by Ann Gosslin
The skin on her neck prickled.
‘I’ve been trying to remember the night of the murders,’
Erin said, resisting the urge to bolt from the room. ‘Where I was.’ She met his eye. ‘And where you were.’
He popped the tab on another beer and handed it across to her, but she shook her head. ‘Where do you think you were? Home in bed, right. Didn’t old Viv have a rule against sleepovers?’
Vivien had a rule against most things. ‘So if I was home in bed, where were you?’
‘How the hell should I know?’ He scratched his neck. ‘What are you, a cop or something?’
‘I’m a psychiatrist.’
‘No shit.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all year. The loony treating the loons.’ He snorted and downed the beer.
‘I’m trying to remember if I heard anything. Like somebody coming home very late, after midnight.’
Unless she had the dates mixed up, Erin was sure it was the same night she got caught sneaking out to the movie theatre, and that there’d been a storm, with the rain hitting the roof like marbles. Lying in bed in the dark, tense with the terror of being alone in the house, she had heard someone come through the kitchen door just before two in the morning.
‘It was a Friday night,’ she said. ‘You must have been out.’
He shrugged. ‘If it was a Friday, I sure wasn’t at home.’ He swung his feet onto the coffee table. ‘Out with the Duke and that crazy Lenny Simko, probably. I wonder whatever happened to those guys.’
‘You don’t keep in touch?’
‘Nah. Not since I moved out to Ohio. And after I came back here, it seemed kind of lame to look them up. For all I know, they’re all in prison. Or dead. The Duke used to do some pretty serious drugs back then.’
‘What kind of drugs? Cocaine?’
‘Nah. Cocaine’s for wussies. The trippy stuff. LSD, shrooms, angel dust.’
‘You mean PCP?’
‘Sure. Whatever you wanna call it. The one that makes you batshit crazy. If I thought any of that old Belle River crowd would end up murdering somebody, it was the Duke, not that wuss, Timbo.’
‘Did this Duke person ever give PCP to Tim, or maybe some marijuana that was laced with it?’
‘How the hell should I know? And why do you care?’ He puckered his mouth as if biting into a lemon. ‘Come on, fess up. You and Timbo are at it.’
An eyeroll would have provided welcome relief, but she refrained. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of my own memories.’
‘Good luck with that.’ He grinned. ‘Do you even have any left? Didn’t they zap your brain like a zillion times at that nuthouse? Probably nothing in there but a big ol’ pile of scrambled eggs. Give it up, sis, and move on.’
She’d been wondering how long it would be before he brought up Danfield. Vivien and Graham, thick as thieves, colluding with that quack doctor to convince him she was mad. Poor little Mimi, totally bonkers. Vivien even going so far as to say she was afraid of her, a child of thirteen.
‘That night, I remember waking up around two in the morning,’ Erin said. ‘It was pouring rain. I thought I’d heard someone come home. I don’t think it was you.’
He made a noise in his throat. ‘If you’re wondering about nocturnal shenanigans, you’d better ask Her Majesty.’ He reached for the remote and switched on the television. ‘She calls herself Vivien Donnelly now. Married some schmuck about ten years back. But he died a few years ago. So now she’s a widow twice over, and milking it for all it’s worth. Calls me all the time, saying she needs me to fix something in the house. Same old Viv. Hates to be alone.’
The room had grown dark. A blackbird, mistaking the glass for open air, smacked into the window. Erin jumped. She crossed to the room to see if the bird was okay, but it was lying on the flagstones, its neck broken.
The locked room, the dark basement. Bloated and pathetic though Graham might be, buried in there somewhere was the savage boy everyone called the Viking. The one who’d pinned her wrists to the floor and laughed when the doctor came to cart her off to Danfield. For the first time since she arrived in the flat, fear sliced through her chest. If he went for her, that steak knife she brought wouldn’t make a scratch.
She picked up her bag and edged backward to the door, afraid that any quick moves might cause him to lunge forward and grab her by the arm. Without turning her back, she opened the door and stepped in the hall.
He tore off another slice of pizza and took a bite. ‘Leaving so soon?’ He smirked. ‘And we were having such a good time.’
