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  “Actually, that's exactly right. She wrote a rather desperate letter to Maddy.”

  “Oh, God, I'm sorry. When Loretta gets upset about something, she starts shooting off letters left and right, and I tell you this house thing has got her twisted in knots. It should, of course. It's a really big problem, especially for her.”

  “Absolutely.” I asked, “So it's your opinion that Maddy shouldn't worry?”

  “No, she shouldn't. Anyway, there's really nothing she can do. It's the house that Loretta's upset about, and all of that could soon be in the hands of the lawyers.”

  I glanced away, stared at a stack of boxes, and thought back to the brief letter that Loretta had written to Maddy. Loretta had said it was a matter of life and death, which could revolve simply around her fear of being forced out of her home. And for her that would in fact be a very grave threat.

  I turned back to Carol Marie and asked the question with which Loretta had armed me. “What about your brother, Bill? Loretta said I should ask you about him.”

  It was as if I'd slapped her. All the energy fell from Carol Marie's face, and it was her turn to disappear into distant thought.

  Faintly, she said, “Well, there's… there's not much to tell.” Carol Marie looked at me with a sad smile, said, “Billy's a hopeless alcoholic and he disappeared about three years ago. No one's heard from him since.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, we all thought maybe he was dead, but about a year and a half ago I saw a show on the homeless. You know, on TV. And there he was, my very own twin brother, sleeping on a subway platform in New York. I can only say it's a good thing our dad was already dead, because if he'd seen that, it would've killed him for sure.”

  “It must have been a shock.”

  Across the small table I studied this woman who appeared at first glance the most well adjusted of the three children in her family. Attractive, well dressed, the owner of a successful store—I wondered how she'd survived. What she'd been up against. I could see some corner of sadness, a gray area of pain, and I wanted to know why this woman had succeeded in life and why Loretta and apparently Billy hadn't. Then again, I noticed that Carol Marie wasn't wearing a wedding ring, which meant none of the three siblings had chosen the traditional 2.2 kids route. Quite possibly they'd all shunned the suburban family ideal, and quite possibly this family line could die out. What I wanted to find out was what was keeping it from thriving.

  That head of blond, frizzy hair poked into the back room, and Carol Marie's employee called, “Help, we just got swamped!”

  Carol Marie took a big slug of coffee and bounced back, energy and excitement masking the pain I'd briefly seen.

  As she started to get up, she said, “Owning your own business is so much work, I can't believe it. I'm supposed to be doing bookwork this afternoon, and instead my other employee called in sick and I have to be in the store until closing tonight.”

  We made small talk. As we moved from the rear to the front of the store, we wrapped things up, with Carol Marie promising that she would talk with Loretta and assuring me I didn't have to worry.

  “Thanks so much to you and your sister,” said Carol Marie. “We'll let you know if Loretta needs any help.” With that she turned to several women, and enthusiastically offered, “And how can I help you ladies?”

  I drifted out of the store, Carol Marie's words bouncing around in my head. I could see all that she'd said, buy it all, but there were some holes; that was all too obvious. Something had shattered this family, and I wanted to know what. And, damn it, I thought, cursing myself, I forgot to mention the incident in the park. I wanted to find out if Carol Marie would have any reaction to hearing Loretta had been chased and Helen had come to the rescue with a knife. Or what if anything she'd say about my being chased and my car rammed last night.

  I stopped, looked back into the store. Someone else was just wandering into CM Fashions, and Carol Marie and her assistant were more busy than ever. I really needed to ask her about the park, what she thought might have happened. I sensed she would say she knew nothing, but it was the quality of her reaction that I needed to witness. Now, however, was obviously not the time.

  So I resolved to get a cup of coffee and stop back in ten or fifteen minutes. Immediately my eyes lifted upward, scanned the second floor for the ubiquitous food court, and spotted a couple of bright umbrellas off to one side. I started for the escalator, wondering why anyone would come to an enclosed mall and sit under an umbrella. Were you supposed to pretend that you were really outside, perhaps at some fashionable outdoor cafe on the Champs Elysées? The snobbish part of me wondered if the masses had grown that dumb, if they could so easily be fooled. Evidently so.

