When She Was Bad: A Thriller (7 page)

She’d nearly lost her nerve a dozen times since then. As late as the previous Saturday she’d been on the verge of calling the whole thing off; instead the business with Lily had brought them to Portland a full day ahead of schedule.

Luckily there’d been no problem checking into their hotel a day early, Pender told Irene when he picked her up at the Institute in the white Toyota he’d rented at the airport. “Not only that, I talked to Marti Reynolds at TPP, they’re going to move our interviews up a day apiece—mine’s tomorrow now, yours is Wednesday.”

“And the airline tickets?”

“I cancelled the round-trip reservations, got us seats for the last flight to San Jose on Wednesday evening—we can take the shuttle home from there.”

Irene shook her head in admiration. “Pender, if I’d ever had a secretary that good—well, I’d still have a secretary.”

“I always knew I had to be good at
something,”
he said—receiving compliments, even left-handed ones, was never his strength. “How’d it go with Lily?”

Irene shrugged. “It went.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Hey, that’s
my
line,” she told him.

The hotel proved to be a standard chain affair—nothing particularly romantic about it. But the adjoining rooms were large and comfortable, with enormous beds and a handsome view of the Willamette. Upon arriving, Irene took a long hot shower to wash off the hospital vibes. She could feel her nerve starting to fail her again—she’d never seduced a man before, and wasn’t sure she’d be able to manage it.

Fortunately, the restaurant Irene had selected with the help of the hotel concierge was both romantic enough for her purposes and informal enough to accommodate Pender’s tragic wardrobe, which tonight consisted of a madras sport jacket, a boldly striped sport shirt, and rumpled polyester slacks; the only items that didn’t clash were his brown Basque beret and his beige Hush Puppies.

Irene herself wore a green frock that showed off her best feature, her long slender legs. Emboldened by an unaccustomed in-take of alcohol—she’d polished off most of a carafe of house red while Pender stuck to his Jim Beam on the rocks—she contrived to rest her hand on his more than once during the meal. And in the backseat of the cab on the way back to their hotel she edged closer and closer to him, until their thighs were touching—any closer and she’d have been in his lap.

But still he seemed clueless. In the elevator on the way up to their adjoining rooms he kept plenty of space between them. When they reached his door and she turned her face up to his for a good-night kiss, closing her eyes expectantly, all she got for her brazenness was a platonic peck on the cheek.

So what’s a gal to do? Persuading herself she was drunker than she actually was, Irene took another shower, changed into a slinky, nearly transparent black negligee, and knocked on the door that communicated between her room and Pender’s.

“Pen?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I come in for a sec?”

The door opened. Pender, wearing a too-small hotel bathrobe—one size fits
almost
all—looked down at Irene, standing in the doorway with her arms at her sides. “Oh, shit, oh dear,” he said.

Irene wanted to sink through the floor—or failing that, die on the spot. Instead, feeling stunned and foolish, she began backing away, her arms crossed over her chest. Pender, realizing the enormity of his gaffe, took her by the wrist and drew her back into his room. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No, it’s my fault,” she heard herself say. “I shouldn’t have just…I mean, I had no right to…. “

“Ssshh,” he murmured, wrapping his arms around Irene and pulling her tightly against him. “It’s not your fault—there’s no way you could have known.”

“Known what?” she said, in a tiny voice.

“Long story,” Pender replied gently.

After six months, either the pain was beginning to subside or he was growing inured to it, Pender explained to Irene a few minutes later. The two were sitting side by side on the edge of his bed; he’d fetched her the monogrammed hotel bathrobe from her room, filled an ice bucket, and fixed them each a glass of Jim Beam on the rocks. Rare now were the body blows, he told her, the attacks of grief so visceral the sobbing literally doubled him over.

