LITMIR.BIZ

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dreams had started before that; “repressed memories,” Dr. Yancy told her later, but her father and Lorinda just wanted her “fixed.” They didn’t care whether Hathaway House was the right choice. They just sent her there and she could envision Lorinda dusting her hands of Albert’s crazy adopted daughter. Somehow Lorinda had then convinced Albert that Hague was as messed up as Liv and away he’d gone to Grandview Hospital, which actually had a reputation for treating more serious mental patients. Should she feel grateful that they hadn’t assumed her problems were as bad as Hague’s, and that’s why they’d sent her to Hathaway House instead? Or, was it a money issue: Hathaway House was mostly funded by donations whereas Grandview was a private mental hospital. Maybe it was just simply that Hague, being Albert’s own flesh and blood, was more a son to him than she was a daughter—an idea undoubtedly fostered by Lorinda’s disinterest in both of them.

      Whatever the case, when she was a girl the dreams of her mother’s hanging form . . . mixed in with some kind of bogeyman chasing her down . . . and sometimes dead bodies rising from graves outside, from the fields, and stalking toward her house, zombie-like . . . intensified over the years until finally Liv had woken up screaming nearly every night. That’s when she was sent to Hathaway House and assigned to a room with three other female patients, all of them teenagers.

      She was regimented from the start and there were household chores. Before breakfast: room cleaning. Breakfast. Group therapy. Lunch. Rest time. One-on-one with Dr. Yancy. Dinner. Quiet time in your room or in the main hall with its soothing blue chairs and empty shelves, save for books. Lights out at nine.

      Dr. Yancy . . . She was in her fifties with gray hair and deep brown eyes and a quiet way about her that was the first thing Liv always noticed. They had sessions four days out of five. On Thursday, Liv was given the option of an hour of television in one of the rooms upstairs, where an employee (guard) watched over her and the other inmates, or she could take a walk around the fenced yard. No, it did not have razor wire across its wall, but there was a watchtower.

      “Very medieval,” Liv had told Dr. Yancy after the first time she chose the walking yard. “Like a rotting prison.”

      “A rotting prison?” Dr. Yancy asked.

      “The wall looks like it’s from some castle. I can half-believe there’s a moat on the opposite side.”

      The doctor half-smiled. “There’s a creek on the north end. Otherwise, it’s a fir-lined cliff down to the highway below. We’re not that far out of the city limits.”

      Liv knew where Hathaway House was: on the west side of Portland, not all that far from Laurelton. She’d lived in Rock Springs until they’d sent her to Hathaway House, and after her incarceration ended, she’d returned to her family only briefly; she wasn’t part of it any longer. Albert and Lorinda had moved to east Portland, nearly Gresham, and she’d made a stab at finishing her senior year, getting her GED in the end. As soon as she could, she got a job at a restaurant and moved into low-cost student housing next to the nearest campus of Portland Community College, where she took business classes.

      But that was later . . . after her sessions with Dr. Yancy, who’d offered up the repressed-memories theory about a month into their therapy. “You saw something about the time of your mother’s death,” she told Liv on that rainy Monday afternoon. “Something else. You don’t want to look at it, so it’s coming to you in your dreams.”

      “I saw my mother,” Liv stated carefully. She didn’t like treading this road.

      Dr. Yancy nodded and tilted her head, considering her. “And something else, too.”

      “No.”

      “Until you look at it, it will keep coming back.”

      Liv shut her mind down. She would rather keep the dreams than go back down that hall and see her mother’s body. She knew the zombies were from Hague’s description. She suspected the women from the fields were the strangulation victims from the serial killer that had terrorized the area before disappearing; she’d read about his actions later, going through old newspaper accounts, but it hadn’t sparked any repressed memories, either.

      And as far as a bogeyman chasing her. She still believed that was real.

      Dr. Yancy had kept trying to break through Liv’s resolve, but fear, and a large dose of stubborness, had kept Liv from responding.

      Now, however, thinking of the doctor—the zombie, stalking doctor who might be the man in the photo—she felt a flutter of awareness. Until you look at it, it will keep coming back.

      Dropping the curtain, she walked back to the kitchen and sat at the table. Screwing up her courage, she closed her eyes and envisioned those moments when she’d found her mother hanging in the kitchen.

      I’m done.... She’d seen her mother’s vision say those words, but now, holding herself tightly, her eyes squeezed shut, she believed they were meant for her father. Her mother was done with the marriage. There was nothing more sinister than that in their meaning.

      But there was something else . . . some intent . . . something. Carefully, Liv allowed her inner vision to move past her mother’s hanging form, toward the back door and out into the moonlit field beyond . . . something was there. Someone was there . . . watching . . .

      “Liv?”

      Her eyes flew open at her name. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. Then she saw a man’s form.

      A man.

      Her mouth opened on a silent scream and then Auggie bent down in front of her and gazed into her eyes.

      Letting Liv know who he was had to happen, Auggie had concluded, but he needed the right moment to spring it on her. Looking at her horror-struck face, he determined this wasn’t the time.

      He was good that way.

      And he just hadn’t expected to care about her as much as he already did. It was a conundrum to be sure. But it wasn’t the first time.

      He was a sucker for women, that was the problem. Not in the long run, he supposed; not when it really counted. But in the short run he was definitely a sucker. A modern-day knight in shining—maybe tarnished—armor who couldn’t help himself whenever some damsel in distress crossed his path. And as path-crossing went, Liv Dugan was a doozy.

      He definitely was a sucker for her. Those soulful hazel eyes filled with a raft of emotions: anxiety, mistrust, worry and fear. Though sometimes she seemed to look at him with longing, too. Not sexual longing, although he’d certainly felt faint glimmers running along his own nerves. No, she was longing for friendship, and understanding, and maybe the truth of cold, hard reality.

      The fact was, he wanted to help her.

      But if he told her he was the police, how would that go?

      Not well, he suspected.

      She was coming back to herself with an effort. The gun was on the table beside her right hand. He wondered how advisable that was, given the fact it looked as if she’d put herself in a trance.

      “You all right?” he asked.

      She shook her head and looked away from him. He followed her gaze. His cell phone was on the counter.

      For reasons more personal than smart, he suspected, he was going to keep up the charade and see what he could learn. Luckily, his cell phone was out of battery. If at any time she’d seen fit to take it from him and check him out, it might not have been pretty. But Liv Dugan was living in her own hellish world inside her head. She was fighting paranoia and wasn’t paying attention to the details in the real world. She didn’t trust anybody, but she wanted to, even though she might not know it. She’d spent too many years of her life not trusting anyone and didn’t know how to.

      She said, “I need to go to Hathaway House. Where I was—put—to straighten out my head.”

      “Looking for ‘the doctor’?” he asked.

      “Hague said we both knew

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