Dreams in the Key of Blue (25 page)

ON THE DRIVE SOUTH, I ALLOWED MY PUZZLE PIECES
to grab whatever random assembly they wished.

The woman in the limo visited Mellen Street and asked for Harper Dorman. A similar woman visited Katrina Martin. Two years ago, Melanie Martin arrived in a limo and supervised Loudermilk’s design modifications to the scrimshaw. She selected the timber rattler as her serpent.

Were Lily Dorman and Melanie Martin the same person?

Always, there were questions.

Amanda Squires presented the gift of etched whalebone that depicted a tale of vengeance.

Was Squires connected to Martin?

Days later, someone crept into my house and deposited a timber rattler in the study. After that, a knife impaled an orange on my kitchen counter.

Why focus on me?

Someone prowled my road, raced away from the Weld crime scene, then dumped the suspect Volvo at the bluff, a hundred yards from my front door.

Coincidence is for fools.

A woman invited me to find Wendell Beckerman’s
body, and planted the notion that I killed the young man. The weapon connected six homicides and left the question of my complicity hung on the line like putrid socks after a rugby match.

Whalers were hunters. They captured their prey, lashed it to the side of the ship. A larger predator rose out of the sea and devoured whalers, ship, and whale.

Payment received for damage done.

Vengeance.

Harper Dorman’s murder made sense if Lily Dorman had destroyed and shredded the agent of her horror.

“Wonder if she arrived in a fucking limo,” I muttered.

Why target the three students?

Why kill Steve Weld and Wendell Beckerman?

Why stalk me?

Always, there were more questions than answers.

Martin International connected Jaycie Waylon and Steve Weld, albeit tenuously. Melanie Martin and Amanda Squires also shared a possible connection. Stuart Gilman lurked somewhere in the mix.

The kid with a fondness for LSD was Squires’s friend, but had no MI connection that I knew of.

Where does Beckerman fit?

The hybrid kills people she knows, and she kills strangers.

“Fuck it,” I muttered. “Strip away the horseshit and all you’ve got is another murderer.”

ELLIE MCLEAN STEPPED OUT OF HER TRAILER AS I
walked through the courtyard.

“Her soaps are over,” I said.

“I knew you’d be back. I’ve been getting her to take her pills. She showered, cleaned the place. I told her you’d been here. She remembered you, hoped you’d come back.”

“Thanks, Ellie.”

“She said you were a doctor.”

I nodded.

“Why does a doctor wear jeans and not get a haircut?”

“Neckties get in the way when I’m fishing,” I said, walking to number three. “The hair keeps the bugs off my neck.”

The TV glow had disappeared from Katrina’s trailer. I knocked, thinking about the woman I had known briefly thirty years earlier.

Late one night, near closing time, she had walked into the restaurant and ordered an ice cream cone. She sat at the counter, held the cone, and stared at it as it melted. When business slowed, I cleaned her mess.

“Time vanishes,” she said. “It melts away. Everything dies.”

The trailer door swung open. Katrina Martin looked as if she had shrunk. I remembered her as a tall, dazzling blond. Her long, lush, flaxen hair was gone, replaced by a thin fall of brittle white strands. She wore faded jeans and a tan cardigan buttoned wrong.

She looked at me and tried to focus her eyes. Remembering seemed to be a strain for her.

“Lucas,” she said, with a strength in her voice that I had not expected. “Please come in.”

I stepped into the low-ceilinged kitchen. The place was the same vintage as Ellie’s, and we sat at a similar, but damaged, laminated kitchen table.

“I thought this would feel strange, but it doesn’t,” she said. “We were friends one summer. I remember the beach. You look different.”

I stared at her, trying unsuccessfully to see the woman I had known for a few short weeks so long ago.

“Age,” I said.

“Not just that.”

I prodded Katrina to talk about her life, about experiences that I knew were painful. She dropped into silence and stared at the table.

Memory is selective and often unreliable. When she spoke, she erased segments of her life, remembered some events in a rewritten or revised form, and described others with nearly eidetic recall.

“When I left Provincetown, I came home to Portland,” she said. “I went to the hospital where my mother used to go.”

