Dead of Night

He leaned forward and blew on the mirror. A tiny patch of fog appeared. He continued until most of the mirror was frosted and he could see the spidery script the killer had left on the glass.

I am you.

Chapter 12

Michael Garrett glanced at his watch. As always, she was right on time. Not a minute before or a minute after, but straight up two o’clock. Sarah DeLaune was nothing if not punctual.

Unlike Sarah, though, the clock had gotten away from him, and he hadn’t had much time to prepare for their appointment. Ever since he’d moved his practice from the Poydras office to the upstairs apartment of his Garden District home, he’d been finding that distractions came a little too easily.

Last semester, he’d accepted a full-time teaching position at the university and had cut his practice back to only a few sessions per week. Keeping the medical-center office open had seemed an unnecessary extravagance, and most of the patients he still saw had been with him long enough not to be disconcerted by the new arrangements. It helped that the office had a private entrance by way of an outside stairway at the back of the house.

Michael stood at the window now and watched as Sarah came through the garden gate, pausing on the other side as if to get her bearings. That brief hesitation had become her ritual, and Michael often wondered what went through her head at that moment. What internal battle she had to wage before she could continue across the garden to his office.

She was an attractive young woman, intelligent and articulate, but she wore her self-defense like a suit of armor. And she was full of contradictions. A tattoo artist without any visible tattoos. A nonconformist whose past hung around her neck like a noose.

Today she had on a lightweight jacket with black pants and boots. A leather handbag was slung over one shoulder, and as usual, her face was heavily made up. Kohl liner around the eyes, dark red lipstick on the mouth. Her thick, black hair was twisted up in the back, but the wind had whipped it loose and she lifted a hand to swipe a strand from her face.

The gesture held a certain unconscious elegance that took Michael by surprise. Sarah’s hidden grace was yet another of the many dichotomies he’d noted.

She reminded him a little of Elise, and Michael sometimes wondered if that faint resemblance was enough to warrant suggesting another psychologist. The last thing Sarah needed was a distracted therapist, and he had to admit that her dark eyes and full lips had caused his mind to wander on occasion. Even more so now, with the anniversary of Elise’s death coming on. Some days his head was filled with so many bleak thoughts he had a hard time concentrating.

But even more problematic was the way Sarah’s therapy had stalled. She’d been referred to him by her doctor when medication had failed to alleviate her insomnia, but the walls she’d erected since her sister’s murder were proving formidable. She’d told him something of her background, something of her sister’s death, but always she kept a distance. Always she kept some doors closed.

She’d once inquired about memory-regression hypnosis, but for Michael, that was a treatment of last resort. Far from a magic solution, hypnosis was often ineffective—even downright risky, with sometimes unexpected consequences. And, too, a therapist could inadvertently feed his patient leading or suggestive questions in order to produce a response that fit a preconceived theory.

Michael was not one of those psychologists who eschewed the entire concept of repressed memories. He did believe, however, that dissociative amnesia was extremely rare, and that in most cases—perhaps Sarah’s as well—the inability to recall certain events was not the result of lost memories, but of a lost neural connection. In other words, something physical may have destroyed Sarah’s memories of her sister’s murder, and it was entirely possible she would never recover them.

Michael watched her move across the garden, and a few moments later, the door to the outer office opened and closed. He turned from the window a split second before she knocked.

“Come in, Sarah.”

She opened the door and hesitated for another fraction of a minute before entering. “How did you know it was me?”

He smiled. “It’s two o’clock on Friday afternoon. Who else would it be? Besides, I saw you in the garden.”

“The banana trees are a mess from the freeze.” She shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it on the floor with her purse. “You’ve got some serious work to do in that garden.”

“I’m not too worried about the banana trees. They’ll recover soon enough, but I’m afraid I may have lost most of the plumerias.”

“You can’t save everything, I guess.” She sat down and folded her hands in her lap as she waited for Michael to take a seat. “So,” she said. “Here we are again.”

“Yes. Here we are. How have you been sleeping since I saw you last?”

She shrugged. “I catch a few hours now and then.”

“Are you still taking Xanax?”

“Only when I need to.” She laughed softly.

“Any adverse side effects? Memory loss, blackouts…?”

“I had an episode of sleepwalking last week. I woke up and found myself sitting in the shower. Thank goodness the water wasn’t turned on.” She laughed again.

“Another drug might be more effective as a sleep aid,” Michael said. “I can talk to Dr. Bayden about other options if you’d like.”

“Maybe. I’ll think about it.” Her smile disappeared. “I don’t really want to talk about my sleep disorder today.”

“Okay.”

She bit the side of her lip. “I want to talk about Sean.”

Michael nodded. He knew who she meant. She’d talked about Sean Kelton before.

“I saw him the other night,” Sarah said. “He called and asked me to meet him at a crime scene. The victim had a lot of tattoos and he wanted to know if I could identify the artist.”

“Did you agree to go?”

Her gaze drifted to the window. “Yes. The body was found near my home. I suppose that’s one of the reasons he called.”

“How did it feel seeing him again?”

She took a moment to answer. “I’ve been surprised at how angry I still am.”

“Why would that surprise you?”

“Because it’s been months. I should be over him by now.”

“According to whose schedule?”

“I know, I know.” She ran her fingers through her bangs, ruffling them into a charming fringe above her winged brows. “I saw him again the next day and things really got ugly.”

“Would you like to talk about that?”

“No, actually.” She twirled a strand of hair around her finger, a gesture that reminded him of Elise. She’d done that, too, when she was nervous or anxious. When she was getting ready to go home to her husband.

A frown flicked across Sarah’s face. “What I want to talk about is something Sean said to me at the crime scene. It’s been bothering me ever since.”

“What did he say?”