The trouble was, said Pender, he wasn’t so sure he
wanted
the pain to subside. Except for his memories and a few trinkets, it was all he had left of his second wife, who’d died from pancreatic cancer only a few months after their wedding. So perhaps it had been a mistake to leave the tropical paradise where the two had met, wed, and lived happily ever after—if three months qualifies as ever after.

But at the time, the reminders had been too plentiful and too painful to bear. Every Caribbean sunset broke Pender’s heart all over again, and with booze duty-free on the island and a bar on virtually every corner, it didn’t take him long to realize that you can’t drown your sorrows in alcohol, you can only pickle them. So he’d opted for the geographical solution instead, resigning his post as St. Luke’s chief of detectives and moving nearly four thousand miles west to the golfing mecca of the Monterey peninsula to take another stab at retirement—and at lowering his handicap, which after twenty years on the links still hovered around the drinking age.

Not that there was any shortage of either booze or bars on the peninsula, he told Irene. But at least there nobody felt sorry for him—largely because he’d told no one of his loss. “So you can see, it’s nothing personal,” he concluded. “You’re an attractive, intelligent woman, Irene—
with
legs to die for, don’t think I haven’t noticed. And I’m flattered as hell you’d even consider…well, you know. But it’s too soon—I’m just not ready yet.”

Irene raised her head—she’d spent the last few minutes studying the carpet—and cocked it to the side, looking up into Pender’s pained eyes.
“Yet
being the operative word?” she asked him.

“Oh, definitely,” said Pender.

She smiled. “Well that’s going to be a little awkward, isn’t it? Waiting for
yet,
I mean.”

Pender thought it over. “Tell you what. When the time is right,
I’ll
show up at
your
door in a slinky negligee,” he said, just as Irene raised her glass to her lips.

And so what was to have been an evening of romance dissolved into a spit take. But afterward, alone in her room, when her mind insisted on exploring her moment of humiliation the way a tongue explores a broken tooth, up popped the image of Pender knocking on her door in a see-through negligee, carrying a box of candy and a floral bouquet, and she found herself smiling instead of weeping.

Pender too, had a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, he told himself, when he was alone in his room again. Turning down that elegant trim at your age—good God, man, you must have lost your mind.

8

“Anything else before I go?” inquired the chunky, bespectacled night nurse. She had already brought Lyssy a glass of water, given him his sleeping pill, helped him take off his leg and change into his pajamas, and tucked the covers around him.

“Yeah, could you move my crutches closer to the bed? In case I have to go to the bathroom?” Lyssy, who’d been trying to postpone the inevitable, began to sense the nurse’s growing impatience. The problem was, he wasn’t just afraid of the dark, he was afraid of anybody
knowing
he was afraid.

“There you go. Anything else?” She waited by the door, her finger poised at the keypad, ready to punch in the security code.

“I guess not.”

“Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

The heavy door slid open, then closed again behind the nurse, locking automatically. The ceiling panels dimmed gradually; soon the only illumination in the room was a faint trapezoid the color of moonlight, cast onto the carpet by the recessed night-light in the bathroom.

What a roller coaster of a day, thought Lyssy, slipping one hand under his pajama bottoms and closing it around his penis, which was already satisfactorily heavy with anticipation.

To make it hard, he thought about the girl he’d met this afternoon, then plugged her image into his standard masturbatory template, which always involved a rescue. Tonight he would save Lily from a fire—another night it might be Miss Stockings whom he saved from a flood, or the pretty black nutritionist who had to be rescued from one of Lyssy’s neighbors on the locked ward. And after the fire (because for Lyssy the idea of even taking the initiative in a sexual encounter, much less resorting to coercion or violence, was a brake-screeching turnoff), Lily became the grateful aggressor.
I know what you want,
she whispered as she began to undress herself at the foot of the bed,
I know what you need….

Another feature common to Lyssy’s sexual fantasies was that the actual sex tended to be indistinct, breast-oriented, and R-rated—he rarely got as far as the nitty-gritty before reaching orgasm.

