The Best Revenge Read online

  She came abreast of me and touched my arm. “What about now, Alan? Right now?”

  “It’s the middle of the night, Kelda.”

  “I know what time it is. I think we should talk about . . . what happened here. I think there are some things that . . . you should be aware of. Things you didn’t see down there. It could change things for you . . . tomorrow.”

  “Change things how?”

  She looked behind her. “Not here, Alan.”

  “It can’t wait?”

  “I don’t think it should. I think you need to know everything that happened up here tonight.”

  Bees and snakes and napalm. Fear lessons, darkness. Shotguns and death,I mused.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I was just thinking that maybe it would be better if I never knew what happened up here tonight.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  I did mean that, but I said, “You obviously have someplace in mind. What are you thinking?”

  “I was thinking, I don’t know, that Boca might loan us his cabin for a short while. We could talk there.”

  I shook my head. “Boca’s been dragged into enough. I don’t want to intrude on him again. He moved up here to get away from . . . situations like this. From people like us.”

  “How about a restaurant in Nederland?”

  At that hour, all that would be open would be a bar, and Nederland’s bars were a little too notorious for my taste. “It’s not appropriate for us to meet in a restaurant.”

  I expected her to argue with me. She didn’t. It was apparent that she had a long string of options prepared. “Then how about your office? Say, half an hour, forty minutes?”

  “You’re sure that this can’t wait?”

  “I’m not going to have any free time tomorrow and I don’t think you are either. I think we should do it now. If the sheriff calls for another interview before we get a chance to talk . . .” She let the thought hang provocatively.

  “What if he does?”

  “You should hear what I have to say before you talk to him again. That’s all.”

  “You want to influence what I say to the sheriff?”

  “Not at all. I want to talk about some things we both experienced tonight. Tell you my impressions.”

  “This makes it sound like this meeting you want will be therapy?”

  “Yes. Therapy.”

  I took three more steps. “Okay. My office. I guess I’ll see you in Boulder, then.”

  I don’t know whether it was a function of the hour or her casual dress or what we’d just been through up near Ward, but Kelda kicked off her shoes in my office and positioned herself on the sofa as though she were curling up to watch TV at home. Her fingertips immediately found a quad muscle to knead.

  I waited. Although for some reason I wasn’t as tired as I’d been an hour earlier, I would have much preferred at that moment to be inhaling the aroma of my little girl as I kissed her good night on the way to join my wife in bed.

  Kelda wasn’t looking at me when she finally began. “Could Jones really have made it all up? All that stuff she’d written in her journal about Tom following her to Hawaii?”

  Given the events of the evening, and the prologue Kelda had offered up near Boca’s cabin, I’d expected something more profound.

  I considered how a clinical psychologist at the top of his game might respond to her question. Whatever the proper response might have been, I’m sure mine wasn’t it. I answered, “I don’t think she exactly made it up, Kelda. Jones wasn’t well. You know that. After she heard that the guy she’d been dating was a suspect in almost beheading a girl who was not that different from her in age, appearance, circumstances—”

  She finished my thought, “That’s when her paranoia took over.”

  I leaned forward, closing the distance between us by a third, and made my voice soft. “Yes, that’s probably when her paranoia took over. Looking back, it seems as though she may have developed a delusion that was centered on Tom Clone, or he conveniently stepped into one that she was developing anyway. Given her predisposition to paranoia, given the absence of her primary emotional support—you—given what she was hearing in the news about Ivy Campbell’s murder, given some tension that may have existed in her relationship with Tom—all the pieces were in place for her to suffer some deterioration in her emotional balance, which was precarious at best, anyway.

  “I think it’s a safe assumption that her reality testing was quite impaired at the end. Once she got to Hawaii, probably even before she left, she began to see Tom Clone where he wasn’t, and she totally convinced herself that he was after her. So . . . to answer your question, no, Jones didn’t make it up. I’m sure she believed that Tom was after her. Remember the paintings. The chasing pictures. Her fears—the danger she felt—were her reality.” I added firmly, “But that doesn’t mean that any of it actually happened.”

