See No Evil

by B. A. Shapiro

  After he calmed down and finished his snack, Lauren sat Drew next to her on the living room couch. She took a deep breath, hoping she was handling the situation correctly. “You know how you feel bad when I yell at you?” she asked, pressing one of his hands between her own. “Or if some kid says something mean to you at school?”

  Drew nodded uncertainly and withdrew his hand.

  “Well, everyone has feelings the same way that you do, and part of being a big kid—part of being a good grownup too—is thinking about how what you do and say is going to make other people feel.”

  “Like not throwing worms ‘cause it’ll make somebody scared?”

  “Just like that.” Lauren smiled at Drew and rubbed his cheek with her knuckle. “Can you think of any others?”

  Drew bit his lip and looked up at her questioningly. “Like when I tell you I hate you just ‘cause you won’t let me go over to Scott’s?”

  “It does make me feel very sad when you tell me you hate me, so that’s a good example. ”

  “I don’t hate you, Mommy,” Drew said, his eyes beginning to well with tears again. “I’m sorry. I’ll try not to say it anymore.”

  “I know you don’t hate me, honey—and it would make me feel very happy if you didn’t say that anymore.” Lauren’s heart filled with such love for her sad little boy that she didn’t know how she could contain it within her body. She blinked back her own tears and tried to speak around the lump in her throat. “But just as important as being careful of what you say is being careful of what you do. Both to other people and to things that belong to them.”

  Drew was silent for a minute and then he reached down and took one of his action figures from the coffee table. Turning the figure’s silver and black head until it was facing backward, he said, “I told Kisha I was sorry I ripped her picture.”

  “It’s good you apologized.” Lauren gently took the figure from his hand. “But it’s more important that you don’t do it again. It’s wrong to hurt other people—and it’s wrong to hurt their things. When you destroy something that belongs to someone else, it’s the same as stealing from them.”

  “I didn’t steal anything,” Drew protested, his face filling with anger. “I wouldn’t—

  “I know you didn’t steal anything,” Lauren said quickly, seeing she had taken a wrong turn. “I’m just trying to show you how bad it felt to Kisha.”

  “It was just some crummy picture.”

  Lauren knew she had lost him. Her only hope was that he had been sufficiently scared by the thought of inadvertently killing Amanda that he would take more care with other people’s feelings. “You know I’m going to have to punish you for ripping the picture and throwing the worms, don’t you?”

  Drew stared straight ahead.

  “What do you think would be an appropriate punishment?”

  He shrugged, still avoiding her eyes.

  “One week without television,” she said, standing up to emphasize the firmness of her decision. Expecting violent protest, she turned and looked at him. One week without television was the most severe punishment he had ever received.

  But Drew didn’t say anything, he just looked at her and nodded.

  “Good,” Lauren said. “Then we understand each other.” She grabbed The Boston Globe from the coffee table and went into her bedroom to give him some time alone.

  Lauren threw herself down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, hoping she had said the right things, that Drew had understood, that she wasn’t going to be the mother of a serial murderer. Before she could slip too deeply into neurotic fretting, she pushed herself up against the wall and began to flip through the newspaper.

  An article about the Cambridge school system caught her eye and she pulled out the Metro / Region section. As she heard Drew stomping into his bedroom, Lauren noticed another article: “Somerville Man Jumps To Death.” She skimmed the first paragraph and let out a gasp. The newspaper fell from her trembling fingers.

  The body of a forty-three-year-old man was recovered from beneath the Tobin Bridge early last evening by the Boston police diving squad. He was identified as Nigel Hawkes, an unemployed carpenter, residing at 732 Broadway.…

  Seventeen

  LAUREN HAD BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS EVENING with both curiosity and trepidation, as well as more than a bit of hormonal agitation. But now that she was sitting next to Gabe, watching him taste his wine and nod his acceptance to the waiter, curiosity was rapidly overwhelming her other emotions. She could barely keep from demanding that Gabe tell her the story of Deborah’s stay in one of the premier mental institutions in the country.

