Black Out_A Novel

21

During the awkward dinner the four of us shared on Frank’s first night home, my mother doted, Marlowe stared at the table, and I watched Frank with a kind of numb horror as he piled food onto his plate and ate with gusto.

“We’re a real family now,” my mother said as she sat beside Frank around the cramped Formica table in our trailer.

“That’s right,” Frank said, patting my mother on the arm. She nuzzled up to him like a house cat.

I was too depressed even to be a smart-ass about it. All I could do was stare at Frank’s hands and think about Janet Parker’s mournful wailing, about the way her daughter had died. I’d never once believed that Frank was innocent. His trial had hinged on the charges against the investigating officer, the suppression of evidence that officer claimed to have found at Frank’s house, and the testimony of the ophthalmologist who the prosecutor claimed had been paid off. Basically, Frank got lucky. And the hands he’d used to murder an unknown number of women were now placing mashed potatoes on my plate.

Frank was a tall, quiet man with narrow blue eyes and long, slender fingers. His blond hair was going white, and his thin lips disappeared into the flesh of his face. He spoke softly, almost in a raspy whisper. I felt him watch me as I ate.

“I see a lot of your mother in you, girl,” he said, finally breaking the silence that hung over the table. His words sounded like a warning, and I felt the hairs rise on my arms. My mother shot me a black look. I made a mental note to draw as little attention to myself as possible.

Outside our trailer there were a few protesters, family members of Frank’s victims. In subdued but persistent voices, they chanted, “Murderer, murderer, murderer.” We all pretended not to hear.

“We’ll be leaving here by week’s end,” said Frank, getting up from his seat and walking over to the window. With those ghoulish fingers, he pushed the curtain back, releasing a heavy sigh as he looked out. The chanting grew louder.

I remember thinking, If he were innocent, he’d be angry. He’d be railing against the injustice of those people chanting outside his door. But he seemed simply annoyed, perhaps even disgusted, as though he looked down on their grief and their rage. They were emotions he didn’t understand. He turned and saw me staring. His eyes were flat, empty, rimmed by dark circles. They made me think of the sinkhole where Melissa Parker’s body had floated. There was nothing in his gaze that I recognized.


The state paid Frank some restitution money, about ten thousand dollars. And he’d used that and some other money he had to put a down payment on a horse ranch in the middle of Nowhere, Florida. True to his word, a week after he was released, we were living there. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to protest. All we brought from the trailer were our clothes. Everything else he declared as junk to be left behind.

Our new house sat back on twenty acres of property, fully a half mile from the road. We were completely isolated from our neighbors, flanked by orange groves to the east and a dairy to the west, a half-hour drive from the nearest town. As we rode up the long drive for the first time, my only thought was that I could scream until my head popped off and no one would hear me.

I awoke my first morning there in my new room; outside my window, sunlight glinted on the dewy grass. I could hear the soft, slow clopping of the horses’ hooves as they milled about their pen, could hear them snuffling and neighing as if in quiet conversation. It would have been the nicest place I’d ever lived if I hadn’t been so sad and so afraid of the man sleeping in my mother’s bed.

Frank’s presence in our lives was a blanket of snow—everything grew white and silent. Including my mother, who seemed brittle and frozen, following blankly in his thrall. She worked the ranch like a hired hand, cooked and cleaned as I’d never seen her do. She hardly looked at me, except to assign me chores. She touched me only when she took my hand as we said grace before meals.

As for me, I just was numb, on autopilot. I dressed myself carefully in baggy, formless clothes so as not to attract any attention from Frank. I went to my new school during the day and, when I got home, did the work I was assigned around the ranch. I tried futilely to reach my father every night. My desire to rage and fight with my mother was drained by my fear of Frank. It was as if he emitted a noxious energy that sucked the life from all of us.

I thought Marlowe and I would be gone before I was living under the same roof with Frank Geary. But Marlowe’s promises of rescue seemed to have evaporated. Something about Frank’s presence changed him, too; he became as unnatural as his father. There was no trace of the passion he’d claimed to have for me, except the dark looks he gave me when he thought no one was watching. I trailed him, trying to steal moments alone with him. But he avoided me until one night I awoke to find him standing in my room.

I sat up in my bed, my center flooding with hope. “Marlowe.”

He didn’t answer me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked when he stayed in the corner of my room, unmoving. After a long minute, my hope evaporated; a dark flower of fear bloomed in its place. I wondered how long he’d stood there watching as I slept, and why.

“He can’t know there was ever anything between us,” he said finally, moving into the light where I could see him.

“I thought we were leaving,” I said. I kept my voice flat and unemotional. I didn’t want him to know my heart—how afraid I was, how much I needed him.

