The Silent Girls (27 page)

“Your mother,” Rath croaked, wanting to occupy Langevine and take a shot at putting the doctor’s narrative together. “Tried to murder you?”

Langevine grabbed Rath by the hair and knocked his head against the wall, Rath’s skull imploded in a white-hot atomic blast in the desert of his barren mind. Fluid trickled from the back of his head, down his neck. Rath closed his eyes, the backs of their lids overexposed X-rays of his capillaries. He opened his eyes again, the lids leaden. Langevine’s pale palm rose in front of his eyes, as big as the moon, the knife in it looking sharp enough to cut clear to the spine with one easy swipe.

Langevine smiled, languorously. He was enjoying this. Enjoying sobs from the vent. Enjoying Rath’s torment like a sick child torturing a frog.

“She
,
” Langevine snarled, “that thing that carried me, was not my real mother. My
real
mother”—he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, and Rath almost lunged—“rescued me from the slattern that conceived me.” Langevine cocked his head dreamily, as a woman’s voice drifted from the vent: “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur!”

“My real mother,” Langevine said, “saved me from that bloodless thing that
incubated
me and plotted to murder me when I was six months in her belly. Six months. A helpless, wee thing, I was.”

Rath crept his hand toward the revolver while Langevine drank in his one-man audience. The revolver was empty, but it could break a nose if swung hard enough.

“My
real
mother saved me from that venomous bitch’s womb,” Langevine said, his voice dramatic, a PBS narrator’s voice, as if he’d practiced all his life to tell his tale aloud. “I was an
innocent.
In the third trimester, when she’d learned I had . . .
issues.
Was
defective.
I fed on her blood. I shared her oxygen. I
lived inside
her. I was
of
her. And she wanted to pull me out by the root because I was a weed instead of a flower. Discard me on a compost heap with the other weeds. Kill me so she could try again. That’s what they all say, when it’s
inconvenient.
I’m young, I’m healthy, I can try again. When the time is right.
Well, what about my time?” He slammed the blunt end of the knife handle down on Rath’s stabbed hand and Rath thought he might pass out from the pain. Langevine leaned in close, his nose touching Rath’s nose. The stench of his breath seemed to suck the oxygen from the hallway. “What about
my life
?” he said quietly, pleading his case. “I deserved to live. Didn’t I?”

Langevine tore at his face as if to peel the skin from it, and his beard pulled free. It was a masterful fake.

Rath inched his fingers closer to the revolver. Felt its cold barrel touch a fingertip.

Langevine held the fake beard in his hand like the pelt of a skinned rodent. His jaw was squeezed at the sides, cheeks deformed and sunken, as if his head had been extruded through a straw. He grabbed at his hair and yanked free a wig and tossed it aside to reveal a frail, luminous skull hideously caved at either side just behind the temples, the pale skin a ruin of raised scar tissue as red and ragged as stitches on a baseball.

“My real mother saved me.
Loved
me. For a while. But. Even she proved not worthy of my love. Weak.”

Rath sat spellbound by this creature before him. There was no other word for him other than
monster.

“My face may be the face of a ghoul, but my heart is pure.” He laughed. His eyes shone with elated glee, with love, as he licked his lips. “I am a doctor. I help people. I save lives!” he screeched, jutting a frail finger at the vent. Rath did not want to hear anymore. He wrapped his fingers around the revolver.

Langevine looked at Rath, lazily. “It will all be over soon.”

“That’s my daughter,” Rath said.

Langevine stared at him blankly. “I don’t know your daughter. It’s unfortunate, if she is.”

“She’s not pregnant.”

“Don’t embarrass yourself by lying for her,” Langevine snorted.

“She’s
not
pregnant.”

“She just goes to Family Matters support meetings for the conversation, does she?” Langevine giggled, lost in an insane hilarity. “Don’t fret. God forgives. But
I
don’t.”

“Let them go,” Rath said.

“Them?”

“My daughter and Mandy.”

“Mandy? Mandy is my
patient.
I would never. Could never. No matter what sin she committed. What do you take me for?” His eyes were dazzling with wild madness. He closed them then, for just a second, as if in reverie, and Rath swung the revolver. Hard.

It struck Langevine’s hand, the one that held the knife, with the cracking of bone.

Langevine peeled off a cry, pinwheeling with a look of surprise as Rath swung the revolver again, across Langevine’s face, gashing his cheek.

Langevine squealed, and Rath pounced, pinned this sick, deformed child beneath him and struck his face and skull again and again with the revolver, smashing Langevine’s face until he lay still on the floor, blood leaking.

Rath fumbled for the .22 shells on the floor in the dark hallway, but he was shaking too badly to get hold of them. He snatched up the knife and ran down the hallway and took the stairs three at a time, slipping across the marble floor of the landing before charging down a hallway, toward a door behind which a girl pleaded: “Someone. Help.”