  I bought a cup of coffee at a frozen-yogurt stand, shied away from the umbrellas, and sat down on a bench overlooking the first floor and the courtyard. Down below there were a fair number of people, primarily mothers with children in tow and groups of giggly teenagers out for some after-school activity. As I was gazing downward, however, I sensed someone behind me, got that uneasy feeling of eyes upon my back. I turned, scanned the food-court area, but saw just a couple of tables of people. Then I gazed up the corridor, eyed an older couple walking along, a single man, but nothing more, not really. It was strange, though. I just couldn't shake off this sense of being observed.

  “Because you probably were. You just have to assume that he was out there.”

  Malls had always made me uneasy with their artificial environments and their processed air, the sterility of it all. I just didn't like sitting there, so I quickly finished my coffee, started down the escalator. As I rode down, one hand on the moving black handrail, I looked across the courtyard and toward CM Fashions, hoping that it would be less busy by now. And apparently it was, because from my vista I saw Carol Marie emerging from her store. Great, I thought, my eyes trained on her. I'd catch her, ask a couple of more questions, and be on my way.

  Carol Marie didn't go far, just down about a hundred feet and toward the money machine. I could see her the entire time, and wondered at first if she was going for some extra cash. But then I watched her as she reached into her pocket and pulled out a coin and went up not to the money machine but to a nearby carousel of phones. Immediately my curiosity was aroused—to say nothing of my suspicions. Certainly CM Fashions had a phone, undoubtedly one with several lines. So why would she, the owner of the store, be stepping out to make a call? Even if it was private, she could have just closed off the back room. Unless… unless what?

  Had I walked right over when I reached the bottom, I would have been fairly obvious. Carol Marie probably would have seen me. Instead I made my way up against a row of stores, moving by a hat boutique, a shoe store, a venerated men's clothing store with a window of khaki pants and button-down shirts. By nature I wasn't a paranoid or suspicious person, but none of this was making sense. I knew as I neared the phones that I hadn't been given the bottom scoop on Loretta and her family. And I guessed I wouldn't get it no matter how many questions I asked or how direct I was. Instead I'd have to connive.

  The phone carousel was a solid post about six feet tall with a half dozen phones blossoming around it. Each phone had a slight partition shielding it from the next, and when I went to the phone opposite the one Carol Marie was using, I could hear virtually nothing. I stepped back, gazed beneath the phones, saw Carol Marie's white slacks and white shoes. From the way her shoes were pointing, it was obvious she was half facing the central courtyard. I moved the other way, started approaching her from behind, and stopped at the next phone. I could hear only a bit more. Only a nondescript mumbling. Everything else was blotted out by the fuzzy roar of the fountain.

  I didn't have much of a choice. I could always claim coincidence, and so I slipped up to the phone right next to Carol Marie, held my head low, and positioned my back to her. My face was shielded by the partition, and I leaned back a tad. I could hear her then, voice low and extremely agitated.

  �
�Jesus Christ, I have no idea how much she told him,” said the anxious Carol Marie. “No. No, I can't. I have to work until closing.” Then she listened, said nothing until finally, “Okay, I'll see you then. I agree. We can't stop now; we've got to go through with it. But if that stupid bitch told him about Ray Preston, things could get really messed up.”

  Chapter 14

  “Jesus Christ, Maddy,” I said, pacing the big third-floor ballroom of my sister's house. “I still can't believe you didn't tell me.”

  “Well, I didn't know, not really.”

  “You mean to tell me you didn't know that Ray Preston was somehow connected to Loretta's family?”

  “Alex, please.”

  “Cut the bullshit, would you?”

  Reexperiencing it all in trance made me upset all over again. I couldn't remember when I'd last been so mad at my sister, and my fury had burst my trance like a needle popping a balloon. In one explosive moment my trance to the past was destroyed and I was back on the island, confronting not Loretta's sister but my own. And wondering who of all of them I could trust: Loretta, Carol Marie, or my sanctimonious Maddy.

