Dreams in the Key of Blue (36 page)

“Don’t know much about murder,” Lodge said, talking around a walnut-sized chaw wedged in his cheek. “Except what I seen on TV. I heard you and Herb talking. This woman kills for the hell of it.”

“I believe that.”

“She’s got more money than she can spend, but that don’t matter to her.”

I nodded. Lodge weighed his thoughts.

“She ain’t practical. What she feels like doin’ decides what she’s gonna do. Ain’t nothin’ else matters to her.”

Lodge’s words echoed Sydny Clanton’s as she confronted Charlie Manson. Whether the little guru’s gofer got sliced hinged on Clanton’s feelings.

I looked at the lanky lobsterman’s back as he piloted his boat, and recalled his incisive observation about Edgar Heath.

“She ain’t come full circle,” Lodge said, and arced a stream of tobacco juice across the wind. “Best you don’t stand right behind me.”

I glanced at the years of brown stains splattered across the boat’s stern.

Full circle.

Feelings dictate Lily Dorman’s behavior. Anyone who hurt her in the past, or tries to stop her now, dies.

Intellect would tell her to take the money and run. The Bahamas or Costa Rica.

She can’t run until she has killed me and confronted the birthplace of her nightmares.

I was not the source of her suffering, but I had failed to protect her. I was a child’s dream of salvation, and I had become another nightmare.

Full circle.

You want me to find you.

She was not ready to be found on Monhegan.

Good and evil inhabit the same circle. The circle itself is complete, but Lily Dorman has not concluded her circuit.

You must finish the task of making yourself whole.

She said that I would eventually find her. “I’ll wait,” she said. “I’ve waited for years.”

She had more confidence in my intuitive gymnastics than I.

The apartment on Danforth Street was furnished with props.

What about the trailer park?

Would she bring her performance to her mother’s doorstep?

THE TRIP TO PEMAQUID WAS UNEVENTFUL. THE SEA
remained choppy, but the wind had calmed considerably.

Lodge stood at the helm. I sat in the stern, away from Lodge’s occasional blasts of black liquid, and thumbed Lily’s journal, searching for something that would tell me where her circle began, and where it would end.

I flipped back through the pages. Lily’s notes to Dr. Westlake would not help me. What drove Lily Dorman was primal, something in a horribly aching past.

I found an intriguing passage about her snakes in the swamp behind Bayberry Court, how they shed their skins and became new creatures of God. Then her handwriting changed from a child’s neat script to a heavy scrawl.

Was this the beginning, the first time that Lily Dorman broke away from herself?

You must enter the beast again, look with confidence into the mirrors, see that you are whole, a new child of God.

She would go there before she vanished again, I thought, but I had no idea where “there” was.

JAWORSKI’S DISPATCHER ESCORTED ME TO THE CHIEF’S
office.

“He says that you’re to make yourself at home,” she said, and closed the door as she left.

The mute TV reflected the scene outside the police station. An underfed, black-haired woman in a fire-engine-red suit and matching lip gloss maintained a somber expression as she spoke into her microphone. The on-screen banner changed from
LIVE IN RAGGED HARBOR, MAINE
to
TAPED EARLIER
as the station cut to views of the college entrance, Crescent Street, footage from Jaworski’s press conference, and yearbook photos of Susan Hamilton, Kelly Paquette, and Jaycie Waylon.

I turned away. The chief’s vinyl sofa hulked against the wall. I would sleep later, either in my bed or in the jail cell that Karen Jasper had waiting for me. I did not intend to subject my back to a second round of pain. I paced, paged through an instruction manual on the proper use of Mace, paced more, then settled into a chair.

Jaworski’s corporal, Dickie Stevens, pushed open the door. “Will it bother you if I watch some videotape?” he asked. “The chief’s got the only VCR.”

I told him to go ahead, then watched as he screened the memorial service videos. Solemn faces streamed past the camera in silence. In the background, in black, white, and gray, Jaworski and I engaged in soundless dialogue as we surveyed the mourners.

“He’s here,” I told the chief.

The killer was conflicted, I thought at the time, but I had not realized then that “he” was a “she.” Now I understood the frenzy evident in Harper Dorman’s apartment, the savage attack on Jaycie, then the patient efficiency with the Crescent Street scene. Lily Dorman would attend the memorial service not because of any psychic turbulence. As I had suspected, the killer was there to enjoy her sense of invulnerability.

Dawn Kramer drifted across the screen to the chapel. Then Amanda Squires clung to Wendell Beckerman’s arm in a brief procession of the now dead. Squires snapped her head in the camera’s direction; her eyes scanned to her right, then stopped.

“Someone called her,” I muttered.

“What’s that, Doc?”

Squires’s eyes widened. She shook her head, turned away, and moved beyond the camera’s reach.

“Can you back that up?” I asked Stevens.

“Sure.”

Squires zipped backward across the screen.

“Right there,” I said.

Again, Squires walked.

“Can you slow that?”

She seemed to freeze; her body, wrapped in a dark jacket and ankle-length skirt, moved in hesitating increments to the beat of the VCR’s soft click. Squires’s eyes shifted to the camera; her neck muscles tightened.

“Hold it.”

The thin line of her mouth hardened as she glared into space beyond the camera. Stevens froze the image.

“Someone called her,” I said again.