Rath burst into the room. On a flat-screen TV on the near wall, a very young Betty Malroy incanted, “Behold, I was shaped in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”

“Who’s there,” a girl moaned from behind a curtain.

Rath threw back the curtain to see neither Rachel nor Mandy Wilks, but a girl he vaguely recognized as Rebecca Thompson, her ankles and wrists bound with leather straps to a metal table. He went to her. Her face was gaunt and pallid, but her eyes lit upon seeing him. Then teared up.

Rath undid the girl’s straps, and the girl draped her arms around him and squeezed him as Rachel had when she was a little girl, crying as Rachel had when she was a baby.

Where was Rachel?

Rath laid the girl back down and searched the room. Rachel was not there.

“Where is Rachel?” Rath demanded from the girl. “Where is she?”

“Who?”

“My daughter. Where is she?”

Chapter 58

T
HE RED AND
blue lights of the ambulance and the state-trooper cruisers kaleidoscoped across the snowy lawn and danced on the stone façade of the manor as the girl was wheeled out on a gurney, a nest of hoses and tubes hooked to pumps and IV bags as she was thrust into the back of the ambulance and driven away.

Rath saw a state trooper standing by his cruiser, speaking to a man cloaked head to toe in a white forensics jumpsuit, booties, and cap.

Rath strode over and interrupted. “Did you find my daughter?” Rath said.

“Excuse me?” the trooper said.

“Did you find my daughter? Did you find Rachel?”

“We found no one else, sir.”

“You searched the place?”

“We had a team in there, sir. There was no one else but Dr. Langevine and his dog.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes sir. Very.”

“What about Mandy Wilks?”

“We found no other girls, sir.”

Chapter 59

G
ROUT SHOOK HIS
head, noting that Larkin was doing the same. Both were in disbelief at what Betty Malroy was saying.

“I thought my son was dead,” she kept saying. “I thought Martin was dead.”

“Tell me again, more slowly,” Grout said. “So Officer Larkin here can get it all.”

Betty Malroy nodded, her body wilting, a defeated woman. A woman at the end of her days, with nothing left to do but confess it all.

“I was a nurse living in squalor for all my good labor and godly deeds, and that rich, filthy Marianne King, she came to me and waved fistfuls of dirty dollars in my face, believing me, a good woman, a godly woman, would succumb to it, give up her God for money, and cut a child from her, a child
six months
in the womb.

“I couldn’t
have
a child. But, I had prayed to God to provide. And God blessed me. You understand that, don’t you? So. Instead of performing the evil she asked of me, I put her under and induced her, and I delivered my child. It was not easy. Mind you. It took great will. And. That baby. My son. He was not . . . ready. Things back then. Well. They were. Crude. I was forced to use forceps. And suction. I’m afraid it did not do him well. Physically. And believe me, it took a great deal to keep him alive. It took a lot of praying. A lot of God’s graces. And I believed then that if God wanted him to live, he would live. And he did. God granted me a miracle. Or so I thought.”

Grout rubbed his eyes and pinched his nose, disbelieving.

“Shortly after,” Betty Malroy said, “I moved and got a nursing job in another hospital, and I faked a pregnancy.

“I kept him alive. As my own. Nursed and nurtured him, as any loving mother would. And he blossomed. Oh he did.

“I made one mistake. I was young. I was bitter and strident and so self-righteous. I told him.”

“You told him what?” Grout said, prodding her, even though he’d heard her spew it earlier, in a state of foaming lunacy. He needed to hear it again, when she was calm, if in a stupor.

“I told him about her. His so-called biological mother. It was a mistake. He was too young to process it. Just thirteen, but so slight. So frail. Ill. He’s always been ill. Weak. He was thirteen, but anyone who saw him would say he was an eight-year-old, a sickly eight-year-old at that. And. Well. He couldn’t take it. And when I read in the papers about her on Halloween. I knew.”

“So you sent him away soon after?” Larkin said, writing in his notepad.

“January of ’87, yes, as soon as I was able. He had some surgeries over there. Hormonal therapy, to help him grow. Plastic surgery to try to . . . correct his face. I—”

“You blackmailed Renstrom,” Grout said, his anger steeping. His disgust.

“That was business. Renstrom sinned. Had an affair. The way you put it, it lacks decorum.”

“Decorum?” Grout said, his voice echoing in the bared room. “You talk to me about decorum—”

“I’m a mother. Renstrom helped me and my son. But then. Well. Martin became . . . He was unmanageable. And we lost touch after he turned eighteen.”

“Until?” Grout said.

