Authors: Keith Ablow

Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Psychological

Denial (32 page)

Kathy hadn't moved. She was lying on her side, her legs drawn up near her stomach, her hands still tied above her head. She looked as if she were praying. I reached down and touched her furrowed brow. Then I draped the blanket over her and tucked it around her shoulders and knees.

I leaned over, untied the belt binding her wrists to the headboard and picked her up in my arms. Her head fell against my neck. I could feel her warm breath. I carried her out to the car and laid her across the back seat. Then I knotted the belt around her wrists again.

I got in the driver's seat and headed off the beach, across the causeway and onto 1A south, back toward Rowley. It took me only twenty minutes to reach the center of town, but at least as long to snake my way through the back roads, into pristine woods that sheltered the Austin Grate Clinic, a hundred-year-old psychiatric hospital owned by its medical director, Matt Hollander.

Hollander and I had met when I was an intern at Tufts. He was finishing his last year of residency and had volunteered to mentor a new trainee. I was taken with him immediately. He was bald and overweight to the point of being very nearly round. He looked like Humpty Dumpty. Every movement taxed him. But his mind idled at speeds that made mine overheat.

"I'd get in shape, but it's ruin me," he told me, gobbling fries one day in the hospital cafeteria. "Something in the fat greases the wheels upstairs. I know it's true, even if I can't prove it, which I probably could if I had the time." More fries. "But why go to the trouble? We all know it. That's why Santa's fat, and the Grinch is thin. Reverse it, the legend falls on its face. Of its own weight, if you will." A gulp of vanilla shake. "Think about Churchill versus Hitler. The Buddha. Minnesota
Fats
. Ben Franklin. Pavarotti." Oreos. "I defy you to remember the last time you saw a fat bum. Whereas, your killers, derelicts, thieves — nearly every one of them, thin as a rail."

Since I'd finished residency, Hollander and I had stayed close. While I opened and closed my practice, he used his family fortune to acquire a half-dozen first-rate psychiatric facilities. He'd asked me more than once if I would run the Secure Care Program at Austin Grate, a twenty-five bed locked unit for dangerous patients. He'd even baited me with one of two majestic homes on the hospital grounds as my private residence. But I'd never taken him up on the offer.

"Not enough grit in Rowley for you," he concluded after one of my refusals. "You like walking mean streets."

"I'd make a lousy monk," I said.

He shook his head. "You make a damned fine monk. You just picked a different church. They're graced to have you."

I hadn't quite believed him then. And I believed him less now.

I cut my headlights as I pulled into his circular drive. I left the car running and walked up the stairs to his door. Before I could drop the bulbous brass knocker, the porch light went on. Then the door swung open.

Hollander filled the doorway. He was wearing a white button-down that could have doubled as a spinnaker. He clapped his hands. "Clevenger!" he bellowed. "A friend at my door!"

I couldn’t keep myself in control. My chin quivered, and my eyes filled up.

"What the fuck? What happened to you?" He engulfed me, stroking my head as I wept.

He must have been able to see into the Rover, because moments later he gently backed away and lumbered down the stairs. I watched his shoulder rise and fall with labored breaths as he peered through the passenger window. Then, with uncharacteristic grace, he twirled around and pointed at me. "Get her inside."

He turned off the porch light, and I carried Kathy into the living room and laid her on the couch. Hollander poured himself into a huge, tapestried armchair. "Start," he puffed. "Omit no detail."

I paced the room, hemorrhaging my story. I told him what Kathy had done to Sarah and Monique and Michael. I told him she'd taken Rachel from me. I told him about Blaire and about Kathy's father and about Lucas. And I confessed that I'd been blind to Kathy's pain, powerful enough to spawn murderous rage and envy.

"You loved this dancer, Rachel," he said, his eyes tracking me as I walked back and forth in front of him.

"Yes. I loved her."

He nodded at Kathy. "The panic button on the wall over there will bring a cop to my front door in under two minutes." He paused. "Unless, of course, you were planning to dig a hole in my woods."

I stopped pacing. "If I turn her over to the police, she won't stand a chance. Nobody in this state can remember when an insanity defense worked."

"Nineteen eighty-one.
Commonwealth v. Barker
."

"Sixteen years ago." I shook my head.

"Barker's the one that got away, if you ask the governor. They wanted to electrocute him."

"Kathy didn't choose to be a monster, Matt. She wasn't
born
a killer."

"In the eyes of the law, it doesn't much matter."

"I want her treated," I said.

"Is that what your Rachel would have wanted? To see her killer healed?"

"I think so," I said. "I don't think I would have wanted it myself before I met her."

"She must have been extraordinary."

