Dreams in the Key of Blue (21 page)

Ellie paused, examined my face, then continued. “Times after Harper… did whatever it was he did to her, she’d come out and sit on the stoop. He’d passed out
from his drinking by then. More than once I saw specks of blood on Lily’s arms. Her shirt stuck to her when the blood dried. She yanked on the sleeve and started the bleeding all over again. Harper carried a skinny, black-handled knife with a long blade. Those times she cut herself, Lily had that knife. She poked at her arms with it. I always cleaned her up and asked her if I could help her. She couldn’t hear me. Her eyes clouded, but she didn’t cry. I expected her to bust out sobbing. She never did.”

Ellie cleared her throat and lit another cigarette. “Katrina’s a sick person. You got to work at it, but you can talk to her. She don’t always make sense, but you can get her to. With Lily, it was different. She was empty. Like there’d be an echo inside if you tapped on her. She was little then. As she got older, she got hard, real cold. They came to get her that time and found out fast that they didn’t bring enough people. Took five men to get her into that state van.”

“How old was she?”

“Maybe fourteen. She looked younger. She didn’t weigh but ninety pounds.”

A kid, I thought. Five adults wrestled her down and slapped her into restraints.

“What was it about the woman who arrived in the limo that made you think it was Lily?”

“A lot of things,” Ellie said. “She visited Katrina, and that would be reason enough. Katrina don’t get visitors. None of us do. She had Lily’s bright yellow hair. When the sun hit her hair just right, it was like she glowed. She was the right age. Mostly it was her eyes. The one time I saw her without the sunglasses, those eyes weren’t Lily’s soft hazel eyes. They were Lily’s ice blue eyes.”

“I don’t understand.”

She flicked ash into the saucer. “At the end, back when I knew her, it was like there were different Lilys. She
waved to me and smiled in the morning when she went by on her way to the school bus. I might go over in the evening to visit Katrina, and Lily looked at me like she didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t sure who
she
was. Her face was different. I swear her eyes weren’t the same color as morning. Probably the worst was when they were taking her out of here. She yelled. She didn’t want to go. She was going to kill everybody, she said. Not just the people who came to get her. Everybody. She meant it, mister.”

Ellie shook her head. “That wasn’t Lily.”

“Why did they take her?”

She took a deep drag on her cigarette, sighed smoke into the air, and tapped her fingers on the table. “Harper fell asleep on the couch. Katrina was in the kitchen heating vegetable oil to make french fries. She turned her head for a second, and Lily had that pot of oil over Harper’s face, ready to pour. Katrina couldn’t get there in time. If you seen Harper’s picture in the paper, you seen the scars. More coffee?”

“Please.”

She poured. “The cops said Lily was out of control. They said she was crazy, so they put her away.”

Ellie leaned back in her chair. “Lily sat rocking in a corner. Two guys came for her. She had Harper’s knife and she cut one of them. The boss cop called in the troops and they put Lily in a hospital. At first, she wrote to her mother a lot. After a few months, she didn’t write so much. No one notified Katrina when Lily escaped. The kid turned up at her door. Katrina was bad off. She didn’t know what to do, so she called the cops. Right after that, Lily Dorman disappeared.”

THERE WAS LITTLE DOUBT IN MY MIND THAT THIS KATRINA MARTIN
was the woman I’d known in Provincetown
thirty years earlier. Katrina the cabaret dancer. Katrina the actress.

I delayed my visit. I did not want to drop into her life after three decades and complicate her already distorted world with questions about her marriage and vague suspicions that her daughter figured in five murders. I would have to talk to her, but I wanted to know more than I did, and to be able to answer her questions while asking mine.

I walked to the rear of the trailer park and found a path into a wetlands area crowded with cattails and sumac. It was the swamp that Lily had prowled as a child. An earthen dike veered away from the path and led into the middle of the bog.

I didn’t expect to find anything. I wanted only to be in the place where Lily Dorman had spent time alone. It was a private place, peaceful in a strange way, and haunting. A small, weathered, wooden cross, held together with roofing nails and pounded into the earth, marked Spike’s resting place.

A red-tailed hawk circled in the slate-colored sky. Wind whispered through the cattails. A water snake slid from a branch, revealing telltale brownish spots on its belly. The snake wound its way across the water’s surface.

I wondered if I had just met a descendant of Lily Dorman’s Billy Brown-spot.

THE JEEP’S DIGITAL CLOCK READ 8:25 WHEN I PULLED
into my driveway.

I prowled through the house, grabbed a bottle of Shipyard, tuned the radio to a station that promised to play Eric Clapton’s “Rainbow Concert” without interruption, and curled onto the sofa with the copy of Lily Dorman’s psychological report that Norma Jacobs had sent via Jaworski.

The timered light in the living room switched on. “Okay, so it’s eight-thirty,” I said.

Hubert Penniweather, Ph.D., had evaluated Dorman when the state sought a custodial placement for her. Penniweather’s report was appended to Katrina Martin Dorman’s application for a permanent restraining order against her husband. The court document was a standard form. Someone had typed the relevant names, dates, and places; Katrina had written two sentences to justify her petition for relief from abuse.