“We can’t,” he said quietly. “He’ll find us. And when he does, he’ll kill you. I’m not allowed to love anything.”

I was too desperate to hear the sickness in his words. I heard only that he was letting me down, like everyone else. “You promised me,” I said, my voice sounding childish even to my own ears.

“That was before,” he said tightly. “I never thought he’d be released.”

I’d seen the way Marlowe followed his father around, looking at him with begging eyes, waiting for scraps of attention. “You don’t want to leave him,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” he said. He came and sat on the edge of my bed. “No one leaves him.”

Marlowe had seemed so strong, so much wiser than anyone I’d known. Now I could see he was just a scared kid, just like me.

“You’ll be eighteen in seven months,” he said weakly. “You can legally leave then. I’ll be eighteen next month, and I’m going to join the marines. He won’t be able to get to me there.”

I was washed over by hopelessness, and I turned to weep into my pillow. He didn’t move to comfort me, just sat there as I cried. I thought there was no end to the well of sadness within me. I thought I didn’t have enough tears.

Then, “There might be a way, Ophelia. I just don’t know if you’re strong enough.”

Something in his tone chilled me, even as I felt a little lift. “What are you talking about?” I said into my pillow.

“It’s the only way,” he said, moving into me. He rubbed my back with the flat of his hand. It was the first time he’d touched me in weeks. I sat up and moved into his arms, let him hold me. It felt so good to be close to him again, to be close to anyone.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. He bent down and kissed me. My body lit up for him. He slipped beneath the covers with me, his hands roaming my skin. My mother had been wrong about me: I’d never made love to Marlowe. I was still a virgin then. We only engaged in these heavy petting sessions. Now I see I was such a child, so starved for affection. I just wanted the physical closeness of another person; this felt like love to me. After a few minutes, when I was hot and aching and alive with my need for him, he pulled away.

“Forget it,” he said. “You’re not ready. You’re too young.”

He got out of the bed and went back to the window. “This time next month, I’ll be gone,” he said.

“I’m not too young,” I said. I curled myself up into a ball and hugged my knees to my chest. “Don’t leave me here.”

He came back to the bed. I lifted a finger and traced the lines of his mouth.

“I’ll do anything,” I said.

“Say it,” he said.

“I belong to you.”


“Annie!”

I awake to find Gray holding me by the shoulders. “It’s okay. Wake up.”

I am drenched in sweat, my heart thudding. Mercifully, the pounding in my head has subsided. But I feel weak, as if I’ve just run a hundred miles.

“What happened?” I ask, disoriented. I can’t tell if it’s day or night.

“You were dreaming,” he says. He pushes a few damp strands of hair away from my eyes. “What were you dreaming about?”

I try to shake the fog from my brain, to grasp at the faded images from my dream that are already slipping away. I move away from Gray and turn on the light.

“I think I’m remembering,” I tell him. He looks at me with some odd mixture of hope and fear.

“What? What do you remember?”

“I don’t know,” I say after a minute. Suddenly I don’t want to tell him what I saw in my dream. I don’t want to say what I think I may have done.

“Tell me.”

I close my eyes and rest against him. “Gray, do you ever wonder what it would be like to be married to someone normal?”

He laughs a little. “I’d die from boredom.”

“Seriously.”

“You’re normal,” he says, pulling back a little so that he can look into my face. “You’re fine.”

I wonder how he can say that, if he really believes it to be true. I find I can’t hold his eyes; I lean against him again so that I don’t have to look away.

“She can never know who I’ve been and the things I’ve done,” I say into his shoulder. “I can never let Ophelia touch her. You know that, Gray.”

“Ophelia was never the problem.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know,” he says. “I know.”



22

When people think of Florida, they think of oranges and pink flamingos, palm trees and beaches, the blue-green ocean. They think of Disney and margaritas. Florida is light and fluffy, kitschy, a place for the family vacation. And it is all that, of course. But it has a feral heart, a teeming center that would rage out of control if not for the concrete and rebar that keeps it caged. There are vast untamed places: shadowy mangroves, deep sinkholes, miles of caverns and caves, acres of living swamps. There is a part of Florida that will recover itself when it gets its chance. Its wet, murky fingers will reach out and close us into its fist. This is how I feel about my life.

I walk through the mall with Ella. Anyone looking at us as we wander through the shops would see two women with time and money to burn. They might assume that the worst of our problems is a cheating husband or a kid with ADD. As I examine an obscenely expensive handbag at Gucci, I hear a shotgun blast ringing in my ears. I smell smoke. I see Frank Geary’s chest exploding and watch as he falls backward down a flight of stairs. I hear my mother screaming. I don’t know where these bloody images have come from, if they are memory or dream.

