F Paul Wilson - Secret History 02 (18 page)

           
Gates leaned back again, twirling
that damn key ring.

           
"I told you that you would
resist the facts. Your sister went through a period of denial too."

           
Kara's revulsion was now turning to
anger.

           
"I will not have my father
defamed! He was a good man who's been dead a dozen years and can't defend himself!
Besides, Kelly would have told me!"

           
"Kelly didn't know."

           
That brought Kara up short. She
stared at Dr. Gates without speaking.

           
"Listen," he said,
"and perhaps you will understand why I asked you here. The regularly
repeated trauma of such magnitude can cause a child's mind to create a second
personality as a defense mechanism. The second personality takes over during
the times of recurrent trauma. There is no communication between the
personalities. The secondary personality shields the primary personality,
forming a barrier between it and an intolerable reality, thus allowing the
child to go about her everyday life as if nothing happened. And in a sense,
nothing does happen to the primary personality—the second personality absorbs
all the trauma."

           
"it never happened!" Kara
said.

           
"When the trauma stops, the
second personality is no longer needed. But it doesn't dissolve, it doesn't go
away, it merely becomes dormant, ready to leap to the surface should the first
personality be traumatized again. I believe that the traumatic break-up of
Kelly's last relationship—the lies she had believed, the betrayal she felt—awakened
Ingrid. Kelly managed to handle the emotional trauma in a mature manner, but
Ingrid was awake. And Ingrid wanted out. It was that tug of war going on in her
subconscious, and the unexplained lapses in memory when Ingrid managed to take
over, that eventually brought Kelly to me."

           
Kara sank back into the chair and
closed her eyes.

           
Kelly… Ingrid… it had to be true. It
explained so much. But the rest of it… sickening…

           
"All right," she said
slowly. "I'll grant the existence of this Ingrid personality. But she's a
liar. You said she was sexually promiscuous—"

           
"Many sexually abused children
grow up to be promiscuous, a reflection of how they were taught to relate to a
male during their formative years. Just as physically abused children grow to
be violent adults."

           
"Kelly was not abused, dammit!
I was there! I grew up with her! The Ingrid part of her is lying!"

           
"Perhaps. I have no way of
knowing. Ingrid often spoke of how her twin sib was also regularly abused by
their father."

           
Kara was out of her seat again. She
wanted to hurl herself at Gates and throttle that bland, matter-of-fact
expression off his face.

           
"Are you deaf? It. Never.
Happened!"

           
It couldn't have happened! Not Dad.
Never. She saw his weathered face, his easy smile, his gentle blue eyes. He
never even raised his voice. Dad was a…
a
prude!
She remembered how embarrassed he'd be whenever she and Kelly as
teenagers would pass him in the upstairs hall in their underwear. He'd shout at
them to get their robes on. He couldn't have—

           
"She said her twin sister was
named 'Janine,' " Dr. Gates said softly.

           
"There! What did I tell you!
This Ingrid is all screwed up! If she can't even get my name right, how can she
have any credibility about the rest of her story?"

           
Kara turned and headed for the door.
She had tolerated as much as she could of this nonsense.

           
"Thank you for your time, Dr.
Gates. I've heard all I want to hear."

           
He did not raise his voice but, as
her hand reached the door knob, Kara heard him with numbing clarity.

           
"What if the Janine she speaks
of belongs to you, Miss Wade?"

           
Kara froze. Her anger vanished as if
it had never been, replaced by a cold, sick fear crawling through her chest.
She turned and leaned against the door, facing him.

           
"Why are you doing this to
me?"

           
"I am not doing anything to
you. I am giving you the information you demanded yesterday, information that
might be of vital importance to you."

           
She hung there, weak-kneed, trying
to comprehend the unthinkable, but the thoughts would not take form. Her mind
fought them off, drove them away.

           
"Please sit down," Dr.
Gates said. For the first time there seemed to be real concern in his voice.

