Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (59 page)

“You’re sure Jillian never mentioned it?”

“Jillian? No. Why would she?”

Gurney shrugged. “It’s possible that Skard may be Hector Flores’s real name.”

“Skard? How would Jillian know that?”

“I don’t know, but she apparently did an Internet search to find out more about it.”

Ashton shook his head again, the gesture resembling an involuntary shudder. “How awful does this have to get before it ends?” It was more a wail of protest than a question.

“You said something on the phone just now about tomorrow morning?”

“What? Oh, yes. Another twist. Your lieutenant feels that this conspiracy angle makes everything more urgent, so he’s pushing up the schedule for interviewing our students to tomorrow morning.”

“So where are they all?”

“What?”

“Your students. Where are they?”

“Oh. Forgive my distractedness, but that’s part of the reason for it. They’re downstairs in the main area of the chapel. It’s a calming environment. It’s been a wild day. Officially, Mapleshade students have no communication with the outside world. No TV, radio, computers, iPods, cell phones, nothing. But there are always leaks, always someone who’s managed to sneak in some device or other, and so of course they’ve heard about Savannah’s death, and … well, you can imagine. So we went into what a sterner facility might call ‘lockdown mode.’ Of course, we don’t call it that. Everything here is designed to have a softer edge.”

“Except for the razor wire,” said Hardwick.

“The fence is aimed at keeping problems out, not people in.”

“We were wondering about that.”

“I can assure you it’s for security, not captivity.”

“So right now they’re all downstairs in the chapel?” asked Hardwick.

“Correct. As I said, they find it calming.”

“I wouldn’t have thought they’d be religious,” said Gurney.

“Religious?” Ashton smiled humorlessly. “Hardly. There’s just something about stone churches, Gothic windows, the muted light. They calm the soul in a way that has nothing to do with theology.”

“The students don’t feel like they’re being punished?” asked Hardwick. “What about the ones who weren’t acting out?”

“The agitated ones settle down, feel better. The ones who were okay to begin with are given to understand that they are the main source of peace for the others. Bottom line, the agitated don’t feel singled out and the calm feel valuable.”

Gurney smiled. “You must have put a lot of thought and effort into engineering that view of the experience.”

“That’s part of my job.”

“You give them a framework for understanding what’s happening?”

“You could put it like that.”

“Like what a magician does,” said Gurney. “Or a politician.”

“Or any competent preacher or teacher or doctor,” said Ashton mildly.

“Incidentally,” said Gurney, deciding to test the effect of a hairpin turn in the conversation, “was Jillian injured in any way in the days leading up to the wedding—anything that would have caused bleeding?”

“Bleeding? Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

“There’s a question about how the blood got on the bloody machete.”

“Question? How could that be a question? What do you mean?”

“I mean the machete might not have been the murder weapon after all.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It might have been placed in the woods prior to your wife’s murder, not after it.”

“But … I was told … her blood …”

“Some conclusions could have been premature. But here’s the thing: If the machete was put in the woods before the murder, then the blood on it must have come from Jillian before the murder. The question is, do you have any idea how that could have happened?”

Ashton looked stunned. His mouth opened. He seemed about to speak, didn’t, then finally did. “Well … yes, I do … at least theoretically. As you may know, Jillian was being treated for a bipolar disorder. She took a medication that required periodic blood tests to
assure that it remained within the therapeutic range. Her blood was drawn once a month.”

“Who drew the blood?”

“A local phlebotomist. I believe she worked for a medical-services provider out of Cooperstown.”

“And what did she do with the blood sample?”

“She transported it to the lab where the lithium-level test was performed and the report was generated.”

“She transported it immediately?”

“I imagine she made a number of stops, her assigned client route, whatever that might be, and at the end of each day she’d deliver her samples to the lab.”

“You have her name and the names of the provider and the lab?”

“Yes, I do. I review—reviewed, I should say—a copy of the lab report every month.”

“Would you have a record of when the last blood sample was drawn?”

“No specific record, but it was always the second Friday of the month.”

Gurney thought for a moment. “That would have been two days before Jillian was killed.”

“You’re thinking that Flores somehow intervened at some point in that process and got hold of her blood? But why? I’m afraid I’m not really understanding what you’re saying about the machete. What would be the point of it?”

“I’m not sure, Doctor. But I have a feeling that the answer to that question is the missing piece at the center of the case.”

Ashton raised his eyebrows in a way that looked more baffled than skeptical. His eyes seemed to be moving across the disturbing points of some inner landscape. Eventually he closed them and sat back in his tall chair, his hands clasped over the ends of the elaborately carved armrests, his breathing deep and deliberate, as though he might be engaged in some tranquilizing mental exercise. But when he opened them again, he only looked worse.

“What a nightmare,” he said. He cleared his throat, but it sounded more like a whimper than a cough. “Tell me something, gentlemen. Have you ever felt like a complete failure? That’s how I
feel right now. Every new horror … every death … every discovery about Flores or Skard or whatever his name is … every bizarre revelation about what’s really been happening here at the school—everything proves my total failure. What a brainless idiot I’ve been!” He shook his head—or rather moved it back and forth in slow motion, as if it were caught in some oscillating underwater current. “Such foolish, fatal pride. To think that I could cure a plague of such incredible, primitive power.”

“Plague?”

“Not the term my profession commonly applies to incest and the damage it does, but I think it’s quite accurate. The longer I’ve worked in this field, the more I’ve come to believe that of all the crimes human beings commit against one another, the most destructive by far is the sexual abuse of a child by an adult—especially a parent.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why? It’s simple. The two primal human relationship modes are parenting and mating. Incest destroys the distinct patterns of these two relationships by smashing them together, essentially polluting them both. I believe that there is traumatic damage to the neural structures that support the behaviors natural to each of these relationship modes and that keep them separate. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so,” said Gurney.

