by Sophie Davis
“She is not our daughter, Eleanor,” my father assured her.
He really believes that, I realized, amazed.
“Really? Then why are none of the trigger phrases working?” my mother pressed.
But instead of answering her, Phillip Kingsley looked at me and said, “I know my daughter.”
I couldn’t help myself, I laughed. And it was actually funny—hilarious even—that my father thought he knew me.
“Lark, my Lark, is smart and savvy—just as I have taught her to be. You,” he pointed at my chest, “you are idealistic. You are naïve. You believe you can waltz into my hotel room and give me an ultimatum.”
“And you don’t think Lark would do that?” I guessed, miffed that my father thought me either too weak or too loyal to confront him.
“Lark is her father’s daughter,” was the extent of his reply.
Smiling smugly, I crossed my arms and leaned back in the chair. My father’s gaze remained on me, but my mother’s remained on the scotch glass.
“You’re right about that,” I told him. “What’s one of your other favorite sayings, Dad? Be prepared for any outcome, never assume you know all of your opponent’s cards. Or, how about, overconfidence is the mark of a fool.” My smile widened as I shrugged. “Well, I guess you’re a fool.”
I reached for the alcohol, draining the glass in three long swallows. In the distance, I swore I heard the team of FBI agents in the hallway, ready to barge through the door at any moment.
“Lark, what have you done?” my father demanded. He must have heard the agents too, because he was on his feet and surveying the room as though for an escape route.
It took my mother longer to understand. “Phillip? What’s happening?”
I ignored her. “Only what you taught me, daddy. I learned from my mistakes.” The door to the suite burst open. “Before, I gave you the opportunity to do the right thing and you had me committed.” Agents in full riot gear swarmed the living room.
I started feeling queasy.
Is this really happening? Am I really handing my parents over to the feds? Or am I going to wake up in Montauk?
Seeing double, I had to use the arm of the chair for support as I stood to look my father in the eyes one last time. “I wasn’t going to let that happen again,” I told him.
Black spots danced in my vision. What’s wrong with me?
Too late I realized my father wasn’t the only one who’d been a fool. As my knees buckled and my body crumpled, I saw the freaking scotch glass mocking me from the coffee table. I should have known better. I should have known my parents were incapable of playing fair or being reasonable. And, I guessed I had known, which was why I agreed when Asher suggested calling his FBI contact on the way to the hotel. And when Gabe suggested allowing the cameras on the chips in my eyes to stream the interaction. And when Blake suggested having my cellphone record the conversation.
My head hit the ground. In the three seconds of consciousness left to me, I watched as one agent slapped cuffs around my father’s wrists and another pulled my mother from the sofa, and as Blake pushed through men with guns to kneel at my side. The scene wasn’t how I imagined it. I didn’t feel good about turning my parents in. But for maybe the first time ever, I did feel at peace. Whether that was because I’d finally come to terms with Jonas’ death and my father’s role in it, or because I wasn’t alone shouldering the burden of being the reason my parents would spend time behind bars. She was with me. And when I woke from the darkness, I knew she would still be there because I still needed her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
My eyes popped open as though I’d been startled awake from a nightmare, except I couldn’t recall dreaming. I blinked several times before the room came into view. In one corner sat a desk I recognized and a big closet took up one wall, the doors ajar.
What the hell? Those are you my clothes.
I sat up and immediately regretted it when the world tilted off kilter. Squinting to make the spots flashing in my vision smaller, I tried to think straight but couldn’t recall how I’d come to wake up in the Gibson Street apartment.
Think, Raven. What’s the last thing you remember?
Asher. We’d gotten in a fight because David wanted him to bring me back to Montauk. Then…then he’d drugged me.
Is that how I got here?