“You seem distracted,” Ella says as we sit down to drink espresso in the food court. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I say lightly. I keep seeing Simon Briggs in my mind’s eye. He’s the headache I can’t shake. His face, so rough and ugly, is familiar without being recognizable. There are so many things like this that I can’t quite remember—people, events slipping through my fingers like sand. “I’m just…not sleeping much.”

“Well,” she says knowingly, “you’re probably still freaked out by that incident on the beach. That would keep me up at night.”

Freaked out. There’s that phrase again.

“I guess so,” I say vaguely. We both take a sip of coffee.

I let a beat pass. Then, “I’m going to get my scuba-diving certification.”

Ella peers at me over her little cup. “I thought you hated the water.”

“I do,” I say, taking another sip of the black, bitter coffee. “But, you know, I have a daughter now. I want her to see me work to conquer my fears.”

She gives a careful nod. She’s very diplomatic, slow to judge. I like this about her.

“Maybe you should start with swimming lessons,” she suggests delicately. “You know, in a pool?”

“Baptism by fire,” I say with a smile.

She looks at me uncertainly. “Oo-kaay,” she says slowly, drawing out the word.

“Well,” I say, putting down my cup with a delicate clink in its saucer. “The lessons start off in the pool.”

“Good,” she says brightly. “You know what? I’m proud of you. That’s great.”

Her cell phone rings, and she looks at me apologetically as she answers it. I can tell by the shift in her tone that it’s her husband. Her voice gets softer. She turns her head away from me. I stare at the other shoppers, think of Gray off trying to figure out who might be looking for me. I think of Victory off with her grandparents. I’m counting the hours until I can pick her up at school tomorrow. I’m just here killing time. I should be home meditating, trying to remember who Simon Briggs might have been to me. But I suppose part of me doesn’t want to remember. That’s what my shrink believes, anyway.

“I have to go,” Ella says, snapping her phone closed. She looks strained.

“Everything all right?” I ask gently.

“Yeah,” she says with a fake laugh and a weak flutter of her hand. We’re both such liars. I hope she’s lying about less awful things, for her sake.

“What about your Prada loafers?” I ask.

“They’ll wait,” she says. “You coming?”

I shake my head quickly, down the rest of my espresso, and stand up. “I want to pick up a few things for Victory.”

“Okay,” she says, tucking her bag under her arm. “Sorry.”

I wave her off. “Don’t worry about it.”

She looks pale, a little red around the eyes. She never talks about her husband or their relationship except in the broadest strokes. He works so hard, she’ll say. He travels so much. He’s very protective. She seems stiff and nervous in his presence. Occasionally our visits are cut short by calls like the one she just received. I know better than to pry. I like to let people keep their fa?ades intact. That way they’re less likely to come poking around at mine.

She rushes off, and I watch until I can’t see her anymore. I wish I could be a better friend to Ella. But I can’t.

When I turn back to grab my purse and shopping bags, I’m face-to-face with Detective Ray Harrison. My stomach bottoms out at the look in his eyes. He looks hungry.

“Let’s talk, Annie.”

“Are you following me?” I say. My voice raises an octave, though I didn’t intend it, and a woman at the next table turns to stare at me.

“Don’t make a scene,” he says with a smile. “You can’t afford to make a scene.”

I smile at him and let him take my arm. I pick up my bags from the floor, and we walk toward the exit.

“That purse you bought. It cost more than my wife’s food budget for an entire month.”

There’s some mixture of astonishment and reprimand in his voice. I don’t say anything. “The mercenary business must be booming,” he says.

He means Gray and Drew’s company, though mercenary is not a word they use in the industry. And indeed, since September 11, business is booming.

“One of the hardest things about being a cop,” he says when we’re outside, “is watching the criminals live better than you do.” We’re walking through the rows of cars. I’m not sure where we’re going, and finally I come to a stop. I’m not walking into the deserted part of the lot with this man, cop or no cop.

“What do you want?” I ask him.

He looks around us. The lot is crowded, plenty of activity. People walking, pushing kids in strollers, pulling in and out in their late-model cars. He lets go of my arm and puts his hand in his pocket, starts that rocking thing he does. I’m not even sure he’s aware of it.

He keeps that fake smile on his face. People walking by might think we’re neighbors who bumped into each other at the mall, that we’re having a friendly chat. I know then that his interest in me is not professional, not legal. If it were, he would have put his handcuffs on me and we’d be in the cruiser heading into the station. This alternative is not necessarily good news.

