False Memory Read online

  lovely in too little light. With darkness, a panic attack might degenerate into something worse, even into gibbering madness.

  Although the rain had stopped, an ocean of black thunderheads remained overhead, from horizon to horizon, and a premature twilight drowned the day.

  True twilight wasn’t far off, either. When it arrived, the cloud-throttled sky would seem as black as night.

  Already, fat night crawlers squirmed out of the lawn, onto the walkway. Snails had come forth, too, oozing silvery trails behind them.

  A fecund odor arose from the wet grass, from the mulch and the rotting leaves in the flower beds, from the darkly glistening shrubbery, and from the dripping trees.

  In the gloaming, Martie was uneasily aware of the fertile life to which the sun was forbidding but to which the night offered hospitality. She was aware, too, that an awful centipedal part of herself shared an enthusiasm for the night with all the wriggling-creeping-crawling-slithering life that came out of hiding between dusk and dawn. The squirming she felt within herself was not just fear; it was a dreadful hunger, a need, an urge that she dared not contemplate.

  Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, and make a safe house, make a refuge in which nothing remains that might be dangerous in violent hands.

  New Life was staffed primarily by nurses and therapists, but a medical doctor was on site from six o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. The current shift was covered by Dr. Henry Donklin, whom Dusty had first met during Skeet’s previous course of treatment at the clinic.

  With curly white hair, with baby-pink skin remarkably smooth and supple for his age, Dr. Donklin had the cherubic good looks of a successful televangelist, although he was without the concomitant oiliness that suggested an easy slide into damnation for many of those electronic preachers.

  After closing his private practice, Dr. Donklin had discovered that retirement was hardly more appealing than death. He had taken this position at New Life because the work was worthwhile even if not challenging and, in his words, “saves me from the stifling purgatory of endless golf and the living hell of shuffleboard.”

  Donklin gripped Skeet’s left hand, and even in his sleep, the kid weakly returned the squeeze. The physician successfully repeated the test with Skeet’s right hand.

  “No obvious signs of paralysis, no stertorous breathing,” Donklin said, “no puffing of the cheeks on expiration.”

  “Pupils are equally dilated,” Tom Wong noted.

  After checking the eyes himself, Donklin continued his brisk examination. “Skin isn’t clammy, normal surface temperature. I’d be surprised if this is apoplectic coma. Not hemorrhage, embolism, or thrombosis. But we’ll revisit that possibility and transfer him to a hospital if we can’t identify the problem quickly.”

  Dusty allowed himself a measure of optimism.

  Valet stood in a corner, head raised, intently watching the proceedings—perhaps alert for a return or reoccurrence of whatever had raised his hackles and had driven him from the room a short while ago.

  At the doctor’s direction, Tom prepared to catheterize Skeet and obtain a urine sample.

  After leaning close to his unconscious patient, Donklin said, “He doesn’t have sweet breath, but we’ll want to check the urine for albumin and sugar.”

  “He’s not diabetic,” Dusty said.

  “Doesn’t look like uremic coma, either,” the physician observed. “He’d have a hard, fast pulse. Elevated blood pressure. None of the symptoms here.”

  “Could he be just sleeping?” Dusty asked.

  “Sleep this deep,” Henry Donklin said, “you need a wicked witch casting a spell or maybe a bite from Snow White’s apple.”

  “The thing is—I got a little frustrated with him, the way he was behaving, and I told him to just go to sleep, said it sort of sharply, and the moment I said it, he zonked out.”

  Donklin’s expression was so dry that his face looked as if it needed to be dusted. “Are you telling me you’re a witch?”

  “Still a housepainter.”

  Because he didn’t believe that apoplexy was involved, Donklin risked the application of a restorative; however, a whiff of ammonium carbonate—smelling salts—failed to revive Skeet.

  “If he’s just sleeping,” the physician said, “then he must be a descendant of Rip Van Winkle.”