“Until he wrote me from London, saying he’d become
someone else,
someone better than me, and if I did not give him—” She adjusted the chopsticks in her hair, patted the bun gently with the pads of her fingers “An allowance. A significant allowance to be deposited regularly into an account. He would make it known. What I’d done.”

“And you could not have that?” Grout said, stepping toward her.

The old woman shrunk into herself.

“No. I could not have that.”

“You’re coming with us,” Grout said. He grabbed the woman’s pale, fragile wrist and squeezed.

“Sir,” Larkin said. “We have no jurisdiction, you can’t just—”

“Get up,” Grout ordered. He yanked on her arm, and her face fell slack, her eyes grew wide and vacant, and she began to shake.

“Sir,” Larkin said.

The old woman slumped in the chair, eyes rolling up in her head.

“Sir,” Larkin said, “something’s wrong with her.”

Spittle frothed out of the old woman’s mouth, and a single thread of blood trickled from her nostril.

Chapter 60

A
S
R
ATH DROVE
through town, his eyes searched for Rachel’s car, for Rachel walking along the dark street. He tried her number again and again and got nothing.

Pulling down his drive, his cell phone lit up, buzzing. He snatched it. Rachel’s number shone in the dark of the Scout.

“Rachel,” Rath gasped into the phone.

Static broke up a voice.

“Rachel?”

“Dad?”

Rath pulled the Scout to a stop. “Rachel, where are you? What—”

“I’m at the Monadnock Motel.”

“I’ll send the police, I—”

“I’m all right, Dad. I saw you on TV. And. I’m so sorry, you must have thought—”

Rath sagged against the steering wheel, bewildered and elated, feeling scraped out and raw as he fought to gain his composure and keep his voice from breaking.

“Come home,” he said.

Chapter 61

R
AT
H SAT SLOUCHED
on the floor, back against the couch in the darkened living room, blindly watching the TV on mute. Rachel was asleep in her old bedroom, but Rath did not want to chance waking her. She needed her rest.

The psychological and emotional toll she’d endured from learning the truth about her parents had scarred her. Changed her. Diminished her buoyancy and zest. Deadened her eyes. It had driven her to hole up in the motel, isolate herself from this man who loved her and had betrayed her. Rath could only hope her estrangement from him was temporary and his daughter would return. She’d not had the energy these past days to show the anger he knew she must have for him. There would be many hard days ahead. He was prepared for them. He’d wanted to talk to her about it when she’d come home, but she’d been too exhausted. All he could do was be there for her when she was ready. She had Felix, too. A good kid. A good young man. He cared for Rachel and had been there for her. He was out now getting her favorite take-out pizza from town for when she woke up. He was strong and nurturing and caring. Tender. Everything Rath had not been at his age.

The news came on, and Rath got up and crouched right in front of the TV, so close he could feel the heat of the screen. He turned the volume up the slightest so only he could hear it from a couple feet away.

A bleached-blond female reporter looked all of fifteen years old as she stood in front of the St. Johnsbury courthouse, her overly sprayed golden locks vibrating in the wind.

She messed with her earpiece for moment then addressed the camera with her best serious, big-girl face.

“A Dr. Martin Langevine was arraigned today on shocking charges that rocked the small town of Canaan, Vermont, and stunned the entire country. The charges include kidnapping, torture, and one count of first-degree murder of a girl whose name has not been released. More charges may be pending.”

The reporter paused. She looked bewildered.

“It was briefly thought that Langevine’s mother was involved. Betty Malroy, seventy-two, a former nurse and the founder of The Better Society nonprofit for family values, and Better Days Play School, which caters to at-risk single moms and their kids.

“Dr. Langevine has allegedly made dramatic claims that Malroy is not his actual birth mother, and as a nurse induced his birth from a woman who had asked her for an illegal abortion. He claims Malroy kept him as her own, and that he knows this because she told him of it when he turned thirteen. He has also confessed to the 1985 Halloween attack on a Mrs. Marianne King, whom he claims was the woman carrying him at the time. Marianne King had no comment.

“It is known that Betty Malroy owns Better Days Adoption Agency, and it was thought there might be a connection between it and Langevine’s motive. However—”

Rath drew closer to the TV, glanced back over his shoulder toward Rachel’s doorway.

“—one Mr. Boyd Pratt III,” the reporter continued, “a prominent Vermont citizen from a distinguished family who recently put in place plans to adopt a child from Better Days, has refused to speak with us. His lawyer insists Mr. Pratt met with Ms. Malroy at a resort in Stowe to finalize the legal adoption. But in light of the news, he will not be moving forward with the agency. It is alleged other girls might have met with Betty Malroy at the resort about possible illegal adoption, though what connection this has to her son’s alleged crimes is yet unclear.”

