A Darker Place Read online

  “Guilt is an insidious force.”

  “I’d sometimes wake up in the morning and need an hour before I could bear to get on my feet, it was like I was under half a dozen of those lead blankets they lay over you when you have an X ray. Everything was just so much work.”

  “And then Glen came.” The story was familiar to both of them, like reciting a litany.

  “And then I collapsed under the weight of Abby’s picture, and then Glen came and offered me a way out. And it was so… easy. I knew it was dangerous. Glen tried to convince himself and me that it wasn’t, but I knew otherwise, and I was glad. Because if it killed me, at least the weight would be off me. And as soon as I left, as soon as I walked off the plane in North Dakota, I wasn’t even frightened anymore.”

  “Surely you must have been, to some degree.”

  “Oh I was, scared shitless about the whole setup and my inexperience and not knowing how I’d react, but at the same time I could push that person away and be just stupid, wide-eyed Anita Walls bumbling her way into an armed camp. It was intensely liberating. The three months flew by, and I never made a mistake, never showed any fear. It was like jittery old Anne Waverly was locked up inside a glass ball, looking over my shoulder.”

  “And then you came back.”

  “Christ, yes. I came out and was taken away for debriefing, and it left me so depressed, I couldn’t eat. But I’m sure you remember that.”

  “I remember.”

  “It must have been fun to have one of Antony’s flaky grad students move in on you and spend a couple of weeks staring at the walls.”

  “It was not that long, and you didn’t stare at the walls. You were charming, in a quiet way.”

  “I’ll bet. But the whole business in North Dakota helped. And once the postpartum depression lifted, the weight I woke up to every morning didn’t seem quite so heavy.”

  “Let’s talk about guilt.”

  “‘Survivor’s guilt,’” Anne said wryly.

  “It wasn’t quite that simple, was it?”

  “No.” Anne took a deep breath and let it out. “No, it wasn’t. Still isn’t. I did have something to do with Abby and Aaron’s deaths. With all the Farm deaths.”

  “So you have told me.”

  “My leaving the Farm set Ezekiel off. Look, even then I had enough training, enough experience to know how dangerous it would be to cross a man in his mental state, but I went ahead. I should have known. I did know—but I took off anyway.”

  They had stepped off the familiar path of the litany, and Marla watched her carefully.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I was selfish. I was stupid and greedy—I was bored with life on the Farm. I wanted to get back to grad school, where people valued what I did instead of telling me how bad I was at milking cows and how unfocused and disruptive I was getting.”

  “You are saying that your desire for self-fulfillment led to their deaths.”

  “My impatience, my self-importance, my… my… inability to get along with the father of my child.”

  “You and Aaron were having arguments,” Marla said quietly.

  “We had a huge fight about going back to Berkeley and I got in the car and drove away. He didn’t want me to take Abby, and I didn’t want her with me. And that was the end.”

  “But not for you.”

  “Yes, for me. Annie died, too, and Anne was built up on the wreckage, poor old battered Anne with her limp and her dogs. And every so often Anne goes away and Anita or Ana or whoever comes to life instead.”

  “So why are you concerned about this investigation, Anne? Why have you come to me?”

  “I’m worried that I can’t do it this time. That Ana won’t, you know, take over.”

  “Is this different, the feeling this time?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. I know it sounds crazy, but I’m afraid that I’m not frightened enough.”

  “You need to be frightened?”

  “You know I do,” Anne said, growing angry with the slow repetition of the therapist.

  “Tell me again,” Marla said, meaning, Remind yourself how it works.

  “Fear is the force that drives Anne into her corner. Fear’s like pain—it can be overwhelming at first, but if you live with it long enough, it can be shaped and molded, and it can be walled away to give you just a little space of your own where it isn’t. And that’s where Ana and the others live and breathe.”

  “And you wish to undertake yet another enterprise that will require you to break open your half-healed wounds and encourages you to split into a dual personality.”

  “You’re exaggerating, Marla.”

