Dreams in the Key of Blue (39 page)

The odds had shifted.

I DROVE THROUGH TOWN UNABLE TO GET LILY DORMAN
out of my thoughts.

“It’s like she knows you’re out here,” Jaworski had said.

Did she, I wondered. Is that what her smile communicated?

“Harper crashed through the door,” Lily wrote, “his shoulders hunched forward, elbows jutted out, and feet wide apart.”

She avoided looking at his face, his eyes.

Karen Jasper questioned her. Lily stared at the ceiling.

“Lily was watching TV,” Katrina said, “but she turned to see how Harper 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.”

Katrina Martin wanted to be an actress. She would play history’s greatest roles on the world’s most fabulous stages.

“I won’t lose her again,” Katrina said of her daughter.

Her flat tone conveyed determination. Katrina’s statement was not emotion-fueled flailing. She meant what she said.

What would she do to make sure that she did not lose Lily? What could she do?

Katrina betrayed Lily. Daughter forgave mother.

Lily Dorman fueled herself with vengeance. I could not imagine her forgiving anyone.

I
have my father’s good mind.

I pulled the car into my driveway, glanced at the dashboard clock—nine-thirty
P
.
M
.—and stared at the darkened house.

I climbed out of the car and into the cold, dry evening air. An hour’s drive from Portland and a few hundred feet of elevation made all the difference in the world. The sky was wide, clear, and spattered with stars. I gazed at the heavens and listened to the sea.

Then I heard the phone ring inside the house. The answering gizmo could do its job. I could think of nothing that required my attention before morning.

Years earlier, Katrina asked me, “Are you a spiritual person?”

She wore black pants and a white sweater, and decorated a table with split walnut shells, each one fitted with a tiny paper sail on a toothpick, as if in anticipation of a breath that would carry them out to sea. There were no owls or pussycats, no pea-green boats, nothing runcible.

“I don’t know if I’m a spiritual person,” I told her. “What are you on?”

Her question was rhetorical. “Mescaline. Don’t interrupt. Listen.”

“I don’t think ‘spiritual’ means tripping on dope,” I said.

Katrina smiled. “It doesn’t matter how you get there, Lucas.”

I frowned my displeasure.

“Are you listening to me?” she asked.

I wanted only to leave, to sit alone on the beach and stare into black night.

“You’re supposed to play your part,” she complained. “Loving you is hard work. You make it that way. You’re like the tall, dark, selfcontained stranger, so… alien.”

Katrina crowded me, and she frightened me.

“I’ve decided that I won’t love you,” she announced, spinning away, “but I do love the idea of being in love. Later, when I don’t know you anymore, I will rewrite your lines.”

She abruptly stopped twirling through the room and said, “There really isn’t anything real. Our lives are illusory, reflections in a distortion mirror.”

Katrina had foretold the story of Lily.

I pushed my hands through my hair, shivered in the chilly air, and walked into the house. I did not bother to search for a light switch. I crumpled newspaper and spread kindling on the fireplace grate. Flames quickly licked through the paper and lapped at the birch strips. I placed beech and maple limb wood on the fire, then held out my hands to the quick, intense heat.

The answering machine’s red eye winked at me. Later, I thought.

When Lily Dorman saw multiple reflections of herself in the spinning mirrors at the House of Horrors, she knew what she was.

Dozens of children, all her, and at center, an image without a head.

None of the people in Gretchen Nash’s paintings and sketches had heads. “Heads are the least attractive part of the anatomy,” she said.

“You have an honest body. People always say ‘honest face.’ I don’t read faces. I read bodies and their movement. You’re a Leo, aren’t you?”

“She talked to a woman who was leaving the building,” I told Edgar Heath. “You opened the car door for her.”

Heath shook his head. “That never happened.”

Lily Dorman sliced her hand with her father’s knife, and her mother crawled from the kitchen floor to wrap the cut with a piece of torn bedsheet. They would go to out-patient, mother told daughter.

“I didn’t want to go,” Dorman wrote. “I don’t like the smells, or the nurses’ swishing sounds when they walk, or muffled voices, or hallways where some noises echo and others do not.”

Nash wanted to wait outside the emergency room. It was not just the smells, she said.

Sound is so muted. I feel like I say something and the walls suck it up.

I grabbed the poker, jabbed once at the logs, and placed the iron rod beside me as I sat on the hearth. I sipped a Shipyard, listened to the fire’s crack and snap, and felt the warmth on my back. The last time I indulged myself with a brew and a blaze, a Volvo slowed in front of the house.

The flames illuminated the space immediately around me and cast dancing light shafts and shifting shadows the length of the room. As my eyes adjusted to the play of light and dark, I remembered the timered light. Before I could wonder why it had not switched on, I saw the woman’s form on the sofa at the far end of the room.

“It must be someday,” she said.

The bottle dropped from my hand and rolled in an arc, spewing amber foam across the floor.

“What do I call you?” she asked, her voice deeper than I remembered. “ ‘Father’ seems so formal. How about ‘Dad’?”

I studied the dark shape on the sofa surrounded by darts of light and moving shadows. I wanted to see her face, but I could not.

“You seem surprised.”

Her voice had a lilting cadence, as if she suppressed laughter.

“You had plenty of opportunity to kill me. You waited until now. What do you want?”

She hesitated. “To talk, to fill in the years.”

“I read your diary. Is there more?”

Seconds passed as Lily sat in silence. Finally she said, “You are going to die.”

“We’re all going to die. Whether I’m alive or dead, you get arrested.”