“I mean, I spend my whole life working hard, providing for my family, paying taxes, saving for retirement. Every vacation, every new appliance we need, every repair on the house—we budget and save, you know? And then I walk into some perp’s garage and I’m looking at a Hummer. Or I go into his crib and there’s a flat-screen and audio system that could pay for a year of private school for my kid. I think, here’s a person with no respect for the law, for human life, and he’s living large. I tell you, it eats at me sometimes. It really does.”

There’s something whiny about his righteous indignation. I get where he’s coming from, but it doesn’t seem quite sincere.

“What do you want?” I repeat.

“Let me tell you a little bit about Annie Fowler. She was born in a small town in Kentucky, where she lived her entire life until she and her infant son were killed by a drunk driver just a few years back. She was a good girl, sweet and pretty. She played by the rules, but still she was mowed down by some a*shole with no respect for anyone or anything. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what kills me, you know?”

I notice something about him that I hadn’t before. Over his right ear, there’s a shock of white hair about an inch thick. It’s so striking, the light of it against the rest of his brown locks, that I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. Somehow it makes him seem more menacing; I am oddly unnerved by it.

“And then,” he continues, “she’s violated again—by yet another person with no regard for the living or the dead. Someone steals her identity. Someone trying to escape the past takes her Social Security number and uses it to start over. What was this person trying to escape? I wonder. Or who? Must be pretty bad, whatever it was.”

“You’re making a mistake,” I tell him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He takes a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of his shirt and puts them on.

“Mrs. Powers,” he says with that same fake smile; it’s starting to look as though it will split his face in half. “Can I call you Annie? Annie, you’re looking a little pale. I won’t keep you. I’m sure you want to get back to your family.”

He turns and starts to walk away. Then he stops and comes back. I can tell he’s played this scene out in his mind a hundred times, rehearsed it for maximum effect.

“You know, Annie, we all have our secret lives, the parts of ourselves we’d rather not share. I understand that. I truly do. The question is, how much are those secrets worth? How much are we willing to pay to keep them buried? I’ll let you think about it.”

He leaves me standing there, watching him walk off. He doesn’t look back, just gets into his Explorer parked nearby and slowly drives away.


When a ship gets lost at sea, it might never be found. If its engine dies and it goes adrift, it could move through the vastness of the ocean and never come to shore, never be seen by another craft or from the air. Even if you hire the kind of people who are able to recover a runaway vessel, even if you have an idea of when it was lost, along with an understanding of the day’s tides and currents—even then you might never find it. Most people can’t wrap their heads around the idea that the oceans of the world are so vast and that something so solid could be so permanently lost yet still out there, still floating around, just never to be seen again by human eyes. But that’s how large the world is. Things disappear and are never found simply because there’s too much ground to cover. People, too.

The idea of shifting off your skin and walking away in a new one is foreign to most people, the stuff of fiction. But it can be done with relative ease. A driver’s license, passport, even a Social Security card—all can be obtained with a birth certificate. Birth certificates can be had just by filling out a form and paying a fee at any local records office. You can use this document to get pretty much anything else you need to establish a new identity. Then it’s just a matter of flying below the radar. It’s better not to work or get pulled over for speeding. And if you’re far enough away from people who have known you, you can drift about in the world and never be found again, just like a ship lost at sea. The world is that big.

Ophelia March died on a dry, cool New Mexico night. In a stolen black ’67 Mustang, she and Marlowe Geary drove off the edge of the Taos High Road into the Rio Grande Valley below. She was presumed dead, though her body was not recovered. Or so the official reports go.

But Ophelia wasn’t in that Mustang. She was handcuffed and drugged in the back of a black Suburban parked off the public square in Santa Fe, in the shadow of St. Francis Cathedral. About two hours after the Mustang burst into flames on impact, a man, beaten and dirty and smelling like smoke, got into the driver’s seat of the Suburban and took her away. Ophelia March was dead. Annie Fowler had just been reborn.

I am thinking of that night as I stand in the parking lot of the mall, my shopping bags at my feet. I’m sick with fear. But is there also the glimmer of relief in my heart? Am I also a little glad that Ophelia still lives, and that one way or another she might have to pay for the things she has done? There are plenty of people who believe that Ophelia was Marlowe’s victim, his captive toward the end. But I know it was more complicated than that. I feel those black fingers tugging at me. I am as afraid of Ophelia as I am of Marlowe.


The only thing I like about Gray’s office is that it’s filled with books. Big, thick books bound in leather, with gilt-edged pages, texts on war and military theory, encyclopedic tomes on world history, classic literature, poetry. But it’s not a library collected after a lifetime of reading. It is a library that has been purchased for show—Drew’s idea of which books should line the shelves of a military man’s office. He has a similar collection in his own office. Most of the books have never even been opened, eyes have never rested on their words, fingers have never caressed their pages. They are as untouched and virginal as nuns.