“A bit over my head,” said Hardwick, who’d been quietly observing the exchange between Ashton and Gurney.

Ashton shot him a glance of disbelief. “An effective therapy for that kind of trauma needs to rebuild boundaries between the parent-child repertoire of responses and the mating repertoire of responses. The tragedy is that no therapy can match in force—in sheer megatonnage of impact—the violation it seeks to repair. It’s like rebuilding with a teaspoon a wall smashed by a bulldozer.”

“But … wasn’t that the problem you chose to focus your career on?” asked Gurney.

“Yes. And now it’s perfectly clear that I’ve failed. Totally, miserably failed.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You mean not
every
graduate of Mapleshade has chosen to disappear into some sick sexual underworld? Not
every
one has been slaughtered for pleasure? Not
every
one has gone on to have children and rape them? Not
every
one has emerged as sick and deranged as when she entered? How can I
know
that? All I know at this point is that Mapleshade under my control, guided by my instincts and decisions, has turned into a magnet for horror and murder, a hunting preserve for a monster. Under my leadership Mapleshade has been utterly destroyed. That much I know.”

“So … what now?” asked Hardwick sharply.

“What now? Ah. The voice of a practical mind.” Ashton closed his eyes and said nothing for at least a full minute. When he spoke again, it was with a strained ordinariness. “What now? The next step? The next step for me is to go downstairs to the chapel, show my face, do what I can to calm their nerves. What your next step is … I have no idea. You say you came here because of a gut feeling. You’d better ask your gut what to do next.”

He got up from his massive velvet chair, taking something resembling a remote garage-door opener from the desk drawer. “The downstairs lights and locks are operated electronically,” he said, explaining the device. He started to leave, got as far as the door, came back, and switched on the large computer monitor behind his desk. A picture appeared: the main interior chapel space, with a stone floor and high stone walls whose colorless austerity was broken by intermittent burgundy drapes and indecipherable tapestries. The dark wood pews were not set in the rows typical of churches but had been rearranged into half a dozen seating areas, each made up of three pews formed into a loose triangle, evidently to facilitate discussion. These areas were filled with teenage girls. From the monitor speakers came a hubbub of female voices.

“There’s a high-definition camera and a mike down there, transmitting to this computer,” said Ashton. “Watch and listen, and you’ll get some sense of the situation.” Then he turned and left the room.

T
he computer screen showed Scott Ashton coming in through the chapel’s rear door behind the groupings of pews and closing it behind him with a heavy thump, the small remote unit still in one hand. The girls filled most of the space in the pews—some sitting normally, some sideways, some in cross-legged yoga positions, some kneeling. Some seemed lost in their own thoughts, but most were engaged in conversations, some more audible than others.

The surprise for Gurney was the ordinariness of these girls. They looked at first glance like most self-absorbed female teenagers, hardly like the inmates of an institution ringed by razor wire. At this distance from the camera, the malignancy of the behavior that had brought them here was invisible. Gurney assumed that only face-to-face, with their expressions in sharper focus, would it become obvious that these creatures were more than ordinarily self-centered, reckless, cruel, and sex-driven. Ultimately, as it was with his murderer mug shots, the sign of danger, the ice, would be in the eyes.

Then he noticed that the students were not alone. In each of the pew triangles, there were one or two older individuals—probably teachers or counselors or whatever Mapleshade called their providers of guidance and therapy. In a rear corner of the room, almost invisible in the shadows, stood Dr. Lazarus, his arms folded, his expression unreadable.

Moments after Ashton entered, the girls began to notice him, and the conversational din began to diminish. One of the older-looking,
more striking girls approached Ashton as he stood at the back of the center aisle. She was tall, blond, almond-eyed.

Gurney glanced over at Hardwick, who was leaning forward in his chair, studying the screen.

“Could you tell if he called her over?” Gurney asked.

“He may have gestured,” he said. “Sort of a wave. Why?”

“Just curious.”

On the super-sharp screen, the profiles of Ashton and the tall blonde were clear to the point that their lip movements were visible, but their voices were indistinct—words and phrases merging with the voices of a group of students near them.

Gurney leaned toward the monitor. “Do you have any idea what they’re saying?”

Hardwick focused intently on their faces, tilting his head as though that might heighten the discrimination of his hearing.

On the screen, the girl said something and smiled, Ashton said something and gestured. Then he walked purposefully down the center aisle and stepped up onto a raised portion of the floor, presumably the area the altar had occupied in the time of the building’s liturgical use. He turned to face the assembly of students, his back to the camera. The murmur melted away, and soon there was silence.

Gurney looked inquiringly at Hardwick. “Did you catch anything?”

He shook his head. “He could have said absolutely anything to her. I couldn’t pick the words out of the background noise. Maybe a lip-reader could tell. Not me.”

On the screen, Ashton began speaking with a natural-sounding authority, his chocolate baritone composed and satiny—and deeper than usual in the resonant Gothic nave.

“Ladies,” he began, inflecting the word with an almost reverential gentility, “terrible things have happened, frightening things, and everyone is upset. Angry, frightened, confused, and upset. Some of you are having trouble sleeping. Anxiety. Bad dreams. Just not knowing what’s really happening may be the worst part of it. We want to know what we’re facing, and no one is telling us.” Ashton radiated the angst of the mental states he was referring to. He had
turned himself into a depiction of emotion and understanding, and yet at the same time, perhaps through the steady richness of his voice, its almost cellolike timbre, he was managing to communicate at some unconscious level a profound reassurance.

“Man, that’s good shit,” said Hardwick, in the tone of one admiring the legerdemain of a superior pickpocket.

“Definitely a pro,” agreed Gurney.

“Not as good as you, ace.”