The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Read online

  The computer and its living soul, the internet, were my tools in this endeavor as one appointment-free afternoon, perhaps three weeks after the attack, I put myself to the task. I first did a search for elephant costumes in general. While this yielded pages upon pages of results, mostly children’s Halloween outfits, they produced nothing of value—at least within the timeframe my hovering, impatient fingers imposed. When the words Monty Python were added, a whole new set of possibilities opened up. It was on page three that I found the link that would send me scrambling among the desk drawers for the reading glasses I hardly ever wore. Sure enough, there it was, plain as day. Too pat for contemplation . . . if it said what I thought it said. I called up an online translation dictionary, plugging in the English search word and looking up its translation both in Portuguese and in Spanish. Bingo. When he had spoken the word, he had used Spanish. Here, it was in Portuguese. I suppose I’d just assumed that the word was the same in both languages.

  Evolução Handmade Costumes,

  Portavora, Brazil.

  It read exactly like that, in mixed Portuguese and English. While the word for “evolution” obviously stood out loudest, the name Portavora also hit me, as I had seen the seaside town on a map I was looking over on the bus ride down from Rio de Janeiro. It lay to the southwest of Tago, easily within twenty miles.

  The question of the context of the man’s dying utterance as it related to the costume shop and its unusual use of the same word would come at its own pace while I looked over the website. The site’s only content on the Monty Python elephant costume was a photo showing someone modeling it with its exaggerated arms spread wide, and a blurb beneath the picture stating in both Portuguese and English that it was a commissioned special tailor order. For now, though, I just stared at the magnified name and address, tracing those graceful, somehow lovely and terrible accent marks . . .

  ***

  The evening before I was to fly to Brazil for the second time in a month, I went into my room in hopes of communicating to the person inside Kristin’s shell that she would be in her mother’s care, at my house, for a few days. I found her snuggled in the covers asleep, however, processing a dinner Felicia had hand-fed her after she had taken only a few bites on her own, preferring instead to roll the vegetables around on her plate with her spoon. That being the only utensil her mother, at some white coat’s advice, would let her use. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her for a few minutes, touched by the peaceful expression she wore, before deciding to call it an evening myself.

  I said goodnight to Felicia, who sat on the couch in the living room re-reading for the dozenth time some notes our Anchorage psychiatrist, who’d visited twice now, had given her. Then I showered and shaved in preparation for the morning’s early departure. When I returned to my room, Kristin was in a different position on the bed, one leg thrown over the bunched-up covers. Her expression had changed. Not so dramatically that I was alarmed to the possibility of another recurrence. Not frightened or pain-wracked, as I had seen too often during these past weeks, but rather troubled. She didn’t appear to be having a nightmare, but was obviously involved in the experience, her brows knitting, her lips moving, murmuring soft incoherencies.

  This aspect moved me in a similar way to the tranquil one it had replaced. I found it hard to get a handle on when I was so used, of late, to seeing the haunted expression that occupied her features between nightmares. Where was she right now? Was she experiencing the normal frustrations and inadequacies we do in our dreams? Was she having a problem with her homework or trying to talk to someone who wouldn’t listen? Or, was she in a less healthy place, where reprieves from terror took this other than ideal form? If only I could join her there, to brush out those lines in her brow, calm those uneasy utterances.

  A word emerged out of the murmuring. I wasn’t sure I’d heard right at first, but then a coherent stream issued from her, its content uttered in a voice of lilting wonder . . . while affecting me like a lavishly cold wind.

  “The trees . . . there are faces in the trees.”

  ***

  In the middle of the night I woke to her screams. Unlike the night before, and the night before that, these screams contained words. And the words were horrific.

  “They want them. They want my babies!”

  I was on the bed in a flash, wrapping protective, restraining arms around her. She thrashed against them, bit my shoulder, smashed my face with her forehead before I could bury her head in my chest offering shushes that were lost in the soprano squeals the screams devolved into. Her saliva against my bare skin, the ripples of her shuddering body inside my person, were their own occurrences in the heightened empathy state the episode commanded. In turn, I impressed my own physical responses on her, clutching her head, squeezing her body with force, insisting that she know I was there, that I was stronger than her tormentors, that together we forged a bridge back from the place she had gone, back to a nucleus I hoped still had some familiarity to her, a womb of love.

