Shades of Eva (55 page)

I had my cell phone on me in case Allie or
Mitchell or the police needed me. I called Allie to tell her that
I’d be home in about an hour; that I had one more place to go. She
asked me where I was going, and I told her. She told me be
careful.

The houses on Maple were small, unique in
style, mostly 1950s-era single-story bungalows and ranches. Some
were remodeled; others were left to age as they would. If they were
human beings, I’d say that some cared about what they looked like,
and some could care less.

There was one brick house that seemed to
stand out from the rest. Not for any aesthetic charm or particular
character; it was a feeling that I got when I saw it. There was a
toolshed in the back of the property. I know it sounds strange, but
the shed seemed to be calling to me, and it seemed to have been
calling to me for quite a long time. I checked the curb outside of
the house where the home’s address had been stenciled. Its number
matched the number I’d remembered from Ramsey’s file.

I shut the car off, sat there and just
stared at the place, trying to take in the essence of it. I looked
not only at the windows in front and to the shed, but to the house
flanking it to its west, just the other side of a hedgerow.
Mitchell said his neighbor used to stand over that hedge and peer
into his family’s back windows. The idea made me turn the car on
and drive around the corner to the alley, and turn in.  I
wanted to see the back of these houses. I wanted in some human way
to connect with my missing patient and connect with what happened
to him, and to his mother. This house, this shed, and this alley
were as good as any way to do that.

I drove that pocked and pitted pathway back
to the rear of his house and parked once again, shut the engine
off, and looked around. There was no one around to wonder who I
was; perhaps, I was lucky in that regard. It was nearing three
o’clock in the morning, so I was taking a risk just being
there.

I got out of the car and stepped into
Mitchell’s backyard. I could see juniper bushes beneath the back
windows of the house, as Mitchell had described. The hedgerow was
just as he described it. I could almost picture the neighbor
peering over that barrier into these very windows. I could almost
see a little boy in one of the windows. I could almost see Eva.

I looked then to the shed just in front of
me. It appeared to have a tin roof. I looked to the east, beyond
the road to which I had come, and there was an open field. There
was a junk pile behind the shed, and upon closer inspection, there
appeared to be an unlocked lock on the door.

I’m not sure why I removed that lock that
morning. It certainly wasn’t in character for me. Maybe it was
sheer curiosity. Maybe it was guilt for having abandoned Eva in her
youth. Maybe I felt I needed to atone for that abandonment. If I
hadn’t left Eva to the wolves at Coastal State, then maybe this
tragedy would have never happened.

I needed to feel something beyond the
detachment that I had become so accustomed to. I needed to feel
something beyond the useless peace that had come to define my
complacency. I needed to feel pride in myself for doing something
beyond professional convention, something altruistic, to feel the
respect Allie wanted to feel for me. I think that’s why I removed
the lock that morning and looked inside those doors, into the past
of a man like Mitchell.

What was the worst that could happen?

The worst that could happen to me wasn’t a
sudden visit from police or a warning to leave. It wasn’t a
headline reporting I’d been arrested for trespassing, or a dog
emerging from the shed to bite me. The worst thing that could
happen was that my patient would never again return, and this
revenge scheme would be just another scheme that took a life, and
beyond that, a life that would not be remembered. The worst thing
that could happen was that nobody would ever know the truth, about
any of these characters, and that my brother, that this Abigail,
that Eva and both her sons, and I even, would forever wear the veil
of mystery, that we’d never receive the eulogy each of us truly
deserved.

I opened the toolshed door.

There were earwigs by the hundreds that
clung to the back of it and jumped to the ground when I pulled it
open. They leapt as if the door had somehow shed its skin…and then
there was the smell. Must and mildew, and on top of that I thought
I smelled the scent of old, stale alcohol bottles.

To this day I don’t know if I truly smelled
the alcohol, or if it was some sort of hallucination in homage to
my patient. It didn’t matter because I was there. In some way,
Mitchell was there, too; in some way, Eva was there with us, and
Abigail, and Fred, and we were the group we were always, perhaps,
destined to be. The word congregation came to mind.