  “Am I? Listen to your own words.” “That’s just a way of talking about a mental process. A shorthand.”

  “I don’t know that it is.”

  “Marla, I can’t afford this,” Anne snapped, and began to gather herself to go. “I can’t risk anything getting in the way. You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “Anne, sit down.” Marla waited for her client to subside warily into the chair. “Anne, I cannot encourage self-deception, I cannot countenance actions that are so antithetical to the healing process. You knew this when you came here with your dream about Glen.”

  “Marla, sometimes you have to work beyond the immediate good to see the long-term picture.”

  “You are saying you need to do this work for Glen for your own state of health?” Marla asked dubiously.

  “I’m saying there’s unfinished business.”

  “I thought the last case, the one that you took to Glen, was meant to settle unfinished business.”

  “It was. But.” Anne thought for a moment and then said slowly, “When I volunteered to go into Kansas, I was deliberately going after Martin Cranmer as a way to balance the disaster of the previous case in Utah. Kansas did that. Now it’s a matter of reaching back to the beginning of the circle again, back to when Glen first took control of my life.”

  “The creature has to stand up to the creator?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You and Glen have been very close from time to time. Tell me this, Anne: Do you love Glen?”

  “I detest him,” Anne said without thinking. “No, I suppose it’s not that simple. I feel… God, what don’t I feel when it comes to Glen McCarthy? It’s like every emotion put together, all the contradictory drives at once. Maybe that’s why he was wearing black in the dream—don’t they say that when you mix all the colors together, you come up with black? That’s Glen, the black hole of my emotions.”

  “He declared himself God.”

  “And was dressed as the devil.”

  “So tell me, Anne: How does Glen feel about you?”

  “I think I make him nervous.” There was a degree of satisfaction in her voice that neither of them missed.

  “Why would that be?”

  “He thinks he controls me but he’s afraid he doesn’t. He thinks he understands me, and he does on one level, better than anyone else in the world, but not on another. He respects and admires me, to the extent that he has an inflated sense of my abilities, but he also, without realizing it, hopes that I will fail.”

  Marla had been a therapist for a long time, but even so it took her two or three seconds to wipe all trace of the shock and concern she felt out of her voice so she could ask evenly, “Why would Glen hope that you will fail?”

  “Oh, he’s not about to set me up for a fall. If I screwed up again, it would mean his job. I just meant that deep down he has to feel some resentment that he’s so dependent on me. I mean, really: Don’t all men secretly want to be the one to come riding on the white stallion to the rescue?”

  Marla chuckled again at that, but Anne decided against any further revelations in the Glen department. If Marla, friend and therapist, was already worrying about Glen’s motivations, it would only muddy the waters further if Anne were to voice her growing suspicion that Glen, deep in a hidden place within that smooth, whole, an
d completely unscarred skin of his, held a certain dark fascination with the scars and injuries that his job had inflicted on her body and mind.

  No, they both had enough to think about; besides, her hour was up.

  The term ended, the grade sheets were turned in, she had a final appointment with her lawyer, a farewell dinner with Antony and Marla, and a relatively full night’s sleep. Two days, and she would be gone.

  The next day she brought out the old Volkswagen bus named Rocinante from its resting place in the barn. Eliot had spent the better part of one enraptured week stripping down the engine and servicing it from roof to road, and it now had nearly new tires, completely new brakes, a more powerful electrical system, a rearview mirror that actually reflected the road behind her, and it had seen the occasional and disconcerting loss of power during acceleration cured by a radical revamping of the entire fuel system. The old lady was set to tackle mountains and deserts again, albeit at her own placid speed.

  Glen McCarthy’s men had also had their hands on the bus, adding a new and very well concealed compartment for her gun and the supply of cortisone and needles for her knee as well as an emergency call transmitter that would be discovered only if the entire body of the vehicle were torn away. Even if a cellular phone would go with her persona (which it would not), it would be useless away from the cities.

