54

Since I’d already seen Beryl once, and Security recalled that I’d been duly approved by Garnet, my arrival was greeted with general relief. From a distance I could hear Thea’s voice, raised in shrill argument. No wonder Security regarded me fondly; can’t have guests shrieking in the looney bin. Distinctly lower class.

Jannie, the aproned attendant, confided, “We must have called Mr. Cameron seven times, but no one’s answering his phone. We’ve left messages everywhere.”

“It’s fine,” I said, calmly assuming an authority I didn’t have because it seemed no one else was willing to shoulder the burden. “Beryl Cameron’s sister has returned from an extended vacation and wishes to see Beryl. I’m certain that if Dr. Manley were here, he’d have no objection. Dr. Manley’s assistant could remain present during the entire visit, or if Thea finds that unacceptable, you might move Beryl to an observation lounge equipped with one-way glass. You have those, I assume? Both Beryl and Thea know me, and while I have no degrees in psychology, I’d be happy to monitor the meeting, so that nothing in any way violent or upsetting could occur. I’m sure the Cameron family, whom I represent, would agree that the institute would be behaving in an entirely responsible manner.”

Well, I did still represent Tessa. It’s just that I sounded so unlike myself, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smirking.

A security man in an impeccable suit frowned and said, “There’s a woman with Miss Cameron—”

“Oh yes,” I agreed, pursing my mouth in distaste. “Dreadful, isn’t she?” No way to get chummy faster than to claim a common enemy; I knew Roz would do the same for me in similar circumstances. “The woman can wait in my car. Or if you’d prefer she leave the property entirely—”

“I would,” he said, sounding relieved.

I was glad Roz couldn’t hear his disapproving tone. If she had, she’d have practiced karate kicks on his ears, and he’d have fired his Taser, and God knows what kind of free-for-all would have erupted.

As it happened, Roz listened amiably enough to my request; she ought to, I figured, after letting her charge get this far from the house! I told her, in no uncertain terms, to clear out. I also blinked my left eye twice in quick succession: an established signal. She’d wait in the car, on alert.

Jannie once again played wardress. Thea—dressed in the same loose shift and khaki jacket of the night before—and I waited for Beryl in the ground-floor sunroom they’d tried to pawn off on me before. An ornate mirror covered most of the right-hand wall. One-way glass indeed. I wondered if the room was wired for sound. Plenty of space to lay wire under the thick carpet. Potted palms and sofas, thick with cushions, in which to hide microphones.

Thea was keyed up; I couldn’t have kept her from talking if I’d tried.

“Did you read my first book?” she asked, apropos of nothing, without saying hello, without seeming to notice Roz’s dismissal, the change in personnel or surroundings.

“Nightmare’s Dawn!” I said. “Yes. Twice. I can’t say I enjoyed it. I admired it. It seemed very painful, very real.”

“The new book doesn’t measure up,” she said in a half-swallowed whisper, as though she could hardly bring herself to mention a fear she’d clung to so tightly and so long.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“I tried,” she answered despairingly. “I wrote. But it was never the same after everyone knew who I was. I felt exposed, like film left in the sun, blank and empty, stunned by the light. I wrote, but I ripped every page to shreds. I made confetti, flushed it down the toilet, so no one would know I’d tried and failed. I panicked.”

She stared at the plush carpet. One thumb and forefinger circled the other wrist, squeezing the flesh like a handcuff. I looked at Jannie. No sign of Beryl. I wondered if they were stalling, trying to neutralize us until Garnet Cameron answered his phone.

Jannie indicated a central table, surrounded by four graceful chairs, inviting us to sit. If I were going to plant a bug in the room, I’d have used the underside of the table, or perhaps the huge cut-glass vase that served as a centerpiece.

Thea didn’t give Jannie so much as a glance. She said, “I kept my notebooks wherever I went. I always wrote, but I could never show my work. It was as if that part of my life was over, covered with glass, dusty, locked away. The first notebook was filled, the first chapter written over twenty years ago. It was Beryl’s story. I was afraid to write my own.”