“That’s where you met your husband,” I said.

She nodded, still staring down, and rubbing the back of her left hand with her right. “Harper worked there. He was young, handsome, an electrician’s apprentice. He didn’t drink then. When I was eligible for off-grounds privileges, we started dating. I got pregnant right away.”

Katrina selected a hard candy from a dish, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. She was coping with one of her medications’ drymouth side effect.

“The first place we lived was an apartment on Danforth Street,” she continued. “It was beautiful there. I could see the harbor from the kitchen window. Then the hospital fired Harper because of me, so he couldn’t get his license as an electrician. He worked at the port, did different kinds of jobs. We always seemed to have enough to get by, but then he started to drink. He moved us here when Lily was two.”

Katrina broke off her narrative and stared into a corner of the room. A slight smile creased her narrow lips before her eyes rediscovered me. I’d seen the behavior in schizophrenic patients numerous times over the years. Katrina listened to noises only she could hear.

“Katrina?”

“He drank most of the time,” she said, the smile gone, her eyes fixed on mine, as if she had never paused. “I was
having problems again, but I didn’t know it. That’s not true. I knew it, but I didn’t want to go back to the hospital.”

She clasped her hands tightly in front of her. “Did you return to Boston after Provincetown?”

I nodded. “I went back to school.”

She pushed her hair out of her eyes. “I never finished school. Is your wife a doctor, too?”

“Savannah is a veterinarian,” I said, seeing no point in explaining that Savvy and I had been separated for years, and that she lived in Africa.

“Lily always loved animals. We had a dog once.”

Katrina’s eyes clouded. “The dog… died. Lily kept snakes after that. She didn’t keep them in the house. They lived in the swamp. She wrote everything about them in a notebook. Even gave them names. The notebook’s here. She asked me to send it to her in the hospital. Then she left it here. I don’t want to talk. I’m tired. You came here for a reason. Tell me what you want.”

“I want to meet Lily,” I said.

Katrina turned away. “She was here. Not too long ago, I don’t think. She and Edgar, her driver, took me to the waterfront in Portland. There’s a little park with benches on Eastern Promenade. I fed the pigeons. We sat on a bench, and Lily sent Edgar to get cracked corn. I watched the ships go by, and I saw the islands. Lily held my hand.”

Again, she hesitated. Then, as if finding a bookmark in her thoughts, she said, “Edgar brought the corn. I fed the birds. Lily was so thoughtful. She said she’d come back and take me out. She hasn’t yet, but I know how busy she must be. I never knew a black person before I met Edgar. He’s a large man, but he’s very gentle, and he protects Lily.”

I was losing her, and there was so much more that I
needed to know. I was uncomfortable probing her pain, but I had to. “Harper killed the dog,” I said.

She stared at me, her eyes narrowed. “Who told you that?”

“A police report.”

“They shouldn’t have come here.”

“Lily stayed with your friend Ellie.”

“They took Harper away. He screamed in pain. It’s hard to think of him dead. Whatever else…we were together all those years.”

Her gaze shifted to a corner of the room, and tears rolled from her eyes. I saw no semblance of a smile this time.

“I betrayed Lily. I didn’t know the right thing to do. She left the hospital. She came here, and I was confused. I called Mental Health and told them she was here. Lily ran. This last time when she visited, she said she forgave me for that.”

Katrina’s eyes locked on mine. “I have her back now, and I’m not going to lose her again.”

I was reluctant to push her, but I had no choice. “Katrina, I would like to meet Lily,” I said again.

“Lily is a successful woman,” she said.

I nodded.

“You can’t hate her,” she said, with the first real emotion in her voice. “You don’t know her.”

“I want to know her,” I said, wondering why Katrina would assume that I hated her daughter.

“You’re going to hurt her.”

She pushed away from the table and walked to the window.

“I have no wish to hurt her,” I said to Katrina’s back.

She turned, her eyes darting from one corner to another. “Edgar helps her when things get really bad. I can’t help her.”

“How do things get bad for her, Katrina?” She stared into the living room. “Harper smeared blood on the walls.”

“The dog’s blood,” I said.

