The Door to December Read online

  would stop him. He pursued me. No one had ever pursued me before. Not like Dylan. He was relentless. Obsessed. But not frightening in any way, not that kind of obsession. It was corny, the way he tried to impress me, the things he did. I knew it was corny at the time, but it was effective just the same. He sent flowers, more flowers, candy, more flowers, even a huge teddy bear.”

  “A teddy bear for a young woman working on her doctorate?” Haldane said.

  “I told you it was corny. He wrote poetry and signed it ‘A Secret Admirer.’ Trite, maybe, but for a woman who was twenty-six, hardly been kissed, and expected to be an old maid, it was heady stuff. He was the first person who ever made me feel . . . special.”

  “He broke down your defenses.”

  “Hell, I was swept away.”

  As she spoke of it, that special time and feeling came back to her with unnerving vividness and power. With the memories came a sadness at what might have been, a sense of lost innocence that was almost overwhelming.

  “Later, after we were married, I learned that Dylan’s passion and fervor weren’t reserved solely for me. Oh, not that there were other women. There weren’t. But he pursued every interest as ardently as he’d pursued me. His research into behavior modification, his fascination with the occult, his love of fast cars—he put as much passion and energy into all those pursuits as he had put into our courtship.”

  She remembered how she had worried about Dylan—and about the effect that his demanding personality might have on Melanie. In part, she had asked for a divorce because she had been concerned that Dylan would infect Melanie with his obsessive-compulsive behavior.

  “For instance, he built an elaborate Japanese garden behind our house, and it consumed his every spare moment for months and months. He was fanatically determined to make it perfect. Every plant and flower, every stone in every walkway had to be an ideal specimen. Every bonsai tree had to be as exquisitely proportioned and as imaginatively and harmoniously shaped as those in the books about classic Oriental landscaping. He expected me to be as caught up in that project—in every project—as he was. But I couldn’t be. Didn’t want to be. Besides, he was so fanatical about perfection in all things that just about anything you did with him sooner or later became sheer hard labor instead of fun. He was an obsessive-compulsive unlike any other I’ve ever encountered, a driven man, and though he was wildly enthusiastic about everything, he actually took no pleasure in any of it, no joy, because there simply wasn’t time for joy.”

  “Sounds like it would’ve been exhausting to be married to him,” Haldane said.

  “God, yes! Within a couple of years his excitement about things was no longer contagious because it was continuous and universal, and no sane person can live at a fever pitch all the time. He ceased to be intriguing and invigorating. He was . . . tiring. Maddening. Never a moment’s relaxation or peace. By then, I was getting my degree in psychiatry, going through analysis, which is a requirement for anyone considering psychiatric practice, and finally I realized Dylan was a disturbed man, not just enthusiastic, not just an overachiever, but a severe obsessive-compulsive. I tried to convince him to undergo analysis, but for that he had no enthusiasm at all. At last, I told him I wanted a divorce. He never gave me time to file the papers. The next day he cleaned out our joint bank accounts and left with Melanie. I should have seen it coming.”

  “Why?”

  “He was as obsessive about Melanie as he was about everything else. In his eyes, she was the most beautiful, wonderful, intelligent child who ever walked the earth, and he was always concerned that she be perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed, perfectly behaved. She was only three years old, but he was already teaching her to read, trying to teach her French. Only three. He said all learning comes easiest to the youngest. Which is true. But he wasn’t doing it for Melanie. Oh, no. Not in the least for her. He was concerned about himself, about having a perfect child, because he couldn’t bear the thought that his little girl would be anything but the very prettiest and brightest and most dazzling child anyone had ever seen.”

  They were silent.

  Rain tapped the window, drummed on the roof, gurgled through the gutters and downspouts.

  At last, softly, Haldane said, “A man like that might . . .”

  “Might experiment on his own daughter, might put her through tortures of one kind and another, if he thought he was improving her. Or if he became obsessed with a series of experiments that required a child as the subject.”

  “Jesus,” Haldane said in a tone that was part disgust, part shock, part pity.

  To her surprise, Laura began to cry.

  The detective came to the table. He pulled out a chair and sat beside her.

  She blotted her eyes with a Kleenex.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “It’ll be all right.”

  She nodded, blew her nose.

  “We’ll find her,” he said.

  “I’m afraid we won’t.”

  “We will.”

  “I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  “She’s not.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Can’t help it.”

  “I know.”

  For half an hour, while Lieutenant Haldane attended to business elsewhere in the house, Laura studied Dylan’s handwritten journal, which was actually just a log detailing how Melanie’s days had been spent. By the time the detective returned to the kitchen, Laura was numb with horror.

  “It’s true,” she said. “They’ve been here at least five and a half years, as long as he’s been keeping this journal, and Melanie hasn’t been out of the house once that I can see.”

  “And she slept every night in the sensory-deprivation chamber, like I thought?”

  “Yes. In the beginning, eight hours a night. Then eight and a half. Then nine. By the end of the first year, she was spending ten hours a night in the chamber and two hours every afternoon.”