  I walked not toward the balcony but toward the far wall where three tall leaded windows overlooked the side yard. Leaning against the glass, I peered down some sixty feet to the lawn below, shook my head. Then I spun around and stared at my darling sis, who was lying way across the room, some thirty feet from me, so meditative, so Gandhi-like, on her black leather recliner. Her arms were at her sides, as still as her paralyzed legs, and with those sunglasses on I couldn't tell if her sightless eyes were open or closed. That didn't make any difference really, but I just wanted to know where she was—still focused on me at the mall with Carol Marie, or here, now, and paying the real me her complete attention.

  “Maddy, do you hear me?” I loudly called across the towering room. “I can't fucking believe you did that to me.”

  “Alex, calm down. You're getting way too emotional about this,” she said in a soft, rather distant voice.

  “That's fine for you to say, you weren't stuck in the middle of it all and no one tried to kill you. No one lied to you, either.”

  “For God's sake, I wasn't lying to you.”

  “Well, if you didn't lie to me, then it was one hell of a sin of omission!”

  With one finger, she pushed her glasses up her nose, rolled her head calmly toward me. I was sure that lots of her clients had gotten mad at her in therapy, that she'd pushed them until they'd furiously broken through some psychological barrier, which undoubtedly had been Maddy's long-sought goal for them. But this wasn't therapy and I wasn't her client. I was her younger brother and it pissed the hell out of me to see how much in stride she was taking my anger.

  “Alex,” she said, condescendingly, “haven't you heard of such a thing as client confidentiality?”

  “My, what a convenient excuse.”

  “Alex, Ray Preston was a client of mine. I can't divulge what he told me in our sessions. I'm not only ethically obliged to maintain his privacy, I'm legally bound as well.”

  “I'm glad you can so rationally legitimize deceit, Maddy. I'm glad you think it's all right to send your brother so blindly into a dangerous situation without telling him what to watch out for.” I snidely said, “You're like all shrinks, you know how to analyze clients, people that you're careful to keep at arm's length, but you don't know how to care for those close to you, your very own family.”

  That did it. With both arms, she shoved herself upright, wiggled deeper into the seat of the recliner, and I could plainly see that if she hadn't been paralyzed she would have either run over and slapped me or gotten up and kicked a chair or a wall.

  “Stop it, Alex!” she shouted. “Don't talk like that! You know how much you mean to me. You're the only brother I have, for God's sake. I'd never knowingly put you in danger. My God, you're the only family I have left. I didn't know there was anything dangerous when I sent you down to Chicago. All I had was that letter from Loretta, who'd been very unstable the last time I'd seen her. When I read the letter I thought she was contemplating suicide and that it was a plea for help. That was why I sent you down there. I just wanted you to check it out, to talk to her. I thought at worst we'd have to intervene, maybe send her to a hospital, but, Alex, no, I didn't, I really didn't think any of this would happen. I swear to God!”

  It was my turn to be calm, and I stood across the room, arms folded across my stomach and quite pleased with myself. I stared at the large Tiffany dome, the large expanse of stained glass that capped the fifty-foot-tall stairwell, the backside of which rose into this attic space like the dome of a mosque. And, yes, I was pleased. Or rather, relieved. I guess I'd just wanted to make her as mad as I was, and her distress was all it took to blot out my fury. Barely breathing and silently standing there, I studied the stained-glass dome, then my sister, and wondered where we could go from here.

  “Alex?” she called, turning her head and sightlessly scanning the room. “Where are you? You didn't leave, did you? Alex?”

  “I'm right here.”

  Still propping herself forward, she turned in my direction and said, “Please believe me. I honestly didn't expect anything like what happened. I had no idea anyone would be killed, least of all Helen. I just thought Loretta was in danger.”

  “From whom?”

  “Herself.”

  “Are you sure it wasn't from Ray Preston?”