  She resisted this emotionally-driven physicality at first, resisted wildly, but then gradually, beneath a continuous and unwavering onslaught of will on my part, her teeth quit trying to find purchase in my skin. Her cries tapered to feeble feline noises, her body shrank back upon itself, molding with my own. In the end she not only returned with me, she came so far back as to let the word ‘Dad’ escape from her . . . ‘Dad’ followed by: “God, Dad, help me.”

  I rocked her in my arms. “Kristin, everything will be okay. Everything will be okay, baby. You just need to trust me. Trust those who love you. We’re here. We’re real.”

  “Amen,” I heard from the door, which I’d been keeping open at night, allowing light in from the bathroom across the hall. Perhaps the communion had assumed the proportions of spiritual rhapsody for Felicia as she stood there looking in, the light a faint halo around her fussy hair. The incarnation didn’t matter. That love inundated every corner of this room did, and that was happening. Kristin was bathing in its pure white energy, and there was nothing the demons in her could do about it. There was no gate they could release over her mouth, which spoke its secrets in whispers.

  “They want my babies, Dad.”

  “Who, honey? Who wants...?”

  “Him,” she said, snapping her eyes at me, whip-like. She seemed to be searching inside me as she went on, “The elephant man.” Her voice fell to a level below a whisper. “And Kathy.”

  The hair stood on my flesh. From the door a strange, off-key, undulating protraction of a moan . . .

  “The other one . . . she told me,” Kristin persisted. “The girl who looks like Kathy. She told me they want my babies.”

  The crawling came in waves, one after the other over my scalp, my arms, the back of my neck. “Kathy is dead, baby. The man in the elephant costume is dead.”

  “They are not dead! I saw them take the girl who looks like Kathy away.”

  “But they’re dreams, sweetheart,” Felicia said, having temporarily regained possession of herself as she joined our huddle on the bed. “They’re just dreams. No one can hurt you here.”

  “They can hurt you anywhere.”

  “Baby . . . ”

  “‘Serve me.’ That’s what he said when he was on top of me, touching inside my stomach with his mind. ‘Serve me as your sister serves me.’”

  The whine released itself from Felicia’s body again, a sharp wandering music in the tomblike chamber we occupied. I put my hand on her shoulder, telling her to go sit down, but she wasn’t hearing anything except what came out of her daughter.

  To Kristin I said, “Is that all he said to you in the hotel?”

  She narrowed her eyes, almost malevolently, as she said, “Not in the hotel. Before then, when he put the tube thing inside me.”

  A cry came out of Felicia, high and anguished, like her very soul was being ripped out of her.

  “Go sit down now!” I shouted at her.

  She obeyed, but not to the cha
ir. She shuffled past it and out the door, dragging behind her the part that wasn’t flesh, like a wounded soldier.

  “Kristin,” I said, gently taking her face in my hand. “Listen to me closely. When did he put something inside you? Was it before Brazil?”

  “I don’t know. I remembered in the hotel when he . . . when he . . . ”

  “Sweetheart? Sweetheart . . . ”

  Her eyes were rolling up under her lids, exposing shocks of white in the semi-darkness. “Felicia!” I yelled. “Felicia!”

  When she didn’t come immediately, I grabbed the phone by the bed, vacillating momentarily on whether I should call 911 or Dr. Whittler. If it was a seizure—

  “Dad,” the blessed word came from the bundle in my right arm.

  I turned to her, phone hanging there at the end of its cord. “Kristin . . . ”

  Her eyes had returned from their false refuge, bringing moisture with them. “Dad,” she said, lip quivering. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I left Kathy alone that day.”

  “Oh, baby.” I let the phone fall and held her, never ever to let go of her again.

  But I did. Not the next morning as scheduled, but soon enough, and God save my living soul for it.