“Everyone loved your writing,” I said soothingly, because she was starting to pace and frown, and I didn’t want to give the staff any reason to call in a major headshrinker, advise Garnet or Tessa that one more family member could do with an extended rest.

Thea said, “That was the problem. Nightmare’s Dawn. They loved it, they loved me, they wanted me to keep writing the same book over and over. I was so young and everyone expected so much. Before I ran away, when I couldn’t write, I started to dream about killing myself.”

Jannie stood straighter. She seemed to make eye contact with someone beyond the mirror.

“Do you know the story of Thomas Chatterton?” Thea continued. Jannie relaxed.

“No,” I said.

“He was a poet, a prodigy. Today, he’s regarded by some as a precursor to the entire Romantic movement. Born in 1752.”

“That’s a while back,” I said, because she seemed to expect comment.

“His work was never appreciated, and in order to live he became desperate enough to attempt a literary fraud. He invented a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, and wrote a series of Rowley’s poems that he then ‘discovered.’ The dead monk’s poems were all the rage of London and so was Chatterton. Until the deception was made public.”

“What happened?”

“Chatterton was banned from literary society. Two years later, living in squalor, he ate rat poison. A genius at fifteen, dead at seventeen.… There aren’t many tales of prodigies who live happily ever after. I couldn’t find any.”

“Is that why you wrote a will?”

“I had one thing of value, the book I’d written in a joyful spurt—a week, maybe a month at most. I gave it to Beryl. It seemed, at the time, like a whim, but it wasn’t. I wanted her to have it because … because I’d ruined her life.”

I spoke softly. “Exactly how had you ruined Beryl’s life? Had you plagiarized her work? Is part of Nightmare’s Dawn really Beryl’s?”

“Of course not! I ruined … I have to talk to Beryl first, to Beryl.”

“Your will wasn’t valid,” I said after a brief pause. “You were underage.”

“I didn’t really think I’d die,” she said.

“You must have had money as well. A trust fund?”

“Whatever, it was probably divided between Garnet and Beryl.”

“You don’t seem to care.”

“There was always a lot of money when I was growing up.”

“Did you arrange to take some with you when you ran?”

“Three thousand dollars,” she said ruefully. “I didn’t know anything about money. I thought it was a fortune until I discovered what it could buy. I’ve learned poverty, if nothing else.” She got to her feet, took a step toward Jannnie. “What’s keeping my sister? You promised.”

I got between them, took Thea’s hand, walked her back toward a chair. I said, “I thought your second manuscript was very fine. It’s uneven. There are chunks of dazzling imagery. You need to work on it.”

“But I’m not a child genius anymore,” Thea said. “Not ‘talented for my age.’”

“Just a writer,” I said. “Just a poet.”

She swallowed audibly. “Thank you,” she muttered faintly.

“You write the occasional poem still?” I asked, thinking about “berlin, now.”

“An act of madness, darkness. I tuck it in my footlocker, lock it away as quickly as I can, afraid some horrid Pandora will escape, and now she has, escaped forever—”

Beryl entered, alone, in a wheelchair that she worked with her hands. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d lost the ability to walk. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe her weight made the wheelchair necessary. Certainly she wouldn’t have been confined to bed so long her legs had atrophied. Not at WPI.

Thea saw her and began to weep, deep sobs starting in her gut, welling uncontrollably. Ugly tears. I passed her a box of tissues and she blew her nose.

Beryl didn’t give any sign of recognition. I didn’t know if anyone had prepped her for the meeting or if they’d sent her to the sunroom cold, to observe her reaction.

Thea dropped the Kleenexes, not even looking for a wastebasket. She lowered herself to her knees, mumbling, stumbling in her haste to speak. “I’m sorry, Beryl. So sorry. You were right. You were right, and I was afraid to say you were right, and so they put you here. ‘Silenced for what they did to you, worse, far worse than caged for acts of rage.’ I’ve come back, and I’ll be put in jail for what I did, for killing, but I don’t know how to free you, Beryl. I don’t know what they’ve done to you.” Her speech became more rapid, her voice loud, angry.

