world.
“It’s Hannah,” she says. “Can you hear me, Cat?”
“Yes.” I smile for her, my best smile so she’ll know I’m okay. It’s easy to be okay with Hannah here, even if it is only a dream.
“I’ve come to speak to you about something important,” she says.
I nod understanding. “Of course. What is it?”
“Agent Kaiser asked me to come. I think that was wise of him.”
“He’s a wise man,” I agree. “A very wise man.”
Dr. Goldman looks almost as sad as my father. “Cat, you know I believe in honesty and frankness, but life always finds a way to test our beliefs. There’s no easy way to tell you this.”
I smile encouragement and pat her hand. “It’s okay. I’m strong. You know I can take it.”
“You are strong.” She smiles back. “You may be my strongest patient. What I have to tell you is this. Your aunt Ann is dead.”
My smile broadens. “No, she’s not. I talked to her today.”
“I know you did, dear. But that was yesterday afternoon. You’ve been sleeping for quite a while. And sometime last night, your aunt drove to DeSalle Island and killed herself by taking an overdose of morphine.”
My smile freezes on my face. It’s not Dr. Goldman’s somber voice or sad eyes that convince me. It’s the morphine. And the island.
Chapter 45
Hannah Goldman is about fifty, with graying streaks in her hair and deep lines at the corners of her eyes. Her eyes are kind, but the intelligence behind them is ruthless. Sitting under Hannah’s gaze, you can feel like a child under the care of a loving mother or a lesser mammal being scrutinized by a scientist bent on dissection. Agent Kaiser was probably right to bring her here, but now that she’s broken the news to me about Ann, I want Kaiser. Psychiatry isn’t going to solve my current matrix of problems.
I sit up on my cot and set my stockinged feet on the carpeted floor. “Hannah, I appreciate you coming here to give me this news. But I need to ask Agent Kaiser some questions.”
“I’ll get him for you,” she says. “But I want you to promise me two things.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll let me sit in while you talk to him.”
“Of course.”
“And you’ll talk to me alone afterward.”
This I don’t especially want to do, but it would be rude not to agree. “All right.”
Left in the silence of the empty office, I enter a strange state where all the images in my mind spin wildly against each other. Foremost among them is my father bleeding plastic pellets from his chest, then Lena the Leopardess pouring blood from her torn belly. I don’t know what that dream meant, but I have to find out. And to do that, I need Lena in my hands again. Only she’s buried in my father’s coffin, in Natchez, two hundred miles away.
I have to get out of this building.
The sound of the door opening and John Kaiser’s voice merge into one startling mix:
I stand and face him squarely. “I want the details of my aunt’s suicide.”
Kaiser glances at Dr. Goldman.
Hannah says, “You don’t have to treat her like she’s not in the room with us. Cat’s used to dealing with stress.”
He looks skeptical. “What do you want to know?”
“Does my mother know about it yet?”
“Yes. She’s enraged. She thinks Ann’s husband murdered her.”
“What?”
“Apparently your aunt was in the middle of a bad divorce. The husband wanted to keep her from getting any money. I talked to the guy. I don’t think he even knew where DeSalle Island was until I told him. It feels like a suicide to me.”
“Suicide,” I echo. “In some ways Ann was already dead. She had been for a long time.”
“What do you mean by that?” Kaiser asks, but Hannah is nodding.
“I’ll tell you in a minute. I want to know exactly where Ann was found, who found her, how she did it, whether she left a note, everything. Forget I’m related to her, okay?”
Kaiser leans against the closed door. “A woman named Louise Butler found her in a one-room building on DeSalle Island. I guess you know all about that island?”
“More than I ever wanted to.”
“Apparently Ms. Butler was looking for you. Your grandfather’s search for you had been called off, but Louise was in the woods and never got the word. She found your aunt instead.”
Despite the horror of this thought, the face of my father’s mistress gives me a comforting feeling as it rises behind my eyes, brown and still beautiful at forty-six. I’m glad Louise found Ann, and not Jesse Billups. Thinking of my last afternoon on the island, a cold certainty comes to me.
“Did the building Ann was found in have a tin roof?”
Kaiser’s eyes narrow. “How did you know that?”
My hands suddenly feel clammy. “Was she found in the building they call the clinic?”
He nods slowly, waiting for an explanation.
“Tell me how she looked when they found her.”
Kaiser glances at Dr. Goldman but answers anyway. “She was naked, lying on the floor by an examining table.”
A deep ache begins in my heart. A lot of suicides take off their clothes before killing themselves. But Ann’s nakedness wasn’t a matter of fastidiousness or infantile regression. “Did she leave a note?”
“No note.”
“What is it?” I demand.
“She didn’t leave a note, but she did leave something. Before she died, she drew two skulls and crossbones on her lower abdomen, about where her ovaries would be. There was a Sharpie marker lying beside her body.”
For the first time, I feel the sting of tears.
“That means something to you?” Kaiser asks.
“Ann was obsessed with having a baby. She never could get pregnant.”
“At fifty-six she was obsessed with having a baby?”
“No, but she never got over the failure. My grandfather performed an emergency appendectomy on her in that clinic when she was ten years old. He always said the infection she had then was what made her infertile. That it blocked her fallopian tubes. I think a dye test may have later proved that correct. Anyway, when she finally gave up on having a baby, she died inside.”
Kaiser doesn’t know what to make of this. I turn to Hannah. “I’ve been wondering if that appendectomy might really have been an abortion.”
Hannah sits in silence, her mind clicking through what she knows of my family. “Ten is too young for pregnancy,” she says finally. “I’m sure it’s impossible.”
“Sexual abuse again,” says Kaiser. “That’s why Ann was a patient of Malik’s, right?”
“We don’t know that for sure,” I point out. “She could have been seeing him for her manic-depressive disorder.”
“Well, we need to know which. I want an autopsy done on her as fast as we can get one. Would a botched abortion be detectable all these years later?”
