Blood Memory

“Dr. Ferry!” It’s Kaiser, trotting after me.

I stop and wait. “You called me Cat back at Malik’s office.”

“That’s how I think of you,” he says. “But it’s good to preserve some professional boundaries in these situations.”

What situations are those? I wonder as Sean walks up behind Kaiser.

“I appreciate what you did today,” Kaiser says. “I’d really like you to come over to the field office later, if you’re feeling better.”

I’m not really listening. “Agent Kaiser, do you think I’m involved with these murders in any way? Or with Nathan Malik?”

Kaiser’s face changes about as much as a rock when the wind blows across it. He’s probably a hell of a poker player. “I think you did everything you could today to help us solve this case,” he says. “And I think the people who matter will see that.”

“Why do you think Malik said ‘Don’t blame yourself’ to me as I left?”

“I don’t know. What do you think he meant?”

This is like talking to a shrink. “I have no idea.”

Kaiser looks at the ground, then back at me. “We’ll just have to try to figure that out together.”

That’s all I’m going to get. I offer him my hand, he shakes it, and then I walk inside my house without looking back.

Chapter 19

I’m standing at my picture window, gazing out at the lake. My meeting with Malik profoundly disturbed me, and I’m not sure why. His cryptic comments about my father stirred up a stew of fragmentary memories, but none has told me anything useful. I’m not even sure the images in my mind are real, and not things I’ve pieced together from old photographs and stories. A few things I’m sure of-salvaged from nights I sat in the loft of the barn my father used for his studio, watching him work into the small hours of the morning. The roar of the acetylene cutting torch, the hiss of steam as he dipped red-hot metal into the trough he used to cool it. The smell of acids he used for etching, the sound of the riveter as he linked various pieces of his sculpture into a whole that existed only in his mind. There were no sketches, no plans. Just raw metal and the vision in his head.

Now and then, he would remove his mask and look up into the loft at me. Sometimes he would smile. Other times he just stared, watching me with something like fear in his eyes. Even so young, I sensed that my father saw me as another of his creations, one too fragile to handle with confidence. He seemed afraid that, unlike the metal he shaped with such assurance, I might be damaged by a wrong word or move, and that the damage could never be undone.

I thought of the barn as my father’s studio, but in truth he slept there for the last few years of his life. It was only a couple of hundred yards down the hill from the slave quarters where I slept with my mother, but the separation was absolute. No one was allowed into the barn when he was working. No one, except me. When I asked my mother for an explanation of these sleeping arrangements, she said it was because of the war. She wouldn’t elaborate. My father told me that he had bad dreams at night, and that sometimes when he woke up, he didn’t know where he was. At those times, he said, it was like the war had never ended, like he’d never made it home. When that happened, it was better for me and my mother if we weren’t in the house with him. It was only later that I realized that, for our family, what my father believed during his flashbacks was true. The war hadn’t ended for him. He had never quite made it home.

“What are you thinking?” Sean asks from behind me.

I don’t turn. There aren’t many boats out, but I need to watch them. A sail moving slowly across the horizon gives me something to focus on when my internal moorings start to come loose. Like now. The frantic feeling that awakened in me upon leaving Malik’s office has not abated. “About my dad,” I say softly.

“What about him?”

“Just stuff. Fragments. That’s all I have, really.”

Sean lays his hand on my shoulder and squeezes lightly. I jump at his touch, but I manage not to pull away.

“I need a drink,” I murmur. “I really need it.”

He waits a bit before answering. “What about the baby?”

“It’s a drink or a Valium. At this point I’m not sure which is worse.”

“Would one drink be that bad?”

“It’s not just one drink. It’s the first step off a cliff.”

The grip tightens on my shoulder. “We need to get your mind off it. What can I do?”

“I don’t know.” The sail I was watching has vanished. The boat is tacking, fighting its way back toward shore. “Maybe we should make love.”

Sean’s other hand comes to rest on my other shoulder. “Are you sure?”

“No. I just need something to numb this thing inside me.”

“What is it? Is it the manic feeling?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt this before. I felt good before I went in to see Malik. And I was fine while I was with him. But now…it’s like he flipped a switch in my head. All these feelings are flooding through me. Too many feelings.”

Sean turns me around and steps close enough that our chests touch. I look into his eyes, trying to lose myself in them. I’ve done it before, lost myself in those green spheres like a little girl swimming in an emerald sea. Drifting and rolling-

I jerk backward. Sean has kissed me, and the touch stunned me like an electric shock.

“Hey,” he says, worry in his face. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” I feel tears on my cheeks. “I don’t know. I have this feeling that everything’s connected, but I can’t see how.”

“What’s connected, babe?”

“Everything! All of it. The murders, me, Malik. Kaiser thinks so, too. He just doesn’t see any upside to telling me right now.”

“Come on, Cat. How could everything be connected?”

“How could it not? A month ago, these murders begin. Then I start having panic attacks at the crime scenes, something that’s never happened to me before. The only connection between the victims is a psychiatrist I happened to know ten years ago, a shrink who hit on me. Then you make another connection between the victims. Vietnam. Who went to Vietnam? My father, Nathan Malik, and two of the victims. Maybe more of them. And they were there in the same year. What are the odds of that, Sean?”

“I’m no mathematician, but it’s not impossible. Coincidences like that happen all the time.”

His attempt to minimize the significance of these facts infuriates me. “My father was murdered, Sean. And I don’t know why.” I reach backward and touch the picture window. The cool hardness of the glass reassures me somehow. “I don’t remember anything about that night before seeing his body in the garden, but I found blood in my old bedroom. And I’m having nightmares. Recurring dreams and hallucinations. I’ve always had them, but now they’re getting worse. The fucking rain…it won’t stop. And what does Nathan Malik specialize in? Recovered memories.”

Sean is looking at me strangely. “What rain are you talking about? And you found blood where?”

I forgot he knows nothing about my visit to Natchez. “In the bedroom I grew up in. Old blood. I think it dates from the night my father died.”

“Cat…what the hell are you talking about? That was twenty years ago.”

“Twenty-three. I only found the blood by accident. When I went home the other day-Jesus, that was yesterday-a little girl spilled some luminol in my room. I think they’ve been lying to me all this time. My mother, our maid, my grandfather. For a while I was afraid my father had killed himself, but I don’t think that anymore. I think-”