Unspeakable (11 page)

“I
read about what happened,” said her four o'clock patient. She sat down in the love seat across from Olivia in the hardback chair. Candace Lavery was a thirty-one-year-old divorcee who sometimes cut herself. Through hypnosis, Olivia had helped Candace curb the self-mutilation, but hadn't entirely broken her of the habit. That was why the slightly dowdy brunette wore a long-sleeved tee and jeans on this hot afternoon. She had to keep the scars covered.

“I told my friends—the ones who know I'm getting help—I told them, ‘That's my therapist at Portland Wellness. It was her patient who went crazy and started shooting those people.' They couldn't believe it.”

In addition to her self-harming compulsion, Candace didn't have much tact. She glanced around the room and frowned. “I guess I shouldn't be surprised they gave you a different office, though I think this one's smaller—and darker. Is anyone using your old office, or is it still considered—like a
crime scene
?”

“It's vacant right now,” Olivia replied, with her notebook and pen in hand. For her first day back to work in three weeks, she wore a tan skirt and a white, three-quarter-sleeve blouse. She had her own scar to conceal—on her shoulder. She wouldn't be wearing sleeveless dresses for a while. At least the bandages were off. The ache in her shoulder hadn't completely gone away yet. Every morning, she did the stretch exercises the hospital therapist had taught her.

As for emotional healing, she'd had talks with the social worker from the hospital and from a coworker from Portland Wellness. They asked her all the right, probing questions, and told her all the right things. She knew the drill. It was her business. Olivia knew she shouldn't blame herself for what had happened. And if any of it had been her fault, she had to forgive herself. Everyone told her so.

But there was one voice of dissent—a bitter, crawly, menacing voice that came to her over the phone.

There hadn't been any more calls from Mrs. Tipton while Olivia had been at the hospital. Maybe the operator had screened them. However, on her third day home in their Laurelhurst town house, Olivia's cell phone rang at eleven-thirty at night. She'd been taking bed rest as her doctor had prescribed, but was wide awake at the moment. She kept the cell on her night table, and her first thought had been about Clay, asleep beside her. He'd been working late to catch up on all the days he'd missed thanks to her. The poor guy was exhausted. She thought for sure her Van Morrison “Moondance” ringtone had woken him. She quickly grabbed her cell and answered it without checking the caller ID. Clay stirred in bed beside her.

“Hello?” she whispered, sitting up in bed, her back to Clay. Except for a faint, bluish glow from the adjoining bathroom's nightlight, the bedroom was dark.

“Did I wake you?” the woman on the other end asked.

“No,” Olivia said, rubbing her forehead. “I'm sorry, who—who is this?”

“I wouldn't think you'd be able to sleep, considering what you did to my son,” Mrs. Tipton hissed. “You filthy whore—taking advantage of a vulnerable, confused young man. Layne was fine until you poisoned his thinking with your sick, psychological—”

Olivia clicked off the phone. She felt sick to her stomach. She stood up and started toward the bathroom.

“What's going on, babe?” she heard Clay mumble. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she managed to say. “Go back to sleep.”

Olivia ducked into the bathroom and closed the door. She fell to her knees and clung to the sides of the toilet, but nothing happened. She sat down on the tiles and waited until she could breathe right again. If this nausea in the middle of the night had occurred a month before when she'd been hoping so much for a baby, she might have been optimistic about what it meant.

But this had nothing to do with new life—just lives lost.

She had no idea how Layne's mother had gotten her cell number. Maybe Layne had tracked it down at one time, and Mrs. Tipton had discovered it among his things.

Olivia didn't tell Clay about the call until morning. He was furious, and wanted to contact the police. But Olivia insisted they wait and see if Mrs. Tipton called again before taking any action. In the meantime, she would just screen all her calls. Mrs. Tipton's number was blocked; and over the next few days, Olivia had at least twenty blocked-number hang-ups on her cell—a lot more than usual. She couldn't be sure how many of those aborted calls had been from Layne's mother.

