Read You Think You Know Me Pretty Well aka Mercy Online
Authors: David Kessler
Seconds later Nat found himself in front of a police car with flashing lights and a siren. Not wanting any trouble, he pulled over. The police car stopped in front of him and a police officer stepped out and approached him.
“Are you aware that you were driving erratically back there?”
“It was a judgment call. I thought it was safe.”
“I’ll need to see your driver’s license and vehicle registration.”
Nat handed them over. The patrolman looked at them and put in a call, to check that the vehicle wasn’t stolen and that Nat didn’t have any outstanding warrants against him.
Nat wasn’t afraid. They weren’t going to find any warrants or theft reports or even unpaid parking tickets. The thing that bothered him was that all this checking was going to take time – and time was the one thing that he didn’t have.
Sometimes highway patrolman like to check these things because they’re being thorough. They would look pretty stupid if they let a driver go only to discover that he was a wanted man in half a dozen states. And if a driver drives erratically, it can mean that he’s under the influence of drink or drugs, or that he’s on the run from the law.
But in many cases, traffic cops stop drivers for no other reason than to make up the numbers or because they’re bored or because they don’t particularly like the look of the person they’ve stopped.
Nat didn’t know which of these was the case in this case, but he sensed hostility from the cop.
“I’m going to have to ask you to take a breathalyzer.”
Nat could have hit him – and
would
have, if he thought he’d get away with it.
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you in here, sir. You can come back in the morning.”
“In the morning it’ll be too late! I’ve got to see her now!”
Alex was standing eyeball to eyeball with a hospital security guard.
“There’s no visiting after hours – except for terminal patients. That’s the rule.”
“She
is
a terminal patient.”
“Well unless she’s listed you as next of kin and she’s in the terminal ward, you can’t come in.”
Alex looked round helplessly. At this time there were very few people about in the corridors, even staff. But he knew that it was only a matter of time before other security staff arrived. He
had
to see Esther and he knew that he was never going to convince this rent-a-cop or any of his colleagues. Alex could see that this man was clearly bigger than he. But, then again, David was bigger than Jonathan Olsen. That hadn’t stopped Jonathan putting David flat on his back with a single punch. And it wouldn’t stop Alex now.
His left fist shot out and caught the security guard square on the nose. The guard yelled with pain, but stayed on his feet. But he was just a little too slow to react. A right sunk deep into his midriff and as he doubled over, a savage left uppercut to his ear settled the issue, sending his semi-circular canals into turmoil and depriving him of his sense of balance.
Not looking down at the results of his work for long enough to feel guilty about hurting a man who was only doing his job, Alex raced up the stairs to the ward where Esther had a private room. He opened the door and went in to the dimly lit room, not quite knowing what to expect. He didn’t even know if she would be awake.
He looked at her in the bed while his eyes became accustomed to the dark. Eventually he got to the point that he could make out her open eyes squinting at him.
“Hallo, Mr. Sedaka,” she said quietly. She showed no sign of fear, and it was obvious that she had seen him before he saw her.
“I’m sorry I disturbed you, Mrs. Olsen. But it’s important.”
“You didn’t disturb me. I knew you’d come.”
The voice was weak, but it held a quiet confidence – the confidence of a woman who wanted something and knew what she wanted.
He walked closer and sat by the bed, so he could speak without his voice carrying to the corridor.
“I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t have to. But I spoke to the governor. He said he’d only grant a stay of execution if you asked him to. I know I have no right to ask you. But I have found out a few things that I need to tell you. I know that Dorothy went to England for the abortion. We have the airline receipt, we have proof that she paid money to the medical center. We know that she never left England. We know that Edgar didn’t commit suicide. It was murder. And there’s no gentle way to tell you this, Mrs. Olsen, but we have evidence that Edgar abused Dorothy. I’m sorry to have to tell you that, but I need you to help me. I need you to tell me what I
don’t
know, so it behooves me to be honest with you.”
“It’s been weighing on my conscience for a long time now – half a lifetime, in fact.”
“What has?”
“The abuse … Edgar’s abuse of Dorothy.”
“You knew about it?”
“Yes, I knew. And I did nothing to stop it.”
There are sins of commission and sins of omission.
“But it wasn’t sexual abuse, was it?”
“It depends what you mean by sexual abuse.”
Susan White lived in a box-sized room in a nearby flat, just a minute’s walk away from the clinic. But she could never sleep comfortably there. It was too close to work. There was too much of a sense of being “on call.”
But that wasn’t the only thing that was disturbing her sleep. There was the thought of that innocent man on death row. She had sent the letter to his lawyers – with Stuart Lloyd’s forged signature. But she hadn’t been able to follow up on it. There were too many people about. She had wanted to phone them and ask what was happening. But she was afraid of someone overhearing. Even now she was afraid of being discovered. She could lose her job over the forgery. She could even be prosecuted for it.
And then there were the original shenanigans with the Dorothy Olsen case. It had been Stuart’s decision to fiddle the dates. But Susan had been a party to it. At minimum, it was gross professional misconduct. And it might well have been a crime in its own right. Even if Stuart was the principal guilty party, she was clearly complicit as she had countersigned the forms. And she had been there when Dorothy was admitted.
Susan looked at her watch. She couldn’t have had more than five hours’ sleep. She was still desperately tired. Her next shift didn’t start until ten. But she knew what would probably happen. She would toss and turn desperately trying to get back to sleep and then would nod off just before her alarm clock was set to go off.
But she was determined to at least
try
and get some sleep.
