Читать книгу Nancy Bush's Nowhere Bundle: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide & Nowhere Safe - Nancy Bush - Страница 18

Chapter 10

Liv watched dawn creep across the horizon. She was at the living room window, peering out through a gap in the curtains. Pink streaks ran across the sky and a golden arc was forming to the east.

Her thoughts had turned to Hathaway House. She’d been there less than a year. The dreams had started before that; “repressed memories,” Dr. Yancy told her later, but her father and Lorinda just wanted her “fixed.” They didn’t care whether Hathaway House was the right choice. They just sent her there and she could envision Lorinda dusting her hands of Albert’s crazy adopted daughter. Somehow Lorinda had then convinced Albert that Hague was as messed up as Liv and away he’d gone to Grandview Hospital, which actually had a reputation for treating more serious mental patients. Should she feel grateful that they hadn’t assumed her problems were as bad as Hague’s, and that’s why they’d sent her to Hathaway House instead? Or, was it a money issue: Hathaway House was mostly funded by donations whereas Grandview was a private mental hospital. Maybe it was just simply that Hague, being Albert’s own flesh and blood, was more a son to him than she was a daughter—an idea undoubtedly fostered by Lorinda’s disinterest in both of them.

Whatever the case, when she was a girl the dreams of her mother’s hanging form . . . mixed in with some kind of bogeyman chasing her down . . . and sometimes dead bodies rising from graves outside, from the fields, and stalking toward her house, zombie-like . . . intensified over the years until finally Liv had woken up screaming nearly every night. That’s when she was sent to Hathaway House and assigned to a room with three other female patients, all of them teenagers.

She was regimented from the start and there were household chores. Before breakfast: room cleaning. Breakfast. Group therapy. Lunch. Rest time. One-on-one with Dr. Yancy. Dinner. Quiet time in your room or in the main hall with its soothing blue chairs and empty shelves, save for books. Lights out at nine.

Dr. Yancy . . . She was in her fifties with gray hair and deep brown eyes and a quiet way about her that was the first thing Liv always noticed. They had sessions four days out of five. On Thursday, Liv was given the option of an hour of television in one of the rooms upstairs, where an employee (guard) watched over her and the other inmates, or she could take a walk around the fenced yard. No, it did not have razor wire across its wall, but there was a watchtower.

“Very medieval,” Liv had told Dr. Yancy after the first time she chose the walking yard. “Like a rotting prison.”

“A rotting prison?” Dr. Yancy asked.

“The wall looks like it’s from some castle. I can half-believe there’s a moat on the opposite side.”

The doctor half-smiled. “There’s a creek on the north end. Otherwise, it’s a fir-lined cliff down to the highway below. We’re not that far out of the city limits.”

Liv knew where Hathaway House was: on the west side of Portland, not all that far from Laurelton. She’d lived in Rock Springs until they’d sent her to Hathaway House, and after her incarceration ended, she’d returned to her family only briefly; she wasn’t part of it any longer. Albert and Lorinda had moved to east Portland, nearly Gresham, and she’d made a stab at finishing her senior year, getting her GED in the end. As soon as she could, she got a job at a restaurant and moved into low-cost student housing next to the nearest campus of Portland Community College, where she took business classes.

But that was later . . . after her sessions with Dr. Yancy, who’d offered up the repressed-memories theory about a month into their therapy. “You saw something about the time of your mother’s death,” she told Liv on that rainy Monday afternoon. “Something else. You don’t want to look at it, so it’s coming to you in your dreams.”

“I saw my mother,” Liv stated carefully. She didn’t like treading this road.

Dr. Yancy nodded and tilted her head, considering her. “And something else, too.”

“No.”

“Until you look at it, it will keep coming back.”

Liv shut her mind down. She would rather keep the dreams than go back down that hall and see her mother’s body. She knew the zombies were from Hague’s description. She suspected the women from the fields were the strangulation victims from the serial killer that had terrorized the area before disappearing; she’d read about his actions later, going through old newspaper accounts, but it hadn’t sparked any repressed memories, either.

And as far as a bogeyman chasing her. She still believed that was real.