Tonight, though, strange things started happening. Lyssy had stroked himself into a sort of trance state, picturing the girl turning her back to him while she slipped off her bomber jacket. But when she turned around to face him again, she was no longer Lily—instead, she had turned into Dr. Al’s wife.

Nothing too unusual there. Though she was in her midforties and starting to spread a little in the waist and rear, Cheryl Corder was still nice and bosomy up front, and had a sort of Martha Stewart ice-queen thing going: frosted hair, knowing eyes that crinkled at the corners, and a wry, crooked smile.

Nor was there anything unusual about the way the fantasy played out at first. Stripped down to her panties, Mrs. Corder sashayed around the bed until she was standing directly in front of Lyssy, then cupped her breasts in both hands for him to nuzzle, kiss, tongue, and suckle.

Most nights, that would have been enough to bring the furiously masturbating Lyssy to orgasm. If not, he’d picture her climbing onto his lap and lowering herself onto him—that would generally do the trick. But tonight, instead of waiting passively, he grabbed the woman roughly by the hair and threw her facedown onto the bed—not his own narrow twin, but a big double bed with satin sheets.

Frightened now, whimpering,
No, please,
she tried to crawl away. Unable to stop himself—it was as if someone else had hijacked his fantasy—Lyssy threw himself on top of her, jerked her panties down roughly. His cock was huge, red-knobbed, and throbbing, a real two-hander.
You like it rough, don’t you,
he said as he spread her cheeks and thrust himself into her hard. She screamed; the more she screamed, the better he liked it. Humping, driving, crushing her down, feeling the dark tightness enveloping him as one scarred hand gripped her hair for control while the other snaked under her to play with her fat, white, heavy-hanging breasts.

Gone was any semblance of control over his own fantasy—Lyssy wasn’t even surprised, when he turned his head, to see Dr. Al and young Alison tied to chairs at the foot of the bed, both naked, bound and gagged, forced to watch.
Don’t worry, your turn’s coming,
he hissed to Alison in a voice that was no more his own than was the fantasy.
And you’ll get yours too,
he confided to Dr. Al.

And as he began to come, a succession of disconnected images flashed before Lyssy’s eyes—a knife being drawn across a throat, blood spattering a wall, a lolling head, a slumping body….

Lyssy opened his eyes, found himself back in his own bed, frightened and ashamed, his hands sticky with semen. With a moan of horror he threw back the covers and hopped into the bathroom, where he scrubbed his hands with soap and hot water, roughly, obsessively, until the scar tissue stretched across the palms was red and raw.

And though in the forefront of his mind he was repeating the same phrase over and over, like a mantra, as he scrubbed—
it’s not my fault, it wasn’t me; it’s not my fault, it wasn’t me
—in the back of his mind Lyssy was pretty sure he could hear dry laughter emanating from the dark place where he was never to go.

1

Lily awoke to the sound of an over-hearty female voice bidding her good morning through a speaker in the wall near the head of the bed. For a few seconds that seemed to last an eternity, she felt lost and frightened, totally disoriented. Then it all came flooding back: the airplane, her grandparents, and—oh God—the Institute!

A moment later the room’s only door slid open, then closed behind a massively built young woman in white duck trousers and a tight-sleeved white polo shirt with the RCI logo over the left breast. Her light brown hair was cut in a mullet: shaved sidewalls, buzzed on top, hanging straight down to her powerful shoulders in back.
PATRICIA BENOIT
,
PSYCH
.
TECH
., read the plastic name badge pinned to her shirt.

“Hi, I’m Patty. Dr. Corder wants me to stick with you this morning, kinda show you the ropes, get you orientated, how’s that sound?”

“I have to pee.”

“You might want to try out the shower, too.” Patty wrinkled her nose. “Getting a little gamy, if you catch my drift. I’ll be at the nurses’ station—buzz me when you’re ready.” At the doorway, Patty angled her body to block Lily’s view of the keypad before punching in the code.

