Deanna Madden #1 The Girl in 6E (4 page)

AT FIVE THIRTY P.M.
, relatives start arriving to the party. Uncle Frank is the first, taking off his worn baseball cap in the front doorway, smiling shyly at Annie, and holding out a small, yellow-wrapped present, which looks as if it has been wrapped with half a roll of tape. She jumps excitedly, wrapping her small arms around his waist, inhaling the cigarette and earth smells that always follow him. She beams up at him, grabbing the present and shaking it excitedly. “Thank you, Uncle Frank.” He squeezes the back of her neck and grins down at her.

“You’re welcome, sweetie.” He crouches down so they are eye to eye. “You want to open it now?”

Her eyes widen. “Can I?” she whispers.

“Sure. Let’s sit on the back step, and get out of everyone’s way.” He straightens, holding his hand out, and she slides her tiny one into his and tugs, pulling him through the small living room to the worn-out back door.

They sit close, heads together, legs touching, on the small concrete step of the back stoop. She leans against his shoulder, pulling at the paper with anxious hands, her frustration with the tape eliciting a laugh from him. He takes the package gently and works the tape loose. “There,” he says, passing it back to her. “Now you can rip it to shreds.”

Inside the house, the front door is opened to another young girl, her father holding on to her small hand until they cross the threshold. The girl runs, heading to the table of favors, her feet pounding the thin floors of the trailer. “Where’s Annie?” the man asks, watching his daughter streak through the house.

“She’ll be in in a minute,” Carolyn Thompson says, setting down a pitcher of tea and flashing a smile. “I know she’ll be excited to see Dana. It’s been too long since you brought her over.”

The man grimaces, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. “You know how it goes, Carolyn. Too many other temptations on our time.”

The woman nods as she sets out a stack of cups, then turns to head back into the kitchen. On the way she stops at the back door, watching the step, seeing her brother lean down and whisper something into Annie’s ear.

I HAVE TWO
shrinks. I don’t really know why, except that I can’t seem to tell one of them things that I can tell the other, and vice versa. I actually pay both shrinks, which is an oddity for me since I normally try to exchange goods for services. Sex, even Internet sex, seems to be a universal currency. I tried using a client as a shrink once, and it was disastrous. Of course, with a username like QuackAttack, I probably should have known from the beginning that it wouldn’t work out. That was the guy with the little dick.

Dr. Brian Russell is my first shrink, my sex doctor. He is a sex therapist who is basically my gossip buddy. His website’s photo shows a thin, bald white man whose photos absolutely
shriek
gay, even though he is doing nothing but smiling into a camera with a business suit on. I wanted a gay shrink so I wouldn’t have to worry about turning him on when I describe my sessions. I talk to him about my customers, and he tells me their sexual motivations and how I can best connect with them. That is the official description of our relationship, but mostly we just giggle about what goes on during my cam sessions. I have no one else to talk to about this, and due to our doctor/patient relationship, he is a vault.

Dr. Derek Vanderbilt is my second shrink and has been on the payroll for eighteen months. He’s the closest thing to a friend I have had in the last three years. I can’t find a photo of him online, which irks me no end. For some reason, knowing what the person on the other end of the line looks like makes me feel I have the upper hand…at least in my mind. We talk once a week, on Wednesdays at two p.m. He has strongly suggested that I increase my sessions to twice weekly, but I have ignored that suggestion. He doesn’t know I have a second shrink. If he did, he might not worry about my psychological health so much. I talk to Derek about my murderous inclinations and the effects of my isolation. I don’t mind being killer-crazy, but I don’t want to be loony-bin-crazy. That would probably be bad for business—a bit of a turnoff.

“Tell me about your most recent fantasy.” Derek’s voice is smooth, deep, and masculine. I could listen to it all day long, though at $150 an hour, I limit myself to hour-long sessions.

“I enter a house at night. It’s quiet. All I can hear is the occasional chirp of a smoke alarm. The sound drives me crazy. I can’t find anyone downstairs, and as I climb the stairs, my heart is beating erratically. I am wet.”

“Wet—from rain?” Derek implores.

“No. Wet, as in aroused,” I clarify.

“Are you often aroused in your fantasies?”

This was taking us off topic, and I wanted to finish telling him my damn fantasy. He often did this, jumping on a random thing I’ve said and chasing it down till we’ve exhausted the poor little subject to death.

“Sometimes.” I knew he wanted more, but I plunged on. “I start to go upstairs, and the third step squeaks—loudly. A dog from above me whines, and I know I must kill him to keep him quiet. I don’t want to kill him, so I almost turn around. But the need has taken me over, and is drumming so loudly in my head, along with the damn smoke alarm, that I have to satisfy it.”

I pause, but thankfully Derek stays quiet, and I continue. “The top of the stairs is lit by a small Santa Claus night-light. I am confused, because it is not winter. I stare at it for a moment, before I hear a scratch on a door. It’s the dog. I reach for the handle, and suddenly I have a knife in my hand. I open the door slowly; the room is dark inside. The dog looks up at me. It is an old golden retriever. His back is swayed, and he is looking up at me with eyes of cloudy blue. His tail wags, and I start to cry. Not sob, just small streams of tears that leak from my eyes. I don’t kill the dog, but my thirst for blood is angry at me for my weakness.”