She felt her eyelids drooping and felt a wave of tiredness wafting over her. But, as she sank back into the realms of sleep, the face that appeared before her was that of Dorothy Olsen – the tearful face of a vulnerable young girl begging them not to make her wait any longer, pleading with them to put her out of her misery.
“I … I don’t understand,” said Alex.
“Edgar always wanted a son and when I gave him a daughter he was bitterly disappointed.”
“Was this because of the son from his first marriage that he lost?”
Her eyes widened.
“You
know
about that?”
“I spoke to Anita Morgan. She told me the whole thing: the car accident, the decline in their marriage, Edgar’s sterility, your desperation to give him a son.”
“Yes, but do you know
why
I was so desperate to give him a son?”
“I don’t know … to make him happy I guess.”
“No, Mr. Sedaka it was not to make him happy. It was to stop him being
un
happy. Because when Edgar was unhappy he took it out on other people. And the person he took it out on
most
was Dorothy. Even when she was a baby.”
“What did he do to her?”
“Oh he didn’t hit her or anything like that. He just shunned her. He would hardly talk to her. When she started to walk, he would leave the room if she crawled in. He never picked her up, never held her in his arms.”
“Was that because he knew that she wasn’t his daughter?”
“It was that, plus the fact that she was a girl. I think he would have forgiven me if it had been a boy. I mean, Jimmy wasn’t his son either. And also, he never took out his frustration on Jonathan. But Dorothy bore the brunt of it.”
“Did you try to talk to him about it?”
“You couldn’t talk to him. He would cut you off with a sarcastic comment or if you stood up to him he’d just walk out of the room.”
“Mrs. Olsen, you said before that it wasn’t sexual abuse. But we know that Edgar once held Dorothy in front of a mirror and ripped her clothes off. Jonathan said that it was something to do with her ‘flaunting her sexuality in front of him.’ Do you know what he meant by that?”
“Yes. And it was partly my fault. You see, I think I made her what she became.”
Alex wasn’t sure if he was in the mood for a Freudian analysis, but he had to let her tell it in her own words.
“How?”
“When she was about four and Edgar was being cold toward her, I sat her down and explained to her that he wanted a boy. It was a stupid thing to do but I did it. I couldn’t talk to him about it, so I was reduced to talking to her. I told her that he wanted a boy so that they could do boy things together. And she asked me what are boy things…”
There were tears welling up in Esther Olsen’s eyes. She brushed them aside and carried on.
“And I told her that it’s the way they dress and the things that interest them like cars and electrical things. So she started acting like the way she thought a boy acted. She even got hold of a pair of scissors and cut her hair short so she’d
look
more like a boy. But the more she did it the angrier it made him.”
“And this was before Jonathan was born?”
“Yes, but it carried on after that. You see, after Jonathan was born, he treated Jonathan well and he was bit less cold toward me – even though he knew that he wasn’t Jonathan’s father – but he was just as cold and unkind to Dorothy. And the more he rejected her, the more she tried to act like a boy. When she reached puberty she continued dressing like a boy – and of course by then she had her own allowance so she could buy clothes for herself.”
“I’d’ve thought that that sort of thing would have made her a target for ridicule from her peers. And that would surely have been a deterrent.”
“You’d’ve thought so but Dorothy had been so toughened up by the harsh treatment Edgar meted out that she was oblivious to anything her classmates could have thrown at her.”
“Oblivious?”
“Well maybe not completely oblivious, but certainly indifferent.”
“So was it just cross-dressing? I mean, Jonathan didn’t say cross-dresser, he just said ‘her sexuality.’ And Clayton Burrow called her a lesbian.”
“It started with cross-dressing, but it pretty soon developed into other things. She started getting pictures of pretty girls and putting them on her walls. Edgar tore them down a couple of times, but she just put them back up. And she kept a scrapbook of pictures of girls in swimsuits. He didn’t know that because she kept it under her bed.”
“Was it just an act or did she really like girls – sexually, I mean?”
“It probably started as an act, but developed into something more than that. I mean, she did experiment with girls. She found girls online who shared her interest and she even used to date them.”
“Did you try to stop her – or did Edgar?”
“He didn’t pay enough attention to her to know what was going on. It was only what she flaunted in his presence that angered him.”
“But didn’t you think of telling her that she was only making it worse by the way she was behaving?”
“Yes, but you see, at least this way, she was getting
some
reaction from him. When she kept a low profile he just ignored her altogether, shunned her. So for her, the choice wasn’t a good reaction from him or a bad reaction: it was a bad reaction or none at all. She chose a bad reaction as the lesser of two evils.”
“But it must have hurt her. I mean, she wrote a poem that betrays her feelings and shows how much he hurt her.”
“Oh I’m sure it did. She didn’t show it to anyone round her but the only way I could sense it was by the constant hurt look in her eyes.”
“But what about him ripping the clothes off of her? Jonathan knew about it, so it must have been when he was old enough to understand. And what was that about the mirror?”
“Well, as I said, she used to dress up in boy’s clothes. When she got older she was able to buy her own clothes. But sometimes she used to try on Edgar’s clothes and admire herself in the mirror and practice picking up girls. I knew she was doing it, but I didn’t stop her. By that stage she’d already decided what she was. There was no point fighting it. At least
I
knew that. But Edgar didn’t. He just wouldn’t accept it. He thought that
she
was in denial, but in reality
he
was. Then one day – when she was about fourteen – he caught her dressing up in his clothes talking to an imaginary girlfriend and he just flipped his lid. I mean, he just blew a fuse and exploded.”