Dr. Yancy had kept trying to break through Liv’s resolve, but fear, and a large dose of stubborness, had kept Liv from responding.

Now, however, thinking of the doctor—the zombie, stalking doctor who might be the man in the photo—she felt a flutter of awareness. Until you look at it, it will keep coming back.

Dropping the curtain, she walked back to the kitchen and sat at the table. Screwing up her courage, she closed her eyes and envisioned those moments when she’d found her mother hanging in the kitchen.

I’m done.... She’d seen her mother’s vision say those words, but now, holding herself tightly, her eyes squeezed shut, she believed they were meant for her father. Her mother was done with the marriage. There was nothing more sinister than that in their meaning.

But there was something else . . . some intent . . . something. Carefully, Liv allowed her inner vision to move past her mother’s hanging form, toward the back door and out into the moonlit field beyond . . . something was there. Someone was there . . . watching . . .

“Liv?”

Her eyes flew open at her name. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. Then she saw a man’s form.

A man.

Her mouth opened on a silent scream and then Auggie bent down in front of her and gazed into her eyes.

Letting Liv know who he was had to happen, Auggie had concluded, but he needed the right moment to spring it on her. Looking at her horror-struck face, he determined this wasn’t the time.

He was good that way.

And he just hadn’t expected to care about her as much as he already did. It was a conundrum to be sure. But it wasn’t the first time.

He was a sucker for women, that was the problem. Not in the long run, he supposed; not when it really counted. But in the short run he was definitely a sucker. A modern-day knight in shining—maybe tarnished—armor who couldn’t help himself whenever some damsel in distress crossed his path. And as path-crossing went, Liv Dugan was a doozy.

He definitely was a sucker for her. Those soulful hazel eyes filled with a raft of emotions: anxiety, mistrust, worry and fear. Though sometimes she seemed to look at him with longing, too. Not sexual longing, although he’d certainly felt faint glimmers running along his own nerves. No, she was longing for friendship, and understanding, and maybe the truth of cold, hard reality.

The fact was, he wanted to help her.

But if he told her he was the police, how would that go?

Not well, he suspected.

She was coming back to herself with an effort. The gun was on the table beside her right hand. He wondered how advisable that was, given the fact it looked as if she’d put herself in a trance.

“You all right?” he asked.

She shook her head and looked away from him. He followed her gaze. His cell phone was on the counter.

For reasons more personal than smart, he suspected, he was going to keep up the charade and see what he could learn. Luckily, his cell phone was out of battery. If at any time she’d seen fit to take it from him and check him out, it might not have been pretty. But Liv Dugan was living in her own hellish world inside her head. She was fighting paranoia and wasn’t paying attention to the details in the real world. She didn’t trust anybody, but she wanted to, even though she might not know it. She’d spent too many years of her life not trusting anyone and didn’t know how to.

She said, “I need to go to Hathaway House. Where I was—put—to straighten out my head.”

“Looking for ‘the doctor’?” he asked.

“Hague said we both knew him and he seems familiar. . . .”

“I’ll go with you,” he heard himself say.

She gave him an “oh, sure” look. But then she looked at him and said, “You want to go to the police.”

“I do. But, I want to follow where this leads.”

“Why?” she asked him. There was something defeated about her. She’d given up her kidnapper routine, and it had taken her backbone, too.

“I don’t completely believe you. I don’t think you’re right about Zuma, but you got the package from the lawyers and things started happening, so yeah, I want to follow along.”

It sounded lame even to his own ears. But Liv looked faintly hopeful. She wanted someone to believe her so badly, it made Auggie feel like a heel.

“I need to go to Hathaway by myself.” She worried her lower lips with her teeth in a way that focused his attention on her. “I want to talk to them.”

“I’ll drive.”

“No.” She wasn’t willing to go that far.

Thinking of his cell phone, and the charger in the glove box, he said more certainly, “Let me. I’ll stay in the car. I’ll wait outside for you.”

She gazed at him uncertainly. He could tell she was thinking it over: was it safer to leave him at the house, or take him on her expedition?

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay?” He held out his palm and she stared at it. “The keys. I’m driving, right?”

