One Last Scream

let in much sunlight. There was a big-screen TV, a sectional sofa, and someone’s treadmill. Stashed in one corner were a bunch of toys, including a dollhouse. Karen draped her coat over a chair. She gazed at the collection of framed family photos on the wall. She figured the stylish, attractive redhead in the pictures was George’s murdered wife. There were also a few photos of Amelia with her family. Karen had been hearing about the Faradays for months, but this was her first actual look at them. She could see a resemblance between the sisters, Jenna and Ina. Studying the pictures of Mark Faraday, she wondered how that pleasant-looking, slightly dumpy man could have shot those two women and then himself. It was hard to comprehend that they were all dead now. In one night, Amelia had lost nearly all of her family-and in such a violent, heinous way.

There were photos of Collin Faraday, too. From the way Amelia talked about her dead brother, Karen had expected him to have been this stunningly handsome, golden-haired teenager. Instead, he just seemed like a normal, nice-looking kid with a goofy smile.

“My brother’s death wasn’t an accident. I know it wasn’t,” Amelia had told her during their first session. “Because I killed him.”

Karen remembered staring at her, and wondering exactly what she’d meant.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t mention anything about it,” Amelia had said, squirming on Karen’s sofa. “It’s too soon to drop a bombshell like that on you. And now the session’s almost over. Jesus. Please, tell me you’ll see me again, Karen. I trust you, and I can’t keep this to myself any longer. Please, don’t send me away-”

“It’s okay, I’m listening,” Karen had said calmly. “We’ve got time.” She wasn’t one of those clock-watching therapists. If a patient was in the middle of something important, she never cut them off because of time. In this instance, she luckily hadn’t scheduled any other sessions that afternoon, so Karen could go on for another hour or so if it meant understanding Amelia Faraday better. Already, she wanted to help and protect this girl.

“What do you mean, you killed him?” Karen asked as gently as possible. “Can you talk about it?”

Amelia nodded. “I was at a Booze Busters retreat in Port Townsend,” she replied, sniffling. “Six of us took an RV there for the weekend and camped out. But I had this premonition about Collin the whole weekend, all these feelings of hatred for him that I can’t explain. I kept thinking about how I would kill him, and it was crazy. I didn’t want that to happen. I couldn’t have meant it. I didn’t even want to think about it. I loved my brother. He was the sweetest guy….” She started sobbing again. “I’m sorry.”

“Take your time.”

Amelia wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. “I must have blacked out, because all I have are fragments of what happened.”

Fragments again, Karen thought. She scribbled the word down in her notes.

“I was standing on the dock in our backyard with Collin,” Amelia explained. “Our house is up in Bellingham-on Lake Whatcom. I hit him with a board or something-a piece of plank, I think. He just-just looked at me, stunned, and-and an awful gash started to open up on his forehead. He let out this garbled, frail cry….” Wincing, she shook her head. “God, it was this weird, warble-type of sound, almost inhuman. And then he toppled off the dock into the water.

“I don’t remember anything else. It’s like I lost nearly everything from that afternoon, because the next thing I knew, I was waking up from a nap in the RV in Port Townsend-and it was dinnertime. But I had those images in my head. It’s how come I knew about Collin before anyone else. I tried to call my folks and tell them something had happened, but they were spending the weekend at their cabin, and the cell phone service is lousy out there-”

“There was no one else staying with Collin?” Karen asked.

Amelia shook her head. “He was alone in the house for the weekend. Before my folks left, I teased him about how he’d be raiding the booze cabinet, watching porn, and having a big party while they were gone. He had a friend coming over that afternoon. He’s the one who found him. When Collin didn’t answer the door, his buddy went around to the back and saw him floating by the dock. His sleeve had gotten caught on something. They figured he’d had too much to drink, then fallen off the dock, and hit his head on some pilings. Turned out he had alcohol in his system. And maybe that’s true, but he didn’t die the way they think.”