The psychologist’s summary included a brief history of Harper Dorman’s drinking and explosive behavior, and Katrina’s psychotic episodes and hospitalizations. The report also included excerpts from a police incident form:

Ellie did not exaggerate. There were five adults on one kid.

Penniweather reported that Lily had tested in the superior range of intelligence, next door to genius. Her achievement levels smacked the top of the chart; she read and comprehended at the college level. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old. Penniweather described her as a “bright, highly verbal child.”

Lily’s responses on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a series of pictures that the client is asked to make up stories about, were of concern to the psychologist.

When Henry Murray introduced the TAT at Harvard in the 1930s, he described Card 6GF as a young woman gazing backward at an older man. During my years of practice, I supervised many psychologists recently out of graduate school and eager to embark on a curing spree. They were ill equipped to succeed, having spent years studying statistics, research design, rats, and rhesus monkeys. They knew all that could be quantified, but lacked the ability to listen to a human.

A few of the more sophisticated clinicians administered the TAT, and often read a client’s responses during case presentations in our sessions. It was common for a woman to attribute surprise, annoyance, or a startle reaction to the female in Card 6GF, as if the old guy intruded, crept up silently behind her, or said something shocking.

Lily Dorman responded: “She sees him. He lives in her closet. He comes out when he wants to play. The game makes blood. It’s different this time because she’s older. She has a gun in her hand. She shoots him. If Lilith comes out of the shadows, she chops him up.”

She saw the old man as a predator, a bogeyman. Like most of the monsters of childhood that specialize in victimizing children alone at night, he resided in the depths of her dark closet.

When Harper Dorman wanted to “play,” blood flowed. He smeared the trailer’s walls; his daughter punctured her arms.

Lily was fourteen when Penniweather administered the TAT. She was not “older.” In Card 6GF, only the woman’s right hand is visible, and she does not hold a gun. The child infused her story with her wishes and fantasies.

If Lilith comes…

Despite recent attempts to rewrite her story, Lilith was best known as a mythical tempest demon found in deserted shadows, abandoned haunts. Would a child of fourteen know this? Lily was bright, a reader, an abused child probably in desperate need of an avenging spirit.

… she chops him up.

Penniweather noted the child’s flat affect. Lily exhibited no feeling as she offered her interpretation of the picture. The psychologist prompted, “How is she feeling in that picture?”

Lily was stumped. She had no idea.

She split away all emotion in order to survive.

“What about the man?” Penniweather persisted. “How is he feeling in the picture?”

“Hungry,” Lily said.

Penniweather cited another response, on Card 9GF: one woman ran along a beach, another watched the first from behind a tree. Lily stared at the picture and slowly
moved her fingers over the tree trunk, a diagonal black band.

“She’s swapping,” Lily said. “When she goes through the dark place, she’s this other girl.”

The psychologist emphasized the response’s dissociative nature. Again, he probed for feelings and found none. Following the test administration, Penniweather asked Lily if she ever “swapped,” ever felt that she was some “other girl.” She did not respond.

Penniweather’s recommendations included psychiatric assessment to rule out a dissociative disorder. His suspicions were justified, but tainted by clinical and cultural stereotypes of women who behave violently. Implicit in the diagnostic impressions was the assumption that when Lily Dorman scalded her father, she was “not herself.”

The phone interrupted my reading. I glared at it, then thought that my caller might be Bolton or Jaworski, so I pushed myself up and grabbed the receiver.

“There’s a package waiting for you,” a young woman said, her voice cold and hard.

“Who is this?”

She ignored my question. “You’ll find it on a concrete barrier in the municipal parking area behind the grocery store.”

Whoever she was, I figured that she had a short agenda: deliver her instructions and hang up. I did not expect her to remain on the line, so I gambled.

“I just returned from Bayberry Court,” I said.

There was silence, then, “I know that. You had coffee with Ellie. Two cups. Leave now. You don’t have much time.”

“Lily…”

The line went dead.

I DROVE INTO THE VILLAGE.

Lily, if that was who had called, had concealed herself directly outside a window or the door while I sat, drank coffee, and listened to Ellie. She had probably followed me into the swamp behind the trailer park.

As I turned the corner at Downtown Grocery and parked, Stu Gilman’s silver Jaguar streaked past on its way out of town. The car’s engine noise faded, and the downtown night slipped into silence. I watched Gilman’s taillights disappear in the distance. I walked through the dark alley between the grocery store and Wooly’s Ice Cream Castle and stepped into the municipal parking lot. As I surveyed what looked and felt like a scene from a 1950s horror film, a cold wind off the water churned through the corridor behind me.

Black and white and gray.

All that was missing was Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff, and eerie background music. I heard no sound but the wind, and felt as if I should be looking at a grainy picture flickering on a giant screen.

No, not horror.

This film was intended for Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. The trouble was that I felt more like Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones. Something was happening here, but I could make no more sense of the moment than I could of the last several days.

A film shown in the outdoor theater that was the parking lot behind Downtown Grocery.