I scan the covers: Sun-tzu, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley. Anyone sitting in my husband’s office would think him a great reader. He’s not. My husband opens a book, he falls asleep.

Curled on the leather couch, I recount my meeting with Detective Harrison for Gray. His face is a knot of concern.

“He doesn’t know anything,” he says after I’m done. “If he did, he’d have used your name.”

“He knows I’m not Annie Fowler.”

Gray nods his assent. “But his interest is not legal. He didn’t come to you as a cop. He didn’t bring you in for questioning. He’s corrupt. And that’s a good thing. We pay him off, he goes away.”

Gray’s sitting behind his desk, capping and uncapping a pen, swiveling his chair slightly from side to side. I don’t say anything. I don’t think it’s going to be that simple.

“Anyway,” he says, “there’s no connection whatsoever between Annie Fowler and Ophelia March. Nothing links them. He could dig into Annie Fowler until her bones shake in the ground and he’s not going to find Ophelia.”

I wonder whom he’s trying to convince.

“So it’s a coincidence, then, that there’s someone looking for Ophelia in New York and this cop down in Florida is asking questions about Annie Fowler. That someone followed me on the beach.”

I can’t read his expression. He’s the one who doesn’t believe in coincidence.

“I don’t see a connection,” he says finally. I wonder, if he’s just in denial, stubbornly refusing to see what’s right in front us. It’s not like him. “I really don’t see one.”

But there’s always a connection, isn’t there? Sometimes it’s just deep beneath the surface, like Florida’s network of caves, dark and echoing, winding silent and treacherous under our feet.


I came home after school one afternoon and found my mother weeping in her bedroom. I stood in her doorway, watching. We were downwind from the stable that day, so the air held just the lightest scent of horse manure. She looked so tiny lying there, so frail on the white sheets beneath the large wooden cross hanging over the bed. The room was spare and plain, like all the rooms in the house. There was just the bed on a frame, two nightstands, and a dresser, all made from pine.

“We use what we need.” That was Frank’s mantra. He didn’t like any flourish, any decoration. “That’s the Lord’s way.”

I was glad to see she was living with as much despair as I was. It wasn’t that I wanted her to be unhappy. I was just relieved to see she felt anything at all. She’d been acting like a zombie for the eight weeks we’d been there, steadily losing weight. Every day she seemed a little weaker, had less color in her cheeks. It was as if Frank were slowly draining the life from her and one day she’d collapse into a pile of ash before my eyes.

I could smell alcohol, mingling with the horse odor. I watched her until she sensed me standing there. She sat up with a start.

“Oh, Ophelia. You scared the life out of me.”

Frank’s truck hadn’t been in the drive, so I knew he wasn’t home. I went over and sat beside her on the bed. She pulled me to her. She wrapped her arms around me from behind, and we lay as we used to when I was a child, before I knew how many different ways a person could fail as a mother.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked. “Why are you crying?”

She didn’t answer right away. Then, “Ophelia, he’s so…so cold. I think I’ve made an awful mistake bringing us here.”

I sat up quickly and turned to face her. “Then let’s go.”

She rolled her eyes and pulled her mouth into an annoyed grimace. “Go where, Ophelia?”

“Anywhere.”

She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “He can’t be with me, you know?”

“Mom,” I said, feeling my face go hot with anger and embarrassment. I didn’t want to hear about her sexual problems with Frank Geary. I just wanted her unhappiness to spur her into action. But she was like a cow in the road; no matter how undesirable or dangerous her location, she’d stay rooted until someone came at her with a stick. I knew this about her.

“He can’t…you know, perform,” she went on, as if she were thinking aloud, as if I weren’t even in the room. “There’s something wrong with him. Something really, really wrong.”

“Let’s leave, Mom,” I said again, grabbing her hands. “We can go back to New York.”

She released a heavy sigh. “We don’t have a car, any money. How are we going to leave?”

I just stared at her.

“How can we leave, Ophelia?” she asked again. I realized that it wasn’t a rhetorical question; she was really asking me how to leave. She wanted me to save her. I hated her then, for her weakness, for her stupidity. I’d hated that she’d handed all her power over to Frank Geary and that we were trapped on a horse farm in the middle of nowhere, with no money and no means of leaving if we chose. I hated my father for disappearing and leaving me to this fate. I felt the rage rise up in my chest, and I made a silent promise to myself never to be powerless like my mother.