  She closed the book. The sight of Dylan’s neat handwriting suddenly made her furious.

  “What else?” Haldane asked.

  “First thing in the morning, she spent an hour meditating.”

  “Meditating? A little girl like that? She wouldn’t even know the meaning of the word.”

  “Essentially, meditation is nothing but redirecting the mind inward, blocking out the material world, seeking peace through inner solitude. I doubt if he was teaching Melanie Zen meditation or any other brand with solid philosophical or religious overtones. He was probably just teaching her how to sit still and turn inward and think of nothing.”

  “Self-hypnosis.”

  “That’s another name for it.”

  “Why did he want her to do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She got up from the chair, nervous and agitated. She wanted to move, walk, work off the frantic energy that crackled through her. But the kitchen was too small. She was at the end of it in five steps. She started toward the hall door but stopped when she realized that she couldn’t walk through the rest of the house, past the bodies, through the blood, getting in the way of the coroner’s people and the police. She leaned against a counter, flattening her palms on the edge of it, pressing fiercely hard, as if somehow she could get rid of her nervous energy by radiating it into that ceramic surface.

  “Each day,” she said, “after meditation, Melanie spent several hours learning biofeedback techniques.”

  “While sitting in the electrified chair?”

  “I think so. But . . .”

  “But?” he persisted.

  “But I think the chair was used for more than that. I think it was also used to condition her against pain.”

  “Say that again?”

  “I think Dylan was using electric shock to teach Melanie how to blank out pain, how to endure it, ignore it the way that Eastern mystics do, the way Yogin do.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because, later, being able to tune out pain
would help her get through the longer session in the sensory-deprivation tank.”

  “So I was right about that?”

  “Yes. He gradually increased her time in the tank until, by the third year, she would sometimes remain afloat for three days. By the fourth year, four and five days at a time. Most recently . . . just last week, he put her in the tank for a seven-day session.”

  “Catheterized?”

  “Yes. And on an IV. Intravenous needle. He was feeding her by glucose drip, so she wouldn’t lose too much weight and wouldn’t dehydrate.”

  “God in Heaven.”

  Laura said nothing. She felt as though she might cry again. She was nauseated. Her eyes were grainy, and her face felt greasy. She went to the sink and turned on the cold water, which spilled over the stacks of dirty dishes. She filled her cupped hands, splashed her face. She pulled several paper towels from the wall-mounted dispenser and dried off.

  She felt no better.

  Haldane said ruminatively, “He wanted to condition her against pain so she could more easily get through the long sessions in the tank.”

  “Maybe. Can’t be sure.”

  “But what’s painful about being in the tank? I thought there was no sensation at all. That’s what you told me.”

  “There’s nothing painful about a session of normal length. But if you’re going to be kept in a tank several days, your skin’s going to wrinkle, crack. Sores are going to form.”

  “Ah.”

  “Then there’s the damn catheter. At your age, you’ve probably never been so seriously ill that you’ve been incontinent, needed a catheter.”

  “No. Never.”

  “Well, see, after a couple of days, the urethra usually becomes irritated. It hurts.”

  “I would guess it does.”

  She wanted a drink very badly. She was not much of a drinker, ordinarily. A glass of wine now and then. A rare martini. But now, she wanted to get drunk.

  He said, “So what was he up to? What was he trying to prove? Why did he put her through all this?”

  Laura shrugged.

  “You must have some idea.”

  “None at all. The journal doesn’t describe the experiments or mention a single word about his intentions. It’s just a record of her sessions with each piece of equipment, an hour-by-hour summary of each of her days here.”

  “You saw the papers in his office, scattered all over the floor. They must be more detailed than the journal. There’ll be more to be learned from them.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ve glanced at a few, but I couldn’t make much sense of them. Lots of technical language, psychological jargon. Greek to me. If I have them photocopied, have the copies boxed up and sent to you in a couple of days, would you mind going through them, seeing if you can put them in order and if you can learn anything from them?”

  She hesitated. “I . . . I don’t know. I got more than half sick just going through the journal.”

  “Don’t you want to know what he did to Melanie? If we find her, you’ll have to know. Otherwise you won’t have much chance of dealing with whatever psychological trauma she’s suffering from.”

  It was true. To provide the proper treatment, she would have to descend into her daughter’s nightmare and make it her own.

  “Besides,” Haldane said, “there might be clues in those papers, things that’ll help us determine who he was working with, who might have killed him. If we can figure that out, we might also figure out who has Melanie now. If you go through your husband’s papers, you might discover the one bit of information that’ll help us find your little girl.”

  “All right,” she said wearily. “When you’ve got it boxed, have the stuff sent to my house.”

  “I know it won’t be easy.”

  “Damned right.”

  “I want to know who financed the torture of a little girl in the name of research,” he said in a tone of voice that seemed, to Laura, to be exceptionally hard and vengeful for an impartial officer of the law. “I want to know real bad.”

  He was about to say something else, but he was interrupted by a uniformed officer who entered from the hall. “Lieutenant?”

  “What is it, Phil?”

  “You’re looking for a little girl in all this, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Phil said, “Well, they found one.”

