Praying for Sleep

  "Oh, my God," Portia shouted.

  "Claire, honey . . ." Robert began, as he rolled to his knees.

  Claire, speechless, stared at his groin. Portia remembered thinking, My God, she's eighteen. This can't be her first hard-on.

  It took a moment for Robert to recover some wits and he looked frantically for his shirt or shorts. As the girl's eyes remained fixed on him, Portia watched the young blonde. This curious a trois voyeurism aroused her all the more. Robert grabbed his shirt and wrapped the knit garment about his waist, abashed and grinning. Portia didn't move. Then Claire choked a sob and turned, running past the cave and back up the path.

  "Oh, shit," Robert muttered.

  "Don't worry."

  "What?"

  "Oh, don't take it so seriously. Every teenager gets a shock at some point. I'll talk to her."

  "She's just a kid."

  "Forget her," Portia said offhandedly, then whispered, "Come on over here."

  "She's going--"

  "She's not going to say anything. Hmm, what's that? You're still interested. I can tell."

  "Jesus, what if she tells Lis?"

  "Come on," she urged breathlessly. "Don't stop now. Fuck me!"

  "I think we ought to get back."

  Portia dropped to her knees and pulled his shirt away, taking him deep into her mouth.

  "No," Robert whispered.

  He was standing, head back, eyes closed, shuddering uncontrollably and gasping when Lis stepped into the clearing.

  Claire must have run into her almost immediately and Lis had either learned, or deduced, what had happened. She stood above the half-naked couple and stared down at them. "Portia!" she raged. "How could you?" Her expression of horror matched Robert's perfectly.

  The young woman stood and wiped her face with her bra. She turned to face her sister and with detachment watched Lis's throat grow remarkably red as the tendons rose and her jaw quivered. Robert pulled up his running shorts, looking around again for his shirt. He seemed incapable of speaking. Portia refused to act like a caught schoolgirl. "How could you?" Lis gripped her arm but Portia stepped away abruptly. Meeting her sister's furious gaze she dressed slowly then, saying nothing, left Lis and Robert in the clearing.

  Portia walked back to the beach, where Dorothy was starting to pack up; the temperature had dropped and it was clearly going to rain. She looked at Portia and seemed to sense something was wrong but said nothing. The wind picked up and the two women hurried to gather up the picnic baskets and blankets, carting them to the truck. They made one more trip back to the beach, looking for their companions. Then the downpour began.

  Moments later sirens filled the park and police and medics arrived. It was in a rain-drenched intersection of two canyons that Portia met her sister, red-eyed and muddy and disheveled, looking like a madwoman, being led by two tall rangers out of a flooded arroyo.

  Portia had stepped toward her. "Lis! What--?"

  The slap was oddly quiet but so powerful it brought Portia down on one knee. She cried out in pain and shock. Neither woman moved, and Lis's hand remained frozen in the air as they stared at each other for a long moment. A shocked ranger helped Portia to her feet and explained about the deaths.

  "Oh, no!" Portia cried.

  "Oh, no!" Lis mimicked with bitter scorn then stepped forward, pushed the ranger aside and put her mouth close to her sister's ear. In a rasping whisper she said, "You killed that girl, you fucking whore."

  Portia faced her sister. Her eyes grew as cold as the wet rocks around them. "Goodbye, Lis."

  And goodbye it had been. Apart from a few brief, stilted phone conversations, those words had been virtually the last communication between the sisters until tonight.

  Indian Leap. It was the first thing in Portia's mind when Lis had invited her here this evening--just as it had reared in her thoughts when the subject of the nursery was raised, and, for that matter, every time Portia had thought of moving back to Ridgeton, which--though she'd never confess it to Lis--she'd considered frequently in the past few years.

  Indian Leap . . .

  Oh, Lis, Portia thought, don't you see? That's what dooms the L'Auberget sisters, and always will. Not the tragedy, not the deaths, not the bitter words or the months of silence afterwards, but the past that led us to that pine bed, the past that's certain to keep leading us to places just as terrible again and again and again.

  The past, with all its spirits of the dead.

  Portia now looked at her sister, ten feet away, as Lis put aside the shovel and waded toward the front seat of the car.

