One Last Scream (8 page)

Karen’s heart ached for him. “I can drive Amelia over,” she said finally. “It’s no problem, Mr. McMillan. But if I insist on taking her to your house, she’s bound to figure out something’s wrong. Would you like me to tell her what happened?”

She could hear him sigh on the other end of the line. “Yes. Thank you, Karen. Thank you very much.”

When she clicked off the phone, Karen could hear Jessie talking to Amelia: “You sit tight, hon. She’ll be with you in a jiff. Rufus, get down!”

Pulling the dog by his collar, Jessie lumbered back into the kitchen and gave her a wary look. “Whew,” she whispered. “That poor girl has the fidgets something fierce. She’s practically bouncing off the walls in there. I think she’s been crying, too.”

Karen took hold of her arm. “Jess, do we still have some of Dad’s sedatives?”

“You mean those light blue pills that made him a little dopey?”

Karen nodded. “Yes, the diazepam, for anxiety.” It was times like this Karen wished she were a psychiatrist rather than just a therapist. Then she could have the proper medications on hand, instead of making do with some secondhand sedatives that were probably beyond their expiration date. “Amelia’s going to need something to calm her down. Do we still have those pills?”

Jessie nodded. “On the crap shelf in the linen closet. I’ve been bugging you to let me clean that out. Good thing you never listen to a word I say. I’ll get them.” Jessie headed up the back stairs.

Karen went to the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water for Amelia. She gave Rufus a stern look. “Stay,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and started toward her office at the front of the house.

The room used to be her father’s study, and had always been one of Karen’s favorite spots in the house. It was very comfy, with a fireplace and built-in bookshelves. But Amelia didn’t appear at all comfortable. Dressed in jeans, a black top, and a bulky cardigan, she nervously paced in front of the sofa. Her wavy black hair was a windblown mess. Jessie was right. It looked as if she’d been crying.

She rushed to Karen and threw her arms around her. Karen wasn’t in the habit of hugging her patients. But she held onto Amelia and gently patted her on the back.

“Where were you?” Karen asked, finally pulling away a little. “I thought you were going to wait for me here.”

Tugging at a strand of hair, Amelia looked down at the floor and shrugged. “Well, I waited for Jessie, like you said to. But after about ten minutes, I got kind of anxious. So I just drove around for a while.”

Karen bit her lip. “You, um, you didn’t by any chance track me down at the Sandpoint View Convalescent Home? I thought I saw you there about twenty-five minutes ago.”

“I have no idea where that even is,” Amelia replied, wide-eyed. “What are you talking about?”

Karen shook her head. “Never mind. It’s my mistake. Here, I got you some water. Sit down, try to relax.”

“I can’t sit down,” Amelia said, pacing again. “I have a feeling something’s happened to my parents.”

“I understand,” Karen said. “I just got off the phone with your uncle. He called. He was worried about you. He told me that…” She hesitated.

Amelia stopped pacing, and turned to stare at her.

Jessie came to the door with the diazepam and handed the bottle to Karen.

“Thanks, Jessie,” Karen said. “Could you close the door, please?”

Jessie slid shut the big, bulky pocket door that came out of the wall. Karen shook two pills into her hand. “Amelia, I want you to take these. They’re like Valium. They’ll chill you out a little.”

But Amelia didn’t move. She just kept staring at Karen. Tears welled in her eyes. “You want me to take a sedative? What did Uncle George tell you?”

“Take the pills, Amelia.”

“Oh, my God,” she said, wincing. A shaky hand went over her mouth. She sank down on the sofa. “Then it’s true. Aunt Ina…my Mom and Dad…they’re all dead, aren’t they?”

Karen swallowed hard and nodded. “I’m so sorry….”

No one said anything in the car while Karen drove across the West Seattle Bridge toward Amelia’s uncle’s house. Amelia sat on the passenger side, pensively gazing out her window. Jessie was in back with a grocery bag full of food from Karen’s fridge. She’d insisted on fixing dinner for Amelia’s uncle and his family.

A bit taken aback by the idea, Karen had wondered out loud if they’d be intruding on the family’s grief.

