her testimony, dismiss the case against Boyer and Barnett, and I’d be lynched by sundown. Unless, of course, I could find an expert witness who would agree to come to court and testify by Monday. But even if I could find one, Beaumont would stand up and object, because if I was going to employ an expert, the rules required that I notify him and send him a report. Then again, I could argue that parapsychology was not recognized as a bona fide science, so the witness was not technically testifying as an expert, but merely as a witness who could illuminate the issues for the court. It might work. After all, everything Alisha had told us had turned out to be true. What other explanation could there be for her knowing what happened?
She was there, you idiot! Either that or she’s wearing a goddamned contact lens over her “bad” eye and she’s really Natasha playing some kind of sick game with you. Nah, there’s no way. The juvenile records. Her mother. They confirmed that Alisha exists. So was she there? Maybe she’s crazy too and she has a grudge against Natasha.
I glanced over at her, wondering whether I was sitting in the presence of yet another crazed murderer who intended to pull out a gun and blow my brains out as soon as we got out of town. But as we reached the city limits of Jonesborough, Alisha began to recount the night the Brockwells were murdered. She was awakened by what she thought was a nightmare sometime after midnight.
“I saw a woman’s back,” she said. “I didn’t know who she was. It was dark, but I could see she was wearing a nightgown. I saw a hand on her shoulder, holding her. And the next image I saw was the ice pick in her back. I saw it over and over, and I knew. I knew it had to be Natasha.”
“You’re absolutely sure it was Natasha?”
“I see what she sees,” she said softly. “At first, I kept telling myself it was just a nightmare. Mrs. Hamilton heard me screaming and came into my room. She held my hand and rubbed a cool washcloth on my face. I think I went back to sleep for a while, but then…”
She became silent. I didn’t want to press her, but I had to know. She had to tell me everything.
“Then you saw the image of Mr. Brockwell?”
She nodded, sniffling. “That was when I saw Sam and Levi. They shot Mr. Brockwell. I’m so sorry.”
She began to sob, and I found myself thinking that she was either telling the truth or she was one of the best liars I’d ever met. She seemed such a gentle creature. I leaned over and popped the glove compartment open, took out a napkin, and handed it to her.
“Does Natasha know you can see these things?” I said.
She nodded her head.
“So that’s why you left your foster parents?”
“I was afraid she might come there and hurt them.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Alisha. If it hadn’t been for you, they’d still be out there killing people.”
“I saw an image of Mr. Beck the day he was killed,” she said through her tears. “He was standing next to a brick wall in the sunlight, holding his son in his arms. Then I saw his picture in the paper the next day. Natasha must not have been there when the Becks were killed, because I would have seen something. But she at least saw Mr. Beck; I’m sure of it. And if I’d come to you sooner, maybe Mr. and Mrs. Brockwell would still be alive.”
I reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “None of this is your fault.”
As we drove south on Highway 81 towards the mountains, she sat quietly in the darkness. I asked her about Natasha, and she shook her head slowly and began to tell me about their lives. She said she and Natasha were born in Mountain City. Her father owned a Chevrolet dealership there, and the family was comfortable until she was eight years old. Then one day her father went out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. The dealership was broke, she said, and her father had embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. There was an intense search, but he disappeared without a trace, taking his embezzled money with him.
Natasha was her identical twin, but she said she never felt the kinship, the closeness that she’d read about among other twins. Alisha remembered Natasha as being surly and reclusive, almost paranoid, from the beginning.
“We both got kittens for our seventh birthday,” she said. “Natasha’s bit her on the finger. It bled and she cried. A little while later, I saw her take the kitten outside. It was the first time I saw the images. I was sitting on the couch with my kitten when this awful scene flashed in my mind. It was a kitten, tied down on its back, spreadeagled, and it was bleeding from the mouth. I went outside to find Natasha. She was behind the garage. She’d taken stakes from our tent and some string and tied the kitten down, just like I pictured it. She was pulling its teeth with a pair of pliers.”
Natasha, she said, was unable to control her rage even in day care. She attacked other children without hesitation, forcing her mother to remove her from the day care and keep her at home. Not even her father, who was a strict disciplinarian, could control her. When their father left, the family moved back to Johnson City to be near Marie Davis’s family. Marie took a series of menial jobs, leaving Natasha’s care and schooling to Marie’s mother. Natasha’s behavior continued to worsen until one day, when the twins were thirteen, she set fire to her grandmother’s home. Marie finally took her to a psychologist, who recommended that Natasha be committed to an institution.
“She was gone for two years,” Alisha said. “They were the best two years of my life. When she came back, they said she’d be okay as long as she took her medication, but she stopped. By that time, my mother had suffered a nervous breakdown and she wasn’t working anymore. She took lots of pills.”
A little over a month after Natasha returned, Alisha awoke one night to find Natasha standing over her with an ice pick.
“I thought I was dreaming. I saw an image of myself lying in bed,” she said. “As soon as I opened my eyes, she stabbed me.”
“Why? Why would she do something like that?”
“Who can explain madness? Who can explain evil? Natasha is both, Mr. Dillard. She’ll kill again if you don’t stop her soon. Now that she’s crossed that line, she’ll never go back.”
Doctors who treated Alisha at the hospital the night Natasha stabbed her called the police, who in turn called social services. Alisha was moved into a foster home for her own protection.
“Natasha told Mother that if she tried to send her back to the institution, she’d kill her,” Alisha said. “Mother talked them into letting her stay. She promised she’d make sure Natasha took her medication. I think she did for a while after that, but Mother can barely take care of herself, let alone someone like Natasha.”
“Isn’t your mother afraid of her?”
“She’s afraid of her, but she says Natasha needs her. They live off of Mother’s social security checks. And if something happened to Mother, Natasha knows she’d be right back in the mental institution.”
She talked for a while longer as I wound through the back roads of the county. The snowfall had eased; there were only occasional flakes rushing past the headlights like tiny shooting stars. Eventually, I brought the conversation back around to the hearing on Monday.
“Do you know Boyer and Barnett?” I said.
“They both grew up in our neighborhood. I went to school with Sam Boyer until Mr. Brockwell finally kicked him out for good. Levi’s a few years younger than me, but I knew him.”
“How would you describe them? What kind of people are they?”
“Poor, angry, neglected. Like a lot of kids in that neighborhood. Levi was especially mean. I saw him beat up Kerry Jameson one day. It was a long time ago; Natasha was in the mental institution. It was summertime, and a bunch of us were playing stickball in a field not far from my house. All Kerry did was call Levi a sissy. Kerry was older and bigger than Levi, but Levi picked up a stick and beat him so badly they had to take him to the hospital.”
“Why would they kill for Natasha?”
“I don’t know for sure, but Natasha started studying Satanism as soon as she got back from the institution. She liked the rituals and the philosophy. She tried to get me involved, but I didn’t want any part of it.”
“What is the philosophy?” I said.
“Do whatever you want. Please yourself. There are no consequences to your actions. If you feel like having sex, you have sex. If you feel like taking drugs, you take drugs. If you feel like killing someone, you kill them. They don’t believe they’re subject to the laws of man. If Natasha was controlling them, she was probably using a combination of sex, drugs, and Satanic propaganda.”