  The sisters' eyes met.

  Lis frowned, troubled by Portia's expression. "What is it?" she asked.

  But just then a low whistle squealed from the car's grille. The engine choked, and kicked hard several times as the fan blade slapped water. Then with a shudder it died, leaving the night filled only with the sounds of the wind, the rain and the lilting music of a clever baroque composer.

  24

  "Well, I didn't go for help because it's over a half mile to the neighbors and if you've listened to the radio you know what kind of storm it's supposed to be. I mean, doesn't it make sense?"

  The words fired from the pale mouth of the petite blonde. She'd stopped crying but was pouring down brandy from a dusty bottle in a medicinal way. "And anyway," she said to Trenton Heck, "he told me not to and if you ever saw him you'd do what he told you. Oh, my Lord. All I kept thinking was, Lucky me, lucky me, I had communion today."

  Owen Atcheson returned from the side yard to the house's tiny living room, where Heck and the fragile woman stood.

  "Lucky me," she whispered and tossed down a belt of liquor. She started to cry again.

  "He just pulled one wire out," Owen reported. He lifted the receiver. "I got it working."

  "He's got my car. It's a beige Subaru station wagon. An '89. Apologized about ten times. 'I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. . . .' Phew." Her tears stopped. "That's what I mean when I call him strange. Well, you can imagine. Asked me for the keys and of course I gave them. Then off he went, squatting behind the wheel. Missed the drive completely but found the road. Guess I'll write that vehicle off."

  Owen grimaced. "If we'd gone that way he would've come right to us."

  Heck looked again at the tiny skull, resting on the paper towel in which she'd handed it to him, unwilling to touch the bone itself.

  "Well," the woman continued, "you can find him on 315."

  "How's that?"

  "He's going to Boyleston. Route 315."

  "He said that?"

  "He asked me about the nearest town with a train station. I told him Boyleston. He asked me how to get there. And then asked me for fifty dollars for a train ticket. I gave it to him. And a little more."

  Heck stared at the phone for a minute. Can't keep it a secret anymore, he thought. Not with Hrubek killing one woman and terrorizing another. He sighed and sucked air through bent teeth. Very conspicuous in Heck's mind now was the thought that if he'd called Haversham like he'd thought of doing--after figuring out that Hrubek was heading west--they might've caught him before he got to that house in Cloverton. All law enforcers, Heck too, had inventories of times when their mistakes and failings had gotten other people hurt--times that occasionally returned hard and kept them from sleeping, and sometimes did worse than that. Though he was removed from the sorrow at the moment, he supposed that that woman's death would be the most prominent in his personal store of those events, and he could only guess how bad it would later come back to him.

  Now though he wanted only one thing--to see this fellow caught--and he snatched up the receiver. He placed a call to the local sheriff and reported Hrubek's theft of the Subaru and where he seemed to be going. He turned to the woman. "Sheriff says he'll send somebody out to the house to take you to a friend's or relative's, ma'am. If you want."

  "Tell him yes, please."

  Heck relayed this information to the sheriff. When he hung up, Owen took the phone
and called the Marsden Inn and was surprised to find that Lis and Portia still hadn't checked in. Frowning, he called the house. Lis picked up on the third ring.

  "Lis, what are you doing there?"

  "Owen? Where are you?"

  "I'm in Fredericks. I tried to call you before. I thought you'd left. What're you doing there? You were supposed to be at the Inn an hour ago."

  A momentary hollowness on the line. He heard her calling, "It's Owen." What was going on? Through the line he heard a roll of thunder. Lis came back on and explained that she and Portia had stayed to build up the sandbags. "The dam was overflowing. We could've lost the house."

  "Are you all right?"

  "We're fine. But the car's stuck in the driveway. The rain's terrible. We can't get out. There're no tow trucks. What are you doing in Fredericks?"

  "I've been following Hrubek west."

  "West! He did turn around."

  "Lis, I have to tell you . . . He killed someone."

  "No!"

  "A woman in Cloverton."

  "He's coming here?"

  "No, it doesn't look like it. He's going to Boyleston. To get a train out of the state, I'd guess."

  "What should we do?"

  He paused. "I'm not going after him, Lis. I'm coming home."