“Ophelia,” she said, covering her eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”

I left her without another word. She called after me, but then I heard Frank’s truck pulling up the drive. A moment later the water was running in the bathroom, and I knew she was brushing her teeth so he wouldn’t smell the booze on her. She’d probably taken the whiskey from Frank’s secret stash I saw in the barn. There were always two or three bottles of Jack in a crate near the back under a pile of flannel blankets. Twice I’d found Frank passed out in the barn, a bottle nearly drained, cigarette butts in an ashtray beside him. Dangerous behavior in a barn filled with hay.


Later that night I found Marlowe sitting on the floor of the stable smoking a cigarette. We hadn’t spoken since that night in my room when he’d suggested unthinkable things to me. Instead we’d been circling each other ever since. I was simultaneously drawn to him and repelled by what he’d whispered to me that night. His eighteenth birthday was just a week away, and then he’d be gone. I’d be all alone here.

I sat down beside him, and he offered me a drag, which I took.

“He met someone today,” he said as I exhaled smoke. “A woman at the feed store. It won’t be long.”

I took in the lean lines of him, the hair in front of his eyes, his arm draped over one bent knee.

“He started chatting her up, flirting with her in that way he has,” he said when I didn’t respond.

I had a hard time imagining Frank “flirting” with anyone. He was as gray and stiff as an old piece of wood. The air was still and thick with humidity. I felt a sheen of perspiration rise on my forehead, a bead drip down my back.

“It’s like an appetite. It rises up in him. He can’t control it.”

He had an odd half smile on his face as he stubbed out the cigarette, started fingering the butt, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger so that tiny brown pieces of tobacco left there drifted onto his leg. The smell of burned tar settled in my sinuses.

“He’ll start out slow at first, but then it will escalate. Before long it’ll be your mother.”

An anxious dread moved through me, made my fingers and the back of my neck tingle. I stared out through the open doors of the barn. I could see the house from where I sat. A light glowed in my mother’s window.

“No,” I said, but it was more like a prayer than a denial. Even though I’d never seen a hint of violence in Frank, I thought I could feel the truth in what Marlowe said. It wouldn’t be long before terrible things started happening; it seemed electric in the air.

“After her it will be you.” He’d dropped his voice to a whisper, peered at me through the strands of hair that hung in front of his eyes.

I pulled my legs in tight to my chest and held them there.

“Why do you think he keeps your mother so isolated? He doesn’t even let her go to the grocery store,” Marlowe asked. “No one here even knows she exists.”

If he noticed that I’d only said one word since I joined him, it didn’t seem to bother him. I traced circles in the dirt on the ground.

“When you’re missed at school, it’ll be weeks before they send someone to look for you,” he went on. “Then he’ll tell them your mother left him, took you with her. He’ll tell them he doesn’t know where you’ve gone.”

“My father will come looking for me,” I said lamely.

“Eventually,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe. But what good will it do you? You’ll already be dead.”

One of the things I liked about the horse ranch was the sky at night. I never knew there were so many stars. I gazed up at them through the open door and wished I were as high and far away as that.

image
“Do you see how he was manipulating you?” the doctor asks. “How he used your fear, your alienation from your parents to spin a web around you?”

I nodded, chewed on my fingernails, something I did in our sessions only when we talked about the past.

“You were seventeen years old. Literally abandoned by your father, emotionally abandoned by your mother, living with a man you believed to be a serial rapist and murderer who was about to start killing again—who might even kill you. You were afraid and very vulnerable.”

I nodded grudgingly. Ophelia was afraid, but she was also desperate, starving for love and acceptance.

“What could you have done at that point that you didn’t do?” he wants to know.

We do this, go round and round, rehashing the past. Thinking of alternatives for Ophelia and shooting them down like bottles on a shelf. The doctor thinks I’m too hard on her. He thinks she was just a kid. But he doesn’t know the whole story—and neither do I, for that matter. I wonder if I’m not hard enough.

“I could have gone to the police.”

He gives a slow, careful nod. “Your stepfather was an innocent man in the eyes of the law. You had no evidence that he’d done anything wrong or planned to. What do you think the police could have done for you?”

I look at anything else but him—the degrees hanging on his wall, the view outside his window, the glass paperweight on his desk, its facets taking in light and casting rainbow points on the wall. “I’m not sure.”

He sighs and shifts in his seat. Behind him, outside his window, the sun is setting in a riot of color—purple, orange, pink—over the Intracoastal Waterway.

“So what did you do?”

“I don’t remember.”

He lifts his chin up, puts his hand to his face, and starts rubbing at his jaw. The stubble there and the dry, hard skin on his hands makes an irritating scratching sound. He regards me carefully, seems to think twice before deciding to say, “You’re not being honest with me, Annie.”

“I don’t remember,” I say quickly. “You know that.”