Although she was wearing a modest cotton-flannel nightgown from the suitcase full of clothes and personal effects Dr. Cogan had packed and brought along for her (the nurse who’d helped her unpack last night had confiscated her tweezers and nail file), Lily waited until the door had closed again before pulling the covers back and climbing out of bed. In the bathroom, she wiped off the toilet seat with a neatly folded square of toilet tissue before sitting down, and patted herself dry afterward with another neatly folded square, keeping her nightgown rucked up onto her lap the whole time. Lily hated exposing herself—even at home, she preferred to lock the bedroom door before disrobing, and the bathroom door as well, whether for a quick pee or a long bath.

Here, though, there was no bathroom door to lock, or shower-stall door, or even a shower curtain—the recessed shower head set high and flush in the curved wall angled away from the open stall doorway, and a six-inch-high tiled ledge in the bottom of the doorway kept the water from flooding the bathroom.

After brushing her teeth, Lily reluctantly pulled her nightgown over her head and looked around the bathroom for a place to hang it. There being no hooks or towel racks, she folded the nightie and placed it on top of the towels and washcloths stacked on a high rounded shelf. Naked, she peered tentatively into the shower stall. There were no temperature controls, no faucets, no taps, but the moment she stepped inside, warm water cascaded from the single jet eighteen inches above her head. Electric eye, she guessed; a little experimenting proved her right.

Boy, they thought of everything, Lily told herself as she soaped up and lathered her luxurious dark mane—shampoo, body wash, conditioner in tiny motel-size plastic bottles were arrayed on a recessed shelf under the jet. You couldn’t drown yourself, scald yourself, hang yourself, cut yourself, or even tweeze yourself. Not enough in the little bottles to poison yourself, either. Maybe you could choke or something if you tried to swallow one, but they probably even—

Then suddenly Lily remembered what Lyssy had mentioned yesterday—there’s a reason they call it the
observation
suite—and all at once, she
knew
she was being watched. Panic seized her; she squatted on her heels with her legs together and her knees drawn up, crossing her arms over her breasts and hugging herself miserably. The shower turned itself off; she was below the electric eye. Cold and shivering, rocking on her heels, Lily uncrossed her arms and buried her face in her hands.

2

Lilah emerges from her blackout to find herself crouched naked in a shower stall, rubbing her right thumb against the pads of the first two fingers. Awakening abruptly in unfamiliar surroundings is nothing new for Lilah—her life has always been a disconnected series of sudden appearances.

So she rises—and jumps back against the wall of the stall with a startled laugh as the water comes on. Electric eye—cool. Fragrant soap, water not as hot as she likes it, spray not as needle-fine, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to control it. She lathers and rinses luxuriously, sensuously, with special attention to the erogenous zones, idly masturbating for the sheer sensation of it, no intention of going for an orgasm.

The water shuts off when she steps out of the oddly doorless stall. Wherever she is, she tells herself—if it’s a hotel, it’s one of those modern ones—at least the towels are clean, thick, and plentiful. She wraps a bath towel around her torso, makes a turban of a second, and is drying herself with a third when she hears a knock. “Be right out!”

But as Lilah tightens the towel under her armpits and steps out of the bathroom—another oddity, there’s no bathroom door—the room door slides open to admit a powerful-looking woman in a white polo shirt, white duck trousers, and a mullet haircut. Lilah, who is nearsighted but too vain to wear eyeglasses, squints at the plastic tag on the woman’s breast. She can just make out the name—Patricia Benoit—but the letters below it are a blur.

Probably a maid, thinks Lilah. And if it’s true what they say—the butcher they are, the sweeter the tongue—she probably gives some heavenly head. “Is that Ben-
oyt
or Ben-
wa?”
She lets a giggle escape.

“Ben-oyt—but you can call me Patty. What’s so funny?”