“Batson taped the same people from a different angle. Want me to try that?”

“Please.”

This time, the view was from Beckerman’s side.

Stevens slowed the tape as Squires reacted. The corporal pointed to the screen. “Just over my shoulder, on that little hill,” he said.

I pushed myself from the chair, ignoring a twinge in my back. “She has a gun.”

The blurred figure stood alone on the knoll behind Stevens. Her left hand gripped what appeared to be a handgun.

“Go slowly forward.”

Squires jerkily shifted her attention to the chapel. The woman on the hill folded her arms across her chest; the object in profile in her hand was clearly a weapon.

“Yeah, she was conflicted,” I said. “She couldn’t decide whether to mourn or to kill.”

“What?”

“Can you enhance that image?”

“We don’t have equipment like that. Maybe if we sent it out, but I wouldn’t know where.”

As I stared at the two women—the startled Squires, the unrecognizable woman and her gun—Jaworski walked through the door. “Heath’s in booking,” he said. “Jasper’s holding him as an accessory. They’re running Squires’s fingerprints. Janine Baker’s prints should be in the computer.”

I pointed at the TV screen. “Meet Lily Dorman.”

Jaworski looked from me to Stevens, then crossed the room and examined the indistinct picture.

Before he could react, I asked, “Herb, does Portland have an amusement park?”

“You don’t find us entertaining?”

Stevens chuckled and left the office. I gave Jaworski the journal and pointed to the paragraph about the mirrors.

“I don’t know of anything in Portland like what she’s written here, but it could be that little park up the street.”

Jaworski gave me a brief history of the Screamin’ Demon, the amusement center that I had seen opposite the entrance to Harbor College. “When you walk into the mouth, blue lights flash and the monster roars. I always thought it was hokey, but the kids like it.”

He walked to the window. I watched the TV view of him from outside.

“The mirrors are in the old fun house,” Jaworski said. “They changed it, but it’s still there. There’s a giant slide with a big bowl at the bottom. The kids grab a burlap sack and walk up three flights to get to the top. You go left to get to the slide, right to enter the distortion room. The floors don’t meet the walls, the chairs and tables are oversized or undersized. That’s where they have the mirrors that make you fat, skinny, headless, or all head with no body. They call it the ‘House of Horrors’ now. You can hear the canned laughter on Main Street all summer. MI bought the place when they bought half the town. The new manager put every imaginable electronic gizmo in there.”

Distortion.

I felt as if my head suddenly filled with cotton candy. Thoughts tried to wade through the sticky pink cloud of spun sugar. I could not get a handle on any of them.

Reflection.

“Reporters are blocking the front again,” Jaworski said. “They’ve got police radios.”

The reporters positioned themselves to know all things from all angles, to reflect back to us their impressionistic renderings of our lives. Reality is subjective and malleable. The only reality they could offer was their own.

Lily Dorman asked for a new father, and her mother gave her one. Katrina rearranged reality that dark night when mother and daughter caught a bus to the hospital.

“I didn’t want to go,” Lily wrote in her journal.

“I don’t like the smells… the nurses’ mysterious sounds when they walk… the hallways where some noises echo and others do not.”

My cotton candy cleared like tumbleweed in a brisk breeze. “Heath,” I said.

“Reporters probably saw me bring him in.”

I was out of Jaworski’s loop, on a totally different wavelength. “I have to talk to Heath.”

“Can’t it wait until they process him?”

“No.”

Jaworski sighed. “I swear you jump around like crabs in a pot of boiling water. Come on.”

THE CHIEF LEFT ME ALONE WITH EDGAR HEATH.

The tall, muscular man sat with his head cradled in his arms on a table. I pulled up a chair opposite him as he sat erect and stretched, his sleep-deprived eyes swollen.

“I don’t know where she is,” he said.

“A month before Lily killed her father, you drove her to Mellen Street.”

He wrinkled his forehead.

“She went inside the apartment building. You waited at the car.”

“That never happened.”

“She wore a black dress, pearls, sunglasses, a black scarf.”

“Who is she supposed to have killed that day?”

“No one. She talked to a woman who was leaving the building, asked her where Harper Dorman lived, then walked out. You opened the car door for her.”

Heath shook his head. “The ones I opened the door for never went to Mellen. When she was the one I drove to the jetport, she waited for me to come around the car.”

His eyes betrayed no involuntary movement. “I haven’t committed a crime,” he said. “I answered the detectives’ questions. I am answering yours. I’m also tired. I need a shower. I’m hungry.”

I showed him the photograph from Portland State University.

“She was just a kid then,” he said.

Heath looked at me. “The smile, the bright blue eyes… I never saw her like that.”

THE HALL WAS EMPTY. I WALKED TO THE REAR OF THE
building and found a stairwell. In seconds I was in the familiar corridor that led to the municipal parking area.

Loud voices carried from the street where the reporters gathered. I moved away between parked cars and found an alley that led to Main Street two blocks south of the police station.

One hundred yards ahead, silver fangs glimmered, poised thirty feet above the sidewalk.

I STOOD AT THE PLYWOOD FACADE THAT PROTECTED
the amusement park from winter storms and local delinquents. A padlock on the temporary structure’s makeshift door was shattered, the door splintered. I crouched to examine wood slivers so recent that the lingering wind had not moved them.