No, that wasn’t right. I remembered something after that—waking in the darkness, blind to the world around me. Gabe was there…we talked about the chips David had implanted in my eyes…I convinced the guys to take me back to the city to confront the Kingsleys…After that things were hazy. Lark. She’d taken control in the car on the way to the hotel. Her time in the driver’s seat wasn’t a complete blank space in my head, just harder to access than my own memories. If I could only wade through the static….
The bedroom door opened, and Blake poked his head inside. The light in his eyes when he saw me awake made me feel warm all over. “Hey, how are you feeling?” he asked, smiling as he crossed to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Okay, I think.”
Reaching for my hand, he folded his fingers around mine. The spark in his emerald gaze dimmed when I looked up at him. He thought I was Lark, I realized and forced a smile to hide my disappointment.
“She’ll be back. She just needs some time to come to terms with everything with her parents.” The incident in the hotel room was coming back to me in fragmented bits, but that wasn’t how I knew Lark needed time to process. I felt her emotions evenly more acutely than I had the previous day. We were coming closer and closer to becoming one.
Why aren’t we one yet? I wondered.
I had followed all Lark’s clues and learned the truth about Jonas and Kingstown. And now she’d finally said her piece to her parents. That meant I’d fulfilled my purpose, right?
Blake wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me to his side. I leaned my head on his shoulder and asked, “Why did you guys bring me here?”
He cleared his throat uneasily. “Well, for a few reasons.”
“Such as?”
Blake squirmed beside me, further confirming he really didn’t want to answer my question. “Look, Raven…I don’t know how to tell you this.”
As he trailed off, I shrugged out of his grip to look him in the eye. “Just say it, Blake,” I said, biting off each word. I was so tired of not knowing things everyone else around me did know.
Blake took a deep, steadying breath and nodded. “Okay, here goes. From what we know, while we were driving to the hotel David learned you and Asher wouldn’t be coming back to Montauk. He also learned Asher, his own son, was dealing with the FBI. So, um, David, it seems, decided to cut his losses. He’s fled New York.”
I stared up at him mouth agape, unsure how I felt about any of what he’d just told me. David was gone. My doctor was gone. The guy who’d used me like a guinea pig was gone. I hated David for screwing with my head. For erasing memories and playing mind games. But with the news of his fleeing came a sense of loss. Until that moment, I’d held the naïve belief that he would play a role in making me—making us—whole again.
“They don’t know where he went?” I asked finally, but it wasn’t really a question because Blake’s expression gave away the answer before the words left my mouth.
“He has several other facilities both in the U.S. and abroad, the FBI has sent agents to those locations,” Blake replied smoothly. “They’ll find him.”
“You don’t look like you belief that,” I said.
He forced a smile. “No, but I was hoping you might.” With a heavy sigh and big shrug, he added, “David knows Asher is cooperating with the authorities, and he knows that his son knows about the other facilities. And Asher admitted his father has been buying up land and….abandon buildings. Asher thinks David intends to turn the buildings into medical facilities and institutions like Montauk but doesn’t know whether any of already been converted or equipped.”
“What a
bout the other people at Montauk—therapists, doctors, orderlies, patients?” I pressed. “Someone must know something.”
Blake reached for my hand, but I didn’t want to be calm. I wanted to shake someone. This was a disaster. Asher had to know more than he was telling. He was the man’s son for heaven’s sake. Like Lark’s the Kingsleys’ daughter? Like you’re the Kingsleys’ daughter? Phillip and Eleanor were so desperate to keep their little girl naïve that they wiped her memory. Who’s to say Asher’s father—the memory wiper—isn’t just as conniving?
“I’m sorry, Raven,” Blake said simply as he shook his head. “Montauk was empty when local authorities arrived.”
How? How did David know? How did he get everyone out so fast?
“What about computers? And the equipment or whatever?” I asked numbly, reality finally sinking in. “Maybe there are records of….”