  Despite Nigel Hawkes’s suicide and Dan’s suspicions, Lauren had decided she was going to meet with Deborah tomorrow, and she wanted to be armed with as much information as possible. Over the last couple of days, she had been forced to the unpleasant conclusion that she didn’t have the luxury for either superstition or fear. She had to write Rebeka Hibbens. She needed the advance money to finish the book, and she needed to finish the book to get her degree and find a job. Being a single parent reduced life to simple equations.

  Gabe smiled as the waiter finished filling their wineglasses. After leaving the bottle to chill in the ice bucket next to their table, the man backed off with the promise to return soon with their appetizers. They were seated in a back corner of the elegant French restaurant Villemomble, a quiet place tucked into a side street on Beacon Hill. Lauren had never been here before, but she had heard of it. Aunt Beatrice, a gourmand who had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase in her kitchen just to hold her cookbooks, had instructed Lauren to order the house specialty, veal Languedoc, a veal and grape dish she claimed was “beyond superb.”

  Gabe lifted his glass. “To Rebeka Hibbens,” he said.

  Lauren touched her glass to his and wondered whether he was aware of the multiple meaning of his toast: to her book and to the real Rebeka Hibbens—and, if one were to take Deborah seriously, to his ex-wife as well.

  “May it be completed on time,” she said, trying to think of a way to tactfully introduce Deborah into the conversation. Lauren took a sip of her wine—white this time—and looked at Gabe. When their eyes met, she felt a warmth spreading outward from between her legs that made her forget all about Deborah. She coughed and took another sip of wine. It had been a long time since she had been on a date.

  Noting the appealing crookedness of Gabe’s smile and the elegant fit of his jacket, Lauren couldn’t help comparing him to Todd. This evening was a perfect example of how different the two men were. Gabe had shown up on time and made reservations at this extraordinary restaurant. And Lauren was somehow convinced that when they returned to his car after dinner, there would be no boot immobilizing it because of unpaid parking tickets—as had happened the last time Todd took her out for what was supposed to be a reconciliation dinner.

  Lauren put her glass down and turned it slowly on the linen tablecloth. “So,” she said, deciding she might as well just ask, “you promised me all the gory details about Deborah.…”

  “Yes,” Gabe said. “Let’s get it over with so we can enjoy the rest of our evening.” He cleared his throat and folded his hands. “I met Deborah when I was in graduate school—I had a teaching fellowship and she was one of my students.” He gazed somewhere beyond Lauren’s right shoulder; somewhere far beyond the wall of Villemomble, Lauren thought. “Deborah had an amazing talent for history,” Gabe continued. “Although the last time I talked to her, she said something about history being ‘patriarchal bullshit’ conceived of, and perpetuated by ‘old white guys.’”

  Lauren smiled. “She told me something very similar.”

  “It’s such a waste of talent,” Gabe said, shaking his head. “Such a waste.” He then went on to tell Lauren the story.

  He and Deborah had been married in the early seventies and struggled through graduate school together—Deborah getting a master’s degree in history and education, he continuing on for his doctorate. Deborah s
upported them by teaching history at a junior high school while he finished his degree and launched his career.

  It was a classic tale of the struggling young couple, drinking chianti in a tiny apartment full of plywood and cinder block bookshelves. Then, about eight years into the marriage, just when Gabe was finally getting established and Deborah was talking about returning to school for her PhD, Deborah was in a plane crash.

  “Do you remember reading about an airplane that ran off the runway at Logan?” Gabe asked. “The thing broke in half and the people in the front were pulled into the ocean?” When Lauren nodded, Gabe continued, “Well, Deborah was in the back of that plane and she never got over it. After the accident she was very depressed—couldn’t do much of anything except sit around the house. So when she got involved with a woman’s group advocating feminist causes—going to meetings, organizing rallies—I was hopeful she’d soon be her old self again.