41
Standing under the metal awning outside Graham’s flat, Erin inhaled great gulps of the rain-washed air. Her clothes smelled of dirty socks and pizza grease. If she were smart, she’d get in her car and drive straight back to Lansford. Wash off the stink of the afternoon under a hot shower and treat herself to dinner at a fancy restaurant. But she’d come this far and survived.
Like an arrow shot from a bow, there was no turning back. Concord was little more than a thirty-minute drive away. If anyone had the answers she was looking for, it was Vivien. Time to face the dragon.
But as the miles ticked past, her courage wavered, and the familiar fear snaked through her gut.
This time, she reminded herself, there was no reason to be afraid. No doctor was waiting to knock her out with a hypodermic and bundle her away. She was no longer a child, and Vivien was old. So who had the power now?
In no time, she had reached the outskirts of town. How predictable of Graham to live a stone’s throw from his old haunts. Not to mention the woman he professed to loathe, but to whom he was tethered like a balloon to a fence post. Stuffed with pizza and bloated with beer, perhaps even now, he was planning his comeback. Sliding behind the wheel of a sporty new car. Wavy blond hair magically resurrected, Adonis body gleaming with health. The Viking’s triumphant return.
She laughed out loud.
But as she pulled off the main road and drove through the centre of town, the tension returned, and she gripped the wheel. Clapboard houses, bordered by strip malls, dozed in the summer haze. As the clouds dispersed, steam rose off the pavement in the heat of the sun.
On the northern edge of town, where the houses thinned out and the forest began, she turned left onto a narrow street lined with single-storey homes set back in a dense wood of hickory and pine. No children played outdoors. No barking dogs or lawnmowers disturbed the still air. She idled the car in front of the last house on the right.
At night, locked in her room with the lights off, she would peer at the dark woods, sensing rather than seeing the nocturnal creatures lurking amongst the trees. Staring at her with their red eyes and sharp fangs. Smelling fear. On some nights, she used to pray that a kindly wood sprite would emerge from the pines and spirit her to safety.
In the hot car, a trapped bluebottle butted against the windscreen. She opened the window to release it and stepped onto a ratty patch of lawn. No dog bounded across the grass to greet her. No pets had ever lived in the house. Nothing warm-blooded to speak of.
Her sandals flapped on the slate flagstones that led to the front door. Erin’s pulse quickened, and her throat felt tight. She glanced round for possible escape routes, gauging how long it would take to run to the nearest neighbour, barely visible amongst the trees. Ridiculous to be afraid. What could possibly happen in broad daylight?
But a vision of a snarling Medea floated before her eyes. Arms raised, kitchen shears poised to deliver the murderous blow. When she touched her pendant for courage, the spectre vanished. With no plan for what she would say, or how she might react when the door opened, she was flying blind. When dealing with a human Rubik’s cube, impossible to solve, the best strategy was not to play. Erin would get the information she’d come for, by trickery if necessary, then make a swift exit. After that, she would disappear into the mists, just as she had all those years ago.
Her legs felt stiff as she m
ounted the steps. Her brain sounded an increasingly urgent alarm. Run. Run for your life. But she sucked in her breath and pressed the bell.
42
A woman in a turquoise cotton shift and towering heels opened the door. In her left hand, she held a burning cigarette. Menthol, judging by the smell. The pale, candyfloss hair was swept back from her forehead and fixed with a net of hairspray. At some point, in a misguided attempt to turn back the clock, the woman’s skin had been stretched tightly across her cheekbones.
If it weren’t for the telltale webbing under the eyes and the spray of liver spots on the deeply veined hands, she might have passed for fifty. At least in the dim lighting of a seedy tavern. But next month, Erin knew, the woman before her would turn seventy-one.
As she scanned Erin from head to toe, the ripple of astonishment was followed by a haughty lift of the chin. ‘Interesting what you’ve done with your hair,’ Vivien said. ‘Though it’s too dark for your skin tone, and it always looked better short.’ Her smile was chilly.
‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’ The words caught in Erin’s throat. She pulled her shoulders back, in an attempt to appear taller.