  Because the trash container held only the box of cutlery and because its wheels were large, Martie was able to drag it up the short flight of stairs onto the back porch with little difficulty. From inside the well-taped box, through the walls of the can, came the angry music of knives ringing against one another.

  She had intended to roll the container inside. Now she realized that she would be bringing the knives into the house again.

  Hands locked on the handle of the trash can, she was frozen by indecision.

  Ridding her home of all potential weapons must be priority one. Before full darkness descended. Before she surrendered more control of herself to the primitive within.

  Into her stillness came a greater storm of fear, rattling all the doors and windows of her soul.

  Move, move, move.

  She left the back door standing open and parked the wheeled trash can on the porch, at the threshold, where it was near enough to be convenient. She removed the lid and put it aside on the porch floor.

  In the kitchen once more, she pulled open a cabinet drawer and scanned the gleaming contents: flatware. Salad forks. Dinner forks. Dinner knives. Butter knives. Also ten steak knives with wooden handles.

  She didn’t touch the dangerous items. Instead, she carefully removed the safer pieces—tablespoons, teaspoons, coffee spoons—and placed them on the counter. Then she removed the drawer from the cabinet, carried it to the open door, and upended it.

  Along with a set of plastic drawer dividers, a steely cascade of forks and knives clinked and jingled into the trash can. The marrow in Martie’s bones rang in sympathy with the icy sound.

  She put the drawer on the kitchen floor, in a corner, out of her way. She didn’t have time to return the salvaged spoons to it and slide it back into the cabinet.

  The false twilight was bleeding into true twilight. Through the open door, she could hear the first rough songs of the little winter toads that ventured forth only at night.

  Another drawer. Miscellaneous culinary tools and gadgets. A bottle opener. A potato peeler. A lemon-peel shaver. A wicked-looking spikelike meat thermometer. A small meat-tenderizing hammer. A corkscrew. Miniature yellow-plastic ears of corn with two sharp pins protruding from one end, which could be jammed into a cob to make fresh corn easier to eat.

  She was astonished by the number and variety of common household items that could also serve as weapons. On his way to an inquisition, any torturer would feel well prepared if his kit contained nothing more than the items now before Martie’s eyes.

  The drawer also contained large plastic clips for bags of potato chips, measuring spoons, measuring cups, a melon scoop, a few rubber spatulas, wire whisks, and other items that didn’t look as if they would be lethal even in the possession of the cleverest of homicidal sociopaths.

  Hesitantly, she reached into the drawer, intending to sort the dangerous items from the harmless things, but at once she snatched her hand back. She wasn’t willing to trust herself with the task.

  “This is crazy, this is totally nuts,” she said, and her voice was so torqued by fear and by despair that she barely recognized it as her own.

  She dumped the entire collection of gadgets into the trash can. She put the second empty drawer atop the first, in the corner.

  Dusty, where the hell are you? I need you. I need you. Come home, please, come home.

  Because she had to keep moving to avoid being paralyzed by fear, she found the courage to open a third drawer. Several big serving forks. Meat forks. An electric carving knife.

  Outside, the shrill singing of toads in the wet twilight.

  22

&n
bsp; Martie Rhodes, struggling to stave off total panic, pushed by obsession, pulled by compulsion, moved through a kitchen that now seemed no less filled with mortal threats than a battlefield torn by clashing armies.

  She found a rolling pin in a drawer near the ovens. You could bash in someone’s face with a rolling pin, smash his nose, split his lips, club and club and club him until you fractured his skull, until you left him on the floor, gazing sightlessly at you, with starburst hemorrhages in both his eyes….

  Although no potential victim was present, and although she knew she was incapable of bludgeoning anyone, Martie nonetheless had to talk herself into plucking the rolling pin from the drawer. “Get it, come on, for God’s sake, get it, get it out of here, get rid of it.”

  Halfway to the trash can, she dropped the pin. It made a hard, sickening sound when it struck the floor.