Olivia got a voice mail message after a week of screening calls:
“I suppose you think you're being so clever not answering your phone. Well, you might be able to dodge me, but you can't escape responsibility for what happened to my son. He was in your care. He depended on you, and you warped his mind. You turned him against me, you miserable bitch. I wished he'd aimed higher and shot you in the head—instead of just wounding you.”
She started crying on the recording.
“It's your fault. He's dead because of you. I'm not going to let you forget. . . .”

Clay played the message for the police, who paid a visit to Mrs. Tipton. Olivia figured the sad, demented woman had probably been through enough after losing her only child. She asked that Layne's mother merely be given a stern warning to cease and desist. One of the police detectives who had spoken to Mrs. Tipton told Clay in confidence that the woman lived in a messy, neglected two-bedroom rambler in Portland's Hollywood District. The cops thought they'd gotten through to her—and made it clear she'd face criminal charges if she continued this harassment on the phone. Apparently, Mrs. Tipton had apologized to them—with tears.

Two days later, someone hurled a rock through their living room window.

Mrs. Tipton was taken to the police precinct for questioning, and then released. She'd insisted that she didn't even know the Bischoffs' address.

Olivia figured that trip to the precinct must have instilled enough fear into Layne's mother. The number of unidentifiable hang-ups on Olivia's cell phone was suddenly cut in half.

With her arm out of a sling and Mrs. Tipton no longer on the warpath, Olivia felt like she was just starting to get her life back. Still, she wasn't ready to return to work, not after what had happened there. Clay didn't see it that way. “Honey, I think you've stayed too long at the pity party,” he'd told her the night before last. “You should go back to work—at least half-days. The longer you stay home, the harder it'll be to pick up where you left off there. You're going to lose all your regular patients. And speaking of losing patience, I've lost mine. You're here all day, moping and doing nothing else. It's not like I've expected to come home to
House Beautiful
these past couple of weeks. But lately, the place looks like a dump. And I'm tired of ordering takeout because there's never any food in the house.”

At first, Olivia had been livid he could be so insensitive. But then she'd figured this had been her husband's “tough love” strategy. It had worked, too. She'd decided to show him. The very next day, she'd gone out and bought five bags of groceries—not an easy haul for someone with a sore arm. She'd given the house a Windex-Pledge-vacuuming treatment. Then she'd called Portland Wellness, and told them she was ready to come back to work.

So here she was at the end of her first day back—with her last patient. In a way, Candace's almost childlike tactlessness was a nice contrast from Olivia's colleagues' forced smiles and efforts not to stare. She knew everyone around her was uncomfortable, just waiting for her to have a breakdown or something.

Candace was right about the new surroundings, which seemed cramped and dark. She was now down on the other end of the hall from her old, empty office. They kept that door closed and locked.

Candace was the only patient she actually put under hypnosis that day—her first subject since the session with Layne. It was like getting back on the bicycle after a horrible accident. Olivia was nervous and uncertain at first, but Candace took to suggestion well. At the end of it, when Olivia snapped her fingers and Candace actually woke up, it was such a relief. The usually sullen Candace was in an upbeat mood as she walked out of the office.

So was Olivia a few minutes later. She'd made it through this long first day back. On her way to the elevator, coworkers told her it was great to see her again. A couple of people mentioned having lunch together later in the week. Walking across the lobby to the garage elevators, she had a smile on her face.

As she pressed the button for the elevator, Olivia felt someone hovering behind her. She glanced over her shoulder at a woman of about sixty with mousy, gray-brown hair. Despite the sunny, mid-eighties temperature, the woman wore a trench coat. A sheer pale green scarf dangled from one of the pockets, in which she had her hand tucked. Unsmiling, she glanced at Olivia, then quickly looked away.

Olivia moved to one side, putting some breathing room between them.