“Nonsense, they gotta eat, don’t they?” Jessie had replied while loading up the grocery bag. “You have all the fixings here for chicken tetrazzini—chicken, noodles, Parmesan cheese, sour cream. I’ll whip up the casserole, stick it in the oven, and then you and I can beat a path out of there if it looks like we’re wearing out our welcome.”

Amelia had been inconsolable, sobbing hysterically for twenty minutes until the diazepam had kicked in. She finally slumped back on Karen’s sofa. “I should go see Uncle George,” she murmured, wiping her eyes. “Poor Jody and Steph…”

Sitting beside her on the couch, Karen handed her another Kleenex. “Your uncle asked me to drive you over. I said I’d be glad to.”

Amelia nodded. “Thanks.”

Biting her lip, Karen studied her for a moment. “You—you still haven’t asked how it happened.”

Silent, Amelia stared down at the wadded-up Kleenex in her hand.

“Your Uncle George said you had some kind of premonition.”

Amelia shrugged helplessly. “It was just a feeling—an awful, awful feeling that something was wrong.”

Karen’s heart was breaking for her. “Honey, there’s no easy way to tell you this. They haven’t confirmed it. But it’s possible your dad shot your mom and your aunt, and then he killed himself. They don’t know for sure yet.”

Amelia said nothing. She merely gave out an exhausted sigh, and closed her eyes.

Karen stroked her arm. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

While they’d gotten ready to leave, Amelia had just sat quietly on the sofa. Her voice hadn’t even cracked when she’d left Shane a phone message, explaining she was spending the night at her uncle’s house. She’d told him he could pick up his car at Karen’s. She’d said nothing about her parents’ deaths. “I’ll call you later tonight,” she’d finished up listlessly.

Once they’d climbed inside Karen’s Jetta, Amelia had suggested they take Highway 99 to the West Seattle Bridge. But after that, she hadn’t said anything else.

Karen took her eyes off the road for a moment to look at her now. She was still staring out at the Seattle waterfront and skyline. There was a tiny, sad smile on her face.

“How are you doing, Amelia?” she asked.

She kept gazing out the window at the view from the bridge. “I was thinking about all the trips we took here to Aunt Ina and Uncle George’s house—the Christmases, Thanks-givings, and birthdays. It’s a long drive down from Bellingham, almost two hours.” She traced a horizontal line on the window with her finger. “This bridge was always the landmark, the sign we were almost there. I remember when we were kids, Collin and I used to get so excited crossing this bridge. We loved going to Ina and George’s.” She let out a little laugh. “Last Thanksgiving on our way here, I noticed Collin had way too much product in his hair. He had his window open, but his hair didn’t budge an inch. I could have broken off a piece of it. I remember teasing him, and Mom and Dad were laughing. Collin’s face got red and he started cracking up too. He had the funniest laugh. You should have heard it….”

Still staring out the window, she said nothing for a moment. Then the smile ran away from her face. “That was the last time I drove here with my family. I can’t believe they’re all gone now. I can’t believe I actually could have…” She trailed off and shook her head.

From the backseat, Jessie leaned forward and patted Amelia on the shoulder.

Karen glanced at her on the passenger side. Amelia had her head down. She absently twirled a strand of her hair around her finger—the same nervous tic Haley had had.

Karen remembered Amelia doing that during their very first session.

Someone from Student Health Services at the University of Washington had referred the 19-year-old to Karen. Karen didn’t have much information on her potential new client, except that her track record with therapists hadn’t been too marvelous. She’d been having problems with alcohol and joined this campus group, Booze Busters. That had worked for a while, but she’d fallen off the wagon when her kid brother had drowned three weeks before.

When Karen answered her door for their first session that warm Friday afternoon, she was surprised at how beautiful Amelia was. The soft-spoken, polite girl had wavy black hair and blue eyes. She wore a pink oxford-cloth shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals. She said, “Yes, thank you,” to a bottle of water, and sat at one end of the sofa in Karen’s study. “So—what do you know about me?” she asked.