  She couldn’t immediately summon the nerve to pick up the pin again. She kicked it, and it rolled all the way to the threshold of the open door.

  With the rain, the last of the wind had drained out of the day, but the twilight exhaled a cold draft across the porch and through the kitchen door. Hoping the chilly air would clear her head, she took deep breaths, shuddering with each.

  She gazed down at the rolling pin, which lay at her feet. All she had to do was snatch up the damn thing and drop it into the can beyond the threshold. It wouldn’t be in her hand more than a second or two.

  Alone, she couldn’t harm anyone. And even if she was seized by a self-destructive impulse, a rolling pin wasn’t the ideal weapon with which to commit hara-kiri, although it was better than a rubber spatula.

  With that little joke, she humiliated herself into plucking the rolling pin off the floor and dropping it in the can.

  When she searched the next drawer, she found an array of tools and devices that for the most part didn’t alarm her. A flour sifter. An egg timer. A garlic press. A basting brush. A colander. A juice strainer. A lettuce dryer.

  Mortar and pestle. No good. The mortar was about the size of a baseball, carved out of a chunk of solid granite. You could brain someone with it. Step up behind him and swing it down hard, in a savage arc, cave in his skull.

  The mortar had to go, right away, now, before Dusty came home or before some unwary neighbor rang the doorbell.

  The pestle seemed harmless, but the two items composed a set, so she took both to the trash can. The granite mortar was cold in her cupped hand. Even after she threw it away, the memory of its coolness and satisfying heft tantalized her, and she knew that she had been right to dispose of it.

  As she was pulling open another drawer, the telephone rang. She answered it hopefully: “Dusty?”

  “It’s me,” Susan Jagger said.

  “Oh.” Her heart withered with disappointment. She tried not to let her distress color her voice. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Are you all right, Martie?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You sound funny.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You sound out of breath.”

  “I was just doing some heavy lifting.”

  “Something is wrong.”

  “Nothing is wrong. Don’t grind me, Sooz. I’ve got a mother for that. What’s up?”

  Martie wanted to get off the phone. She had so much to do. So many kitchen drawers and cupboards had not yet been searched. And dangerous items, potential weapons, were in other rooms, as well. Instruments of death were scattered throughout the house, and she needed to find them all, dispose of every last one.

  “This is a little embarrassing,” Susan said.

  “What is?”

  “I’m not paranoid, Martie.”

  “I know you’re not.”

  “He does come here sometimes, you know, sometimes at night when I’m sleeping.”

  “Eric.”

  “It must be him. All right, I know, he doesn’t have a key, and the doors and windows are all locked, there’s no way in, but it’s got to be him.”

  Martie opened one of the drawers near the telephone. Among other things, it contained the pair of scissors that she had not been able to touch earlier, when she had wanted to cut the strapping tape.

  Susan said, “You asked me how I know when he’s been here, were things out of order, the smell of his cologne on the air, anything like that.”

  The handles of the scissors were coated in black rubber to provide a sure grip.

  “But it’s a lot worse than cologne, Martie, it’s creepy…and embarrassing.”

  The steel blades were as polished as mirrors on the outside, with a dull brushed finish on the inner cutting surfaces.

  “Martie?”

  “Yeah, I heard.” She was pressing the phone so tightly to her head that her ear hurt. “So tell me the creepy thing.”

  “How I know he’s been here, he leaves his…his stuff.”

  One of the blades was straight and sharp. The other had teeth. Both were wickedly pointed.

  Martie struggled to keep track of the conversation, because her mind’s eye was suddenly filled with bright flashing images of the scissors in motion, slashing and stabbing, gouging and tearing. “His stuff?”

  “You know.”

  “No.”

  “His stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  Engraved in one blade, just above the screwhead pivot, was the word Klick, which was probably the name of the manufacturer, although it resonated in a strange way with Martie, as if it were a magical word with secret power, mysterious and full of grave meaning.