“I was thinking about ben-wa balls. You ever heard of them? They’re these like, sex toys, you stick ’em inside your—”

“Oh, right, right.” Patty colors. “I’ve heard of them, I just didn’t know that’s what they were called.”

“Ever use ’em?” asks Lilah, slyly, as she brushes past the much larger woman; her damp feet leave tidy little Robinson Crusoe footprints on the carpet as she crosses the room to examine the clothes folded and stacked in the waist-high blond dresser, which has recessed shelves instead of drawers.

Patty lets the question drop. She’s worked with DID patients before, and some of them—not Lyssy, of course—she’s suspected of feigning the disorder either knowingly or unknowingly. It was fun for them to impersonate different characters, they received lots of attention, and it was also a nifty way to deflect responsibility for their actions. Or at least, it was nifty until Dr. Corder got hold of them.

But this Lily DeVries is for real—after watching the alter switch in the shower on the security monitor at the nurses’ station, Patty has no doubt of that. Not even Jody Foster, whom Patty idolizes, is that good an actress. Lily hasn’t just changed her affect or adopted a set of mannerisms, like the fakers do—the very way she inhabits her body is strikingly different.

This alter, the towel-clad, gutter-mouthed tramp swearing quietly over the selection of clothes available to her, seems entirely comfortable with her physicality. She carries her shoulders low; her walk is liquid and balanced, her hips loose and swaying, and when she unwraps her long brown-black hair and hunkers down on her heels to examine the clothes on the bottom shelf, she reminds Patty of one of Gauguin’s tantalizingly unself-conscious Polynesian girls.

Having been fully briefed by Dr. Corder this morning, and having reviewed the so-called “map” of alters drawn up by Lily’s former psychiatrist, Patty now has a reasonably good idea who this one is. Name: Lilah; alter class: promiscuous; age: actual; self-image: actual; affect: sexually provocative.

“Are you here to make up the room?” asks Lilah, still hunkered down on her heels.

“No, I
was
here to escort you down to the dining hall,” says Patty, with an emphasis on the past tense.

Escort, Lilah thinks. This must be one hell of a ritzy place. “Want to help me work up an appetite?” She rises, letting the towel fall. Stark naked, she holds her hands out at her side, as if to say,
here I am, and I’m all yours if you want me.

“That is
so
not happening, young lady.” Patty looks down at the carpet; she’d have turned down the offer even if she hadn’t known about the hidden security cameras. Taking sexual advantage of one of her charges, even one as extraordinarily desirable and apparently willing as Lilah, is simply unthinkable for Patty.

Nevertheless, she has the feeling that this latest acquisition, the searing image of the naked girl offering herself, has just acceded to the permanent collection in her private museum of erotic images; she also has the feeling that this was precisely Lilah’s intention. “I’ll be right back,” she tells her charge.

Alone again, Lilah selects a sweatshirt and a pair of panties and jeans at random—while the place may be ritzy, judging from the selection of clothes it’s also informal—but just as she finishes changing into them, the door slides open again and Patty announces a change in plans.

“Time to begin your therapy,” she says, tossing Lilah a green hospital gown as the door slides closed behind her. “Take those off, put this on.”

Therapy?
thinks Lilah. Then she reads the fine print—
PSYCH
.
TECH
.—on Patty’s name tag and suddenly fear floods her system. A desperate plan begins to take shape. “Could I have a little privacy to get dressed, please?”

“Now it’s
privacy
you want?” Patty turns away and punches her security code into the keypad. As the door begins to slide open, Lilah dashes across the room, jukes right, then left, and ducks under Patty’s flailing arm. She races down a long green corridor toward a door with a breaker bar and a sign reading Emergency Exit Only, unable to shake the eerie sensation that she’s done this before—and not so long ago, either.

Heads turn as Lilah passes the nurses’ station; the faces are white and blank as night-blooming flowers. She hits the breaker bar, crashes through the door, and bolts barefoot down a flight of stairs.