Karen settled in her easy chair with a notebook and pen. “Not very much, just what they told me at the U’s Student Health Services. Do you know anything about
me
?”

“Not very much,” Amelia echoed her, a tiny smile flickering on her face. “But I Googled you. Under ‘Karen Carlisle, Counselor, Seattle,’ there were a few links. I found out that you’re thirty-six years old. You graduated with honors from UCLA. You have a master’s in Social Work from the U, and you were a counselor at Group Health for five years before you started counseling on your own. Your name kept coming up in articles about that girl who got killed last month, Haley Something. Was she a client of yours?”

“She was a friend,” Karen answered carefully. “But we’re not here to talk about her.”

“I guess you’re right. This is my hour.” Amelia sipped her water. “Well, I suppose you know I’ve been through a lot of therapists. I’m like a one-session wonder with them.”

Karen shifted a bit in her chair. “Why is that?”

Amelia shrugged. “They were all dorks.”

“Dorks,” Karen repeated.

Amelia nodded. “For example, my Aunt Ina recommended this Dr. Racine, absolutely raved about her. And she turned out to be awful. The whole time I was talking to her, she sat there and stroked this ugly cat in her lap. I don’t think she was even listening. Every once in a while, she just said something like, ‘You own that,’ or ‘That’s valid.’ I mean, spare me.”

“Okay, so that’s one crummy therapist,” Karen said. “What about the others?”

Amelia rolled her eyes. “Well, there was this hippie, who seemed very promising until the end of our first session, when he gave me a homework assignment. He wanted me to go home, get some magazines, and clip out pictures and words that made me feel happy—and pictures and words that made me sad. And then I was supposed to make two posters: a happy collage and a sad collage. So I went home, got some magazines, and found this picture of a little girl waving at someone from a car window. I think it was an auto insurance ad or something. I clipped that out, and cut out the word Good-bye. Then I made a little poster of that and mailed it to him.”

Karen nodded. She was trying to figure out this young woman, who had come across as so vulnerable and sweet when they’d met just ten minutes ago. But she had a smartass streak, too. Karen wondered just how much of what Amelia said was true.

“Then there was this Arab guy—not that it makes any difference. I just couldn’t understand him half the time because his English was terrible. He tried to hypnotize me, and kept screaming at me in his thick accent that I was
reseesting
. And I wasn’t, I swear. Honest to God, I was trying to be a good subject.”

“Why was he hypnotizing you?”

Amelia sipped her water. She brushed a piece of lint off the sofa arm. Her focus seemed intent on that. “He was trying to get me to remember stuff about my childhood, before the Faradays adopted me. Didn’t Student Health Services tell you that I was adopted when I was four?”

Karen shook her head. She made a quick note:
Adopted @ 4 yrs old.
“Do you know what happened to your biological parents?” she asked.

“Nope. One of my first therapists was all hot on finding out about them. So my dad tried to get in touch with the adoption agency in Spokane. Turned out the place burned down after the Faradays adopted me. All their records went up in smoke. My folks thought about hiring a private detective to look into it further. I’m sure it couldn’t be too tough tracking down state or county records. I mean, the information’s there, somewhere. Am I right?”

“I suppose,” Karen allowed. “So did they hire a private detective?”

“Nope. They dropped the idea when I dropped the therapist.” She cocked her head to one side and squinted at Karen. “I have a feeling my folks would rather I not know about my biological parents.”

“If that’s true, it’s certainly understandable,” Karen said. “How do you feel? Do you want to know more about your birth parents?”

Amelia started to fiddle with her hair, and wrapped a strand around her finger. “I guess I’m curious.”

Karen stared at her, and remembered Haley. She felt a little pang in her heart. “Well, that’s normal enough,” she said, smiling. “So, Amelia, what do you hope to get out of these sessions with me?”

“Well, I’d like to have more control in my life. I’m tired of being so screwed up.”

“In what way do you feel screwed up?”

“I drink. I have blackouts. I don’t remember doing certain things.”

“What kind of things?” Karen asked.