Her eyes turned pensive, as if she was still trying to work it out for herself. “He implied that the reason I can’t remember what happened the night Rachel died is that I’m trying to protect someone.”

“Why did that bother you so much?”

Her gaze went back to the window. She couldn’t see anything from where she sat, except for treetops and sky, but the scenery seemed to fascinate her. “I guess because it made me think about that night in a different way. I’ve always thought I couldn’t remember being at the farmhouse because of the trauma and shock of witnessing Rachel’s murder. But what if Sean’s right? What if I suppressed those memories, not because of what I saw, but because of who I saw?”

“The killer, you mean.”

She sat up straighter. “Maybe the killer was someone close to me. Maybe even—” She stopped herself short and pressed her lips together, as if afraid she might blurt out more than she intended to divulge.

“You told me once that you believed someone named Ashe Cain was responsible for your sister’s death.”

“That is what I’ve always believed.”

“Is there a reason you’d want to protect him?”

She looked away, closed her eyes. “I’m afraid there may be,” she said very softly.

Michael waited for her to continue, but instead she got up and walked over to the window to stare down at the dead garden. “The camellias are still blooming,” she murmured. “It’s amazing how hardy they are. They look so fragile. Such a delicate shade of pink.” She turned and smiled. “But I’ve gotten off track, haven’t I?”

“It happens.”

She leaned back against the window frame. “Did I ever tell you that I had an imaginary friend when I was little? Her name was Fay.”

“Did Fay have a last name?”

“No, just Fay. I was maybe four or five at the time and I was alone a lot. Rachel was already in school, but even when she was home during the summer, she never paid much attention to me. It was more than the three-year age difference. There was just never much affection between us. At best, she tolerated me. Kind of like my father. Although looking back, I don’t think he tolerated me at all. I think he despised me. Or maybe he despised himself for producing such a plain, mediocre child after the perfection of Rachel.”

“What about your mother?”

Sarah was silent for a long time. “My mother loved me, but there was a distance in our relationship. Like her mind was always somewhere else when we were together. I never felt as if I really belonged in that house, to those people. That’s how I thought of them. They were strangers and I was just someone who lived on the fringes of their lives. I guess that’s why I needed Fay.”

“You were lonely.”

“Desperately so, I think.” She came back over and sat down in the chair. “Am I boring you yet?”

“Why? Do I look bored?”

“No, you have too much of a poker face for that.” She cocked her head, studying him. “It’s a rather nice face, though.”

Her moments of mild flirtation always took Michael aback. Not because he hadn’t experienced it before, but because with Sarah, even a beguiling smile was never quite what it seemed.

“Where were we?” she asked.

“You were lonely as a child.”

“I’m sure that’s why I acted out. I wanted attention.”

“How did you act out?”

She drew her feet up to the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I broke things. My mother’s antique vase. My father’s new fishing rod. Rachel’s favorite doll. And when someone confronted me, I always blamed it on Fay. Fay did it. It was Fay. Very convenient, wouldn’t you say? The strange thing is, after a while I think I actually began to believe it.”

“What happened to Fay?”

“She went away when I started school. I guess my subconscious decided I didn’t need her anymore. But school was hell for me. Worse than home. I had a learning disability, a mild form of dyslexia, that wasn’t detected until I was in the third grade. I wrote certain numbers and letters, even words, backwards. Mirror writing, they called it. By the time I finally caught up to my level, it was too late. I was already branded.”

“Were you bullied in school?”

She rested her chin on her knees. “I was teased, but I never considered myself a victim. I was tough,” she said with a faint smile. “I fought back.”

“Good for you.”

“But by the time I got to junior high school, I was in full-blown rebellion.”

“How did you rebel?”

“Let’s just say, I embraced my weirdness.”

He smiled. “Meaning?”

“I liked being different. We had these Goth kids at our school. Ghost-white makeup, black clothes, satanic jewelry. The whole nine yards. I’m pretty sure that look was already passé in most parts of the country, but trends came late to us. I thought they were cool. I used to follow them around, hoping they’d notice me, but the ironic thing was, even the outcasts didn’t want me. And then I met Ashe.”

Michael saw her shiver and she reached down to pick up her jacket. Then she let it fall back to the floor as if realizing that her chill had nothing to do with being cold.

“Ashe was Goth, too,” she said. “But he didn’t dress that way to shock or get attention like the others did. He wore the black clothing and the white makeup because that’s the way he felt inside. He was dark and troubled and lonely, just like me. And without the clothing and makeup, he couldn’t be himself. He needed the trappings in order to be Ashe Cain. Does that make sense?”

“We all wear masks,” Michael said.

She shook her head, as if impatient that he wasn’t getting it. “It wasn’t a mask. It was who he was.”

“You never saw him without the makeup and dark clothing?”

“If I did, I didn’t recognize him. He was older than me, and he wasn’t from Adamant. At least that’s what he told me. All I knew was that he was my friend. He understood me in a way no one else ever had. We understood each other. He told me once that our souls were like mirror images.” She leaned forward, her gaze clinging to Michael’s. “Maybe they were. Maybe the reason he understood me so well was because…I created him. He was a figment of my imagination.”

“Like Fay, you mean.”

“Are you shocked?” She sat back with a satisfied smile, but her eyes looked bleak and haunted. “Have you ever seen a movie called The Crow?”

“The Brandon Lee film? I’ve caught parts of it on television,” Michael said.

“Then you probably know the gist of the plot. A tormented soul rises from the grave to avenge the brutal rape and murder of his girlfriend. When I was thirteen, I was obsessed with that movie. I can’t even tell you how many times I watched it. I had the sound track, the poster, everything. I was completely in love with the notion of this dark avenger who couldn’t be stopped even in death.” She paused, her gaze meeting his. “You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?”