“I’m starting to get the feeling that there’s a great deal you’re not sharing with me. I’m afraid it’s affecting how much good I can do.”

I give a slow shake of my head and purse my lips. There’s a moment—no, a millisecond—when I think maybe, just maybe, I’ll come clean, tell him everything. But the moment passes in silence.

He looks at his watch and stands up. This means our session is over. “I can’t help you if you won’t face the truth. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say, getting up and walking to the door. I think we’re coming to the end of our relationship. He doesn’t know Ophelia; he doesn’t even know her name. I have kept that from him. I wonder if he thinks I’m making the whole thing up, if he’s just humoring me and taking my money.

“See you next week?”

“Yes. Next week,” I say with a nod. I stop at the door, turn to look at him. He’s a nice man and a good doctor. I know he has tried his best to help me. “Did I tell you I’m considering scuba-diving lessons?”

“I thought you were afraid of the water,” he says with a surprised smile.

“You’re the one who’s always on me about facing down my fears. I thought this might be a good first step.”

“Is it helping?”

“It’s too soon to tell.”

“Take care of yourself, Annie,” he says. This is what he says after every session, but I wonder if I detect an extra bit of concern, a final note of farewell.


The corridor outside the doctor’s office is empty, and I wait in the silence for the elevator. I listen to the electronic beep as the elevator passes each floor on its way to me. I never see anyone in this corridor; no one ever comes and goes from the other office suites. It has never seemed odd before, but today it does. The quiet is total, as though there is no one else behind the other doors.

Maybe I never noticed before because I am always lost in thought when I leave the doctor, but this time I feel a strange unease as I wait for the elevator that seems to take forever. It has paused two floors down and not continued its ascent. I wait for a minute longer, then decide to take the stairs, but when I try the door to the staircase, it’s locked. I guess I don’t have any choice but to wait for the sluggish elevator.

I hear something then, I’m not sure what. It might have been a shout or something falling to the floor. Then there are voices lifted in argument, just a few words, and then it is silent so suddenly again that I’m not sure that’s what I heard at all. It’s then that I find myself walking back down the hall toward the doctor’s office.

Of course the elevator picks this moment to arrive. I listen to the doors open and close as I enter the waiting room and knock lightly on the door to the doctor’s office. There’s no answer, but I’m certain he’s there—I don’t think there’s another exit. I wonder if he’s in the bathroom. I put my ear to the door, wait a second, but I don’t hear voices inside. I knock again. As I do, the door pushes open slightly, and I help it along.

“Doctor,” I say, “is everything all right?”

It takes a beat for the scene to register in my head. The doctor is slumped over his desk, blood pooling on its surface and dripping over the side onto the floor beneath. On the window I can see a high ghastly arc of blood against the sunset.

“Doctor,” I say as I move toward him. My voice sounds like it’s coming from the end of a long tunnel. “Paul?”

I approach the body, battling the urge to run in the other direction. I put my hand on his neck. But there’s no pulse. His skin is still warm, but he is dead.

I try to draw a breath into my lungs, but panic is constricting my airways. My flight response is in high gear; it’s all I can do not to break into a sprint. Then I notice that the door to the bathroom is ajar; the light is on inside. I think I see a flicker of movement, but I’m not certain.

My brain has stopped working; adrenaline kicking, my body takes over. I move toward the exit, keeping my eyes on the thin rectangle of light shining through the opening in the bathroom door. I am not thinking about the poor doctor and the awful way he has died or about who might still be hiding in the bathroom. I am just thinking about getting out of here as fast as possible. I can’t help the doctor, and I can’t afford another run-in with the police.

I start moving backward, my eyes still on the bathroom door. As I do, it starts to open. I find myself paralyzed; I can’t move. I stand and watch it swing wide. She is pale and grim, the young woman I have seen at Ella’s party and standing outside the Internet café. She is soaked in blood. There’s a knife in her hand. Her chest is heaving with the deep, shuttering breaths she is drawing and releasing. We stare at each other for a moment. And then I recognize her. It’s Ophelia.



23

It’s nearly dark when I wake up in my car in the parking lot of my doctor’s office. The sun has disappeared below the horizon line, and the sky is glowing a deep blue-black. My peripheral vision is almost gone from the migraine I have coming on. I am struggling to orient myself, to separate reality from fantasy. I see her face again, her blood-drenched clothes. I see my doctor slumped over his desk, blood draining from him onto the floor.

I don’t feel the appropriate level of terror, I’m just stunned, numb. I look at my watch; it has been only forty minutes since my session with the doctor ended, which seems impossible given what’s happened. There’s a large bloodstain, still wet but drying quickly, on my jacket. I shrug out of it, crumble it into a ball. I don’t want to look at the blood. Then my cell phone, balancing on the dash, starts ringing. I answer.

