“The police will be here soon,” I said.
“Yes, they will,” Heath said. “But we have a while before that time comes. Can you listen?”
I nodded wordlessly.
“You must already realize this by now,” he went on. “That I brought you here under false pretenses. It was my idea, the story about participating in a couples’ retreat.”
Suddenly, I felt excruciatingly hot, my entire body bathed in a fine layer of sweat. My heart slammed in my chest, and I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Not that I expected the doctor to take the ruse to such elaborate extremes,” he continued. “But then again, he’s always been a bit on the theatrical side.”
Something very bad was about to happen in this room. I understood that now. And there was no way I could stop it.
“We’re going to talk,” Heath said. “The three of us, right now.”
My head had begun to feel buzzy, and I couldn’t shut out the images of Glenys’s dead, bloated face. A rusty chain slung over a branch. An empty three-room apartment. A lawn strewn with dead birds. I breathed deeply, willing my body to settle.
Heath sighed. “I needed you here with me, Daphne. I was scared if you knew what was really going on, you would refuse to come. So, the doctor arranged the week. He arranged the McAdams and Dr. Teague. The economy up here has been squeezed for years. With the promise of cash, it wasn’t that hard to convince a few locals to help us out.”
He shifted, easily. Too easily. His knee didn’t look like it was bothering him any longer, as a matter of fact.
“I wanted us, the four of us—you, me, Cerny, and Cecelia—to come together so the truth could finally come out. I’ve never told you the truth about myself, but I would like to tell you now, if you want. Would you like to hear the truth, Daphne?”
“Of course,” I said. I was trembling, and he saw it and smiled.
Strange, what a relief it was to finally say those words, even though I had spent our entire relationship avoiding both his truth and mine. Yes, I did want to know the truth—even though I was certain that, when Heath was finished telling me, the world would look like an entirely different place.
Friday, October 19
Night
“I’m supposed to just start talking?”
“That’s the way it’s always worked, Heath. Or have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t forgotten anything. And it feels strange for you to call me that.”
“Would you prefer Sam?”
“Either way.”
“All right, then. Sam. Why don’t you start at the point when you left us? What was it like for you during those years on your own?”
“Different, I guess. For a lot of reasons. Mainly all the unsupervised time. The freedom. I was on my own. Homeless, essentially. Drifting around Georgia, Florida for a while. Louisiana. Working odd jobs, painting crews, ditch digging. Sleeping in alleys, on sidewalks. In cars I could break into.”
“Must have been a heady feeling. Finally being free to do what you wanted.”
“I don’t know if heady’s the word I’d use. I was free, yeah. But I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do with that freedom. Of course, I wanted to drink and smoke weed. Meet girls, and . . .”
“And what?”
(silence)
“What did you want to do with those girls?”
“You tell me, Doctor.”
“How could I possibly know that?”
“All the times we talked? All the things I told you? The birds.”
“That was a long time ago, Sam. You were a boy then.”
“Boys grow into men.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean the fantasies never went away. They never . . . lessened in their intensity. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Playing them out in my mind every day. Dreaming about them every night.”
“So when did the thoughts become actions, Heath? Tell me about that.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Friday, October 19
Afternoon
“What we did,” Dr. Cerny said. “What happened to Heath . . . it was all because of my ego. My need to be recognized—”
The doctor stopped, as if he couldn’t continue. I wondered if it was a real reaction to everything that was happening, or something put on just for effect. Bastard, I thought. He wasn’t remorseful. He had brought this all on himself—and I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t killed Glenys as well. It certainly was plausible.
Cerny had resumed talking. “From my days as a student, I’d always been fascinated by one area of psychiatry—an understudied, misunderstood, popularly maligned personality disorder. Doctors said there was no cure for it. No treatment and no hope of improvement. But there was no research to back up those claims. No hard, incontrovertible data.”
He folded his hands.
“In an absence of data, we experiment. And for experiments we need test subjects. But certainly no parents were willing to offer up their children. No fit parents, anyway.”
Heath was sitting very still.
The doctor continued. “There were studies, few and far between, MRIs that revealed anatomical differences in the subgenual cortex and the paralimbic system. Underfunctioning of the amygdala and so on. But they’ve never been adequately tested on children suspected of having the disorder.”
The doctor’s words flowed around me like a riptide. I gripped the nearby edge of the bookshelves, as if that could keep me from being swept away.
“I knew, if I found the right subject, if I was allowed to create the perfectly modulated test environment, I could conduct the research we needed to truly understand the disorder. It would involve intricate, meticulous planning. Careful monitoring and the utmost discretion, allowing a level of experimental observation and behavior modification that I’d never undertaken. I realized”—his eyes flashed—“that a study of groundbreaking significance was within reach. One that could revolutionize a formerly dark area of psychiatry.”
I glanced at Heath.
“I moved to Atlanta after receiving my degree and opened a practice there with a woman I’d met in school, Cecelia. We ran it for many years—but she knew where my interest truly lay, and eventually, together, we began the search for our first subject.”
Silence settled over the room. I looked at Heath and cleared my throat. “You still haven’t said what disorder you’re talking about.” He and Heath each shifted in their seats.
Dr. Cerny spoke. “A nonspecified disorder not officially listed in the DSM—commonly known as psychopathic disorder.”
Something changed in the room, something in the air—as if the barometric pressure had dipped dramatically and everything had to reset. After a second or two, I laughed, but it sounded hollow. Strange. “Heath’s not a psychopath,” I said.
No one contradicted me. No one said a word.
“I know him,” I went on. “He’s a good man. Kind. Considerate. And he cares about me.”
Cerny stood. “Psychopaths aren’t what you see in the movies, Daphne. They’re not sadistic killers or violent criminals. They are simply devoid of some of the human emotions we consider basic and, dare I say, essential. Emotions like empathy, shame. Remorse and fear.”
I glanced at Heath. He was looking down at his clasped hands.
“Without these emotions, they are untethered by normal connections to humanity. This enables them to pursue their own ends without being restrained by inconvenient feelings. The threat of punishment means nothing to these people. The only thing that motivates them is reward. And they’ll do anything to gain it.”
“That isn’t Heath,” I said. “That isn’t him at all.”
Once again, silence.
Then, in the calmest, most level way imaginable, Heath replied, “It is me.”
I fixed him with a defiant stare. “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s not. Fuck you. Fuck both of you.”
Heath stood and moved to me, and I slapped him, hard, once across the face. His head snapped away, then swiveled back like I hadn’t even struck him. When he looked at me, he seemed so sad. There was a bright-red spot where I’d hit him.