“No, I . . .”

“You can hold me at gunpoint, if it makes you feel better,” he said dryly. “And is there any chance we can get breakfast on the way? Drive-thru McDonald’s sounds fantastic.”

The look on her face was priceless. “McDonald’s?” she asked.

“I’ll buy. Oh, wait . . . no wallet.”

She grabbed her backpack, zipped it open, put the gun inside and pulled out her wallet and the Jeep’s keys. “I’ll buy,” she said.

Then she dropped the keys in his palm.

Hathaway House was just as Liv remembered it: respectable. The buildings were simply brick and mortar surrounded by trimmed oak trees and several stately Douglas firs and a boxwood hedge and azaleas, which were months past flowering, their green leaves gleaming dully in the heat of the sun. In Liv’s dream-mind the windows were eyes and the front door a yawning mouth. Today, it looked carefully tended, if a bit tired, as if all the scrupulous landscaping couldn’t disguise the darkness inside.

Shaking her head at her own paranoia and what it had driven her to, Liv trudged up the front steps, glancing back once to where the Jeep was parked at the curb across the street. She could see Auggie through the driver’s window, drinking from his McDonald’s to-go coffee cup. He was looking at her and she wondered if he would just drive away once she was inside. Why wouldn’t he?, she asked herself. If the situation were reversed, she would.

She just irrationally hoped he would wait for her. She’d had a helluva time getting him to stay in the car; he’d insisted on coming with her. But she’d been adamant that she was going in alone, and in the end he’d reluctantly agreed.

With a faint prayer to the powers that be, whoever or whatever they were, she pulled open one of the institution’s dark green double doors and stepped inside the administration entry hall.

The place smelled like floor wax and dust and took Liv zinging back to the time she spent here. She inhaled and exhaled slowly, as she walked toward the reception area at the end of the short hallway. The overhead lighting was dim and made pools of illumination along the polished linoleum, like a fuzzy string of pearls, which led to a more modern counter that hadn’t been there when Liv was a patient.

A woman with a grayish shag hairstyle sat behind the counter, wearing a headset. She didn’t look up at Liv’s approach. Liv surreptitiously glanced down the hallways that radiated both left and right behind the counter. Those were the same hallways she’d traversed when she’d been a resident, although there had been a wide wooden desk, mahogany maybe, that had gleamed like the floor where the counter now stood. Hathaway House had prided itself on its sense of period, circa 1940s as far as Liv could tell, but that had apparently finally given way to modern times. There was an electrical conduit running along the edge of the wall and it burrowed through a small hole in the counter to feed the computers, telephone and other electronic equipment.

The woman said into the headset, “Dr. Knudson will be back on Monday.” By her tone it sounded like she may have already delivered this information to the caller at least once. “Yes. Monday.” A pause. “You can leave a message on his voice mail. Yes. I’ll connect you.” She quickly stabbed a few buttons and then darted Liv a look. “How can I help you?”

“I’m looking for a doctor who once worked here. Maybe still does. Dr. Yancy?”

“Dr. Yancy retired.”

Liv absorbed that. “Is there someone else I could talk to?”

“I’m afraid not. Our director will be in Monday.”

“Dr. Knudson?”

She smiled tightly. “Yes.”

“Maybe there’s someone else on staff I could speak to?” she asked, but the woman shook her shaggy gray hair.

“It’s Saturday. I’m sorry,” she stated flatly in a tone that suggested she wasn’t in the least. “Dr. Knudson is the one you should talk to.”

Realizing she wasn’t going to get any information by going through the correct channels, Liv thanked her and turned away. She didn’t want to draw too much attention by being a nuisance. She was just going to have to wait.

She returned outside and felt a rush of relief at the sight of the Jeep. Letting herself in through the passenger door, she slammed it shut. The interior still smelled like sausage and hash browns from their breakfast on the go. It took her a moment to realize how tense Auggie was.

“Thanks for waiting,” she said. Then, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. What happened? Something happened?” She looked around the car wildly, her gaze falling onto the glove box. Without any clear thought she pressed the button and it snapped open, the wires of an electric charger popping up.