I tried to imagine the sound of a gun firing
in there and the crying and the sound of rape, whatever that
sounded like. It was not easy to empathize. It never is. It was
much easier to leave the site alone, like my patient was trying to
do, and that is what I did. It was all I could do. Remembering is
not always easy, nor is it always wise.

And that’s when my phone rang.

It was a woman’s voice on the line, but it
wasn’t Allie. The woman introduced herself as Dr. Anna Norris. I
knew her as the name of the woman who had alerted police to this
mess in the first place. The Chief Medical Superintendent of the
Coastal State Psychiatric Hospital at River Bluff was calling
me.

***

April 25, 1995: 3:12 a.m.

Ben Levantle

The Coastal State Regional Psychiatric
Hospital was somewhere I’d never set foot. It wasn’t from a lack of
opportunity. I’d been asked to complete a part of my residency
there in 1959, and of course Eva had been there. She’d asked me to
come and visit her in a thousand different ways, but I could never
bring myself to go. When the residency issue popped up, I didn’t
know if Eva was still there or not. That’s why it was an issue and
not an opportunity. I couldn’t bear to risk seeing Eva in some
clinical situation. I’d be introduced as Dr. Levantle. She’d be
introduced as Eva number such and such with diagnosis x or y—a
depersonalized figment of the beautiful child I had once loved. I
couldn’t do it, so I didn’t. I went somewhere else.

I had asked Anna Norris to what reason did I
owe the pleasure of meeting her, and she said, and I’ll never
forget her response: “I think you know.”

I didn’t know, and a part of me wanted to
keep it that way. But in these kinds of stories, there’s something
or someone far more powerful than us governing things. Maybe it’s
divine justice. Maybe its destiny or the sheer power of coincidence
that guides us. Whatever it is, it led Anna to call me, and now I
was driving further east—further away from home, and further into
the life of a client—or coincidence, or fate. Take your pick, but
toward whatever I was driving, I felt no more powerful than a bit
of tin drifting ever so slowly through the cosmos toward some giant
magnetic planet.

Her pull was that compelling.

A receptionist directed me down
a
wide hallway to Dr. Norris’s office. I felt honored in a way, yet
troubled. There was something I wanted from this place beyond
information. I wanted to explore it in the way that I had always
wanted to explore it. I wanted to go back in time and roam her
corridors. I wanted to feel the cold marble of her floors beneath
my feet, and the coolness of her air. I wanted to explore her in
the way Mitchell must have explored her, seeking out her old rooms,
her divisions, her quiet places and unquiet essence, and rummage
through her files. I wanted to run a hand across her red brick
exterior and the walls of her interior until perhaps she whispered
a secret or two to me.

I wanted to steep myself in the chemistry of
this place—into the heart of the atoms that formed her, and into
the mysteries of the radiation she gave—to go back in time and to
know her as Eva knew her.

I wanted to reappear to Eva in the way that
she reappeared to her son, most notably in his journal, when she
revealed things about herself. I wanted to talk to her on her
terms—on her turf, the way she talked to me on mine. I wanted to
experience the place the way Eva had experienced her, but I knew
that was impossible. I knew that desire was a function of my guilt,
and that I would be better served if I directed my energies toward
helping these people find the man I had counseled if I
could—whomever that man was.

My purposes had to be clear. I reminded
myself I was a skeptic and a scholar, a diplomat in clinical
psychology. That much I knew. This whole ruse may have been
manufactured, but it was manufactured for a reason—by someone, be
him real or be him an alter. Whoever he was, he was real!

I made my purposes known to Dr. Norris: I
wanted to speak to Brad, and possibly Ully. I wanted to cooperate
and to be a member of the team that brought Mitchell home, or Elmer
in, and Abigail, and resolve exactly what was going on.

What I wanted first was the same thing
Mitchell wanted—answers about his mother.  What was her
diagnosis? Why the first committal? Why the lobotomy, and what kind
was it? Did the staff here really erase her personality, as
Mitchell had contended, and force her to forget, or was Mitchell a
victim of the same sort of delusion that Eva was once rumored to
be?