  Susan said, “His stuff, his…spunk.”

  For a moment, Martie couldn’t make sense of the word spunk, simply couldn’t connect with it, couldn’t process it, as though it were a nonsense word invented by someone talking in tongues. Her mind was so preoccupied with the sight of the scissors lying in the drawer that she couldn’t concentrate on Susan.

  “Martie?”

  “Spunk,” Martie said, closing her eyes, striving to push all thoughts of the scissors out of her mind, trying to focus on the conversation with Susan.

  “Semen,” Susan clarified.

  “His stuff.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s how you know he’s been there?”

  “It’s impossible but it happens.”

  “Semen.”

  “Yes.”

  Klick.

  The sound of snipping scissors: klick-klick. But Martie wasn’t touching the scissors. Although her eyes were closed, she knew the shears were still in the drawer, because there was nowhere else they possibly could be. Klick-klick.

  “I’m scared, Martie.”

  Me too. Dear God, me too.

  Martie’s left hand was clenched around the phone, and her right hand hung at her side, empty. The scissors couldn’t operate under their own power, and yet: klick-klick.

  “I’m scared,” Susan repeated.

  If Martie hadn’t been shaken by fear and struggling determinedly to conceal her anxiety from Susan, if she’d been able to concentrate better, perhaps she wouldn’t have found Susan’s claim to be bizarre. In her current condition, however, each turn of the conversation led her deeper into confusion. “You said he…leaves it? Where?”

  “Well…in me, you know.”

  To prove to herself that her right hand was empty, that the scissors weren’t in it, Martie brought it to her chest, pressed it over her pounding heart. Klick-klick.

  “In you,” Martie said. She was aware that Susan was making truly astonishing statements with shocking implications and terrible potential consequences, but she wasn’t able to bring her mind to bear exclusively on her friend, not with that infernal klick-klick, klick-klick, klick-klick.

  “I sleep in panties and a T-shirt,” Susan said.

  “Me too,” Martie said inanely.

  “Sometimes I wake up, and in my panties there’s this…this warm stickiness, you know.”

  Klick-klick. The sound must be imaginary. Martie wanted to ope
n her eyes just to confirm that the scissors were, indeed, in the drawer, but she would be entirely lost if she looked at them again, so she kept her eyes shut.

  Susan said, “But I don’t understand how. It’s nuts, you know? I mean …how?”

  “You wake up?”

  “And I have to change underwear.”

  “You’re sure that’s what it is? The stuff.”

  “It’s disgusting. I feel dirty, used. Sometimes I have to shower, I just have to.”

  Klick-klick. Martie’s heart was racing already, and she sensed that the sight of the gleaming blades would plunge her into a full-fledged panic attack far worse than anything that she had experienced previously. Klick-klick-klick.

  “But, Sooz, good God, you mean he makes love to you—”

  “There’s no love involved.”

  “—he does you—”

  “Rapes me. He’s still my husband, we’re just separated, I know, but it’s rape.”

  “—but you don’t wake up during it?”

  “You’ve got to believe me.”

  “All right, of course, honey, I believe you. But—”

  “Maybe I’m drugged somehow.”

  “When would Eric be able to slip the drugs to you?”

  “I don’t know. All right, yeah, it’s crazy. Totally whacked, paranoid. But it’s happening.”

  Klick-klick.

  Without opening her eyes, Martie pushed the drawer shut.

  “When you wake up,” she said shakily, “you’ve got your underwear on again.”

  “Yes.”

  Opening her eyes, staring at her right hand, which was knotted around the drawer pull, Martie said, “So he comes in, undresses you, rapes you. And then before he goes, he puts your T-shirt and panties on you again. Why?”

  “So maybe I won’t realize he’s been here.”

  “But there’s his stuff.”

  “Nothing else has that same smell.”

  “Sooz—”