  “She was sweet, Alan. If you could get past her fears, she had a terrific heart underneath.”

  “I don’t doubt that, Kelda. Jones had an illness. Not a nice illness. The fears weren’t real. But Jones was.”

  She smiled faintly at me, as though she was grateful that I wasn’t going to ask her to give up her love for her friend.

  Although I still hadn’t heard anything that convinced me that this emergency session was necessary, I reminded myself to be patient. I decided to try to plant a seed even though I didn’t expect to see anything sprout from it anytime soon. “I’m thinking that Jones wasn’t the first girl that you tried to rescue, Kelda.”

  “What?”

  I allowed a few seconds to drip away before I responded. “So much of what we’ve talked about since you first came into my office has to do with Jones and with Rosa Alija. In a way, your life has been very much consumed with your efforts to save those two people, and the consequences of those efforts.”

  I expected her to brush me off. She didn’t.

  “I . . . um. I . . .” She looked away from me.

  “Go on, Kelda,” I said.

  She wrinkled her nose in an expression I’d not seen before. She said, “I’ve never told you much about . . . growing up.”

  Here we go,I thought.Here we go. “No, you haven’t. You haven’t spoken about your family much at all.”

  “You’ve guessed, though, haven’t you? Do you already know?”

  “Do I know what happened when you were growing up? No, I don’t. I don’t have any idea. Have I imagined that something did happen? Yes, I have. We all have history.”

  She grew silent and stayed quiet for a length of time that stretched into minutes. Her hands stilled and she ceased massaging her legs. It was by far the longest period of contemplation—or escape?—that I’d witnessed since I started seeing her for psychotherapy.

  If you had asked me to bet, I would have bet that Kelda was going to take a protective stroll away from any examination of her past. I would have bet that her defenses would rise to protect her like her gun rising from her holster. A quick-draw.

  I would have bet wrong.

  “We had a tree house,” she said. “My little sister and I. My dad built it for us. A really, really special tree house. With a shingled roof and curtains and rugs. We loved it. It was our favorite place.

  “I could climb all the way from my bedroom window, out onto the roof, down some long limbs, and into the tree house. Sometimes I’d sneak up on my sister and scare her when she was there by herself. One time.”

  Kelda didn’t pause after she said “One time.”

  She stopped.

  I did the therapist’s equivalent of putting a hand on her back and shoving. “Go on,” I said.

  She took a long, slow breath to steel herself. “One time, one night, when I was eleven and she was eight, I went out my window after dinner and snuck up on her and I found her in the tree house with the boy who lived two doors down from us.” She closed her eyes. “You know the rest.”

  “No, I don’t.”

>   “Her shorts were down. He was touching her. That’s the rest.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  She opened her eyes. The glare was incendiary. I fought an impulse to pull away from her fury.

  She swallowed once and went on. “I pushed him out the door. He fell, and landed on his neck. That’s it.”

  “You saved her?”

  “Are you kidding? I was too late to save her. I’m always too late. But I punished him. He hasn’t taken a step since that day. Not one.”

  Clarity. A little girl molested by a neighbor. A culprit punished.

  Clarity?

  Hardly.

  “That’s not all, though, is it?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The fall paralyzed him. But that wasn’t all, was it?”

  “No, that wasn’t all. He had brain damage, too. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t communicate.”

  The fire had left her eyes and Kelda’s voice was cold.

  I stated the obvious. Often it was the most important part of my job. “Which meant that he couldn’t tell you why he did it. He couldn’t tell you what made him tick.”

  “No. He couldn’t.”

  “And that left you feeling . . . what?” I asked.

  Her nostrils flared just a tiny bit. “So,” she said flatly, “Tom Clone didn’t have anything to do with Jones’s death.”

