The Good Listener (30 page)

I just didn’t understand.

“I thought you said that she chose you.”

“You did. When you offered to help me, over all those people that were waiting to see you, you chose to help me. You made room for me because I was the biggest “project”. It was all about your ego and your reputation because deep down inside you knew that if you could fix me, you could fix anybody. So, you did choose me.”

“But whether I did or not, whether I took you on as a patient or not, if I was your next victim you still would have killed me. Even without my time or my words, if what you’ve told me was true about you, you would have still wanted to kill me.”

“True. But I was really hoping that you would change my mind.”

“Why?”

The longer I sat there, the more I realized that I wasn’t scared of death. I wasn’t even scared of him. But I was scared of his answer.

He didn’t say anything for a while.

For what seemed like forever he just sat there and stared at me.

He watched me swarm all over the place.

He watched me start to sweat.

He heard me ask him the same question over and over again but for the longest, he just sat there.

“Why Blake? Why do you want to kill me?”

“Think about everything that I have told you.”

I let out a deep breath.

“People and papers lie.”

“Yes. What else?”

I’d read my notes on him a thousand times so I knew almost everything that he’d ever said to me by heart.

I started to almost quote them verbatim.

“What else?”

“I don’t know.”

“What else Hannah?”

I tried to think, but it was hard to do tied up, with a gun being pointed in your face.

“What’s your favorite color, Hannah?”

Blue.

He knew that it was blue.

“Why? It was you that saved me from killing myself wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Why?

“You didn’t have the right to take your own life. I would have been a fool to let you beat me to it. All of my hard work would have gone to waste.”

“How? How did you know that I would?”

“I told you I’m better at your job than you are. I thought like the patient. I thought about what I would do if I were in your shoes. If I’d had the job that you had. The life that you had. The reputation and the sudden cheating husband and pending conviction. It wasn’t all that hard to know that suicide would be your next move. Not to mention that I’d watch you on the news that day. It was all over your face that you were giving up. I could see death in your eyes. I could hear how desperate you were in your voice. I knew what you were planning to do and when I pulled up at your house, and saw that Joel wasn’t there I knew then that you would try to make your move.”

I shook my head.

“How did you get in?”

“Come on, I’ve had a key to your house for months.”

What?

“I made a copy that night when I brought Joel home drunk, which I’d spiked his drink that night with something that was going to knock him out. He only had one drink I put a little something in it when he wasn’t looking. It wasn’t poison that time, I lied. He drunk the drink, started feeling woozy, I led him to my car, took his keys and went and made a copy, and then I brought him home.”

So that’s why he tried to get close to Joel. That’s why he hired him to gain access to small, yet important, things such as getting him “drunk” or drugged up enough to get access to our house.

“Like I told you, I am so much better at your job. Every book that you have read, so have I. Every case study that you have glanced at, so have I. Every possible article that I could find on things of the mind, treatments, causes of mental illnesses, I have read them all. I’ve devoted my life to the world of psychology and everything that surrounds it. There was nothing that you could have said to me that I didn’t already know.”

“Then why come to get help?”

“You were the good listener. The mind manipulator. Surely you knew something that I didn’t. Surely you could convince me, save me, and save yourself. Surely you could get through to me,” Blake said sarcastically.

He was even crazier than I’d thought that he was.

“You should have just killed me. Why play games? Why waste your time and mine? Session after session. Conversation after conversation. All of the back and forth was for nothing.”

“Even with your life hanging in the balance, you still don’t listen. I wanted to see if you could change my mind. If you could change me. I wasn’t lying about that part. Sure I know everything that you know, but I figured that with both of our minds together, that was a for sure way to cure me, but here we are. So, I guess that means that you couldn’t do your job.”

“But why? Did you see me and have the urge like you said? You obviously already seen me before you came to me so why did you want to kill me, Blake? What was it about me that gave you the urge?”

He didn’t say anything.

I waited, but he never answered the question.

I closed my eyes for only a second to try to think, but he spoke again.

“I gave you everything that you have always needed. Every answer to your questions has always been there. You should have known that I was talking about you all along. All you had to do was listen, Hannah. All you had to do was do the things that I told you to do. I told you to see what wasn’t there. I told you to hear what wasn’t being said. I told you that the truth was always in between the lines, but you never heard a word that I said.”

He was wrong.

I listened to everything that he said.

I always replayed our conversations and meditated on his words.

What was he talking about?

I was thinking.

I was thinking hard, but nothing, nothing that was clear enough said that he had been talking about me.

“But you saved me. You want me dead but you saved me.”

“I told you why I did it. I wanted the pleasure of killing you myself.”

“But how when I was going to prison?”

“No, you weren’t. We were just having a little fun.”

“We?”

Just as he said the words, Summer appeared as though she had been hiding in the shadows, listening, waiting for her cue.

She didn’t have on a wig, and she definitely wasn’t pregnant.

She smirked at me and came over to sit beside Blake.

“Do you really think that if we wanted you to go down for her disappearance or suspected murder that she would have come to the courthouse? She wanted you to see her. And she made sure that you did.”