“Don’t—panic,” he warned.

“What is this?” Her brain wasn’t connecting. “You had the glove-box key?”

“It . . . was under the mat.”

He was staring at her, and she realized he was expecting her to say something else. And then she finally woke up. “That’s your cell charger. It was in the car all this time?”

For an answer he pulled his phone from his pocket. “I plugged it in while you were inside,” he confessed.

“And made a call?”

“You didn’t give me enough time.”

“I don’t believe you. Hand it to me.”

“It doesn’t have enough power. I had to rip it out of the charger when you came back.” He placed the phone in her hand, and she stared at it, wishing she knew one damn thing about cell phones. She pushed the green button and nothing happened.

“You have to hold down the red button to turn it on, but it’s not going to work until it gets some power,” he said.

“You were going to turn me in.” She felt betrayed. Ridiculous, but true. She sank back against the seat and covered her face in her hands, struggling for composure.

“No, I want to help you,” he said again.

“If I had any energy left, I’d laugh,” she said behind the protection of her hands. She was moving to a strange psychological place, she realized distantly, the place where you just give up completely.

“I think there’s something there,” he insisted again. “With the package the lawyers sent you from your mother.”

“Why would you help me?”

“Because you need it.”

He sounded sincere and she dropped her hands to look at him through eyes that were watering. She wasn’t crying, exactly. She was just . . . done.

He reached over and caught a bit of the liquid that fell from the corner of one eye. “I’m kind of a sucker for women in need,” he admitted. “Just ask my last ex-girlfriend. It was on the top of her list of complaints. Well, at least number three or four. She also said I was uncaring, uncommunicative and dog shit, not necessarily in that order.”

“Don’t be cute. I can’t stand cute.”

“One thing I’m not . . . is cute.”

His blue eyes regarded her with warmth. Kindness, even. In another time, she might have argued that fact. He was a hell of an attractive guy and she was pretty sure he knew it.

“I thought it was an ex-wife,” she said.

“That,” he admitted, “was a lie.”

The starch just went out of her. Surrender. Capitulation. The aftermath of too much adrenaline. Whatever the case she felt her body start shaking as if she had the palsy and her watering eyes flooded in a rush of tears she found embarrassing.

“Hey . . .”

“Shut up,” she said through a thick throat. “I mean it.”

Silence fell between them. Fighting emotion, she lowered her gaze, focusing on his cowboy boots. “Go ahead and call the police. Charge your phone and call them.”

He didn’t answer, just started up the Jeep.

“Where are we going?”

“Don’t worry. I’m not turning you in,” he said, on a long-suffering sigh. “We’re going back to my house. Then, we’re going to take it from the top. Figure out what to do. We’ll start with what happened at Zuma. That’s where it all began. That’s why you and I are together now.”

The mood around the station was tense, and Lieutenant D’Annibal had actually said, “Damn,” which was way outside his usual vocabulary. He was the face of the authorities and looked good on camera, and he was as careful off camera as on.

It was a testament to his own anxiety when he used the word, and he used it when September questioned him, a bit tensely, about her brother.

“I just got a text from him,” the lieutenant told her and Gretchen after September asked to speak to him and Gretchen followed her quickly inside his office, as if she’d been invited. “He’s been with Olivia Dugan since about five o’ clock last night.”

“With?” September asked. “What does that mean?”

Gretchen said, “So, she wasn’t involved with the Martin murder?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” D’Annibal said.

“Well, where are they?” September demanded. “Why doesn’t Auggie bring her in for questioning? What’s the big secret?”

“What does he think about the Martin shooting?” Gretchen asked.

“I don’t know if he knows.” D’Annibal was crisp. “I told Channel Seven I’d give them an update. Maybe he’ll see it on the news.”

“Update.” Gretchen snorted. As if she were reporting, she said, “Person or persons unknown shot him in the residential parking lot of Zuma Software’s employee, Olivia Dugan, missing since yesterday’s massacre.”

“Have you tried calling him?” September asked the lieutenant. “’Cause he’s not picking up for me.”