  The change in direction was so abrupt that I felt as though I’d just been subjected to inhumaneg forces. I managed to say, “No. It appears he didn’t. You changed the subject, Kelda.”

  “Did I? That leaves—”

  My phone rang in my pocket. I guessed it was Lauren wondering where the hell I was, so, despite the poignancy of the therapeutic moment, I took my attention away from Kelda and glanced at the caller ID on my cell. I was wrong about the identity of the caller. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but, given the circumstances, I should get this,” I told Kelda.

  “I understand.”

  I stood, moved behind my desk, and turned my back on Kelda. I considered walking out into the hallway to take the call but didn’t want to leave Kelda alone in the office with my phone logs and files. I said, “Hi.”

  Sam said, “You knew it was me, didn’t you? I hate caller ID. Listen, there’s something I thought you’d want to know. This Park County cop we have up here? He’s a guy named Bonnet, George Bonnet, calls himself Hoppy for some reason. Thing is, after sitting quiet for almost three hours, he just confessed to killing Ivy Campbell.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it, and finally managed to say, “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I’m not. One of the sheriff’s guys leaned on him a little—not hard. Well, not too hard—and he just started talking. Then he led us all to this mineshaft and showed us where he killed his friend—another Park County cop named—just a second—named Prehost. Says he shot Prehost and let his body go down an old mineshaft. It’s going to be a bitch to recover.”

  “He killed his friend, too?”

  “Yeah. Apparently the two of them had been following Clone, trying to get the focus of the old murder case back on him and then, then . . . well, then something totally screwy happened up here. There’s some weird prison fence thing out in the forest and Tom Clone was trying to tell everybody he was kidnapped and attacked by bees and snakes and shit. Goofiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” He paused. “Well, almost.”

  “But you’re sure about Ivy Campbell’s murder?”

  “I’m sure Bonnet confessed, if that’s what you’re asking. I heard it myself. Is it legit? Who the hell knows? But this cop says he did it. I can’t come up with a reason why he’d confess if it wasn’t true.”

  “Was the other cop part of it?”

  “Hoppy says not. He says the other cop thought Clone was guilty of the old murder the whole time. Hoppy killed him because he was afraid that the guy who was torturing Tom might say something that would let his partner figure out that Hoppy was involved in Ivy’s murder.”

  “Wow.”

  Sam’s voice changed a little. “You don’t know anything about any of this, do you, Alan?”

  I was grateful that the answer was that I didn’t.

  I said, “Just what I heard from Boca at the cabin. Just what I heard from Boca. The same stuff you’ve probably heard about the kidnapping and the fence thing and the fear lessons. The bees and snakes. And the gasoline. There was something about gasoline. I told you that earlier on the phone. Remember?”

  I looked over my shoulder at Kelda. Her attention to my conversation was rapt. She mouthed, “What?”

  A minute too late, I walked out into the hall and closed the door behind me.

  Sam said, “Boca’s great. I like Boca. Yeah, we got all that, the gas part, too—found a cooler full of some napalm stuff out by this fenced-in pen. Had to get the HazMat guys out of bed to deal with it. But you don’t know anything about this guy Hoppy and the Campbell girl? That’s news to you, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Hoppy says the guy who was shot up here had been babbling about some old murder in Hawaii. You know anything about that?”

  “A murder in Hawaii?” I managed. In a split second I spied the trapdoor that was hidden in a dark corner of Sam’s question. Without much hesitation, I lifted the lid and slithered into the blackness. By uttering a few additional words—“I don’t know anything about a murder in Hawaii”—I pulled the door shut over my head.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  I know about a girl who died at the base of a cliff near Paia. But no murder. No. The girl I know about jumped. Or maybe she fell. But no murder. No.“What was Hoppy’s motive?”

