecting one thing and end up getting something else entirely?
I have to be honest, these questions are keeping me up at night and away from my schoolwork, which is something I promised Mom wouldn’t happen. But I’m obsessed now. We all are, to a certain extent.
Maybe Mom’s greatest wish will come true and somehow we’ll find out we were wrong and you’re not a killer. I don’t see how that’s possible, but after all this searching I feel no closer to an answer, though I do have a new question. Surprise, surprise, it’s about Ryan.
We got into a fight about you, and that fight was my fault. I was needling him intentionally, wanting to see if he’d snap. And oh boy, did he snap, all right. There’s got to be a reason he dropped out of school so soon after your arrest. Is there a connection?
I get that Eve protects you, Penny, but my question is this: Are you protecting Ryan?
CHAPTER 39
WITH THE TRIAL LOOMING, Sunday workdays were commonplace, and Greg Navarro gave no objection to coming to Annie’s house in Swampscott on what was typically a day of rest so that she and Grace could show him the war room they’d constructed. It had been Grace’s idea to convert an available study into a headquarters of sorts. One wall in the room contained note cards, string, newspaper clippings, and various timelines that allowed them to better visualize information they’d gathered about Penny’s case. Ideally Grace would have preferred to set up the war room at her house, but since Ryan had cooled off after his altercation with his brother, she didn’t want to stoke those fires again.
If it weren’t for Mitch, Grace knew they would be heading to trial with the slimmest hope of keeping Penny out of prison. The hope meter hadn’t shifted much in a positive direction, though, as Mitch hadn’t unleashed some psychotic state that would prove Penny belonged in Edgewater. What he’d done mostly was get them more questions than answers.
Now, thanks to the war room, Grace had a place to keep all those questions and possible answers organized. Her secret wish was to find some evidence, a new connection or possibility, that would convince Greg Navarro to enter a plea of not guilty.
I didn’t do anything wrong.
Grace couldn’t let go of the idea that Penny’s only crime may have been picking up the knife that had been used in the murder. Were it not so symbolic of their inadequacies as detectives, she would have purchased a copy of Private Investigations for Dummies at the local Barnes & Noble. Perhaps Attorney Navarro, with his background and experience, would be able to make something of their theories or come up with new ones.
He arrived with a coffee cake from Newman’s Bakery, for which Annie could not have been more grateful. Grace noticed some crumbs on his blue oxford shirt, suggesting he may have already sampled some of the bakery’s other offerings. Annie went to the kitchen to cut the cake while Navarro studied the index cards pinned to a board.
All of the cards were connected with pieces of string to denote correlations between different possibilities. In particular, the card on the wall with Vincent Rapino’s name on it had a line of yellow string connecting him to Rachel Boyd’s card.
“We’ve done the timeline,” Grace said to Navarro. “And Vince Rapino is the only one linked to Rachel Boyd both before Penny was born and after the murder.”
A beam of sunshine streaming in through a window across the study lit up Vince’s card, as if to spotlight that theory. Annie returned with three pieces of cake, but Navarro, who had his hands on his hips, studying the board, was too busy thinking to eat.
“This is Vince’s wife, or ex-wife,” Grace said. She traced her finger along the yellow piece of string connecting Vince’s card to one with Nicole written on it. “We don’t have much on her, though, and certainly nothing to call her a suspect just yet.”
“And we’ve got Maria,” said Annie, who had joined Grace and Navarro at the board. Navarro took his time to assess everything the way an interested museum patron might read the placards of an exhibit display.
“What do you think of Maria?” Navarro asked. He pointed to three strips of paper below Maria’s card, on which Grace had handwritten important details. Clues, Annie called them.
1. Burned it all up. (Chloe)
2. Arrested for attempted second degree murder.
3. Weak alibi for night of murder.
“I think she’s sketchy as all get-out,” said Grace. “But we don’t have more than our suspicions.”
“Are Penny and Maria still in contact?”
“They write each other letters,” Grace said, answering Navarro’s question with a dismayed headshake. “It’s inappropriate, I know, but I can’t stop it. Those two have shared a special bond—a twisted one, I’ll give you that—since they met, which is why I think Maria is somehow involved in all this.”
Navarro noted the card with CO Blackwood’s name on it. “Any updates on him?”
“Denies it, but what would you expect?”
“Yeah, I’d expect that,” said Navarro. “And these?”
He pointed to the card listing all of the locations Penny had rattled off when s
he went into her trancelike state.
“We don’t know,” Annie said. “She’s never been to any of those places. And we don’t know what the name of the book she keeps talking about is either.”
Annie directed Navarro’s attention to several color printouts of books she had sourced online, all of which featured water and boats on the covers.
“The book means something to her,” said Grace.
“So do these,” said Navarro, looking at the list of phrases Penny had spoken either as herself or as an alter, which Grace had written out in black marker.
I wasn’t alone.
Gone and gone for good.
I’ll get the bucket.
“When did she say this?” Navarro was looking at the card that read: Mommy is going to prison for a long, long time if she doesn’t do as she’s told.
“There was a second switch to Ruby,” Grace explained. “She was taking a whirlpool tub in the PT room to alleviate muscle soreness after Darla’s attack. We don’t know why, but Ruby came out, and that’s what she said.”
“We think this all points back to Vincent Rapino. He’s been arrested before—criminal, prison,” Annie said.
For Navarro’s benefit, Grace reviewed the tidbit of information that Morgan, the edgy bartender, had given them outside Lucky Dog. Grace connected the dots for him.
“So, if Vince and Rachel were together years back, before Penny was born, then it stands to reason that Vince Rapino could be—”
“Penny’s birth father,” Navarro said in a quiet exhale, finishing her thought. “But why come to Big Frank’s and antagonize you the way he did? If he’s somehow involved in the murder, why do that?”
Navarro knew all about that unsettling incident, along with Grace’s desire that no action be taken, including filing a restraining order.
“He’s not stable,” Grace said. “I smelled booze on his breath that night, too. Vince is an idiot. Who knows what he was thinking?”
“He wanted to mess with us,” Annie suggested. “Grace said it’s like arsonists going back to a fire. They get a thrill out of it.”