           
Kara shook her head. "No. Just
finish this and let me go."

           
"All right. I'll put it all in
a nutshell. Your twin sister developed a separate personality to shield her
from a massive childhood trauma. I dealt with that personality. I know it
existed. Therefore, since you and your twin grew up so closely together, and
since you have no memory of your sister's trauma, I thought it fair and prudent
to warn you that it is entirely possible that you, too, may have developed a
second personality to shield you from that same trauma."

           
"Okay," she said slowly.
"You've warned me. Maybe there was a trauma. Maybe we've both repressed
it. But that doesn't mean it absolutely had to have been… incest."

           
"Judging from Ingrid's
promiscuity, I'd say there's a high probability that—"

           
"But you can't be absolutely
sure
can you?"

           
Grant
me that! Please grant me that!

           
"No," he said after a
pause. "It's hard to be absolutely sure of anything in this case.
Especially with Kelly gone."

           
Thank
you.

           
Now. There was one more thing she
had to know before she fled this place, this man, this city.

           
"How could I tell if I had
another personality?"

           
"If you have black-outs, memory
lapses, new items around the house that you don't remember purchasing, you
might suspect, but short of a chance encounter with a friend or relative when
the other personality was in charge, you couldn't actually
know
. Except perhaps…" His voice trailed off.

           
"What? Tell me!"

           
"Hypnotism can sometimes bring
the other personalities to the surface, but it's not foolproof. And it can be
risky."

           
Kara turned and opened the door.

           
"Good-bye, Dr. Gates. And thank
you for your time."

           
She forced her feet to carry her
from the office, to the elevator, and out to the street. Everything around her
seemed blurred, as if she were moving through a fog.

           
I'm
sleepwalking
, she thought.
This is a
nightmare, and any minute I'm going to wake up
.

           
She took a cab back to Kelly's
apartment. She couldn't face Jill and Ellen now, not feeling as sick and…
defiled as she did. She had to pull herself together, put things in
perspective.

           
But how?

           
As soon as Kara stepped through
Kelly's front door she realized she had made a mistake. She didn't want to be
here. Not now. Not alone. She needed someone to talk to, she needed to bounce
all this off someone. But who? Certainly not her aunt. Ellen was practically a
basket case as it was.

           
Only one person in this lousy city
was fit to hear it. She didn't want to call him, but there was no one else.

           
When they'd told him he had a
personal call from a woman, Rob had assumed it was Connie. She'd been bugging
him since Sunday, wanting to forget their falling out and get back to their old
arrangement. Rob wasn't interested. So he was surprised to hear Kara's voice on
the line. He had expected she might possibly call for a progress report in a
few days, but not this soon, especially after the way she had all but run from
him yesterday, literally dragging her cute little girl after her.

           
"Are you very busy today?"
she said. Her voice had a strange, dull sound to it. Almost as if she'd been
sedated.

           
"Yeah. It's a zoo. You back at
the farm?"

           
"No. I'm still in the city. Um…"
Her voice trailed off...

           
Rob waited, then said, "Kara,
what is it?"

           
The words came out in a rush:
"Rob, could you come over?"

           
"Come over where?"

           
"I'm at Kelly's."

           
"What's wrong? Did you find
something?"

           
"No. But I've learned something
about her you should know. I need to talk to you about it. When can you come
over?"

           
"I won't be able to get free
for at least two hours. Maybe more. How about five?"

           
"Okay. You know where?"

           
"West Sixty-third."

           
"Right. Don't be late, okay?
And come earlier if you can."

           
"Sure. See you then."

           
Rob hung up slowly. What was going
on? This did not sound like the Kara Wade he had dealt with during the past
week. So tentative. As if someone had knocked the pins out from under her.

           
Rob did a rush job on the report he
had turned in on the double homicide on West 48th, but still it was a little
after five before he got over to Kelly's apartment.