“Hi, Annie.”

I already recognize the voice—it’s Detective Harrison. I don’t say anything.

“Just wondering if you’ve had any time to think things over.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” I ask him. My voice sounds hysterical, even to my own ears. I am shaking as I put the key in the ignition and start the car. “Did you do this?”

There’s a pause on the other end, as if he’s registering the pitch and tone of my words.

“Annie, what’s wrong?” he asks me. He sounds legitimately concerned. “Where are you?”

“Why are you doing this?” I say again. It must be Harrison. He has done this somehow. He knows about me and is trying to drive me insane. “For money? You can have whatever you want.”

“Take it easy,” he says. His tone is calm and soothing; he must be used to talking to hysterical people. “What’s going on?”

There’s something in his voice that reminds me why I liked him that first night. Even though he’s trying to destroy my life, it’s almost as though he would put that on hold to be a cop for me in this moment. I’m half considering telling him about the doctor, but since I’m not a hundred percent sure that he’s dead and that it wasn’t me who killed him, I decide against it. I’d be admitting that I’m either mentally ill or a murderer, probably both.

“What happened, Annie?” he says, more firmly this time.

But his voice sounds tinny and distant. I end the call and throw the phone on the seat beside me. I drive out of the parking lot, heading for home.

The small causeway that leads to our island is not heavily trafficked in the evening. I pull over and grab the jacket from the passenger seat, race to the railing, and toss it over. I watch for a moment as it drifts into the water, then quickly get back to the car and start driving again, too fast. The sight of a cruiser hiding in a speed trap encourages me to slow down, to take the rest of the drive at the speed limit.

I wave at the guard as I pull through the gateway to our neighborhood. Lights glow in windows, televisions flicker, and there are a couple of kids still playing in the street even though it’s fully dark now. Everything is so quiet, so normal. I do not belong here. I realize more than ever that I never have.

I park the car in the drive and walk, though I want to run, into the house. As I shut the door, I hear Gray in the kitchen making dinner.

“You’re late,” he calls with a smile in his voice when he hears me enter.

There are candles lit on the table and lobsters in a huge pot on the stove. When he turns to look at me, his smile fades, he goes a little pale. My legs buckle when he reaches me, and I sink into him.

“What happened?” he asks. His frightened expression tells me how bad I look. “What the hell happened?”


I awoke in the middle of the night with a start to the sound of the horses. They were restless in their stalls, agitated and making noise. I’d heard them act like that twice since we’d been there. Once a Florida panther had been spotted the next day on a neighbor’s property. The second time we never figured why they’d been anxious. I slipped from beneath the covers of my bed and walked over to the window. The doors to the barn stood open. Frank’s truck sat idling, the hatch wide, waiting like a mouth. A full yellow moon cast a strange glow.

I moved to the side of the window and peered through the curtains. I’m not sure how long I stood there, but finally Frank emerged from the dark interior of the barn. In his arms he carried a large bundle wrapped in horse blankets. He leaned back against the weight of it and then dropped it awkwardly into the truck. He closed the hatch quietly, glancing up at the windows of the house. He looked stricken, like a man grieving a terrible loss. Then he got into the driver’s seat of the truck and rolled out of sight.

I stood rooted, my whole body shaking. I thought of all the things Marlowe had told me. Part of me hadn’t really believed him…the collection of purses, the shoe under the porch, his recent dire predictions that Frank’s “appetites” couldn’t be kept at bay much longer.

I saw Marlowe leave the barn then, a garbage bag in his hand. He pulled the doors closed behind him and locked them with the key. As he did this, he turned and looked up at my window. Maybe he could sense my eyes on him. I was certain he couldn’t see me where I stood. But something in his face told me that he knew I was there.

I got back into my bed quickly, wrapped myself up in the covers, and closed my eyes. I measured my breathing, made it deep and steady. After a minute I heard Marlowe creaking on the stairs. The floorboards outside my door groaned beneath his weight, and I heard the knob on my door start to turn. I tried to control the quaking of my body, to fight the urge to scream as I heard the door open just a little. The seconds dragged on as I waited to hear him come in or to speak my name. But he didn’t. After a moment I heard him walk away and go back down the stairs.

When I thought it was safe, I raced to my mother’s room. I was sure I’d see an empty bed. But when I burst through her door, she was sleeping soundly, undisturbed by the events that had just transpired. I thought of waking her, telling her what I’d seen, but I didn’t. I just went back to my bed, lay there wide-eyed and listening to the night. Frank didn’t return until just before dawn.