The elevator bell rang and the door whooshed open. Olivia stepped inside and turned to press the button for garage level C. The woman came in after her. Olivia noticed the green scarf on the lobby floor. She automatically stopped the elevator door from shutting. “Oh, you dropped your scarf,” she said.

The woman barely looked at her as she stepped out to retrieve the scarf. Stuffing it in her pocket, she hurried onto the elevator again. Olivia let go of the door and it slid shut.

As the elevator made its descent, she frowned at the woman. Olivia didn't expect her to fall on her knees in gratitude for holding the elevator. But would a smile or a simple
thank you
have killed her?

Then again, maybe the woman didn't say anything because she didn't want Olivia to recognize her voice.

Olivia remembered Layne's mother—and her scathing message:
“He's dead because of you. I'm not going to let you forget.”

During her few trips out of the house—even just down the driveway to get the mail—Olivia had always been on the lookout for Mrs. Tipton. But she'd never laid eyes on the woman.

Was she looking at her now?

Olivia told herself she was being silly. How could Layne's mother know she'd started back to work today? Besides, Mrs. Tipton had stopped harassing her almost a week ago.

The woman's eyes met hers for a moment, but then she glanced away. Olivia stared at how her hand was inside the pocket of her trench coat. It looked like she had something else in there besides the scarf. Was she concealing a gun—the same way Layne had hidden a Smith & Wesson in his jacket?

The elevator came to a stop, and the doors opened. Olivia waited for the woman to walk out first. A cell phone's muffled ring startled her. The woman stopped just outside the elevator, almost blocking the exit. She pulled the phone out of her trench coat pocket. “What?” she barked into it. “No, I just came from the pharmacy. They'll have my pills tomorrow. I'm in the garage now. I can barely hear you. . . . I said I'm in the garage. . . .”

Olivia walked around her. She knew from her voice, the woman wasn't Layne's crazy mother. She could still hear her by the elevator, yapping into the phone. Then the sound of her irritating voice gradually faded. Olivia approached the row where her car was parked, but an SUV blocked her view of her red Beetle. Fishing into her purse for the car keys, Olivia walked around the SUV, and then stopped dead.

The front hood of her VW was streaked with brown and black slush. Dried rust-colored bubbles coated the marred surface. She immediately glanced up to check if an overhead pipe had dripped on the hood. But there was nothing. It was no accident. It looked like someone had doused the hood of her car with acid.

Stunned, Olivia stepped back. She noticed the deflated front tires, flat against the concrete floor. For a few moments, she just stood there with her mouth open.

She could hear tires screeching on the parking level above her. And in her head, she could hear Mrs. Tipton's crawly voice.

 

 

“I'm telling you, we never should have let that crazy bitch off with just a warning,” Clay said, watching the road ahead. Olivia sat in the passenger seat with the window down. The wind whipped through her auburn hair. They were in Clay's Lexus, driving back from the Portland Wellness campus, where they'd talked with the police for the last hour.

Now Mrs. Tipton had property damage and malicious mischief added to her harassment charges. Photos were taken of Olivia's VW. The police were pretty certain that indeed some kind of acid had been poured over the car's hood. Three of the four tires had been slashed. The tow company hauled her Beetle to an auto body shop. Clay knew something about cars, and estimated Mrs. Tipton's handiwork would set them back about three thousand dollars.

“Didn't you tell me that she used to beat her kid and do all sorts of screwed-up shit to him?” Clay asked.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “But for the record, I never said anything. That was patient-doctor confidential stuff.”

“My lips are sealed,” Clay said, turning onto their street. “But God, after all the crap she pulled on him, it burns me that she's accusing
you
of screwing up her kid. That's just so typical. No accountability. Well, she's gonna pay now. I hope they throw her sorry ass in jail. . . .”

He pulled into their driveway and parked. As Olivia retrieved the mail from the box at the end of the driveway, Clay called to her: “How about if we just order a pizza, stream a movie, and try to forget about bat-shit crazy Mrs. Tipton for the rest of the evening?”