  5

  I had one order of business to attend to before making the journey. His name: Bobby Owens. I’d no trouble spotting the young man when he came out of school the next afternoon. Coach Wells, his basketball coach and a friend of mine, had told me to look for a tall kid with younger girls draped over him. His entourage gave me the suspicious eye when I separated him from their company, but I paid them no mind as I suggested to young Mr. Groves that we take a ride. It wasn’t clear whether or not he knew who I was at this point, but he was certainly alarmed by my interest, as evidenced by the meager ‘Why?’ he managed to get out after a difficult swallow. To bring it all together for him, I threw out Dr. Whittler’s name. To this he responded more actively, glancing around to see who was looking before ducking inside the cab of my beat-up 4Runner, squeezing his backpack to his chest like a security blanket.

  I’d no sympathy for him. Yes, I’d been there. I knew the pressures of adolescence, having been through the rigors of imposed religion in the home, the lofty expectations, the demands of teachers, coaches, peers, the whole bit. But I also knew he was a senior and my daughter was a freshman, that he had as big a mouth, even if it only omitted, as he had an appetite for the cradle, a penchant for feeding his self-esteem on the readiest means possible. Quite frankly, he could have been the poster boy for family values and I wouldn’t have cared. Kristin was all that mattered. The truth, whatever his level of involvement, was coming out of him one way or another.

  I drove us down Montana Creek Road, the nearest outlet into the wilderness. To illustrate how appropriate that word, ‘wilderness’, when Felicia, Kristin, and I first moved to Juneau, a repairman I was quizzing about the local hiking opportunities gave me this advice about Montana Creek: “I wouldn’t go back there without bear mace.” I doubted bears would concern my jock passenger too much, but the seclusion was a different matter. To his credit, he did muster up the courage about halfway along the three-mile stretch of weather-battered road to ask where I was taking him. It might as well have been a rhetorical question, as we both knew full well the road ended in a circle by the trailhead, a perfect place to have a little chat. When I failed to provide even a ‘shut up’ for his effort, his better judgment prevailed. I strongly suspected it would continue to do so without too much finger-breaking on my part. He knew who I was now, no question. This drive was designed to let that knowledge sink in real deep.

  When I’d parked and shut off the engine—the both of us very much tuned to the fact that we were surrounded by dense, dark forest, as far away from anything resembling a comfort zone as could be obtained without hiking in—I faced him.

  “Let’s get to it, Mr. Groves. I want you to tell me exactly what happened that night.”

  He clutched his backpack, looking everywhere but at me. “I didn’t, you know . . . like I told the doctor. . . . nothing happened.”

  My next words were calculated. The spearhead of an extremely direct tactic that potentially left me exposed for having no support from Kristin herself. They followed the path that had been cleared by Dr. Whittler, who had apparently approached the young man without explanations for his questions, shrewdly letting the mystery surrounding his interrogation also encompass the consequences of blabbering about it.

  “Did you rape her, Mr. Groves?”

  He met my eye for the first time as he replied, “No! God, no, Mr. Ocason. It wasn’t like that at all.”

  “What was it like? You used a condom, so that paints it prettier than rape?”

  He took a deep breath, getting command of himself, as though preparing either to tell all or to tell me to fuck off. Fortunately for him, he proceeded in the former direction.

  “The condom was mine. I admit that. But I didn’t use it. I couldn’t bring myself to. I mean, she was really fucked up, man.” Again, he paused, gathering more fuel for the punch. “All right, look, we’d scored some acid earlier and she was trippin’ hard. So hard she—”

  “From whom?” I said, locked on the word.

  He was startled by the question. “I don’t know. Some dude down by the Douglas Bridge. You know, those guys that live in the tents.”

  “Had you seen him before?”

  “No, but what’s that got to do—”

  “Describe him.”

  He opened his hands. “He was bundled up, man. Hood around his face. And it was getting dark. Then when we went down to do the transaction, he’d put on this weird elephant head thing. He was a freak, what can I say.”

  My blood, already rushing through me, now thumped in my temples. But I kept on point. “Did you ever see this man again? That night? Since?”