My throat tightened, but I forced my words through it. "I need Kathy admitted to Secure Care."

"No chance. No jury will let it happen."

"We could make it happen. Right now."

"Oh... I see. I thought we might be headed that way." He folded his hands over his girth. "You know, Frank, you got real
balls
." He breathed like a bellows. "You're talking about several rather serious offenses. There's kidnapping, from her perspective; harboring a fugitive, from the Commonwealth's. And those are just the appetizers."

I looked at him. His face was set with a mixture of contempt and resolve. I worried he might turn Kathy in himself. "I'm sorry, Matt," I said. "I didn't know where else to go. I had no business asking you to... I'll figure something." I walked toward Kathy and knelt to pick her up.

"So we sure as hell couldn’t use her real name," he went on.

I stopped and turned to him.

"I don't want the long arm of the law clawing at my rectum. I'd have to admit her under a pseudonym to my private service. Make up a compelling clinical history. No access by mail or phones. No visitors." He paused. "Not even you."

I nodded. Then the gravity of the conspiracy settled on me. "You're right, you know. We could both end up wearing stripes. Obstruction of justice, contempt of—"

"Contempt?" He leaned slightly forward. "No court could guess the depth of my contempt for this miserable civilization. I'd happily devour a judge if I could find a tender one."

I couldn't help smiling.

"Won't anyone miss her? Here today, gone tomorrow?"

"Party line: We broke up. She took off. I've got somebody who can dummy up a one-way airline booking out of the country, canceled ticket and all."

"This Lucas character will make an issue of her."

"Absolutely. He'll probably make her the mainstay of his defense. The state doesn't have a perfect case, anyhow. I wouldn't be surprised if he walks." I looked down and shook my head.

"What?"

"I'm not sure I could bring myself to try to help a man like him."

"That's why it's Christ on the cross, not you. Some people can only go to God to be healed. You and I are human. We have limits. That's why we need God, too."

I was too stressed to dwell on Hollander's comment just then, but it was something that would come back to me again and again over the years, whenever I felt powerless and needed to forgive myself.

Hollander sighed. "You know, if you press that panic button, some crackerjack attorney might be able to get Kathy off on a technicality. Best shysters in the world, right here in Boston. This way, she'll be locked up indefinitely. Years. Maybe decades. Might eventually have to spirit her off to my facility in the Virgin Islands. Or Puerto Rico. Who knows? Not to mention the problem of what to do with her when and if she gets well." He stared at me. "You sure you're comfortable playing judge and jury?"

I thought about that. "Why the hell not?" I said. "They seem to be."

* * *

We gave Kathy enough sedatives to keep her under until morning. I slept next to her, in a towering four-poster bed in one of Hollander's guest rooms. When I drifted off, I was on my back, rigid, as far to the edge of the mattress as I could get without tumbling off. But when I woke with the sun, just after six, I was on my side spooned against her. For a moment I forgot where we were and what had happened. I reached to touch her hand, and the feel of the leather binding her wrists reminded me. And yet, cradled there with her, I felt on balance more sadness than horror, as much pity as rage, and even stole a few deep breaths at the nape of her neck.

She turned her face towards mine. "Where are we," she asked.

"Someplace safe," I said.

She closed her eyes and put her head back down on the pillow.

"Sorry it couldn't have been safer, sooner," I whispered.

* * *

Hollander woke me so I could leave before his attendants came for Kathy. We agreed I wouldn't contact him for at least a month.

I drove home, but sat in the driveway, feeling like home was the wrong place to be. I wanted to be closer to memories of Rachel.

I headed to Revere, pulled into the Lynx Club lot and went inside.

The Lynx Club by day is darker than by night. The runway lights are dormant. Music flows from two, not ten, speakers. The girls are a little older and not quite as pretty, and the drinks are stronger.

I walked past two men in suits, wolfing the breakfast special, to a seat in the corner of the room. Elton John's ‘Candle in the Wind’ had started to play, and a brunette in a thong had appeared on stage. When the waitress came by, I ordered a screwdriver, but sipped it just once.

A contorted man in a wheelchair was the only customer on Pervert’ Row. He took out his wallet as the dancer began her routine and floated a dollar bill toward her. She lifted her long, slender leg by curved toes, like a ballerina, and pulled aside the cloth triangle over her crotch. Then he sighed and smiled and looked over at me, and I smiled back.

We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war. But a very few people, who we may as well call angels, appear unpredictably in our lives and help us stop running from ourselves. Sitting there at the Lynx Club, raw and alone, I at least knew that I had been lucky enough to find one.

—
THE END
—

Table of Contents

Title page

Chapter 1