“He’s not picking up for me, either,” D’ Annibal admitted. “For the moment, I’m going to trust he knows what he’s doing. Dugan apparently went straight to her apartment after she fled the homicide scene. Then she grabbed up some belongings and headed out on foot. Rafferty picked up her trail at that point. He was in his Jeep, and he caught sight of her and called it in. He was going to keep with her.”

“Well, that was yesterday.” September couldn’t stem the irritation in her voice. “And then he texted you today? You sure it’s him, and not her with the phone?”

“You think she took Detective Rafferty’s phone off him, found my cell number, and texted me an alibi for herself for last night’s murder?” The lieutenant gazed at her calmly and September felt her face heat up as she heard how improbable that sounded.

“From what we know of Olivia Dugan, that’s not likely,” she admitted.

“From what we know of your brother, it’s quadruple unlikely,” Gretchen said. “He doesn’t let women get the upper hand on him.”

You don’t know him as well as you think you do, September thought, but she’d said enough already.

She and Gretchen were dismissed from D’Annibal’s office and September said, “Where were you last night?”

Gretchen made a sound of disgust. “On a date. With a man with grabby hands. Slid ’em over my ass about ten times while we were waiting for a table. So, I ordered the most expensive things on the menu and stuck him for a huge bill. He liked the idea of taking out a cop, but got pretty nasty when he realized the night was ending at my front door. Told him I’d arrest him for sexual harassment if he didn’t let up. He believed me and left.” She made a face. “Turned my phone off. Sorry. Would’ve rather been with you. So, the girlfriend blamed Olivia Dugan?”

September had given her the highlights before they walked into D’Annibal’s office, and now she gave her a more complete report. Gretchen listened closely, then nodded a couple of times.

“All right, let’s go see Kurt Upjohn and the ex, if she’s still at the hospital.”

“Camille. What about Maltona’s boyfriend . . . um . . . Jason?”

“Jason Jaffe.” She humphed her annoyance. “Slippery bastard. Yeah, I’m gonna track him down after the hospital. When’s the interview with Channel Seven?” September shrugged and Gretchen said, “Probably soon. They’ll put it on like a teaser. D’Annibal looks good on camera and so does the viper.”

“Pauline Kirby? Wes called her a barracuda.”

Gretchen smiled thinly. “You’re bound to have a ‘moment’ with her sooner or later. You’ll find your own adjectives.”

Liv watched the landscape flash by outside the window. “Actually, this started long before Zuma,” she said to Auggie, picking up the conversation where it had dropped off. They were almost back at his place.

He shot her a look. “You’re thinking it started with your mother. Her death. Or, maybe something to do with the things she sent you?”

“Her death . . . And there were other deaths at the same time of my mother’s supposed suicide.”

“Supposed,” he repeated.

“The official version is she hanged herself, but I’ve never been able to make myself believe that. There was a serial killer, just outside of Rock Springs. Twenty years ago. He strangled them, and left their bodies in fields. And I think it’s connected to my mom’s death.”

“You think he’s responsible.”

“It’s a theory.”

He asked, feeling his way, “You lived in Rock Springs at the time of the killings?”

“Strangulations. Yes.”

He thought in silence for a few moments, then said, “I remember some about that case. They never got the guy, and the killings seemed to stop.”

“The theory is that he’s either dead or in prison for something else.”

“You don’t believe that,” Auggie guessed.

“No. I don’t. Like I don’t believe it was suicide. Mama’s death. I always thought it was . . .”

A long pause fell between them, and then Auggie said quietly, “The bogeyman.”

“The bogeyman,” Liv repeated.

The old hag put me in a rage today.

She asked about the truck.

It is hidden away, but I couldn’t think up an answer and I felt the need rise in me, hot and hard. My hands clenched. Did she know? Does she know?

I could feel the worms inside my brain, feeding on me. I’m getting sicker, that’s what the doctors will say.

Sicker and sicker.

I just need to be careful. And keep with the plan.

The bitch may have to be killed, too. It would be a pleasure.

But first Olivia.

Liv . . .

I’m coming for you.

I will throw you down and shove deep into you, my thumbs at your throat.

And you will scream.