Karen squinted at her. “Have you talked to anyone about this?”

Amelia sighed. “Just my Aunt Ina. She said I was crazy with grief, and that I shouldn’t repeat it to anyone. It would just upset people even more.”

“You said you were with people from Booze Busters that weekend,” Karen pointed out. “How did you manage to break away from the camp, then drive to Bellingham and back without them noticing? It’s at least a hundred miles and a ferry ride each way. You’d have been gone the entire afternoon.”

Amelia seemed to shrink into the corner of Karen’s sofa. She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know how I got there. But I remember what happened. And a neighbor saw me there, too. The police determined Collin must have died around two or three o’clock that Saturday afternoon. Our neighbor, Mrs. Ormsby, said she saw me hosing down our dock around that time. But because I was supposed to be gone the whole weekend, no one really believed her. She’s an old woman. They figured she was senile or just wanted some attention. Mrs. Ormsby later said she might have been mistaken. But I don’t think she was.”

Karen leaned forward in her seat. “But she must have been wrong, Amelia. Don’t you see? Your friends would have noticed if you’d left the campsite-”

“I know, I know,” she cried. Her whole body was shaking. “But I have these-these pieces of memory that tell me I killed him. When I’m alone in bed at night, I can still hear him making that strange, horrible sound after I hit him with the plank. I still hear Collin dying.”

Karen let her cry it out. “There are a lot of explanations for what you were feeling-for these sensory fragments,” she said finally. “It doesn’t mean you killed your brother, Amelia. Your sudden rage toward him, that’s not entirely uncommon. I’ve heard many stories from people who suddenly, for no good reason, became irritable or distant with a loved one-only to lose them within a few days of this inexplicable anger. Even when the death is unexpected, our extrasensory perception can sometimes kick in and start to protect us from the impending loss.”

Curled up in the corner of the sofa, Amelia gave her a slightly skeptical look. But at least she’d stopped crying.

“You said that you and Collin were close,” Karen went on. “Often with family members and loved ones, we can sense when something is wrong-even if that loved one is over a hundred miles away. We can still pick up a frequency that there’s trouble. Maybe you just tapped into Collin’s frequency. Maybe you have a bit of ESP.”

“Do you really believe that?” Amelia murmured, still eyeing her dubiously.

“Well, it makes a lot more sense than the notion that you traveled over two hundred miles without ever really leaving your campsite in Port Townsend. Doesn’t it?”

Amelia sighed and then reached for her bottle of water.

“I’ve just met you, Amelia,” she continued. “But you don’t seem like a murderer to me. And what would your motive be, anyway? You loved your brother. As for that neighbor woman who saw you, why do you still believe her even after she recanted what she said? No one else believed her, but you did. Why do you want to take the blame?”

Karen remembered going on like that for a few more minutes, until Amelia had started to calm down. She’d made her promise to go back to Booze Busters, and they’d agreed to meet twice a week.

That had been four months ago. Karen didn’t need to hear bits of a flashback in which Amelia’s biological mother asked if someone had touched her “down there” to presume she’d been abused in some way as a young child. All the classic attributions of child abuse were there in the 19-year-old: her low self-esteem, nightmares, flashbacks, lost time, and her assuming guilt for just about everything.

A perfect example of this was Amelia’s episode with her boyfriend, Shane, and how quickly Amelia had assumed she’d done something wrong when he said he’d seen her in that car with another man. Amelia had gone and gotten herself tested, because she’d automatically figured herself guilty of infidelity. It never seemed to have occurred to her that Shane might have been mistaken.

There were a lot of problems they worked on over the next four months. And in that time, Karen felt a special bond forming with this young woman who depended on her so much. She was more like Amelia’s big sister than her therapist.

Amelia had kept her promise and went back to Booze Busters. And though things still got a little rocky with Shane from time to time, they continued to see each other. Her grades were improving at school. Mark and Jenna