“It is also alleged that Dr. Langevine stalked his victims outside meetings for group counseling for pregnant women and lured the young girls with his slight physical stature by assuming the guise of an elderly woman in need of help. Dr. Langevine has allegedly said that he did what he did to save other innocents from dying. That girls ‘like this’ have many abortions and he was preventing many murders by doing God’s work. He was quoted as saying: ‘Now, we must rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to death; don’t stand back and let them die.’ ”

The reporter tucked a length of hair behind her ear. She was outside in the cold, and her makeup was beginning to crack. Rath thought he heard a noise behind him and looked back toward Rachel’s room, to find nothing but a dark hallway.

“It has been reported that the remains of two other girls were found in an incinerator at the back edge of the estate on Ravens Way.”

Rath knew from Sonja that the other girls were Sally and Fiona. Where was Mandy? Why had they not found her?

The reporter continued, “It is believed that each girl had been pregnant at the time of abduction, and that Dr. Langevine tried to keep the girls alive long enough for them to give birth, but —”

The reporter turned abruptly away from the camera toward the court steps, the camera trying to get back in front of her. “It appears Dr. Langevine is coming out now.”

The camera swung and its angle went wide to capture both her and Langevine as he descended the steps slowly. His movement was stiff. His face was scabbed and bruised. A vicious zipper of stiches ran the length of his left cheek, from his eyebrow to the corner of his mouth. He looked washed out, until he stepped up straight to the camera, and flashed a look of supreme confidence and defiance.

“Today, I pleaded not guilty to these absurd charges, based on the defense of Vermont’s Third-Person Defense Statute.”

Rath blinked. This was insane. What was he possibly arguing? Was he setting himself up for an insanity plea, or something else much more cunning?

“This defense statute states—” Langevine squared himself: “ ‘A person may defend the life of another third person when that third person is unable to defend itself against personal bodily harm. And if that third person is being threatened with mortal violence, they may be defended in kind.’ That is
exactly
what the law states. And that is exactly what I did. I am a doctor. I heal people.
Save
them. I obeyed Vermont’s law. God’s law.” His tongue flicked like a viper’s.

Rath turned up the volume slightly, breathless at the words coming from this man’s mouth and the certainty with which he spoke them.

Langevine smiled as if he’d just been elected president, and made the sign of the cross. “Psalm 82:4 reads: ‘Rescue the weak and needy and innocent; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.’ I tried to do just that, even if I may have failed at it.”

Astonishingly, a smatter of cheers arose from the crowd.

The reporter looked as flummoxed as a cheerleader at a spelling bee, her heavily made up eyes batting, the mascara starting to seize in the cold, giving her a slightly frozen, frightful look. But, she jabbed a mike in front of a woman cheering and asked, if not in the most professional manner, perhaps the most sincere: “Why in the world are you cheering?”

The woman shouted, “He dares to do what is in his
heart
. We are—”

“Turn it off,” a frail voice said, and Rath turned from where he was crouched, the TV’s sick light playing on him, to see Rachel staring at him, hollow-eyed and brokenhearted, clutching her bathrobe to her throat. “
Please,
turn it off.”

Rath picked up the remote and clicked off the TV, then turned back to Rachel. But she was gone, and all he saw was the light of her bedroom extinguished as her door shut with hard
click.

R
ATH JOLTED AW
AKE
on the floor, blinking in the darkness.

“Dad,” a voice whispered in the chilly room.

Rath rubbed his eyes and blinked in the darkness.

Rachel knelt beside him. She had a blanket, and she unfolded it now and lay it over him, making certain to cover his feet, pulling the blanket up to his chin.

He reached from under the blanket and touched her hand. It was cold. “How long have you been out here?” he said.

She shrugged. “Awhile.”

He propped himself against the arm of the couch. He looked at his daughter, breathless before her. The humiliation he bore for jeopardizing her might have crushed him if it were not buoyed by the rush of euphoria he felt at her very presence beside him.

“I—” he began.

She took his hand and put it back under the blanket. “Rest,” she said, and pulled the blanket to his chin again as she helped him lay back down. This was not how it was supposed to be. He was supposed to be comforting her.

“I should never have—” he began again.

But she would not let him continue.

“Rest,” she said.

She laid her head on his chest, and he felt his heart pounding the way it had pounded all those nights the first months she’d been a baby in her new home with him.

“I should have protected you.” His voice drifted from him. Soft. A whisper.

“You can’t,” she said.

No, he couldn’t. It was the pain every parent must live with, always.

His chest rose, and she laid a hand on it to calm it though it would not calm. “I—”

“Rest,” she said again. “Shhh.”

“Thank you,” he said.

She tried to speak, but her voice hitched, and he knew she was crying, could feel her starting to shake and sob. He reached a hand out form under the blanket and cupped the back of her head and held her close.