  “But it wasn’t to be.” Gabe sighed. “Deborah lost interest in the political aspects of feminism and she started spending time with a fringe group of religious fanatics—and let me tell you, those people were really weird. Somewhere along the line they convinced her that she was the reincarnation of Joan of Arc.” He smiled wryly. “But that was a bit much even for Deborah to buy. It was she who decided she had been Rebeka Hibbens—Rebeka being, ironically, the topic of her master’s thesis.”

  “And she used the reincarnation theory as an explanation for her interest in the subject in the first place,” Lauren couldn’t resist interjecting.

  Gabe smiled, obviously pleased with Lauren’s take on the situation. “I figured it was a stage she was going through and tried to ignore the whole thing. Then I happened to read what I thought was a paper she was writing about life in pre-revolutionary Massachusetts—and it scared the shit out of me.”

  “You don’t mean the chronicle?”

  “Deborah tried to tell me it was written by some woman in the nineteenth century, but I saw her working on it.”

  “A large leather book with parchment pages? Old-style handwriting?”

  “That one came later,” Gabe said. “I think she had it copied over to impress the weirdos she gathered around her after the divorce. When I read the chronicle, it was typed on our IBM Selectric typewriter.”

  “But why didn’t you tell Jackie this when you knew Deborah was giving her the chronicle?”

  Gabe looked into the depths of his wineglass and sighed. “Jackie was there when Deborah and I fell apart. She knew how distraught Deborah could make me. How crazed.” He looked up at Lauren. “I figured Jackie would never believe me—that it would be a waste of my time to get into it with her.”

  Lauren nodded slowly. If what Gabe said was true, then the chronicle was completely bogus. On the other hand, Deborah might have had a reason for retyping a portion of the real chronicle. Lauren carefully looked at Gabe. There was no way to know if his version of events was accurate. It was possible he wasn’t the most reliable narrator. In her experience, both as a participant and an outside observer, neither party involved in a divorce ever saw things as they really were.

  “But it was what was on the pages that spooked me,” Gabe was saying. “There were descriptions of weird rituals involving suicide and murder—and what appeared to be plans for more. All I could think was that there was going to be another mass suicide like the one at Jonestown—with Deborah as the next Jim Jones.

  “So I took her to a psychiatrist a friend recommended, and Deborah readily admitted her beliefs. She told him she was the reincarnation of Rebeka Hibbens, that she was a powerful sorceress, and that her life’s mission was to find the other members of her coven and perform the great Immortalis, thereby freeing them to achieve eternal life among the sages.

  “As you might expect,” Gabe continued, “Dr. Blue-stone told me she was a very sick woman. That she was psychotic and paranoid. Preoccupied with suicide and delusions of grandeur. He said she needed to be hospitalized because she was a threat to herself and to others. Although I was concerned, I was amazed at the seriousness with which he took the situation; it wasn’t as if Deborah were hallucinating or losing touch with reality. But Bluestone explained that her problem wasn’t like schizophrenia, that it wasn’t uncommon for people with Deborah’s disorder to be ‘highly functional.’ Still, he was anxious to get her started on a regimen of antipsychotic drugs as soon as possible.”

  Lauren remembered back to the conversation she and Jackie had had about the seeming contradiction between Deborah’s delusions and her ability to run a successful business. Dr. Bluestone’s diagnosis explained the incongruities.

  “Of course, she wouldn’t agree to the hospitalization.” Gabe lowered his eyes and twirled his wineglass. “We had to ‘pink paper’ her and—”

  “‘Pink paper’?” Lauren interrupted.

  “Commit her against her will.” Gabe finished off his wine, and immediately a waiter appeared to refill his glass. When the waiter left, Gabe resumed his story. “They gave her a diagnosis of ‘psychotic disorder NOS’—whatever that means—put her in a locked unit at McLean, and started dosing her with medication.