  “Alex, Loretta had talked about suicide before and I was afraid this time she might really try.”

  I knew my sister, not only from our childhood days when she felt glee at mercilessly tricking me in any number of pranks, but particularly after what we'd been through when Toni, my old girlfriend of college days, was killed. I'd always, and often stupidly, trusted Maddy, and I'd learned the hard way to raise a flag of caution in questionable matters. As always, I had to remind myself that there was as much information in what Maddy didn't say as in what she did. So actually I was already assuming there was more to come. It was just a matter of asking for the details, then double-checking to make sure I got all of them, which was going to take some digging, no matter how direct I was.

  I strolled across the room and toward the French doors that opened onto the balcony and the vast view of Lake Michigan. I moved slowly, though, one cautious step at a time as if I were pondering a crucial move in a serious game of chess. My main question was, of course, who was the pawn?

  “You didn't answer me before, Maddy, and you're not answering me now. Did you know Ray Preston might know Loretta or someone in her family?”

  “Alex…”

  “Screw client confidentiality, Maddy. We're talking about murder. You knew, didn't you?”

  She meekly replied, “Yes. Both Ray and Loretta were my clients, so, yes, I was aware that Ray had some dealings with Loretta's family.”

  “What kind of dealings?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Maddy!”

  “No, I don't, not really.”

  Like a lawyer finding a chink in the armor of a witness, I stopped just short of the French doors, turned toward her, and rather dramatically said, “Not really?”

  Maddy lowered herself back onto the recliner, placed one hand on her forehead. She was silent, but she knew she'd been caught or cornered. She started to say something, stopped, then began her confession.

  My often-too-clever-for-her-own-good sister said, “I started seeing Ray after his little girl was killed, and that's what I was working on with him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His pain, his grief. He had a tremendous amount of anger over her death and he didn't know what to do with it, where to go with it. That's what we were working on. I was trying to help him deal with his grief in a healthy, sane way.”

  “I don't get it,” I commented, moving up to the doors and peering out. “How does that hook in with Loretta and her family?”

  “I'm not really sure. He never mentioned them, not at
all. That's why all of this is so confusing.”

  Two separate people, not related, both seeing my sister. How had Maddy made the connection between the two of them? Had Maddy been more than her amazingly insightful self? Had she been psychic?

  I asked, “If he didn't say anything, then how did you figure out there was any sort of contact or association between the two of them?”

  Behind me I heard nothing. I waited, let the seconds drag into pained silence. And then asked the obvious.

  “It was Loretta, wasn't it?”

  When there was still no reply, I glanced back, saw Maddy apparently in deep thought and slowly nodding her head. Her face was flat, expressionless, her eyes hidden behind her glasses. A mournful face—that was it. So what was it that was making her so sad?

  Finally she said, “Yes.”

  “Well, what did she say?”

  “Nothing, really. She only alluded to something.” Maddy lifted her shoulders, then slowly lowered them. “Loretta just showed up at my office one day and demanded to see me. I had clients all day, booked solid. The receptionist told her I had no time, but Loretta insisted on waiting, said she'd wait until the very end of the day. When I was told about her, I was concerned, of course, that it was someone at suicide risk, so I briefly saw her between patients. That's how I first made the connection between Loretta and Ray Preston.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I asked her how she found me, why she decided to come to me. And she said she'd heard about me from Ray Preston, whom I'd actually seen that morning. In the course of this first and rather short conversation, I ascertained that Loretta was not an immediate threat to herself, but I did note how nervous and agitated she was. I had an opening the following day and asked her to come back. She did, and I saw her for a full hour, and it was only then that I realized how difficult it was for her to come into the city. Not just physically but emotionally, you know, because of her agoraphobia. She didn't drive and she was afraid of the bus, so she took a cab the entire way. In fact, she paid for the cab to wait then and every other time she came to see me. She was afraid of not being able to find a way home.” Maddy drifted away in thought, then added, “I saw her for only two months, and that was the principal focus of our work, her fear of being out in public.”