“I’ve got news for you, Kate,” Ira said. “You can’t be a doctor twenty-four-seven. You just lost a good night’s sleep, right when you needed it the most. So what gives?”
“I couldn’t bear the thought of her spending last night in the hospital alone,” Kate confessed. “I suspect there’s abuse in the home. Maddie’s father. No conclusive proof yet. Just a gut feeling.”
“Since when are you a mother substitute? You can’t blur the lines, Kate. This isn’t about you. It’s not about appeasing your guilt for something you may or may not have done sixteen years ago.”
Kate lowered her gaze and stared at her hands. “Wow, Ira. Don’t hold back.”
“You know me, Kate. I tell it like it is.”
Her cheeks flushed. She looked at him. “This has nothing to do with sixteen years ago. Okay? And you’re right, I am a poor mother substitute. But at least I was there for Maddie when she woke up this morning. If she trusts me, maybe she’ll open up and tell me what the hell is going on.”
He grinned. “I like it when you defend yourself.”
“Was that a test?”
“Maybe.”
Kate scowled. “I’m not in the mood to be your guinea pig, Ira.”
He shrugged.
“Anyway, so far, it looks as if most of her wounds are self-inflicted, including the bite marks on her arms—they match her dental impressions.”
“So she’s a self-harmer?”
Kate nodded. “But Mrs. Ward thinks she’s possessed.”
“Interesting. Does the child believe she’s possessed, too?”
“Hard to say. She relinquished the crosses and rosaries pretty quick, which could imply she’s a believer, since the devil is supposed to reject all religious symbols. It could be a case of ‘possession syndrome.’”
“Okay,” Ira said. “Let’s go with that for now. Don’t challenge her belief system. Let’s accept the delusion as a baseline and deal with it through the patient’s eyes.”
“Right,” Kate agreed. “If she’s having an acute episode, then she’s confused and gullible, and her mother is providing her with the answer.”
“A crazy answer, sure… but let’s go ahead and talk about the demons, if that’s what she wants to do,” Ira said.
Kate nodded. “Use the patient’s own belief system to treat her.”
“Exactly. What’s their religious affiliation? How was she raised? Let’s delve into the family background. Find out more about her parents. I’d like to consult on the case, if that’s okay with you.”
“Great. I’d welcome it.”
His phone rang. “Hold on.” He spoke to the department chair for a moment, then hung up. “How’s everything else, Kate? How are you handling Nikki’s suicide?”
“Okay, I guess.” She shrugged. “To be honest, it’s nice to have a distraction.”
He nodded. He waited.
Kate blurted out, “I mean, I’m dealing with it, you know? But it makes me question everything I’ve been doing for the past couple of years. How many other mistakes have I made? Are any of my other patients going to kill themselves? Am I missing all the signs? I have to admit, it’s taken a wrecking ball to my self-confidence.”
“I’ll tell you a story,” Ira said. “Ten years ago, this very successful man took an overdose of sleeping pills. He had everything going for him—money, family, career… but he was deeply depressed. I took him on as my patient, and after a few years of therapy, he got better. He was no longer suicidal. He resumed his career as a high-profile attorney. He got back with his estranged wife. I was over the moon about it. But then one day, guess what happened next?”
“He committed suicide?”
“Nope. Cardiac arrest. Ironic, huh? Here I’d managed to save this man’s life against all odds, but he died anyway. Why?
Because we’re only human, Kate. We aren’t God. Far from it.”
She frowned. “I guess you handle life’s ironies better than I do.”
“Well, you can’t fight reality. Just because we’re psychiatrists, doesn’t mean we control our patients’ destinies, anymore than we can control our own. All we can do is help them find their way through the darkness. If we’re lucky.”
“So basically we’re flashlights?”
He laughed. “Yes, we’re flashlights.”
The echo of Savannah’s bright laughter rippled through her. One hot summer night sixteen years ago, Kate had given her little sister a flashlight, but instead of finding her way home, Savannah was lost forever.
Before he buried her alive in his backyard, Henry Blackwood had shaved Savannah’s entire head, even her eyebrows. The police never found the clippings. Among the questions still haunting Kate, that was the biggest one of all—where was Savannah’s long blond hair?
12
KATE WENT HOME TO prep for the Risk Management interview and get some well-deserved sleep. James was at work. She found his note on the kitchen island. I like you, do you like me? Check box—yes or no.
She smiled and checked yes. She kicked off her shoes, poured herself a glass of wine, and curled up on the sofa, where she wrote down her responses to imaginary questions in longhand on a notepad. After a while, she couldn’t follow the hieroglyphics of her own handwriting anymore and nodded off.
“Am I a bad person?”
“No, Savannah. You’re good through and through.”
“But I think bad thoughts sometimes.”
“We all do. It’s called being human.”
The day after Savannah went missing, dozens of reporters descended on the town. During the first forty-eight hours, missing-child posters popped up all over the county. Volunteers scoured the woods and fields. Four days later, cadaver dogs found her body buried behind Henry Blackwood’s house, less than thirty feet from his back door. Her sister’s tragedy led the nightly news for weeks.
Blackwood lived in a suburban home with a pickup truck parked out front. He and his wife had divorced years ago. They didn’t have any kids. The Wolfe girls rarely spoke to Mr. Blackwood, even though they walked past his house every day on their way to school. He had blond hair, freckled skin, sea-green eyes, and a widow’s peak. He was the unfriendly neighbor who kept his property spotlessly clean, picking up litter by the side of the road and tying the lids of the garbage cans shut with a length of rope in order to keep the raccoons out. Later on, that same rope was used on her sister.
Throughout the years, Kate periodically had the same dream. She would find herself back inside the cabin in the woods, only Savannah wasn’t there—just her size six jogging shoes with the big Ns on the sides. In Kate’s dream, something reached out of the darkness and grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her relentlessly backward. She would scrape her nails across the splintery boards screaming, “Savannah!”—thinking her sister must be hiding in the shadows. She always struggled but couldn’t escape the relentless pull, and when she woke up, her mouth tasted like dirt.
Now she sat up gasping for air, furious that it was happening all over again. The nightmares, the anxiety attacks, the self-doubt. Kate thought she’d managed to move on, but some things never left you.
She fetched her wallet and pulled Savannah’s careworn picture out of its hidden compartment behind her credit cards. She poured herself another glass of wine and gazed at the old snapshot. Her little sister was like a sugar-icing rose—so sweet and delicate, you couldn’t imagine that anything bad would ever happen to her. Their mother used to say she was made out of caramels and moonbeams. Kate had only wanted to protect her. She hadn’t meant to hurt her.
At the funeral, she was compelled to say goodbye to her dead sister in her child-sized casket. Savannah’s skin was a bloodless color, like rancid milk, and she wore a wig because her hair was all gone. The mortician’s assistant had even penciled in eyebrows, and Savannah would’ve loved that. A grown-up wig and grown-up eyebrows! Cool!