  “He says Ivy offended him in a bar. He says she ‘disrespected’ him in a bar the night before. He followed her to where she was staying and then went back out there the next day and demanded an apology from her. He says he was drunk, that he used to have a problem with alcohol. She responded by disrespecting him again. Things deteriorated from there, apparently.”

  “That’s it? Jesus.”

  “This Hoppy guy was assisting on the murder investigation from day one. He made sure that Clone was framed like a picture in a museum. He was in a perfect position to do it.”

  “I guess.”

  One more time, Sam asked, “Is there anything you want to add, Alan? This Hawaii thing, maybe? You don’t know anything about it, you’re sure? Last chance. I have to go.”

  “Nothing. Nothing. I don’t know anything about any murder in Hawaii. Not a thing.”

  He was silent. His silence felt like a big fat hand shoving me insistently in the back. I was glad he couldn’t see my face. I said, “Thanks for calling. Thanks for everything you’ve done tonight.”

  “If you decide you know something, you have my cell number, right?”

  What did he think I knew? Worse, what did he know I knew? “Yes, I know the number. But I don’t know anything.”

  He hung up. I folded the phone, returned to my office, and sat back down. Kelda didn’t appear to have moved.

  Kelda said, “What’s going on?”

  I tried to remember where we’d left off. “You had just changed the subject. You’d been talking about your sister and the tree house and then you said that Tom didn’t have anything to do with Jones’s death.”

  “That was Purdy, wasn’t it? What did he just tell you?”

  When totally off balance, I tend to fall back on the rules. It’s not one of my more endearing traits. I said, “This is therapy, Kelda. I don’t discuss my personal phone conversations in therapy.”

  She didn’t hesitate. She said, “You’re joking, right?”

  “No. I’m serious.”

  “Then you’re fired.”

  “What?”

  “You’re fired. You’re not my therapist anymore. So what did Purdy just tell you? Answer me or I’ll go get my phone and find out for myself. You know that if I have someone call the Boulder Sheriff, they’ll tell us what’s going on
.”

  I was too tired to care about the rules. “Hoppy Bonnet? The Park County cop? He just confessed to murdering Ivy Campbell.”

  She blinked twice as though she had to translate my words from English before she could process them. Then she gasped and her hand flew to her mouth. After fifteen seconds or so, she started to weep.

  “Can I start therapy again?” she asked.

  With that as a prelude, I definitely wanted to hear whatever she was planning to say next. Cynical? Sure. Was it the right clinical course to jump back and forth into a therapeutic relationship, given the events of the night? Probably not, but I didn’t think about it long enough to come to a thoughtful conclusion. I was too determined to hear what was going to come next.

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Right now? We’re in therapy again? This is confidential?”

  “Yes.”

  She said, “I planted the knife that got Tom Clone out of prison. It wasn’t the real murder weapon.”

  “You . . .”

  “The man who was killed up there tonight is Ira Winslett. Ira is Jones’s brother. He and I planted the knife that got Clone freed from prison.”

  My mouth hung open.

  “I came up with a ruse to get into the property room in Park County, and I stole a section of her bloody clothing out of evidence. Ira doctored the knife with the blood that was dried on the clothes. We hid the knife, and then I went and pretended to find it.”

  I actually said, “I’m speechless.” I was that incredulous.

  “Once our lab determined that some of the blood on the knife wasn’t Tom Clone’s, I anonymously let the attorney who was handling Tom’s appeals know that the anomaly had shown up. That got everything going. He contacted the Bureau; the courts took another look at the case. . . . It all took some time, but we got Tom out of prison.”

  “Why, Kelda? Why did you do it?”

  “Ira and I wanted to get him out of jail so we could punish him for what he did to Jones.”

  “Punish him? He was on death row, for Christ’s sake.” I didn’t feel I had to add,For a crime it turns out he didn’t commit. So I didn’t.

  “He was on death row for what he did to Ivy Campbell. We wanted time alone with him for what he did to Jones.”