Draw the Dark (9 page)

“Hello, Christian.” Today, she was wearing a white, buttoned shirt open at the throat, blue jeans, and brown cowboy boots. But it was her. “I’m Dr. Helen Rainier. Come on in.”

I didn’t move. “
You’re
Dr. Rainier? But . . . they call you Doc, like you’re a real doctor.”

“Because I am? All psychiatrists are, and I’ve had additional training in neurology and geriatrics. So I’m boarded in both. Actually, triple-boarded.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“What did you want me to say, exactly? And would you have wanted me to do that in front of Mrs. Krauss?”

That was a good point. “Well, that’s a good point.”

“Yeah, I thought so too. Everyone at Aspen just calls me
Doc
, so . . . I didn’t see any graceful way to bring it up, and I didn’t want to embarrass you. Winter’s a small town. Most people are pretty sensitive when it comes to seeing me, and we hadn’t set any ground rules yet.”

“So, uh, what do we do?”

She stepped away from the door. “Coming in would be a start.”

And here I’d been all prepared to hate her.

“Nothing important.” She tilted her head to the right. “Want to come have a seat?”

I hung back. “Who goes in that room? With all the toys?”
And the easel . . .

“Kids, mainly, ones who are too young to want to just talk. Do you want to go in there instead?”

I eyed a box of crayons and colored pencils, watercolors. A blackboard. “Ah . . . maybe another time.”

Her main office was big, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along one entire wall, a bank of windows opposite that overlooked the lake, a desk with a computer workstation, a couple of sling-back chairs. She gestured me to one and then dropped into the one opposite. She said, “Let’s talk about here versus Aspen Lake first, okay? At Aspen, we work together, so it’s nothing heavy. Just whatever comes up, and we may not run into each other that much. Here, we work together too, but . . .”

“You get to call the shots.”

Her lips moved in a small smile. “You could put it that way, but not really. Anything we talk about will have to be a two-way street. The thing is, we might also run into each other around town. I usually leave it up to patients to approach me. So if you spot me, I won’t say anything unless you say something first. That way, you control things, not me.”

I liked that. “What do I call you?”

“What do you want to call me?”

I thought about that. “Dr. Rainier, if that’s okay.”

“That’s fine.” She fingered up a sheaf of papers. “I’ve got the court’s report, the sheriff’s report, and the results of the psych testing. There’s other stuff here from the time when your mother left: the report your uncle filed and an assessment by a court-appointed social worker.”

“I don’t remember any of that.” It also hit me that I hadn’t thought about my mother in days. It felt like years. “My mom didn’t leave.”

“Oh?”

But I was already sorry I’d said anything. I just shrugged and then folded my arms and looked at the wall of books. “You read all those?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you’re smart.”

“I’m not sure that reading a lot translates to smarts. You can read Swahili too, and not understand anything. I once picked up a book on quantum physics, and I could read all the words, but I didn’t understand a thing.”

“That’s different. You read Swahili?”

“No. French and German. What about you?”

“I take Spanish. I wanted to take Japanese, but the school’s too small to afford a teacher.”

“Why Japanese?” Then her face cleared. “Ah, you must like anime.”

I blinked. “Manga. Yeah. I like
Hellsing
. Alucard is awesome.

She was nodding. “I know that one. What do you like about Alucard?”

“Well, you know it’s Dracula backwards, right? He’s just . . . awesome. He’s got this great red coat, he’s kind of creepy, and he goes after ghouls and bad vampires and . . .” I stopped.

“What is it?”

“This tells you about me, doesn’t it? I mean, that I like this kind of stuff.”

“Well, you also like art, and that says just as much about you.”

“You don’t want to know all about me.”

“Why not? We all have our dark places, Christian.”

“Right. Like what bad things have you lived through?”

She cocked her head, studied me for a long moment that stretched into three and then four—enough to get a little uncomfortable. She said, finally, “Here’s what I’ll tell you. I don’t have to have a heart attack to know how to treat one. In a way, it’s the same thing here. I don’t have to be an axe murderer to understand how to deal with one. But—” A smile flitted across her lips. “There is the old saying about shrinks: either you have to be incredibly normal to know what crazy looks like or it takes one to know one. Let’s just say that I’m comfortably in-between.”