  Now the bus was Anne’s again. She sat in the driver’s seat and breathed in the musty odor of old upholstery and traces of mildew, a scent that always reminded her of her grandfather’s old Chevy with its wide horsehair seats and soft cloth roof lining. She sniffed, wondering if any of it was the smell of ancient blood that Glen’s men had missed after the Utah shootout. (Such a melodramatic word, that, and inaccurate as well: She’d been far too busy negotiating an escape to try to return fire.)

  She shook herself out of her macabre reveries and got out of the bus to begin her own renovations. She began by pulling the inside furnishings apart and scrubbing every corner and surface, then giving the bus back its personality. New curtains, a cheerful batik fabric with heavy lining to keep out the light, went up on the rods over the windows, along with new covers for the cushions. She filled the water reservoir and checked the propane tank, stocked the tight little drawers and cupboards with sheets and blankets, a quilt and a towel, foodstuffs and pans, and a wardrobe of jeans and flannel shirts that would have surprised her students. Hiking boots and a pair of sandals, heavy wool sweaters and an old but sturdy rain poncho, Dr. Bronner’s liquid almond soap (good for body, hair, and light reading matter), a first aid kit, a couple of coffee mugs with humorous pictures on them, some cones of pine-scented incense, and a myriad of colorful necessities went into the camper van that was to be occupied by the woman Ana Wakefield. She ended by hanging a small, well-balanced mobile of varicolored crystals that she had bought in the local alternative bookstore over the table that converted into a bed and then mounting a Navajo dream-catcher on the cabinet over the one-burner stove, where the spiderweb shape would be set off by the white paint. Finally she arranged the smooth leather cord of a tiny, fringed buckskin bag from the rearview mirror. This, her medicine pouch, was lumpy with bits of rock from the stream in back of her house, tiny thread-wrapped tufts of hair from each of the dogs, some bits of bee pollen she had bought at a health food store, and one red bead from Abby’s favorite necklace.

  It should have been a relaxing day, with the relief of physical work and the blessed simplicity of concentrating on one thing, but in truth it was nearly unbearable. Anne wanted only to climb into Rocinante and drive off, leaving Glen McCarthy to run after her and fling all the last-minute business into her lap without speaking, allowing her to sort out her new identity and purpose unimpeded.

  Instead, he phoned that evening as she was sitting with her stomach in a knot, pushing lumps of food around on her plate, to say that one of her credit cards had not yet arrived and he thought they ought to wait for it. Did she mind putting off her departure for another twenty-four hours?

  Oddly enough, she did not mind; in fact, the rush of relief left her light-headed. No, she managed to say calmly, that was fine, she actually had a number of things left undone here anyway. It was a lie, but Glen would not know that, and he said he would be up in the late afternoon tomorrow.

  Giddy with an entirely unwarranted sense of freedom, Anne ate her meal and had another glass of wine, chose a handful of improving books to take with her in the bus, and sank gratefully into ten hours of sleep.

  The next morning she took a last look at the now-thick dossier that she had compiled from the things Glen and Gillian had sent her. She was careful not to see the details—Glen’s material even had the names of the Change members blacked out, at her request—but she leafed through, letting her attention roam.

  The last set of drawings Gillian had sent her held her gaze for several minutes. This was the abandoned drawing pad of a child who had stayed with his grandmother for several days when the boy’s mother had taken ill on a visit home. The sketchbook began with stiff, clichéd drawings of houses and figures, but as the days passed, so did the artist’s reticence, until the pages flowed with snakes and rocks, horses in a paddock, two distinctive cats, and a very lifelike scorpion that had obviously made a deep impression on the child.

  Then toward the end, the second-from-the-last drawing in fact, there appeared an odd image of what looked like a stick figure of a bearded man trapped inside a giant raindrop. On either side hung two huge monsters, all gaping teeth and red eyes, looking as if they were about to bite into the pear-shaped raindrop and the man inside.