But the door on the next landing is locked. And here’s Patty lumbering down the stairs after her, red-faced and puffing, her arms mottled and meaty-looking as two legs of lamb, spread wide to block Lilah’s retreat. “Come on now, oh come on,” she’s saying, in a voice less of anger than of schoolmarmish annoyance.

Joining Patty on the stairs is another massive, white-clad figure who fills his polo shirt like the Mighty Hulk. If this is a dream, I’d really like to wake up now, thinks Lilah. It sure feels like a dream, the way she’s rooted to the landing, frozen in place as the two close in on her, looking nightmarishly similar in their white uniforms, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum in a madhouse production of
Alice in Wonderland.

They flank her, each taking an arm, and walk her back up the stairs and down the corridor; this time the nurses all turn away busily as they pass the desk. Patty accompanies Lilah into the peach-colored room while her male counterpart—his name tag reads simply,
Wally
—waits outside. “Let’s try this again,” says Patty, picking up the discarded hospital gown and shoving it firmly into Lilah’s hands.

3

Hotel dining room. White tablecloths, tinkle of glass and clatter of tableware, muted breakfast conversations. Striking vistas of Portland through tinted plate-glass windows. From the entrance alcove, Pender scanned the premises and spotted Irene Cogan, wearing a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, sitting alone reading the
Oregonian
and picking desultorily at a grapefruit.

He crossed the room, his head pounding with every footfall, despite the double padding of his rubber-soled Hush Puppies on a thick gray carpet patterned with the hotel chain’s interlocking initials in burgundy. “Mind if I join you?”

“I like your outfit,” she said, gesturing graciously toward the empty chair across from her. He was wearing a white-on-white guayabera shirttails-out over not-yet-rumpled brown slacks. “Have we been invited to a Mexican wedding?”

“Har de har har,” said Pender, whose interview at the TPP offices down by the warehouse district was to begin in less than an hour and was expected to take all day. He turned to the hovering, white-jacketed waiter. “Screwdriver. Light on the oj, heavy on the Stoli. If it takes, I may consider solid food.”

“Hungover?” asked Irene, after the waiter left.

“Aaaargh!
As Charlie Brown used to say.”

“Serves you right.”

“For what?”

“For all the booze you drank last night, what else?”

“Oh, that,” replied Pender, then: “Look, about last night…“

She held up both hands; two silver bracelets jingled as they slid down her long slender wrist. “Please, let’s not talk about it, okay?”

From that high point, the conversation flagged. Irene dissected her grapefruit and skimmed the newspaper; Pender sipped at his orange-tinted Stoli and gazed out the window at the cityscape below. “I’m sure glad this didn’t turn out awkward,” he said after a few minutes.

“Me too,” said Irene over the top of the newspaper. Then she folded it and slipped it into her gigantic Coach bag. “I keep thinking I ought to give Lily a call just to see how she’s doing. I know it’s inappropriate, but—”

“Why inappropriate? I mean, think of that poor kid, waking up in a strange place, not knowing anybody. And it’s probably just starting to sink in about her grandparents—of course you should call her, why shouldn’t you?”

Because she’s no longer my patient, thought Irene. Then she reminded herself that as far as her relationship with Lily was concerned, she’d crossed that line a long time ago. “You know, I think I will,” she told Pender.

“Tell her Uncle Pen says hi.”

4

“Where are we going? Where are you taking me?”

No answer. Dressed in an open-backed green gown with strings in back that tie in front and paper slippers that keep threatening to slide off, Lilah shuffles down the long green corridor, flanked by a white-clad psych tech on either side. When they reach the elevator, Mullet Woman punches in the security code and steps inside first, while Hulk follows Lilah. Exiting one floor below, they reverse the process, then flank Lilah again and march her down another long green corridor, this one two-toned with a waist-high, olive-colored wainscoting, to a door marked
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
.