“What have you done to my sister?” she screamed at Jannie. “She wasn’t like this. She could speak, she could laugh. She could dance and sing, and play the piano. Do you know that? She played better than Mama ever did. Other children liked her best, always. My father liked her best.”

Thea was on her feet now, menacing, backing Jannie into a corner. “What have you done to her? I want her medical charts! I want to see what that idiot, Manley, did to her, did to her so he could have my mother when my father died. He’d have done anything Mama said. And Tessa would have said anything Franklin wanted her to say!”

“Dorothea!” Beryl’s croak of a voice commanded our attention. “Dorothea,” she repeated slowly. “Why are you come from the dead?”

“I was never dead.”

“Yes, you were. We buried you, Thea. I wore white, not black. Mama made me wear white.”

“Beryl!” Thea grasped her hand. “I’m not dead. I’ve come back for you. To tell them that you always told the truth.”

“Why? Why now?” Beryl patted her nightgown and I could hear the faint crinkle of paper. She must have kept her sister’s words near her since she’d found them in the photo box.

Thea’s voice sank to a whisper. “I didn’t know before. Honest to God, Beryl, I didn’t know. Manley promised me he’d help me explain to you if I came back, and now he’s not here.”

“Is this about recovered memory, Thea?” I asked.

“Yes. Yes, that’s what he called it. He said that when Daddy came to your room, you were there, you remembered. But I learned to go to another place in my head, to pretend so deeply that it never happened, that after a while I could just go away in my mind, and then it truly never seemed to happen. So I wasn’t really lying when I told Mother that Daddy never bothered me at night, and that you were making the whole thing up. Even when you tried to kill yourself, taking all Mama’s pills, I thought, ‘She’s just crazy.’ I’m so sorry …”

“When?” Beryl asked.

“What do you mean? When did I remember?”

Solemnly, Beryl nodded her head.

“When I started to rewrite your book, Beryl. I’d been writing about you, and the stories you told me, stories I didn’t believe, about Daddy tying you with birthday ribbons, and I realized I’d written ‘tying me’—not ‘tying her,’ but ‘tying me’—I erased it so fast, but then I knew, and I felt so sick inside I couldn’t move or talk. It clawed at me, that ‘I,’ that ‘me.’ I couldn’t write without ‘I’ or ‘me’ coming out. It was as if my hand was not in control any longer. I put the notebooks back in the footlocker, and I locked it tight, and I didn’t look at them again. I wanted Thea to stay dead then, more than ever, because I didn’t want to remember.” She was breathing quickly now, talking fast and low. I hoped she spoke too softly for audio equipment, if they were using it, but in a first-class joint like this one, they probably had stuff that could catch the faintest sigh.

“Aren’t you Thea, Dorothea?” Beryl asked, shaking her head back and forth, back and forth. “I wish you were her. I wish you were.”

“Yes, dear, I am, but I’ve been somebody else for a long time, so long that I have a grown son. I have another life, a quiet life … I had a quiet life. But I couldn’t stop the remembering. Not once it started.”

I heard a man’s voice then: Garnet, calling, racing through the hall, coming closer.

“There’s another way out,” Thea said to me. “I won’t see him. I won’t.”

Before I could stop her, before I had any idea of her intent, she seized the fat crystal vase, shook half the flowers on the floor, and thrust the leaded ball away from her, hard and fast, with hands and elbows, like a volleyball pass. It crashed through the mirror, destroying a vast section of phony wall, revealing an adjoining room staffed by a lone white-coated technician, frozen in his chair.

Then she had me by the hand, and we were smashing through the opening she’d made, racing through the small observation room, out a nearby door, down a path lined by late-flowering shrubs.

Roz had the presence of mind to start the car when she saw us running toward the lot.

I’d had the presence of mind to grab the spool of tape off the machine operated by the astonished open-mouthed man in the lab coat.

As soon as we were safely on the highway, Thea whooped and hollered in victory. Roz and I joined her. I think I’ll always remember that one unexpected glimpse—Thea as she might have been, with laughter in her eyes and color in her cheeks.

Maybe she knew there wouldn’t be much to celebrate at the end.