Sympathy and understanding filled Blake’s gaze. “Gabe’s working on it. David—or more likely an underlying—tried to destroy all the files on the premise, but Asher says everything is backed up to a server. And they were in a hurry to leave, so it’s likely they missed something.” This time he didn’t take no for an answer when I tried to pull away. Blake wrapped his arms me and held me tightly as I began to shake. “It’s only a matter of time. We might not find David, but once Gabe breaks through the encryption and we figure out what sort of treatments you were receiving another doctor will be able to help you.”
He spoke with so much conviction that I couldn’t help but hope maybe he was right.
Pulling back from the embrace, I didn’t feel quite so despondent. There was hope, I had to believe that. My parents and David had fractured me, and I was slowly putting the pieces back together, but I didn’t know if I’d ever be whole again without help.
Then, a thought struck me: There is one person from Montauk you can still talk to.
“Where’s Asher?” I demanded, nudging Blake aside as I pushed passed him.
“Raven, wait,” Blake called as I pulled on the first pair of shorts I found in the closet and tried not to wonder why I was wearing undies and a tank.
“What?”
He crossed the room and joined me near the door, placing both hands on my shoulders. “I’ll take you to talk to him, I promise. But first, I need you to understand something.”
“Talk fast,” I said and crossed my arms over my chest.
“Asher’s FBI contact, Agent X, she’s not a friend of the family or whatever the story he told us originally was. Agent X has been investigating Montauk for a few years. She’s been trying to get Asher to turn on his father for nearly that long.”
“Turn on his father? So the FBI knew David was erasing people’s memories?”
“Not exactly,” Blake hedged, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably. “Agent X heard rumors that David was implanting memories—thoughts, ideas, emotional responses even—in his patients, but she’s never been able to prove it. Every time she has gotten close to a source inside Montauk, David seems to know and that person disappears. That’s why she finally targeted Asher. She at least thought a father, particularly one who lost his wife, wouldn’t kill his own son. She thought appealing to Asher’s humanity might be enough to overcome family loyalty. It wasn’t. At least, not until you.”
I was cold all over, even on the inside. It was too much to process. Too much to comprehend. David was a mad scientist and a killer. I’d been locked away with a murderer. The Kingsleys—my parents—had handed me over to that murderer, gave him free reign to use me like a test subject and even paid him for the privilege. I stumbled backwards, suddenly unsteady on my feet. Blake gripped me tighter, keeping me upright.
“When Asher called Agent X yesterday on the way back to the city, she only agreed to send that team to the hotel on such short notice and with so little information because he agreed to go on record about Montauk and his father.”
I swallowed hard. “Where is he?”
Over the coming months, but especially in the days following my parents’ arrest, I would wonder how many things I overlooked that could have led me down the path to discovery much sooner. For example, not once had I wondered who lived in Apt. #2 in the Gibson Street row home. Had I wondered and asked Asher, he surely would have lied, but maybe I would have investigated the mystery. Maybe not. Either way, that was where Blake brought me.
“Is this—what is this place?” I asked, marveling at the sheer number of monitors and FBI techs in the living room. Several people glanced up when Blake and I entered, but none spoke to us.
“This is—was—Asher’s command center,” Blake said softly.
On one of the monitors, a man with a crew cut was scrolling through footage from inside The Pines. “You mean this is where he watched me from,” I corrected Blake.
“I just wanted to help you.” Asher’s voice drifted down a short hallway off the living room.
I turned to find him standing beside Agent X. Neither appeared to have slept, nor did they look happy to be with one another. Blake had ahold of my hand, gripping it tightly as though expecting me to run at Asher at any second. His instincts weren’t wrong. The urge to attack Asher was strong, but my desire to be whole was stronger.
“Now’s your chance,” I replied.
Asher stepped closer, Agent X shadowing him closely. I mirrored Asher’s advance, Blake at my side.
“I assume by the snarl Blake told you everything,” Asher said, his brown eyes never leaving mine. He took my silence for confirmation. “Things aren’t as black and white as they might seem.”