  He heard her exhale a sigh. "Thank you, honey."

  "Stay in the house. Lock the doors. I'm only fifteen minutes away. . . . Lis?"

  "Yes?"

  He paused. "I'll be there soon."

  Heck and Owen said goodbye to the woman and hurried out into the rain, buffeted by the terrible wind. They followed the driveway to the dim road that led back to the highway.

  Owen glanced at Heck, who was trudging along morosely.

  "You're thinking about your reward?"

  "I have to say I am. They'll probably get him in Boyleston for sure. But I had to call and tell them. I'm not going to risk anybody else getting hurt."

  Owen thought for a moment. "You're still due that money, I'd say."

  "Well, the hospital's gonna have a different opinion on that, I'll guarantee you."

  "Tell you what, Heck, you burn on down that highway to Boyleston, and if you get him first, fine. If not, we'll sue the hospital for your money and I'll handle the case myself."

  "You a lawyer?"

  Owen nodded. "Won't charge you a penny."

  "You'd do that for me?"

  "Surely would."

  Heck was embarrassed at Owen's generosity and after a moment he shook the lawyer's hand warmly. They continued in silence to the clearing where the ruined Cadillac sat.

  "Okay, Emil and I'll head south here. It's a beige Subaru we're looking for, right? Let's hope he doesn't drive Japanese any better'n he drives Detroit. Okay, let's do it." On impulse he added, "Say, after this's over with, let's stay in touch, you and me. What do you say? Do some fishing?"

  "Hey, that's a fine idea by me, Heck. Happy hunting to you."

  Heck and Emil limped, and trotted, back to the battered Chevy pickup fifty yards down the road. They climbed in. Heck started up the rattling engine, then sped through the fierce rain toward Route 315, his left foot on the accelerator and an eye on his modest prize.

  The sign revolved slowly in the turbulent night sky.

  Dr. Richard Kohler looked toward the flashes of light in the west and laughed out loud at the metaphor that occurred to him.

  Wasn't this how Mary Shelley's doctor had animated his creature? Lightning?

  The psychiatrist now recalled very clearly the first meeting with the patient who would play the monster to Kohler's Frankenstein. Four months ago, two weeks after the Indian Leap trial and Michael's incarceration in Marsden, Kohler--overcome with morbid and professional fascination--had walked slowly into Marsden's grim, high-security E Ward and looked down at the huge, hunched form of Michael Hrubek, glaring up from beneath his dark eyebrows.

  "How are you, Michael?" Kohler asked.

  "They're lis-ten-ing. Sometimes you have to keep your mind a complete blank. Have you ever done that? Do you know how hard it is? That's the basis of Transcendental Meditation. You may know that as TM. Make your mind a complete blank, Doctor. Try it."

  "I don't think I can."

  "If I hit you with that chair your mind'd be a complete blank. But the downside is that you'd be a dead fucker." Michael had then closed his mouth and said nothing more for several days.

  Marsden was a state hospital, like Cooperstown, and offered only a few dismal activity rooms. But Kohler had finagled a special suite for patients in his program. It was not luxurious. The rooms were drafty and cold and the walls were painted an unsettling milky green. But at least those in the Milieu Suite--so named because Kohler's goal was to ease the patients here gradually back into normal society--were separated from the hospital's sicker patients and this special status alone gave them a sense of dignity. They also had learning toys and books and art supplies--even the dangerous and officially forbidden pencils. Art and expression were encouraged and the walls were graced by the graffiti of paintings, drawings and poems created by the patients.

  In August Richard Kohler commenced a campaign to get Michael into the Milieu Suite. He chose the young man because he was smart, because he seemed to wish to improve, and because he had killed. To resocialize (one did not cure) a patient like Michael Hrubek would be the ultimate validation of Kohler's delusion-therapy techniques. But more than precious DMH funding, more than professional prestige, Kohler saw a chance to help a man who suffered and who suffered terribly. Michael wasn't like the many schizophrenic patients who were oblivious to their conditions. No, Michael was the most tragic of victims; he was just well enough to imagine what a normal life might be like and was tormented daily by the gap between who he was and who he so desperately wanted to be. Exactly the sort of patient Kohler wished most to work with.