‘I have company. Whatever you’ve come to say, you can say it right here.’
A plump woman in a voluminous pink-flowered dress, her face flushed with heat, poked her head into the front hall. ‘Vivien? Is everything okay? It’s not those Jehovah’s people again, is it?’
‘Everything’s fine. Just someone I used to know.’
Sweat broke out on Erin’s forehead, but she stood her ground as Vivien took a drag of her cigarette. In the oppressive heat, with the hot sun on her back, she was afraid she might faint.
‘All right.’ Erin looked directly into the faded eyes, once a dazzling blue, and refused to look away. ‘Let’s talk about Tim Stern.’
Vivien blanched, but quickly recovered. ‘That boy who killed his family?’
‘Not the son. It’s the father I’m interested in,’ Erin said. ‘The two of you were having an affair.’ She paused. ‘On the night of the murders, you provided him with an alibi.’
Vivien’s friend reappeared, clutching a straw handbag against her bosom. ‘I really should be going,’ she murmured, casting an alarmed look at Vivien as she squeezed past them and hurried to her car.
‘Lunch next week?’ Vivien called gaily, but the woman merely flapped her hand and drove away. ‘Still a troublemaker, aren’t you?’ She exhaled a stream of smoke. ‘What are you, a cop?’
Like mother, like son. Perhaps it was a sign of a guilty conscience. ‘I’m just looking for answers.’
Vivien narrowed her eyes. ‘You’d better come in then. I won’t have you making a scene in front of the neighbours.’
The neighbours were too far away to hear anything, but that wasn’t the point. It was all for show, and the face Vivien put on for the world, engaging and warm, was certainly not the one she wore at home.
As Erin stepped over the threshold, the cloying scent of Vivien’s perfume brought back a flood of complicated memories. Home. What should have been a refuge had only ever been a prison.
Vivien hesitated, as if trying to decide where they should sit. When Erin lived here, the living room, with its spindle-legged furniture and satin upholstery, was strictly reserved for guests. The dining room was poky and dark, and the narrow kitchen claustrophobic.
As they stood in opposite corners of the front hall, like pieces on a chessboard, Erin felt her edges dissolve as the air shifted and the familiar tunnel appeared, offering escape. But she focused on her breathing and held on.
She can’t hurt me.
Besides, Erin had the advantage. She was no longer a child, cowering in terror, but a trained psychiatrist, well-acquainted with the many varieties of human suffering. How easy it was to see that behind Vivien’s spite and bile lurked a woman terrified of the darkness in her own soul. As a child, grasping for order in the chaos, Erin had been unable to spot the cracks in Vivien’s shell. But she could see them now, clear as day.
Vivien pointed a lacquered nail at the living room. ‘We can sit in there.’ She pulled the drapes closed against the light and settled into the wingback chair by the fireplace. As she crossed her legs and lit another cigarette, she studied Erin through a curl of smoke.
Who was she supposed to be this time? A forties screen siren? A woman done wrong by a no-good man but choosing to wear her pride like a crown? This was the woman who’d stalked Erin’s nightmares for years. When Vivien plotted to send her to Danfield, who was she playing then? Conniving mistress, grieving widow, ruthless harpy? The thought that she was ever concerned for her own daughter’s welfare had never crossed Erin’s mind.
She perched on a chair near the door. No need to get comfortable. She would say her piece and go. ‘Tim Stern.’
Vivien flicked cigarette ash into a crystal bowl. ‘What about him?’
Was that a flutter of anxiety in her eyes? For the first time, Erin felt she held all the cards.
‘On the night Doris Stern and her daughters were murdered, you told the police you’d spent the night with her husband in a hotel in Portland. The entire night.’ She waited for this to sink in, but Vivien didn’t so much as blink. ‘Did he ask you to lie?’
‘Who says it was a lie?’ Her voice was cold.
A child’s natural desire to please struggled to the surface, and it was an effort for Erin not to back down. After her father died, she’d had little choice but to seek comfort from her sole remaining parent, despite Vivien’s deficiencies in that regard. When Aunt Olivia rescued her from Danfield, she used to say that children were wasted on her sister, that Vivien didn’t have a maternal bone in her body.