“So . . . not too crazy?”

“I have my moments, but . . . no, not too crazy.”

I liked her for that. “So how come you’re not scared of me?”

“You mean, beyond the fact that you’re not holding a gun to my head? What’s to be scared of?”

“I dunno,” I said, feeling stupid. “A lot of other people are.”

“You mean because of what happened with your teacher? Betty Stefancyzk?” She shrugged. “I wasn’t here then. I don’t know anything more about it than she had a nervous breakdown. How that’s related to you, I don’t know. But if the reports I read are right, she’d been diagnosed with manic-depressive illness. Ten to one, she simply didn’t take her meds.”

“She said it was me in her note.”

“So what?”

“Well, I . . .” I thought of the power flowing out of my fingers with Lucy. And Aunt Jean. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Okay. So then let’s talk about the barn. How come that happened?”

“I . . . I don’t remember doing it.”

“So you were sleepwalking. What do you think you were painting? A nightmare?”

Yeah, but someone else’s.
I remembered what Uncle Hank had said about a murder, and for the first time, it occurred to me that maybe
that
was what I was seeing. Like what they talked about when you heard about haunted houses, a psychic residue. Except why
now
? I’d lived in Winter my whole life, and I’d never gone out to that barn or ever
heard
about a murder. I said nothing.

She said, “I guess it’s easier to talk about how everyone hates you and is scared of you, right? I mean, that’s a part of you, like your name.”

“If you say so.”

“Is that what you want me to put in my notes?”

“Look, I had a bad dream. I sleepwalked. That’s all.”

“But why there? And why swastikas?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think it has something to do with
Hellsing
?” At my frown, she said, “The Nazis. They’re all over
Hellsing
, right? And you like manga, so . . . maybe that’s where the swastikas came from.”

I didn’t think so. “I don’t think so.”

“So what’s your theory?”

“I don’t have one.” I pulled on my lip, then blurted, “Did you know that someone was murdered there?”

Her eyebrows arched. “Really? No, I didn’t. Tell me.”

I told what little I did know and then said, “I keep meaning to look it up, but I’ve been kind of busy.”

“Okay. And you think this means . . . what?”

“
I
don’t know. I’m not the doctor.”

She chuckled. “Touché. Well, I think that maybe you heard about this at one point in your life and it surfaced now.”

I was shaking my head before she finished. “You heard Mrs. Krauss. This is a little, tiny town, and there are things people don’t talk about. This is one of them. I’ve never heard about this, never.”

“You had to have known, Christian.”

“I don’t see how. It’s not something Uncle Hank would talk about. Heck, he barely knows anything himself, it’s been so long, and other than the fact that it happened in 1945, that doesn’t explain the swastikas. I mean, Nazis? In Winter?” I shook my head. “Never happen.”

“Ah. Well, you know that case your uncle’s working? The baby in the hearth?”

“That’s
your
house?”

“The very one.” She held the door open. “See you Friday.”

Uncle Hank chewed a mouthful of stew very carefully. He swallowed and said, “Well, it really wasn’t any of my business now, was it?”

“What are you talking about? You’re investigating a body in
her
house, and she’s my shrink!”

“Would it have changed anything? . . . No? Then,” he spooned up another mouthful of beef and carrots, “no harm done.”

I frowned. Stirred my stew a few times. My appetite was still terrible. “What do you think of her?”

“Dr. Rainier?” He gave this careful thought. “She’s an interesting woman. A lot of other people, men and women, they’d have been long gone out of that house, completely spooked. She’s very . . . analytical about it. To her, they’re just bones. She’s an interesting person.”

“Yeah, you said that.” Was there color in his cheeks? “How often are you going out there?”

Uncle Hank was, suddenly, very busy salting his stew. “As often as I need to.”

“Uh-huh. So how often is that?”