I shook my head.

Like, what?

I just didn’t understand.

“She made sure that the rest of the world and the police saw her too; which is why she took off the wig and looked towards the camera.”

“Both of you need help.”

“Of course, we do. But we enjoyed watching you panic. Everyone else fell for it all so easily. They didn’t waste any time trying to put a woman of your stature away. They didn’t mind pinning something on you so fast just to show you that no matter what you may think of yourself, you’re just as disposable or replaceable as the next. A woman who had saved so many people in this city; probably even one of their family members, spouse, parent or sibling, but they didn’t care about any of that. They didn’t mind locking you up and throwing away the key. I told you, people can’t be trusted. Nobody is worthy of another person’s loyalty. I told you to remember that. We showed you just how accurate that statement was.”

I was disgusted.

But Blake continued.

“We timed everything just right. Summer getting the job. Summer seducing your husband and faking the pregnancy. Me dropping the hints about the affair. I’d come with plans to reveal what I did to you that day on purpose. I set the bait, and you took it, just like I knew that you would. All we needed was for you to cause a scene which you did. We knew all of the schedules of the neighbors, so we knew someone was bound to see you try to attack her.”

They both had been trying to set me up.

Only to save me so that they could kill me themselves.

“I was the one that they saw, in all black, go around your house that night. I was the one setting off your alarm most of the time; a few times it was the cats, and that one time, it really was Joel.”

I shook my head and rocked back and forth.

All of this time.

He had been in the mix all of this time.

Summer had played me for years.

How could I have been so stupid?

“We set the scene. She cut herself, a few times to get us a good bit of blood. She dripped the blood all over the floor and then attempted to write your name. I found a random pregnant woman, paid her for her urine and handed it off to Summer as she went inside of the doctor’s office.  We had it all figured out. Once we set all of the evidence, she came to hide out here to disappear.”

I still couldn’t understand why they would do this to me.

And just for fun.

It just didn’t make sense.

“That day in your office. The day that I used your bathroom. I left my phone there on purpose. Knowing that you would look and see who it was that was calling. Especially if it was Summer. We’d set up an exact time for her to call, and when I glanced at the clock, I asked you to use your bathroom. I’d wiped it down before I came in and you didn’t notice but when I’d used the end of my blazer to put it on the couch and to it back in my pocket so that my fingerprints weren’t on it. Only yours. Summer and I switched phones that same day. She put her SIM card in it, and she put her bloody fingerprints all over it. I was the one who called you from the backyard of your house. And then I planted the phone in the bushes.”

Both of them deserved to die.

“Why?”

“We weren’t going to let you rot in prison. That defeated the purpose. And Joel, well he was just something, someone that we needed to use to make the plan work. I had no plans on killing him, but the poor bastard ended up killing himself. We didn’t expect that. Isn’t it something? You’ve saved so many people, but you couldn’t even save your own husband?”

“It’s your fault. He felt so guilty, and all of this was just one big game to you. You don’t just plan to destroy a person’s life. You could have just killed me and gotten it all over with.”

“Yeah, I could’ve. But like I said, I wanted to see if you could help me. And I really didn’t kill China. Whatever happened to her was truly an accident. But hell, she deserved it for being a slut.”

He taunted me.

“We’ve been planning this for a long time. When you gave Summer the job, we knew that we were going to be able to get away with it. You believed everything that paper said about her and everything that she told you. None of it was true. She was pretending too. For years. She got close enough, learned everything she could about you and then told me.”

Summer never said a word.

She just looked at me.

I was heated.

I felt betrayed on so many different levels.

“So you two are dating? Do you like to kill together? Ruin people’s lives together?”

“Dating? No silly. She’s my brother’s wife. My sister-in-law.”

“What? Your brother’s wife? Your sister-in-law?”

“Yes. See, you weren’t listening. I never talked about it but I gave you that one moment. That one piece of truth that you couldn’t afford to miss, but you did. I told you that I was the “oldest” of my siblings. But you never asked how many children were there. You never asked about what happened to my sibling during the foster homes and everything else. You only heard what you wanted to hear instead of truly listening to what I was giving you.”

I was flabbergasted, and I felt as though I was going to die from a heart attack.

He wouldn’t have to shoot me at all.

“But to answer your question, they split us up. My brother stayed here, with one family that actually treated him as though he was their own.”

“Who is he?”

“Remember the patient that was “stalking” you? The one that was court ordered for you to see and ended up going to prison for a robbery, and dying in a prison brawl?”

My eyes grew big.

“That was my brother. That was Summer’s husband.”

You have got to be kidding me!

“Summer came onboard just to fill the gap and get close to you, but soon the plan became personal for her because she was jealous that her husband found you attractive and actually started pursuing you when really he was supposed to have been there playing a role just like she was. To find out more information that you wouldn’t share with Summer as an assistant, but you might share with a patient. But he got sloppy. He developed something more for you, so I had to take him out of the picture. I set him up for the robbery and even ordered for him to be killed in the prison brawl. As I said, I have a few connections.”