  “At first she was completely wacked-out from the drugs, but even doped up, Deborah was too smart for them.” He smiled sadly at the memory of his brilliant ex-wife, and Lauren had a fleeting flash of jealousy. “She told me later that she realized the only way out was to play along. So she ‘cheeked her meds’—pretended to take her medication—and changed her story. Thrilled with their success, the doctors released her.” He shook his head as if to shake off a bad dream. “As soon as she got home, she began hanging out with a band of misfits who bought into her madness.”

  “The coven,” Lauren said.

  “Cult is more like it,” Gabe corrected. “They’re a sorry lot—she even met one of them, the guy with the ring in his eyebrow, at McLean.”

  “Bram,” Lauren said, relief flooding through her. Mental illness would explain why Bram believed himself to be a powerful sorcerer. But, she thought, her relief vanishing, it did nothing to explain Nigel Hawkes’ suicide.

  “Whoever.” Gabe waved his hand dismissively. “They’re just a bunch of life’s losers who need someone to tell them they’re special—and I guess Deborah does that. As long as she doesn’t talk them into killing themselves, I try to convince myself that no harm’s being done.” He raised his glass in a mock toast.

  “So that’s why you were so adamant about steering me away from the chronicle.”

  “At first, I didn’t feel right telling you Deborah’s story—it’s pretty personal stuff.” He rested his arm on the back of Lauren’s chair. “But now that things appear to be changing between us, I just couldn’t let you believe that a manuscript I knew had been written in the twentieth century was a seventeenth-century primary source—especially when it was written by someone who’s been diagnosed by some of the best doctors as delusional and psychotic.”

  Lauren felt the warmth of his hand against her shoulder. Although she agreed with and was touched by his remarks, there was a complacency to his argument that annoyed her. “But is it really that simple? Do the ‘best doctors’ always agree? Or always know the truth?” she asked, leaning forward. “A friend told me the other day that her doctor at Beth Israel—one of the best hospitals—recommended an herbal remedy from a health food store because it worked better than anything he could prescribe.”

  “A friend you met at the Moorscott jail?” Gabe asked, removing his arm from her chair.

  Lauren glanced quickly at him, but she saw from the twinkle in his eye that he was teasing. “As a matter of fact,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest, “a friend I ran into at Wiggins Library.”

  Gabe threw his head back and laughed. Lauren joined him. Gabe possessed a laugh that demanded company, a laugh that pulled all those around him into his circle of charisma. A few of the other diners turned and smiled at them.

  An elegantly dressed woman, her blue-tinted hair perfe
ctly coiffed, rose and came over to their table. “Please excuse my interrupting your dinner, Dr. Phipps, but my grandson is a history major at Cornell. He’s such a great fan, and his birthday is just next week.…” She held up a small notebook and pen, her face flushing slightly. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind—”

  “Of course not,” Gabe said, quickly taking the book to cut short the woman’s embarrassment. “I’d be honored.” When she left, he turned back to Lauren with a wide smile. “I’m not knocking herbal remedies,” he said. “I’ve even been known to take a bit of seaweed and miso when I have a cold. I’m just saying that I don’t see a place for the supernatural in serious scholarship.”

  “I agree with a lot of what you’ve said.” Lauren paused and took a sip of wine. “But I’m still committed to talking with Deborah tomorrow.”

  Although she knew it wasn’t what Gabe had intended, his story had actually made her feel better about Deborah and Bram. They weren’t powerful sorcerers controlling the mysteries of black magic; they were just a litter of sick puppies. And it all jibed with the conclusion she had reached about Nigel Hawkes.

  After the first shock of reading about his death in the Globe, Lauren had carefully reread the article, hoping Nigel Hawkes was a more common name than she had thought. She quickly realized that it was unlikely there were two Nigel Hawkeses in the Boston area who had been recently acquitted of sexually molesting a young boy. But when her eye caught a quote from Nigel’s mother, her spirits lifted. “He was so happy after the trial was over,” Mrs. Hawkes had told the reporter. “But then his boss got all bent out of shape and fired him for something he never done, and he got real depressed again.”

  Lauren was sure that depressed people without jobs had been known to commit suicide without the benefit of a witch’s incantation.