  The details were difficult to make out because the child had drawn over it when it was finished, brief but furious swings of the red crayon across the image, and then quickly gone on to the next page and drawn a cheerful rainbow in primary colors, arched over a grassy field with bright flowers.

  Then he had closed the sketchbook and left it behind.

  The drawing troubled Anne. She studied it for a long time, wondering what it could mean. Finally she closed the folder, put it into the box where she kept all the other Change material, and went to make herself a Spanish omelet for breakfast. She chopped the peppers and tomatoes and onions with great attention to their size and consistency and she ate the food slowly. She then washed and dried the dishes and pans, retrieved her hiking boots from Rocinante, strapped on the new knee brace, put on her heavy jacket, and set off up the mountain.

  For the first hour, Stan was hard put to keep up with her. She walked fast, leaning into the cold wind, taking little notice of her surroundings, aware only of the need to get out, away, free. For the past two weeks she had felt as if fifty radio stations had been blaring in competition inside her brain, a cacophony of sounds and conversations and images, none of them strong enough to override the others for more than a few seconds. The truncated plan for next quarter’s class on New Religious Movements, arrangements to find homes for the puppies, anger at Glen, concern about Antony, the nag of her unwritten book dying away in the back of her mind, details from the thick dossier on the Change community catching at her, the damage she might do her knee by forcing it to act normally, reminding herself to remind Eliot to clean out the water tank and replace two of the window screens and keep an eye on that place in the roof that seemed to need patching, and resentment at Glen and worry about one of her more troubled students and a book that InterLibrary Loan had recalled and Anne couldn’t find and—

  And then below that lay the anger, a wild irrationality that was the only sane response to the idea of walking calmly into the camp of a mortal enemy and pretending to be his friend.

  And below the anger and the confusion and the craziness, underlying it all, she could feel the disturbing roil of her old, tired guilt, as worn and dull as a river rock from all the long years of handling. She was asking it now to support and energize yet another hard slog through the most distressing times of her past, a past that she thought she had earned the right not to forget, but perh
aps not to dwell on quite so much. The dreams she had were no longer so utterly devastating, the flashbacks she experienced no longer galvanizing; the memories had become, at long last, a part of the vocabulary of her inner life.

  She’d been spoiled by complacency and resented being forced to face herself again. Very well: She would be manipulated. But only so far. And not again.

  In the cold spring wind and the brush of damp, fragrant branches against her jacket and her face, the cacophony of voices began to fade. The confusion and resentment receded somewhat, the opposing pulls made an effort to sort themselves out, and the fluttering thrill and dread she always felt on these last nights screwed themselves down into a semblance of calm anticipation. At the same time, walking among the trees and hills with only Stan and the wind for company, she came to the decision that this would be the last time. Never again would she submit to Glen McCarthy, become a part of the machinations of federal justice and the personal manipulations of the man himself. Dues paid endlessly became tribute to an extortionist, and with this last operation, Glen had revealed himself as perilously close to a blackmailer.

  Clearheaded and satisfactorily aching, her bad knee only one sharper twinge among the pangs of middle-aged exertion, Anne walked back down the hill to her home. She showered and washed her thick hair with slow attention, put a pot of lentils and sausages on the stove, and went outside to split firewood until she heard the sound of Glen McCarthy’s government car dragging its inadequate transmission up her hill. So much warning did it give her that she had all the wood neatly stacked before he arrived.

  As his overheated car pulled up onto the flat before her house, Glen saw her, standing next to the woodpile with an ax in her hand. She watched him park and heard the engine die, and then she half turned to sink the ax, one-handed, deep into the chopping block before stooping to gather the kindling and carry it in through the kitchen door. Glen sat for a long moment looking at the door before he reluctantly set the brake and got out. It must have been a trick of the light, he told himself, the approaching dusk and the overhang of her roofed-over woodpile, but when she had so easily driven the hand ax into the stump, there had seemed to be a very odd expression on her face, a sort of grim pleasure, almost of malice.