Was I a witness to craziness or cunning? I wondered. I decided on the latter. She would be armed, confident that she held the advantage. My task was to tip her into madness. My only weapon was my ability to crawl inside her mind.

“I want you to listen—”

“Not interested,” I said.

“You’re playing a head game. It won’t work.”

“I wouldn’t attempt to screw with your mind,” I lied. “I know that it would be a waste of time.”

She sat forward on the sofa, her forearms resting on her knees. Now I saw the outline of the gun in her left hand.

“I waited years,” she said.

“Terrible waste of time,” I said, testing to see how far I had to shove before I got a reaction. “Killing me kills you. The reason for you to be whole, to make your millions, to enjoy the hunt and the kill… dies with me.”

I crossed my legs, using that movement as an excuse to slide a few inches to my left. The firelight careened erratically through the room.

At random intervals, Dorman’s eyes glowed like embers across the black space, narrow mirrors of yellow-orange light. The room’s altered luminescence allowed glimpses of her expression, a study in sculpted facial lines
devoid of feeling. She was not the woman I had seen in Jaworski’s interrogation room. Lily Dorman was the woman I knew as Gretchen Nash.

“Katrina said you were a kind man,” she said, her voice low-pitched and hard, with a barely noticeable tremor.

“She knew me before I chased killers like you.”

“Not like me.”

“That’s the one trait that all of you have in common. You think you’re unique. Markham thought he was the only one. Someone should get a bunch of you together in a room and make you listen to one another.”

“You are an insufferable, odious man.”

“I’ve been in Maine less than two weeks, and that’s the second time a woman has called me insufferable. I’ll yield on that one, but I might quibble about odious.”

To liberate the unreasoning rage deep within Lily Dorman, I had to represent a threat to her. When she was young, she was trapped. There was no escape from her father, the man who terrorized and tortured her. She retreated into her mind and found solace and power there. The police who arrived at the trailer when she burned her father, cornered her. I wanted Lily Dorman to feel trapped and taunted. I wanted pure rage.

“If you expected me to sit around and reminisce with you, you were wrong.”

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“Stuart Gilman told me the same thing. This trip has been one long déjà vu. Everything happens twice, or not at all.”

I noted her quick, involuntary eye movement to the right, the first hint of disorientation that I’d seen, the only indication I had that she was vulnerable. The non sequitur was a distraction technique that I often used in hypnotic work.

“I have to admit,” I said, “I am curious about Squires and Baker. Squires was obviously expendable.”

She stood unsteadily, the gun at her side.

I needed her standing within five feet of me before she raised the gun. Driving a person to flail, and not tripping them into an act of directed aggression, required precision. It was time to allow her some slack, before I snapped the line taut.

She shrugged. One knee bent slightly, so that her body weight was no longer evenly distributed. “Amanda was a reasonably good actor, but weak.”

“Where did you find her?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Her death won’t be ruled a suicide,” I said.

“The police will charge Edgar Heath. They won’t know what else to do. It was his gun.”

“They have Baker,” I reminded her.

“For now,” she said. “Janine is… devoted.”

“All the years that you were in Oregon, there wasn’t any trace of Janine…no traffic tickets, no charge accounts, nothing.”

A slight smile creased her mouth. “Her name is Melanie Martin.”

She took a step forward, the growing fireglow illuminating her face.

“How did you survive the House of Horrors?”

“I like to think that I got out of there alive because of my determination to avoid defeat by a machine, but you didn’t intend that I die there.”

“Astute.”

“Not terribly. You had the perfect opportunity to kill me two nights ago. Will you tell me about Markham?”

Dorman shifted her weight and moved a step forward. “I made a compartment for him, welcomed him in, and
gazed into his mind’s eye. You remember his mind’s eye, don’t you?”

I did not care what she talked about; I wanted only that she talk.

“I never doubted that I could find him,” she said. “He was on the run, frightened, not wanting to die, not wanting to be caught. His sister was all he had left. I knew that he wouldn’t take a direct route. He never went anywhere in a straight line. I used a computer map program to track him. I plotted the least-direct roads, figured a range of driving times, and isolated one twelve-hour period and a ten-mile radius near Portsmouth. Then I used topographical maps to locate the campsites and vacation cottages in that area.”

Her tone remained flat. She was not a proud daughter reporting her accomplishments to Dad. I had seen psychopathic indifference hundreds of times, but always in men.

“Markham never drove at night, so I did. From the time I arrived in Portsmouth, it was two hours until I walked up the rutted driveway to a hunting camp and saw the Pennsylvania license plate on the stolen truck. Perhaps the daughter is more skilled than the father.”

“You took a great risk,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” she said, moving a step closer. “I told him the story of his escape, how he found a car with keys in the ignition and money in the glove box. He never looked at the registration.”

“You registered the car in his name,” I said.

“He didn’t believe me,” she said. “The sound of the gun was loud and satisfying in the small cabin.”

She gazed around my living room. “Probably like it will be in here,” she said, her eyes settling again on mine. “He disappointed me. I expected more blood.”

“Blood used to sicken you.”

“People change,” she said. “I feared and hated violence, and pain, and blood. I don’t anymore.”

I spread my palms on the brick hearth as if I were supporting myself, and grasped the fireplace poker. It was time to yank her hard and fast.

“A smart psychopath wouldn’t have your perverse need to be present for the kill,” I said. “She wouldn’t take the unnecessary risks that you have. She’d hire someone, or she’d make sure that I didn’t walk out of the amusement park. I’d be dead. She’d be pleased as punch. This way, everything blows up in your face.”