“Owen,” she says and then she begins to sob, laying a hand on the wall to steady herself.
“Mia, honey, who is Owen? There is no Owen. The man in the cabin? That man? That man is Colin Thatcher.”
“Eve,” I say. My self-worth is increasing by the second. I managed to do what a Ph.D. couldn’t. I’ve got Mia placing herself in the cabin with a man named Owen and a cat named Canoe. “He went by a number of aliases. Owen is probably just another one of them.
“Is there anything else you remember?” I ask. “Can you tell me anything else about him?”
“We should call Dr. Rhodes,” Eve interrupts. I know she means well—she has Mia’s best interest at heart—but I can’t let that happen. She reaches into her purse and I say her name. Enough has passed between us that Eve knows she can trust me. I won’t let anything happen to Mia. She looks at me and I shake my head. Not now. This is getting good.
“He said that he hated cats. And that if he saw it in the cabin he’d shoot it. He didn’t mean it. Of course he didn’t or I wouldn’t have let the cat in.”
“Did he have a gun?”
“Yes.”
Of course he did. I know he did.
“Were you afraid of him, Mia? Did you think he might shoot you?”
She’s nodding. “Yes.” But then she stops. “No.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Well, of course you were, honey—he had a gun. He kidnapped you.”
“Did he threaten you with the gun?”
“Yes.” She’s thinking. She wakes up from a dream and tries to remember the details. She gets bits and pieces, but never the whole thing. We’ve all been there. In a dream, your house is a house but it’s not your house. Some lady doesn’t look like your mother, but you know that she is your mother. In the daytime, it doesn’t quite make as much sense as it did during the night. “He held me down. Outside. In the woods. He pointed the gun at me. He was so mad. He was screaming.” She’s shaking her head vigorously. Tears fall freely down her cheeks. It’s making Eve a nervous wreck. I have to step between the women to keep Eve back.
“Why?” I ask. My voice is calm, subdued. Maybe I was a shrink in a former life.
“It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”
“What’s your fault, Mia?”
“I tried to tell him.”
“Tried to tell him what?”
“He wouldn’t listen. He had the gun. He kept pointing it at me. I knew if anything went wrong, he was going to kill me.”
“He told you that?” I ask. “He said if anything went wrong, he would kill you?”
No, no, she shakes her head. She looks me right in the eye. “I could see it in his eyes.” She says that she was scared that day in the bar. She tried not to be, but she was scared. My mind does an about-face to the jazz bar in Uptown, the balding proprietor and fancy green candle. This is where Mia first encountered Colin Thatcher, aka Owen. From the waitress’s testimony, Mia left in a hurry, of her own free will. I think back to the waitress’s words: Seemed to me she couldn’t wait to get out of here. Doesn’t sound like fear to me.
“And then,” Mia cries, “everything was going wrong. I tried to tell him. I should have just told him. But I was scared. He had the gun. And I knew that if anything went wrong he’d kill me. I tried to—”
“Colin Thatcher,” I interrupt, “Owen. Owen would kill you if anything went wrong?”
She nods, then quickly shakes her head. “Yes. No.” She’s frustrated. “I don’t know,” she splutters.
“What did you try to tell him?” I ask instead but her mind does a 180 and she shakes her head, stymied, frustrated; she can no longer remember what she was about to say.
Most people think there are two natural responses to fear: fight or flight. But there’s a third reaction to a bad situation: freeze. Like a deer in headlights. Play dead. Mia’s words—I was scared; I tried to tell him—prove just that. There was no fight-or-flight response. She froze. There she was: on high alert, adrenaline pumping, but unable to do anything to save her life.
“It’s all my fault,” she says again.
“What’s your fault?” I ask, expecting a replay of the same conversation.
But this time she says, “I tried to run away.”
“And he caught you?”
She’s nodding.
I recall her earlier admission. “Outside, in the woods?” I ask. “And he was mad at you for trying to run away. So he pointed the gun at you. And told you that if you ever tried that again...”
“That he would kill me.”
Eve gasps. She covers a gaping mouth with her hand. Of course he threatened to kill her. That’s what they do. I’m sure it happened many times.
“What else did he say?” I query. “What can you remember?” She’s shaking her head; she comes up with nothing. “Canoe,” I prompt, “you said he’d shoot him if he saw him in the cabin but he didn’t. You remember that the cat was in the cabin?”
She strokes the cat’s fur. She doesn’t look at me. “He said he laid by me for days. He never left my side.”