I shift, the memory of the dream filling me with renewed urges. “The pounding in my head increases. It’s like that feeling when you are really aroused; when your body is consumed with the need for release—you would do anything, and are in such a blind fervor that you lose all rational thought. The need overtakes my rational, compassionate side, and I rush into the room, worried that they are awake and that I have lost the advantage of surprise. I stop by the bedside, and wait for my eyes to adjust. I am mad at myself for leaving the dog alone, and I hear the soft pad of his old feet on the carpet as he walks over to me. He sits at my side and pants up at me. The soft pants of his happy breath increase the maddening chorus of my mind, and I know the only way to shut it up.”

I stop for a moment—breathing hard—the description of the fantasy making me excited, making the need stronger. It was a double-edged sword, talking to Derek. He helped me to calm the urges, but getting to that point often gave the urges strength.

“My eyes have adjusted and I see the room: a master bedroom. There are two bodies on the bed. The man has thrown the sheet off and is lying on his back. The woman is on her side, facing away from me. I go around to her side of the bed and do her first. Then I—”

“How do you kill her?”

I pause, clenching my hands, trying to stop the flow of excitement that is building in strength. “I use a knife. I stab her neck. She struggles but can’t speak. I watch her die.”

“And how did you feel as she died?”

“Empowered.” I close my eyes as I say the word, knowing that it is not the answer he wants. He keeps thinking that something is going to change. That the emotion of regret will start to enter my fantasies.

“Then what happens?”

“I go to him. I take more time with him and start with his chest. I stab him there, which instantly wakes him up. I wait for him to see her, then I finish him quickly.”

“Why wait for him to see her?”

I rub my forehead. “I don’t know. Because I’m psychotic.”

“You don’t seem happy with this fantasy.”

“Do I ever seem happy about my fantasies? It’s just so fucked up. I hate that I enjoy the thought of this disgusting shit. Lately, it’s been depressing me more than usual.”

“Do you want me to prescribe you something?” There is something in his voice, in his question, but I can’t tell what it is.

“
Fuck
, no. I want you to find the magic key that will make me normal.”

“No one is normal. Everyone is just pretending to be normal.”

“Don’t give me that shit. I used to be normal, and I liked it just fine.”

“Did your mother seem normal?”

I sigh, blowing out a huge
whoosh
of air, and close my eyes. I had been wandering around the loft, my cell to my ear, so I plop down on my real bed, staring up at the ceiling. “Yeah, Mom seemed normal. It’s not like I had a second mother to compare her to, but she was great. She had fresh homemade cookies every Wednesday when we’d get home from school. And she loved coupons. Dad made more than enough money, but Mom was obsessed with couponing; she did it every night after the dishes were washed, while we did homework. She seemed happy, maybe a little detached from Summer and Trent, but as normal as anyone else.”

“Detached? Explain.”

“She was always hugging me, wanting to talk about my day, coming up to my room to spend time with me. With Summer and Trent, there wasn’t that show of affection, she didn’t seem eager or interested in spending time with them. It was almost like she was afraid of getting close to them.”

“Think back, Deanna. Was there any hint of what was to come?”

I close my eyes, concentrating on the question, flipping back through the past. But I already know the answer; it was a question I had asked myself for four years. “There were times she was moody or quiet, and times when we knew to give her space, but that’s ordinary behavior for any person, right? And sometimes she would fly off the handle for no reason—just go ballistic on us over some little thing.”

I roll over, playing with a seam on my comforter. “Something happened in the past, when I was young. I overheard Mom and Dad talking about it one day, something that caused Mom to be sent away for a bit. I asked Dad about it one day, and he just said she was sick, and I dismissed it as nothing. Honestly, even if she did fly off the handle at times, what happened seemed to come completely out of left field. The only clue I can think of, looking back on it, was that she had sent me away that day.”

“Why do you think she sent you away?”

“Mom and I were very similar. I was a younger clone of her; at least that’s what she and Dad always called me.”

He cut off my next sentence. “Deanna, if you always considered yourself to be a clone of your mother, isn’t it possible that you are projecting this fantasy of violence onto yourself because you think that is what she was struggling with?”

“Anything’s possible, but I don’t think that paranoia would manifest itself in urges like the ones that I have.” Derek doesn’t know that I have killed before. He doesn’t know that I have sunk a knife into someone’s stomach and watched them die. That I left that experience and wanted more. More bloodshed, more death. I don’t trust the bonds of patient-doctor confidentiality that much. I move on before he can latch on to this theory and analyze it to death. “Anyway, I don’t know that she planned what happened, but I think she might have known something was coming. Killing me would have been like killing herself.”

“But she did kill herself.”

I pause. “Yeah, but maybe that was unexpected. Maybe after she did what she did, she couldn’t live with herself anymore.”

“Is that really what you believe?”

I stiffen on the soft bed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, don’t spout off bullshit to make my questions go away.”

“It’s not bullshit; it’s the truth. And if I wanted your questions to go away, I’d just hang up the phone.”

“Maybe.”

That does it. I hang up out of spite, and then, giving in to my sophomoric tendencies, I stick my tongue out at my cell.

Derek doesn’t think that I am a killer. He says that my urges are strictly fantasies, that I don’t manifest other traits of a killer. He thinks I’m bipolar, that the dark side of me is just one facet of my personality, not the real me. He thinks we can compartmentalize it, kill it off altogether with “proper medication.”