  Laura’s heart seemed to clench as tightly as a fist: a knot of pain in her breast. An urgent question formed in her mind, but she was unable to give voice to it because her throat seemed to have swollen shut.

  “How old?” Haldane asked.

  That wasn’t the question Laura wanted him to ask.

  “Eight or nine, they figure,” Phil said.

  “Get a description?” Haldane asked.

  That wasn’t the right question, either.

  “Auburn hair. Green eyes,” the patrolman said.

  Both men turned to Laura. She knew they were staring at her own auburn hair and green eyes.

  She tried to speak. Still mute.

  “Alive?” Haldane asked.

  That was the question that Laura could not bring herself to ask.

  “Yeah,” the uniformed man said. “A black-and-white team found her seven blocks from here.”

  Laura’s throat opened, and her tongue stopped cleaving to the roof of her mouth. “Alive?” she said, afraid to believe it.

  The uniformed officer nodded. “Yeah. I already said. Alive.”

  “When?” Haldane asked.

  “About ninety minutes ago.”

  His face coloring with anger, Haldane said, “Nobody told me, damn it.”

  “They were just on a routine patrol when they spotted her,” Phil said. “They didn’t know she might have a connection to this case. Not till just a few minutes ago.”

  “Where is she?” Laura demanded.

  “Valley Medical.”

  “The hospital?” Her clenched heart began to pound like a fist against her rib cage. “What’s wrong with her? Is she hurt? How badly?”

  “Not hurt,” the officer said. “Way I get it, they found her wandering in the street, uh, naked, in a daze.”

  “Naked,” Laura said weakly. The fear of child molesters came back to hit her as hard as a hammer blow. She leaned against the counter and gripped the edge of it with both hands, striving not to crumple to the floor. Holding herself up, trying to draw a deep breath, able to get nothing but shallow draughts of air, she said, “Naked?”

  “And all confused, unable to talk,” Phil said. “They thought she was in shock or maybe drugged, so they rushed her to Valley Medical.”

  Haldane took Laura’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “But . . .”

  “What’s wrong?”

  She licked her lips. “What if it’s not Melanie? I don’t want to get my hopes up and then—”

  “It’s her,” he said. “We lost a nine-year-old girl here, and they found a nine-year-old girl seven blocks away. It’s not likely to be a coincidence.”

  “But what if . . .”

  “Doctor McCaffrey, what’s wrong?”

  “What if this isn’t the end of the nightmare?”

  “Huh?”

  “What if it’s only the beginning?”

  “Are you asking me if I think that . . . after six years of this torture . . .”

  “Do you think she could possibly be a normal little girl anymore,” Laura said thickly.

  “Don’t expect the worst. There’s always reason to hope. You won’t know for sure until you see her, talk to her.”

  She shook her head adamantly. “No. Can’t be normal. Not after what her father did to her. Not after years of forced isolation. She’s got to be a very sick little girl, deeply disturbed. There’s not a chance in a million she’ll be normal.”

  “No,” he said gently, apparently sensing that empty reassurances would only anger her. “No, she won’t be a well-balanced, healthy little girl. She’ll be lost, si
ck, frightened, maybe withdrawn into her own world, maybe beyond reach, maybe forever. But there’s one thing you mustn’t forget.”

  Laura met his eyes. “What’s that?”

  “She needs you.”

  Laura nodded.

  They left the blood-spattered house.

  Rain lashed the night, and like the crack of a whip, thunder broke across the sky.

  Haldane put her in an unmarked sedan. He clipped a detachable emergency beacon to the edge of the car roof. They drove to Valley Medical with the light flashing and the siren wailing and the tires kicking up water with a hissing sound that made it seem as if the world itself were deflating.

  chapter six

  The emergency room doctor was Richard Pantangello. He was young, with thick brown hair and a neatly trimmed red-brown beard. He met Laura and Haldane at the admitting desk and led them to the girl’s room.

  The corridors were deserted, except for a few nurses gliding about like ghosts. The hospital was preternaturally silent at 4:10 in the morning.

  As they walked, Dr. Pantangello spoke in a soft voice, almost a whisper. “She had no fractures, no lacerations or abrasions. One contusion, a bruise on the right arm, directly over the vein. From the look of it, I’d say it was an IV-drip needle that wasn’t inserted skillfully enough.”

  “She was in a daze?” Haldane asked.

  “Not exactly a daze,” Pantangello said. “No confusion, really. She was more like someone in a trance. No sign of any head injury, though she was either unable or unwilling to speak from the moment they brought her in.”

  Matching the physician’s quiet tone but unable to keep the anxiety out of her voice, Laura said, “What about . . . rape?”

  “I couldn’t find any indication that she’d been abused.”

  They rounded a corner and stopped in front of Room 256. The door was closed.

  “She’s in there,” Dr. Pantangello said, jamming his hands in the pockets of his white lab coat.

  Laura was still considering the way in which Pantangello had phrased his answer to her question about rape. “You found no indications of abuse, but that isn’t the same as saying she wasn’t raped.”