  Not that Michael leapt at the chance to join the psychiatrist's program.

  "No fucking way, you fucker!"

  Paranoid and suspicious, Michael refused to have anything to do with the Suite, or Kohler, or anyone else at Marsden for that matter. He sat in the corner of his room, muttering to himself and suspiciously eyeing doctors and patients alike. But Kohler persisted. He simply wouldn't leave the young man alone. Their first month together--and they saw each other daily--they argued bitterly. Michael would rant and scream, convinced Kohler was a conspirator like the others. The doctor would parry with questions about Michael's fantasies, trying to break him down.

  Finally, tuckered out by Kohler's aggressiveness and by massive dosages of medicine, Michael reluctantly agreed to join his program. He was gradually introduced to other patients, first one on one, then in larger groups. To get the young patient to talk about his past and his delusions, Kohler would bribe him with history books, filching them from the library at Framington hospital because the collection at Marsden was almost nonexistent. In their individual sessions Kohler kept pushing the young man, turning up the emotional heat and forcing him to spend time with other patients, probing into his delusions and dreams.

  "Michael, who's Eve?"

  "Oh, yeah, right. Like I'm going to tell you. Forget about it."

  "What did you mean by 'I want to stay ahead of the blue uniforms'?"

  "Time for bed. Lights out. Nighty-night, Doctor." So it went.

  One cold, wet day six weeks ago, Michael was in Marsden's secluded exercise area, walking laps under the surly eyes of the guards. He gazed through the chain-link fence at the bleak, muddy New England farm on the hospital grounds. Like most schizophrenics Michael suffered from blunted affect--hampered display of emotion. But that day he was suddenly swept up by the bleak and sorrowful scenery and started to cry. "I was feeling sorry for the poor damp cows," Michael later told Kohler. "Their eyes were broken. God should do something for them. They'll have a hard time."

  "Their eyes were broken, Michael? What do you mean?"

  "The poor cows. They'll never be the same. Good for them, bad fo
r them. It's so obvious. Their eyes are broken. Don't you understand?"

  The flash came to Kohler like an ECS jolt. "You mean," he whispered, struggling to control his excitement, "you're saying the ice is broken."

  With this backhanded message--like the one about getting close to Dr. Anne Muller--Michael was trying to express his inmost feelings. In this case, that something about his life had changed fundamentally. He shrugged and began to cry in front of his therapist--not in fear but out of sorrow. "I feel so bad for them." Gradually he calmed. "It seems like a difficult life to be a farmer. But maybe it's one that'd suit me."

  "Would you be interested," Kohler asked, his heart racing, "in working on that farm?"

  "The farm?"

  "The work program. Here at the hospital."

  "Are you mad?" Michael shouted. "I'd get kicked in the head and killed. Don't be a stupid fucker!"

  It took two weeks of constant pressure to talk Michael into the job--far longer, in fact, than it took Kohler to gin up the paperwork to arrange the transfer. Michael was technically an untouchable at Marsden because he was a Section 403 commitment. But there is no easier mark than state bureaucracy. Because Kohler's voluminous documentation referred to "Patient 458-94," rather than "Michael Hrubek," and because the supervisors of vastly overcrowded E Ward were delighted to get rid of another patient, Hrubek was easily stamped, approved, vetted and blessed. He was assigned simple tasks on the farm, which produced dairy products for the hospital and sold what little surplus there was at local markets. At first he was suspicious of his supervisors. Yet he never once had a panic attack. He showed up for work on time and was usually the last to leave. Eventually he settled into the job--shoveling manure, lugging sledgehammers, fence stretchers and staples from fence post to fence post, carting milk pails. The only times you'd suspect he wasn't your average farm boy was when he'd use white fence paint on Herefords to even up markings he found unpleasant or scary.

  Still, as soon as he was told not to paint the cows, he shamefacedly complied.

  Michael Hrubek, who'd never in his life earned a penny of his own money, was suddenly making $3.80 an hour. He was having dinner in the hospital cafeteria with friends and washing dishes afterwards, he was writing a long poem about the Battle of Bull Run, and he was an integral part of Kohler's delusion-therapy program, not to mention the cover boy of his proposal to the State Department of Mental Health.