Anna Norris was all smiles when we met. She
had a certain grace about her that put me immediately at ease. She
also had a presence of personality and exuded a certain wisdom of
experience and determined intelligence that I found stimulating. I
wanted to pick her brain and see just exactly how far back she and
this place went.

As it turned out she was Eva’s psychiatrist
in 1950 on up to Eva’s death in 1976. Maybe I could find answers to
my questions from her.

Just as I wanted my answers, however, Anna
had questions of her own. She wanted to know if I knew the truth
about Eva’s contentions way back when, and if I’d lied to the
detectives looking into those contentions about my brother. I told
her I hadn’t lied, and that was the truth. What I had done was what
we all did back then. We all disbelieved Eva. To that we both pled
guilty.

I inquired about Ully. I had to wonder if
Ully was safe at Coastal State. The Asylum prison did offer him
some protection. He was at least behind bars.

“He’ll have police protection until he’s
released tomorrow,” Anna explained, “and he has the means to
provide his own private security after that.”

“What about this shooting in the Cayman
Islands?” I said. “I’m not a law enforcement officer, but I think
I’d want to know who Ully talked to in the last 48 hours. He was
never the kind of person who took to personal insult very
well.”

“Are you suggesting Ully may have had
something to do with Sophia Bermicelli’s murder?”

“I’m only raising an eyebrow.”

Dr. Norris was nodding. “Just between you
and me, Ully wasn’t moved into the prison division just for his
protection. Police have been questioning him all morning about what
you’ve just pointed out.”

“And have they learned anything?”

“Not yet. Ully’s a cool cucumber. The way
that he sees it, someone working for Angstrom got greedy. He called
it infighting. Police are wondering if there weren’t two people
working for Angstrom sent to the Caymans to cash out the account,
not just one. They think someone might have gotten greedy and he—or
she—is probably on a fast boat to China right about now.”

Anna moved the conversation along. She said
that she and Ully and Brad had a long sit down just a few hours
ago.

They’d discussed Elmer, Eva, and Dorothy
Biggs, Eva’s would-be sister.

As to Elmer, Ully was sticking to his latest
story that he had nothing to do with the infant’s disappearance,
and didn’t know anything about it. He said that he had no knowledge
of any rape that might have occurred, though he was forced to admit
just that by Angstrom, earlier. Ully told Anna that he always
thought Brad was the father of the baby, because that’s exactly
what Brad had always claimed.  

Anna then asked me if I was familiar with
Dorothy Biggs? I told her I hadn’t heard of her.

“Dorothy was a sister of Eva’s,” Anna
explained. “Or a half-sister. She was trying to adopt Eva’s child
so that he wouldn’t be transferred to the Marquette Institution as
per Eva’s father’s wishes. Dorothy died shortly after Elmer was
taken.”

“I didn’t know Eva had a sister,” I said.
“Was her father married previously?”

Anna shook her head. “I’m not sure at this
point. I just remember Eva talking about her. Virgil wouldn’t
discuss her. This always angered Eva, and I can understand why.
Dorothy was quite a bit older than Eva, so I presumed Mr. McGinnis
was married before. But I’m not sure.”

“She might have given Elmer a nice home,” I
offered. It was all I thought of to say.

Anna agreed. “When was the last time you saw
your brother, Ben?”

“1954. He cut us off without so much as a
goodbye.”

“I’m sorry about Fred. I truly am.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t sure what to say. She
made it sound as if my brother was dead. I gave her a look of
gracious misunderstanding. In my heart he was always only
missing.

“I mean I’m sorry about all of this,” she
clarified. “Surely, you must have thought Eva’s issues were
resolved. I’m sorry about what this has done to your career and
your reputation, but I might add it doesn’t take away from who you
are. This isn’t you, Ben. I wouldn’t ride yourself too hard over
things. You were young, you and Eva. Young people are full of
passion. You went separate ways.”