A coppery taste filled my mouth, which was when I realized I was biting my cheek. I unclenched my jaws just long enough to ask: “Did David make me? Did he implant me inside Lark’s head? Is that why the memories of my family in Pennsylvania are so real?”
“No, not exactly.” As Asher sucked in air, I held my breath and waited for the other shoe to drop. “You, Raven, are what we call a pure alter, one invented solely in the mind of the patient.” He closed his eyes briefly, as though searching for the strength to continue on the back of his eyelids. “But the rest, including Lila, are David’s inventions. He believed by splitting the psyche he could suppress the traumatic memory inside the secondary ego, leaving Lark, the primary ego, otherwise free to live her life. Through therapy and pharmaceuticals, my father hypothesized he could control the secondary egos, keep the dormant for lack of a better word.”
Hypothesized? David didn’t just experiment on me, I am an experiment.
“Was I even sick? Was I really having troubling coping with Jonas’ death, with what I saw that day in my father’s office? Or is that a lie?”
Asher shook his head. “You were having issues. Your file says you had night terrors, started sleepwalking, became withdrawn, and experienced a dramatic shift in personality. These can be signs of abuse, but after a physical examination ruled out the possibility, David took the Kingsleys’ word that you had witnessed a traumatic event and set out to erase that event from your memory.”
Blake snorted in disgust. “Surely there are easier ways to get rid of unwanted memories than dividing a child’s psyche.”
“There are, and there aren’t,” Asher said. “Suppressing traumatic memories is relatively easy, but repressed memories will surface again eventually. Even with continuous therapy and drug cocktails…well, there are no guarantees. But when you split the psyche and give all of the traumatic memories to a secondary alter, the primary can no longer access them. Or, well, that’s what my father believed—what he still believes.”
“Still believes? But Lark has proven him wrong,” I interjected. “I mean, she did remember. So David is wrong. His hypothesis or whatever is wrong.”
“Lark had a memory flash,” Asher said carefully. “It’s not quite the same.”
I shook my head, more confused than angry at least for the time being. “It was more than a flash. She knows everything now. She remembers Jonas and Kingstown and the Architec
t,” I insisted.
“Yes, she knows about those things, but it’s not because she remembers them,” Asher corrected me gently. “Lila remembers Jonas and Kingstown. Those are Lila’s memories. Lark saw the same tapes you and I did. That is how she knows about what happened in Canada.”
“What about in the eighth grade? When her teacher read them that story, Lark remembered Jonas—ask Adam. He told me she yelled out about the blood and the boy. Ask him.” I surveyed the living room, expecting to find Adam and Gabe nestled in a corner pouring over a laptop. But neither guy was in sight.
Where is Adam?
“That was a memory flash,” Asher repeated. “And it caused her mind to fracture further. Lark doesn’t remember that day. If any ego could remember that day, it would be you, Raven. Just like it’s Lila who remembers the day Jonas died. And once the psyche is split, the memories are separate and distinct across the egos.”
Finally, something I know that he doesn’t.
“Not quite separate or distinct,” I countered.
Asher’s gaze narrowed. “Can you access Lark’s memories? What about Lila’s?”
His interest was no longer personal but professional. The hurt girl inside of me, who’d trusted Asher, who’d thought he was her friend, didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of the truth.
“Raven, this is…this is huge.”
Behind the excitement, it was as though something clicked into place for Asher. Like an event or offhand comment suddenly made a lot more sense. I honestly didn’t care to hear the realization he’d just reached. Suddenly I was exhausted and just wanted this all to be over.
“Are you aware of Lark right now? Is she here too?” Asher pressed.
I caught Agent X’s eyes widened before she composed herself, but not before glancing in Blake’s direction as if to ask: “Are you really dating this looney toon?”
I wiggled my finger back and forth in front of Asher’s face. “I’m not feeding your father’s obsession any further, not until you agree to make Lark whole.”