But a clingy, anxious child must have been suffocating for someone with Vivien’s restless nature. Ever seeking opportunities to display her charms, she liked to go out on the town at night. But rather than pay for a sitter, Vivien chose the more expedient solution of spiking Erin’s bedtime glass of milk. What harm could it do? Curled up on the mattress, fighting sleep, Erin would tremble with fear in the empty house, with its dark rooms and strange noises.
But Vivien rarely stayed out past midnight. How would it look if the neighbours saw her, sneaking home at dawn. A woman raising two children on her own. As a widow, grieving the loss of her husband, she had her reputation to protect. But any relief Erin felt when she heard Vivien coming through the kitchen door was swiftly replaced by a mounting dread. Terrified of falling foul of Vivien’s moods, when anything might happen. A cigarette burn on the arm. Her head snapped back by a swift yank of hair. The glint of the sewing shears. Snip, snip. Easy to commit, easy to deny.
Vivien stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Twenty years without a word, and you’ve come here to ask me about an old lover?’
‘I heard you come into the house that night,’ Erin said. ‘Just before two.’
‘So?’
‘Why lie to the police about spending all night in Portland. After Tim was arrested, Stern was no longer a suspect.’
‘He asked me to,’ Vivien replied, fiddling with her rings. She lit another cigarette. ‘It’s always the husband, isn’t it? Until they found Tim’s son, he was the prime suspect. I was in love with him, or thought I was. So it was only natural for me to protect him. And what of it? It’s ancient history now.’ Her voice had gone flat. ‘After they found the son, covered in blood, it didn’t matter what I told the police.’
Erin fixed her eyes on Vivien’s face, hoping to unsettle her by refusing to back down. ‘If it didn’t matter, then why the need, two years later, to have me locked up?’
Vivien’s mouth was a thin line.
‘You were afraid I’d give you away,’ she continued. ‘When you came home so late that night, I pretended to be asleep, but you weren’t fooled. And it must have worried you that I might mention it to someone, a teacher or a friend. Or Aunt Olivia.’ She studied the grim mouth. ‘That could have been dangerous for you, or your lover, if it ever ca
me out.’
Vivien’s eyes were like slits. ‘Why all the questions? Or is this an excuse to come crawling back to your family.’ She looked pointedly at Erin’s left hand. ‘No husband, I see. Poor Mimi, all alone.’ She stood and turned to the fireplace, where she straightened a picture on the mantel. ‘You think you know everything, but it wasn’t easy for me, after your father died, raising two children on my own.’ She checked her face in the mirror. ‘Such a wild imagination you always had, but sending you to Danfield was for your own good. What else could I do? You were crazy as a loon.’
Her eyes had grown misty, but Erin wasn’t fooled. She was no stranger to crocodile tears.
‘What was I supposed to do?’ Vivien said, throwing her hands in the air. ‘You were babbling to yourself and sleepwalking at night. And those strange incantations you used to chant before entering the house. Holding funerals for the dead birds in the yard. Communing with spiders, for heaven’s sake. If it hadn’t been for me, you’d be living under a bridge now. If not dead.’
Communing with spiders? Erin bit her lip so she wouldn’t laugh. ‘There was nothing wrong with me,’ she said, looking Vivien in the eye. ‘The truth is, you sacrificed your child to save your own skin.’
They stared at each other across the distance. In spite of what Erin had endured, it was worse for Vivien, she supposed, who had to live with what she’d done. And to find new ways, as the years passed, to paper over the cracks in her life. But let her live with her delusions. Whatever Vivien told herself, she had been incapable of giving Erin the love and nurturing she needed. Blood from a stone.
It was time to go. Erin stood and walked to the door. In the hall, a floorboard creaked, the old house settling around its sole remaining occupant, living out her days alone.
Before stepping into her car, she glanced back at the house to see Vivien standing at the window, motionless as a department store mannequin.
Lucky for you, Erin mused, that we’re not bound forever to the orbit of the earth. Perhaps in her next life, Vivien would have the chance to try again.