  “Nah, man. He’d poofed when we went back down there later to tell him only one of us had gotten off, that he’d given us bad shit. It was blotter acid, right? Well, one of the tabs, it was different than the others. It had a heart on it. The other ones had smiley faces. Dude said the heart was less intense, that if we had anyone new to tripping, they’d probably do better to drop it instead of one of the smileys. So we gave Kristin that hit. We didn’t think . . . I mean, we thought it was cool, and just dropped it into the last bit of rum in the bottle. But it was, like, the opposite of what the dude said. We never got off on our hits. But Kristin, man . . . man, she was really out there.”

  He paused long enough for me to wonder, then dismiss as irrelevant, whether Kristin had known about this little genie in a bottle. Long enough, also, for me to notice a change in his expression, a devolution to something conflicted, disturbed. I was about to prompt him to go on when he did so on his own, eyes glazed in memory.

  “She seemed okay when we left her in Elvin’s sister’s bed and went out cruising for a while, but when we got back and I went in to check on her, she was naked, Mr. Ocason, naked from the waist down. She had this goo, like Vaseline or KY jelly or something, all over the insides of her thighs. I thought . . . I mean, it looked like . . . like maybe she had been masturbating or something. Sorry, but that’s all I could think, man. Then she started mumbling, and I laid down with her, just to kind of pet her, you know, tell her she was going to be okay. But she was clinging to me, right . . . then we started kissing . . . or that’s what it seemed like . . . but I swear, man, nothing happened. Yeah, I pulled out the condom, but I couldn’t do it. ‘Cause . . . ‘cause it hit me at some point that the way she was clinging to me, it wasn’t like making out. It was more like . . . like she was scared or something.”

  Scared or something. That’s what he said to me. Scared or something.

  “Mr. Ocason?” he said as I sat there trying to process it all.

  “Yes, son?”

  “Is Kristin okay? I mean, I never wanted . . . ”

  I was silent.

  He straightened in his seat, unclenched his securi
ty blanket, resting his hands on top of the bag, and met my eye squarely. “I want you to know I never intended any harm. Elvin came in, saw her lying there, saw the condom, and assumed things that weren’t true. I let him. And I’m sorry.”

  I looked at him for a long time before replying. When I did, it was without calculation, though for the first time I addressed him by his first name. “I need you to clean up the mess, Bobby. I need you to go out of your way to restore her reputation. When that is accomplished, we can talk about forgiveness.”

  ***

  When I returned home from delivering my hostage to basketball practice, I found Felicia lying on the couch in a pair of shorts, her knees up, the back of her hand on her brow, and her eyes closed but not in sleep. I wondered, as I looked at her a moment before sitting down by her bare feet, how long the Forest Service was going to let her leave of absence continue. At least another week, I hoped, with Portavora ahead.

  “Where’s Kristin?” I asked.

  “Sleeping. Quietly. In her bed. Earlier she walked down to the pond and fed the ducks.”

  “Ah,” I sighed. “How I’ve longed to hear such words.”

  “I know,” she said, still resting her eyes. “Hey, Barry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you for always being there for Kristin. I don’t blame you, you know. For taking her to Brazil.”

  “I know, Felicia.” The forgiveness seemed to be going around today, a touch of something good amid the madness. I placed her foot in my lap, rubbing the tension out of it. Out of her. When I finished with one foot, I massaged the other, both of us silent, letting our thoughts drift, or disappear altogether. When I finished with the second, I got up and knelt beside her, stroking her cheek with the backs of my fingers, admiring how beautiful she was, how fragile. She had suffered too much, this woman I had once been married to. She had changed, become both less and more in the face of it all. We all had.

  It was she, eyes still closed, who leaned up to kiss me, but I accepted it warmly, from the mother of my children; eagerly, from this woman who had won my heart in another lifetime. They were small, really, these gestures, as I grazed her nipple with my thumb, stroked the inside of her leg. Uncostly sacrifices to each other, considering. But with each touch, each caress, each exploration, grew something more, something needier, more desperate. The flow of emotion being less an outpouring than an intake, a physical incarnation of the dependence our situation so demanded. When we moved to the bedroom, we never let go of each other, nearly stumbling in a tangle of legs in our haste to communicate what we could out of each other before the opportunity was lost, bleeding back into the reality of life, where possibilities remained only possibilities, fleeting daydreams.