EPILOGUE
KARL RHINEMANN’S VARIOUS degrees hung in gilt-framed splendor against his office’s rich, oiled-walnut paneling. His diploma from Harvard, denoting a Bachelor of Arts degree in biochemistry, hung in the center. Surrounding it were the rest. The medical diploma from Harvard Medical School. The Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia. The L.L.D. and J.D., also from Columbia. But neither the years of schooling nor his equal number of years in practice had prepared him for the woman who sat across the desk from him, perched nervously on the edge of the deep red leather wingback chair that usually made his subjects feel more relaxed than they had any right to be. Rhinemann’s practice was in forensic psychiatry, and on this day it had fallen upon him to do an initial evaluation of Joan Moore Hapgood.
As his subject watched him warily, he quickly reread the file in front of him. According to the report made out by Daniel Pullman, who had been the chief investigator of the crimes Joan Hapgood was accused of committing, she had killed her husband, her mother, and an unrelated teenage girl, attempted the murder of her son, and battered a second, unrelated teenage girl.
His eyes shifted from the file to the woman who sat before him. She did not look like the monster the file depicted. Indeed, she did not look like any sort of monster, but like a very frightened, very worried woman, whose face was etched by a grief that was engulfing her prettiness. “Would you like to tell me what happened?” Rhinemann asked, leaning forward and resting his chin on his folded hands, his attentiveness letting her know he would see through any lies she might tell.
“I don’t know what happened,” Joan Hapgood said softly. Her eyes, wide and frightened, met his with no hesitation. “I know what they say I did, but I don’t believe I did any of it. I loved my husband and my mother. I still love my son.”
“And the girls?” Rhinemann asked. “How did you feel about them?”
“Kelly Conroe is my best friend’s daughter. I loved her. I — ” She faltered. “ — I hardly knew Becky Adams. But I know she was a sweet girl. Shy, but very sweet. When we lived across the street from her, I always liked her very much.”
Rhinemann leaned back in his chair, unfolding his hands and idly picking up a pencil he had no intention of using. Whatever notes he took would be committed to paper after the subject was gone. “Would you like to tell me what happened the day your son had to go to the hospital?” Joan Hapgood tensed, and he could see her debating something in her mind. He nodded — an almost imperceptible gesture that he knew would probably not even register in the subject’s consciousness. It would, however, suggest to her subconscious that she could trust him. Sure enough, she shifted in her chair, making herself more comfortable.
“You’ll think I’m crazy,” she said.
Rhinemann shrugged noncommittally. “Try me.”
“I–I was clearing my sister’s things out of my house… ”
“Cynthia’s things?” Rhinemann had studied Dan Pullman’s account of his conversation with Joan Hapgood on the night she was arrested so many times that he could have repeated it verbatim, had no need to ask Joan to identify her sister. It was his way of prodding her. When she nodded but still said nothing, he added, “And she didn’t want you to do that?”
Joan bit down on her lip as if to prevent herself from speaking, then shook her head. “She said it should have been her house. Then — ” She took a deep breath and continued. “Then she started laughing at me.”
“Laughing at you?” Rhinemann repeated, deliberately lending his voice a touch of mockery. As he had intended, the subject exhibited the first signs of anger. “Did she laugh at you often?”
For the first time, Joan Hapgood’s eyes moved away from him, and she began picking at the seam of her dress. “She always laughed at me. As long as I can remember, she always laughed.”
“Why would she do that? Why would she laugh at you?”
Joan’s eyes met his again and when she spoke, Rhinemann could hear her anger in her voice. “She always thought she was better than I was. And she always said that even though I wanted to be her, I never could. She said I could never be as pretty as her, or as smart as her. She said Mother would never love me the way she loved her.”
“And that was true, wasn’t it?” Rhinemann asked, his voice bland though his pulse was quickening as he saw the subject’s rage growing.
“No!” Joan shouted. “It wasn’t Cynthia that Bill Hapgood loved — it was me! And even if I didn’t give birth to Matt, I was his mother. Not Cynthia! Me!”
“But it was always Cynthia your mother loved best, wasn’t it? And no matter what you did, you couldn’t be as pretty or as smart as your sister.”
Joan’s voice hardened. “I could! I could be everything she was. I could have been just as beautiful as she was. And just as smart and popular too!”
“But you couldn’t make your mother love you, could you?”
Joan flinched as if she’d been struck.
“Is that what it was about? That you could never make your mother love you?”
Again Joan flinched, and then, abruptly, she straightened, seeming to grow taller in the chair. Her expression shifted too, but more than that, her features now appeared more refined, her cheekbones higher, her eyes more widely spaced. And her lips curled into a smile so cold it made Karl Rhinemann’s skin crawl.
“Of course Mother never loved her,” the woman who sat across from him said. “I saw to that. I saw to everything.”
Rhinemann regarded her without speaking for several seconds, wondering how to proceed. Finally, he asked, “Does Joan know about you? Does she know what you’ve done?”
Cynthia smiled enigmatically. “That all depends, doesn’t it?”
“Depends on what?” Rhinemann countered.
Cynthia Moore shrugged. “Oh, come now, Doctor. I’m not a fool, and neither are you. We both know that what happens to Joan depends entirely on what you say in the report you’re going to write as soon as Joan is taken back to her room. So what is it going to be?” The forefinger of her right hand touched its counterpart on her left hand. “It’s quite possible that Joan is totally insane, isn’t it? After all, the way Mama beat her and locked her in the cedar chest in the basement when she was little could account for a lot, couldn’t it? Certainly it would account for her fear of the basement at Hapgood Farm. And it would account for the way she beat Mama and Becky Adams to death. And it would certainly account for me — Joan wouldn’t be the first person to develop a second personality, would she?” She cocked her head knowingly. “Someone had to take the abuse that she couldn’t stand. And who better to come up with than me?” Her smile turned brittle. “After all, Doctor, you and I both know that no matter how much she professes to love me, deep down she must hate me. Why wouldn’t she? I’m everything she never was. I’m everything she ever wanted to be. And she was my whipping boy from the day she learned to crawl. Without me, she never would have gotten those beatings.” Cynthia laughed, a cold, harsh sound. “But there’s another possibility, too, isn’t there?”
Rhinemann raised his brows in a silent invitation for her to go on.
The woman’s right forefinger moved on to the middle finger of her left hand. “Perhaps Cynthia doesn’t really exist at all — maybe I’m Joan, simply pretending to be Cynthia. After all, is it really reasonable to believe that Cynthia simply ‘appeared’ whenever I needed to be rid of someone? Don’t forget — Bill had left me, and told me he was going to take Matt away from me — he showed me the proof that he’d fathered him. He even told me that the only reason he married me was because he began to suspect that Matt really was his son. His, and Cynthia’s! So why wouldn’t I kill him? He was going to take my son away from me. And why wouldn’t I kill Mother, after everything she’d done to me?”
“And the girls?” Rhinemann asked.
The woman shrugged as if what she’d done to the two teenagers was barely worth explaining. “They wanted Matt. They wanted him, just like Bill wanted him.”
“So you killed one of them and beat the other,” Rhinemann continued. “Just like your mother beat you.”
