The Girls He Adored

82

It's over, Irene told herself. The chase, the capture, the glimpse of her own death in that frozen moment when the rock was poised in Kinch's upraised hand, then the ordeal of being halfpushed, half-dragged up the ravine and across the meadow, followed by the stumbling descent into this glaring white hell with its two damned souls, had left her beyond exhaustion, beyond hope, even beyond terror-or so she thought.

The room was ten feet high, twelve paces wide, and thirty paces long, with cement walls, a musty green indoor-outdoor carpet over the cement floor, and an elongated, opaque, thermoplastic bubble for a ceiling. Electric fans, one to suck air in and another to draw it out, were set into the walls at either end of the room, just under the ceiling.

A single tap eighteen inches above floor level in one corner supplied water for drinking and, apparently, washing hair, because lined up against the wall nearby were at least a dozen bottles of shampoo and creme rinse. No soap, just lots of shampoo. The only other amenity in the room, the privy, was a doorless four-by-four alcove, with a wood-grained plastic toilet seat mounted on a hollow platform over a deep pit.

“Over here,” whispered the taller of the two women, seizing Irene by the elbow, attempting to pull her toward the tap. “Please, it's best to do as he says.”

“Why?”

“To avoid unnecessary pain,” the smaller woman explained patiently, taking Irene's other elbow. “He's very good at pain.”

And what Irene saw in their eyes, glancing from one woman to the other as they gently tugged her toward the corner of the room, sent the terror welling up inside her again. Because what she saw was pity-for some reason too frightening even to contemplate, these two walking cadavers felt sorry for her.

When she understood that they meant for her to kneel naked on the steel grate set into the concrete floor under the tap, Irene balked. Even together, they weren't strong enough to force her down; as they urged her, their eyes kept glancing back to the door in the opposite corner of the room. When it opened, they stepped away from Irene.

“Kneel,” called Maxwell, striding across the room naked, with the sewing basket over one arm, and gesturing to Irene with the barrel of his pistol. She knelt.

“You two, over there.” He waved the gun in the direction of the door; they obeyed, but instead of crossing the room directly, they scuttled sideways around the perimeter, blankets drawn around their throats, giving him as wide a berth as possible without turning their backs on him.

“Get your head under the faucet, close your eyes.”

After the fear, and the shock of the cold water, came the humiliation. Kneeling naked and powerless left Irene feeling not so much angry, or even despairing, as defeated. No more praying, no more bargaining, no more affirmations, no more scheming. She closed her eyes and let her head loll while Maxwell, his touch as sure and gentle as her own hairdresser, lifted and separated the strands of her hair, parting and sifting them with his fingers to rinse out the mud and leaves from the riverbank, the pale green clinging seeds of meadow grass.

Under the rushing water, a sort of peace came over Irene. And although the pychiatrist in her couldn't help putting a name to ittraumatic dissociation-Irene knew that what she was experiencing was beyond classifying, beyond analyzing. How presumptuous of her, she thought, to insist on dragging her patients back to reality all these years. Because in the not-here, not-now, she had somehow managed to distance herself from the pain and the unbearable fear. The once overwhelming emotions were still there, but at a remove; hers, but not her.

And not even the gentle tugging at her scalp as Max gathered her twice-washed, creme-rinsed, strawberry blond hair in one hand, or the annoying buzz of the portable clippers as he harvested it, reached Irene in the no-place to which she had retreated.