“Depends. There are logistical matters. Updates.” Then he eyed me in a way that said no more questions. “Eat your stew before it gets cold.”

I did what he said. But I thought:
Hunh.

At school, the other kids stopped poking each other every time I went by and settled back into treating me like a bad smell. Dekker was waiting for me one day after school but then got all buddy when Jason rolled past in his cruiser. After that, Dekker just told me I could do the paint job on his bike in another week and then we’d be cool. Uh-huh.

I saw Dr. Rainier every Tuesday and Friday. She was okay. Mainly, we were kind of feeling each other out. I didn’t tell her anything, really. I mean, shrinks aren’t mind readers. Thank God.

I did the home on Mondays and Thursdays, with the possibility of the occasional Sunday. Things at the home got routine pretty fast, though Peggy kept me away from Lakeview House most of the time. The few times we
did
go on the unit together, she kept checking to make sure I stayed right with her. On the other hand, she loosened up enough that she said I could come extra days if I wanted to speed things up and get all my community service hours in. So I said, sure, I’d try to come by on Wednesdays. . . . I mean, might as well fill up the afternoons, right?

So yeah—the week was full. I did homework and took tests and stuff. And I kind of calmed down enough inside so that I could actually feel hungry again, and Uncle Hank said he thought it was because of all the extra work I was doing at the home. I let him think that.

The muttering just kind of . . . died. I tried not to think about it because I didn’t want to jinx anything.

My dreams didn’t change, though, and that was bad. They came in snatches, always the same thing: a dark space, the smell of hay and blood, the horses screaming and men shouting, but everything was garbled. I always had the weird feeling that I watched through eyes that weren’t mine, though I didn’t know whose. That boy’s? David? Had to be.

It rained the next weekend, so I wasn’t able to go to the barn, which didn’t exactly slay me. Staying away helped too, a little. Sometimes I’d snap awake like a rubber band, and I almost felt as if the answer, whatever that was, was on the tip of my tongue. I’d try drawing what I dreamt, but they weren’t, well,
right
. Just . . . images and sometimes not even that. More like hints of sensations: Something bright, that rust smell. The screams of horses and men.

Definitely the barn, I thought. No way in hell I wanted to find out more. I was good with that.

Oh, and one other thing: the door on my wall didn’t reappear. I was good with that too.

“Oh no,” said Sarah. “People find bodies in their walls all the time.”

“Except that,” said the kid. “And you’ve already got dibs, so what does that leave?”

“Listen, not every paper has to be on something as sensational as what Sarah’s doing,” said the teacher. “You’ve got the history of the foundry, for one, and the Eisenmanns after World War I. There’s the union unrest of the ’30s and ’40s, the big fire of ’45, the town’s contributions to the war effort, and so on. There are plenty of areas that tie us into the state and national level, and world events after World War I. I’ll get a list of general topics together, and then I’d encourage you to use your imagination.”

After class, Sarah paused by my desk. “So . . . I’ve interviewed Dr. Rainier.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. She’s pretty nice.” Sarah was studying me.

I gathered up my books. “That’s good.”

“You going to come out when the anthropologist gets here?”

“Maybe . . . look, I got class.”

“So what are you going to work on?” she asked as we moved into the hall. I saw people look at us and then each other and do the elbow-nudging routine. Sarah either was ignoring them or didn’t care—and I had to wonder about that.

“Well, I was kind of thinking about a murder myself.”

She looked interested. “Yeah? Which one?”

“Hey, Sarah!” It was one of her girlfriends, and I saw Sarah frown and then nibble on her lower lip.

Sarah turned back. “Look, I—”

“Yeah. See ya,” I said and walked away.

Then, on the approach road to the home, I saw a quartet of crows lift from the remains of a squashed rabbit, and I had this funny, really weird feeling like:
What are you guys doing out here?
Like they were the same crows from the barn, right? Dumb. But I twisted around in my saddle as they swarmed back down over that roadkill. One crow tugged a rope of intestine, and I looked away.

