“To be honest,” he says, “I’d suspected this early on. In my life I’ve been around enough killers-in Vietnam-to know one when I saw one. At the trial, Marlowe seemed as dead inside as his father. As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
I realize something then. The lights start to come on inside, illuminating places within me that have been dark for so long. “Briggs worked for you. You sent him to find Marlowe after we ran.”
He nods. “I wasn’t sure what Marlowe had to do with Melissa’s death. But I knew he’d used Janet to kill his father. And when I realized he was killing other women, taking other people’s daughters away, I wanted to stop him. I was filled with a sick rage-it was something living inside me. But I didn’t want him arrested and in prison. I didn’t want that kind of justice. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to suffer and die the way his victims did. And I knew plenty of people to help with that-the military is good at turning out merciless killers.”
“Why didn’t you come yourself?”
“After Janet died, I started coughing up blood. The sickness of fear and anger, you can’t carry it forever. It starts to kill you. In my case, cancer.”
More of that horrible coughing. I hate, am repulsed by him, and pity him in equal measure.
“After you and Marlowe were ‘killed’ in your car accident, I had an epiphany. I realized that my and Janet’s rage and desire for revenge had cost us everything. We might have had some years together, we might have touched happiness again, if only we had faced down our fears, our regrets, our hatred for Frank Geary. But instead we let the rip he’d opened in the fabric of our life suck us in like a black hole. We let him destroy all three of us.”
He looks at me as though trying to decide if I’m listening to him. Whatever he sees on my face makes the corners of his mouth turn up slightly.
“I decided I’d fight my cancer and live for Janet and Melissa rather than die for them. As I fought that war, I realized that the rage I’d directed at Frank and Marlowe Geary was really directed at myself, for all the ways I’d failed as father and husband. If I’d been present for them while they lived, maybe I wouldn’t have had so many regrets when they died.”
I notice how still he is. There was so much anxiety and adrenaline living inside me that I couldn’t keep myself from fidgeting, shifting my weight from foot to foot, pacing a few steps away, then back toward him. But he is fixed and solid. He keeps his hands in his pockets, his eyes locked on some spot off in the distance. All there is to him is his raspy voice and the story he tells.
“When I went into remission, I started an organization called Grief Intervention Services with some friends of mine to help other victims and families of victims face their fear and heal.”
I draw in a sharp breath as I remember. “Your website. I visited it after I heard about you on television.”
He nods. “The website captured your IP address. It was only a matter of days before we traced it to Gray Powers. It was only a little while longer before we connected him to you. Just one visit confirmed that you were Ophelia March.”
I stare at his pale face and think how ill he looks. There is a distance to his stare. He is already on his way somewhere else.
“Naturally, I started to wonder. If Ophelia survived, what about Marlowe Geary? And, if so, where is he?”
“But you’d given up your quest for revenge,” I say, putting my hand on the hood of his car. I am feeling weak now, wobbly. The frenetic energy I had is abandoning me.
He offers a thin smile. “I’ve always remembered you, Ophelia. You were the saddest-looking child I’d ever seen. I remember you coming and going from that farm, the circles under your eyes, the way you hunched your shoulders and hung your head. You were living in a pit of snakes; I was never sure which of them would be first to squeeze the life out of you, then swallow you whole. I should have guessed it would be Marlowe.”
I don’t know what to say.
“The man you knew as Dr. Paul Brown believed that somewhere inside you, you might know where Marlowe Geary was. He suspected that your fugue states, the flights you made from your life as Annie Powers, were Ophelia’s attempts to return to him. He also felt you were on the cusp of remembering a lot of the things you had forgotten. So he devised ways to jog your memory a bit.”
“Wait,” I say, lifting a hand. “Dr. Brown worked for you? So the encounter on the beach, the necklace-those were his ideas on how to jog my memory? So that you could find Marlowe Geary and exact your revenge?”
“This is not only about me and what I want.”
“No?”
“No. It’s about both of us. I’m trying to help you.”
I confided those things to my doctor, and he used them to manipulate my memory. It seems a relatively small violation in comparison to everything, but I feel my face go hot with anger. I realize that I have grown uncomfortable with rage. Ophelia used to rant and scream and weep. But Annie is always dead calm.
“But Vivian brought me to Dr. Brown,” I say. I remember then that Gray told me that the doctor was someone Drew knew. And suddenly I feel sick, realizing how everything fits together.
Parker gives me a sympathetic grimace; for a second he looks as though he might reach to comfort me, but I take a quick step back from him. “They thought they were helping you, Ophelia. They thought they were helping you to face your fears so that you could be well again. For Victory.”
At first I think he means my husband, too. But it doesn’t sound like Gray. He’s too upright, too honest. He loves me too much. I can’t imagine him being a part of something like this. And if he were, why would he kill Briggs?
“Gray didn’t know what was happening,” I say. “He was afraid, too, that Marlowe-or someone from the past-had come for me. That’s why he killed Briggs.”
Parker offers a slow, sad nod. “You’re right. He never would have been a part of it. He would never deceive you or cause you so much pain. In fact, in his way, though only because he loves you, he has been enabling you. Maybe part of him doesn’t want you to remember.”
“So who then? Who thought they were helping me then?” I yell, nearly shriek. I am startled by my own emotion. He seems startled, too, as though he didn’t expect any of this to upset me. He raises a calming hand.
“Your in-laws, Drew and Vivian. A representative approached Vivian, told her that you’d contacted us for help and then changed your mind. She and Drew agreed to our plan to help you confront your past.”
I think of Vivian taking me to Dr. Brown, of the fear on her face when I confronted her with the things that were happening to me. I struggle with this, trying to recast her as the liar and the manipulator she had to be to do that. I want to think I know her well enough to know that she was trying to help me. I hope that’s true, at least.
“No,” I say, drawing in a breath to calm myself. Something is wrong. “They’d never let you hurt Victory. They’d die first.” I am as sure of this as I have ever been of anything.
“Admittedly,” he says with a mild shrug, “they weren’t aware the lengths to which we’d go to accomplish our goals. No one ever is.”
He seems empty then, vacant, and I see that Alan Parker is a man who has been gutted by grief and rage, filled up again by a quest for revenge that he could never quite release, even when he knew better. I feel a sob rise up, a great tide moving inside my chest.
“They were so sure you were helpless, so devastated by the events of your life that you would never be whole. They resorted to these tactics to help you. Well, really to help Victory, I think, so that she would have a strong and healthy mother. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that now you’re the one to help them.”