“He hurt her,” Katrina said as she returned to her chair, sat, and rocked back and forth. “He held her by the neck. She couldn’t breathe. He made her…”

She stopped talking and spread her palms across her face.

“Katrina,” I said, reaching across the table to touch her hand.

She was gone, wandering among the many realities that her world comprised. When she looked back at me, her eyes cleared, and she nodded her head. Something had clicked for her, but I did not know what.

“I’ll tell you,” she said.

Lily Dorman was born on May 1, 1967, in Portland, Maine. “We couldn’t afford to send announcements. We called a few relatives.”

Harper Dorman provided a sporadic, evershrinking income; Katrina cared for the child, the house, the meals, her husband, and the noises—the bits of static that beckoned to her from her mind’s dark corridors.

She inhabited multiple realities, wormwood worlds replete with holes and contradictions. Sometimes, when Katrina could not disregard her summons from the kaleidoscoping corners of her soul, she “rested” at Maine Central Mental Hospital.

“Lily always said her first memory was of the move from Danforth Street to Bayberry. She hated it here, and she cried for the old place.”

Katrina, confused and confusing, told her twoyear-old daughter that the child was too young to have feelings. Later, she told Lily that she had been too young to have any memory of the move.

Harper called Bayberry “a step up.” Katrina’s smoky eyes saw nothing of her new home’s prefabricated horror, nothing of the trailer park’s rancid poverty, and nothing of her husband’s incipient violence.

“I think now that Lily felt everything,” Katrina said. “She had feelings that I couldn’t know about.”

I imagined the little girl tasting and smelling the sweaty fear and rage that roiled the air within and beyond the trailer’s walls. The next day always arrived in a bottle with a smooth white label, one she could run her fingers over until Harper yelled or smacked her hand.

“I always said he had a love affair with Mr. James Beam. He called the bottle Jim. It smelled like cleaning solvent. He stared with those bloodstreaked eyes. ‘Keep your fuckin’ hands offa Jim,’ he’d yell at Lily, after he stung her wrist or the back of her hand with a hard slap.”

He glared. He swallowed. He roared.

“When Lily was six years old, I asked Harper to break off his affair with Mr. Beam. Lily was watching TV, but she turned to see how he moved, how he held his shoulders, whether his hands were open or closed. That’s how she knew what was coming. She read his body.”

Dorman pushed himself from the sofa, swayed, stumbled into the dining area where Katrina sat crocheting, wrapped his hands around her throat, and squeezed. Neither one said a word. He grunted once with anger or exertion; she uttered a single squeal like the soft peep of a kitten. The only other sound crackled from the TV.

“Lily said she had a terrible headache, like something grew inside her skull and clawed to get out.”

Lily watched Katrina’s chair tip backward and the two of them crash to the floor. Harper passed out. Katrina stared at the ceiling.

“Lily said, ‘He’s out like a fucking light.’ I looked at her, and I asked her where she’d heard a word like that. I
didn’t have to ask. Harper said it all the time. But it wasn’t like her to talk that way. I told her he didn’t mean it. I told her that he would bring flowers.”

Katrina stood and walked to the rear of the trailer. She returned with a blue notebook, opened it, and slid it across to me.

“She left this here when she ran away from the hospital.”

I looked at the neat handwriting. “I read some of it,” Katrina said. “Part of it’s about her snakes. The rest… I had to put it down.”

Am I to sleep forever, silently, somewhere in black shadows?

My mother is one person struggling with many worlds. I am many people at war with one world.

Will the others always shove me aside?

On Lilith’s first night, we looked down at Harper where he lay across our mother. We listened to him snore and cough and nearly choke. Lilith wished him dead.

Our mother was motionless, her eyes wide, her face without expression. She looked as if she did not dare to move.

For three years, Harper brought flowers on the days after pain. He brought tulips or roses or miniature carnations, whatever the florist threw into the compost.

I was seven when Harper invited me to sit on his lap.

“Please don’t read it here,” Katrina said.

I closed the notebook. “I’ll return it,” I said.

“Give it to Lily when you see her. I don’t want to look at it again.”

“How do I find her?”

“I have a phone number. Lily said I could call anytime I wanted to. I haven’t. I don’t want to pester her.”