Peggy was off. The woman in her place—Stephanie—was tiny and brown, like a house wren. She had eyes like a bird too: quick and bright, darting all over the place, always sliding off my face until I finally figured out that she was freaked out to be working with me. She kept shooing me away from the trays: “Oh now, I can do that” or “No, no, you go help out in the dining room, why don’t you?”

But they didn’t need me in the dining room. So after I’d settled Lucy and some other people in wheelchairs at their spots, I wandered out....

And thought:
I got a key card. Why the heck not?

My heart was banging against my ribs, and I was breathing kind of fast.
Calm down.
I smoothed moist palms over my jeans. I don’t know what I was expecting—well, that’s a lie. I
did
. I was hoping for that little
thrum
again but nothing happened. I knocked softly on the doorjamb. “Mr. Witek?” Then again and a little louder: “Mr. Witek, it’s me, Christian.”

Of course, he didn’t answer. Duh.

But something changed. I felt it in the air, a subtle plucking at my brain, like fingers at the strings of a harp.

My eyes crept to the decorated brass tube on the doorjamb. Now that I was close enough, I saw that there was also some kind of symbol, also fashioned out of brass, near the top. It kind of looked like some kind of letter, like a
W
—and for a brief second, that tip-of-my-tongue feeling, the one that grabbed me every time I woke up from one of those weird dreams, surged through me:
I know what this is....

Pulling the door shut behind me, I stepped across the threshold.

The paintings stared out from the walls: a few landscapes and what looked like a family portrait of mother, father, daughter, and son. The closest, to my right, was a woman reclining on a couch. Her skin was like alabaster, and her arms were thrown back over her head and sank into the lush tangle of her hair that cascaded like molten gold over the deep forest green pillows. She wore only a shimmering cream-colored silk robe with black trim and bloodred chrysanthemums, and the robe sagged around her neck, and the faintest crescent of pink nipple was visible along her left breast. She looked directly out of the frame, completely unself-conscious, more than a hint of invitation in her dark eyes. Her lips, full and blush red, were parted to reveal small, even, white teeth.

The woman was posed against a long picture window with a stained-glass transom. The stained glass reminded me of Tiffany, a style called French Nouveau: stylized tulips, water lilies, and pond grasses. The picture window looked out on a garden. To the right, I saw a brass fountain: a woman in Grecian costume pouring water from an urn. To the left were an enormous willow and those kinds of wrought-iron benches that completely encircle the trunk.

I looked for the artist’s signature and found nothing but an odd symbol: a six-sided star and two letters in the center,
MW
. Two numbers above and below the star at twelve and six o’clock: 4 and 5.

That thought, again:
I know this....

Then my eyes clicked to the oil to the right of the portrait—and a forest of hackles prickled along my neck.

There was no mistake. There were the same rolling hills, the tracts of deep green woods, and the thin ribbon of lake along the eastern horizon. The square brick clock tower and the foundry alongside. Even the curls of smoke rising above the buildings were the same—and there was the azure blue of that onion dome: the White Lady.

It was the oil of the sketch I’d drawn the night of my first nightmare. And then I’d seen it again, in the barn, as David.

“Oh my God.” My whisper was like a shout in my head. Goose bumps rose along my arms, and I felt a cramp in my groin, like I had to pee. I thought I heard something coming from the old guy, and my head whipped around, my mouth open, ready to scream
....

He was lying there just as he’d been: the bellows of his chest moving with every breath, his jaw unhinged and his mouth all caved in on account of his having no teeth. Beneath his halfclosed lids, I saw the slivers of white and his eyes jerked from side to side. Dreaming . . .

My hands came alive at once, with a ferocious sting of electricity. The fingers actually spazzed and twitched, and I thought:
a pencil, a pen, anything . . .

Then I saw a slim packet on the bed stand to Mr. Witek’s right. Had it been there before? I didn’t recall. The packet was a khaki canvas roll and lay atop an artist’s sketchbook. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d picked up the roll. Instantly, the pain in my hands eased. Not all the way but a bit. I tugged at the ribbon and unrolled the packet and caught just the faintest whisper of turpentine.