“For example, I started seeing this really sweet guy, Shane, about two months ago. Well, one afternoon last week, he saw me at a stoplight in the University District in a beat-up Cadillac with some goony-looking urban-grunge type. He said I was all over this guy.” Amelia shook her head. “I swear to God, I didn’t remember any of it. But after Shane described the guy and his car to me, I had this vague impression that it really happened. I can’t help thinking I might have had sex with this other guy. I went and got tested just to make sure I didn’t pick up any STDs from this—this
stranger
.”

“So how did the tests turn out?” Karen asked with concern.

“Negative—all around. I begged Shane to forgive me, and he did, thank God. He knows I didn’t do it
consciously
.” She gave a pitiful shrug. “Anyway, see what I mean about being screwed-up and not having any control?”

With a sigh, Karen leaned back in her chair. “Well, you know, Amelia, I don’t mean to preach at you. But blackouts, memory loss, and erratic behavior generally come with the territory when people drink excessively.”

“I wasn’t drinking that afternoon. I was napping all day at a friend’s house—at least I
thought
I was napping.”

“Were you sick?”

“No. Hungover,” she murmured. Her eyes wrestled with Karen’s for a moment. “Listen, I was having blackouts when I was in Booze Busters and totally off the sauce. So it’s not just connected to the drinking. I’ve always had this problem with—with
lost time,
ever since I was a kid. I was pretty screwed up back then, too, having nightmares all the time, along with these pains. My mom used to call them phantom pains. But they were real to me, they hurt like hell. I remember one in particular when I was six. I was playing in the backyard, by our dock, and out of nowhere, I suddenly got this terrible burning sensation on the back of my wrist. I let out such a shriek. I swear to God, it felt like someone was putting out a lit cigar on me. Mom thought a wasp might have stung me or something. But there was no sign of anything wrong. Still, it hurt like hell for days afterward.

“That’s why I started drinking on the sly in early high school. It numbed these weird pains. And after a few drinks, I’d drag myself to bed and pass out. And I didn’t have to lie there for an eternity with my usual tossing, turning, and worrying about the nightmares. Hell, for a long time, drinking was my
salvation
.”

“So—do you think you’re better off with an alcohol dependency?” Karen asked.

Amelia shook her head. “I’m not defending my drinking. I’m just saying that I was having these problems a long time before I tipped back my first shot of Jack Daniel’s.”

“Do you still get these pains?” Karen asked.

“No, thank God. They stopped around the time I was sixteen.” Amelia sighed. “Anyway, that’s why some of the other therapists wanted to explore my early childhood. I mean, something must have happened to me early on to make me this screwed up, right?”

Karen smiled. “Do us both a favor and stop referring to yourself as screwed up, okay?”

Amelia smiled back at her. “Okay.”

“Can you remember anything from that time before the Faradays adopted you?”

She started to peel at the label on the water bottle. “Just fragments. I remember one night, sitting alone in a car, in the front seat. I was cold—and tired. The car was parked by this forest. It was dark all around me, and I could hear screams. I remember thinking, ‘When the screaming stops, then we can go home.’”

Karen stared at her. She didn’t write anything down. “Do you know who was screaming? By any chance, did you recognize the voice?”

Amelia shrugged. “Some woman, I don’t know.”

“Were you frightened?”

“No, I just remember wanting to go home. That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. Like I said, it’s just fragments of memory.”

“Do you recall who took you home?” Karen asked.

Amelia shook her head.

“I’m just trying to piece this together, Amelia,” Karen explained. “Earlier you said, ‘When the screaming stops, then we can go home.’ Who’s ‘we’?”

“I told you, I don’t remember,” she replied, a bit edgy.

“Okay,” Karen nodded, reading her discomfort. “Let’s move on. Is there anything else from your early childhood you’d like to tell me about? Did you have any friends or playmates?”

Amelia took a moment to answer, and Karen quickly jotted in her notes: “Young A in car alone @ nite—screams outside—go home when screaming stops.”

“I remember there was a little playhouse in a neighbor’s yard. I think it was a toolshed, but he’d fixed it up like a playhouse with a small, red, plastic table and chair inside. I have this vague recollection of eating cookies at that little table.”