The Admirer Read online

  He leafed through the gunshot wounds, the stabbings, and the process of decomposition. The last chapter was entitled, “The Forensics of War.” It was short and consisted mostly of text. He was about to close the book when he caught sight of a black and white photograph of a woman seated on a pedestal. She was dark–skinned with gray hair, and, to his seven–year old eyes, very old. What caught his eye was the place where her legs should have been. Instead of limbs, her shorts exposed a mass of hardened scars like the gnarled roots of a tree. Below the picture, the caption read, “Polina Petrova: Landmine victim exhibits unusual scarring.”

  He stared. His groin hurt. His whole body trembled. He was afraid he had been struck by one of the strange diseases pictured in Father’s books. Then he closed his eyes. He could see Polina Petrova. And he knew what to do. The orgasm frightened him but not enough to eclipse the pleasure that washed over him.

  For six years, the image of Polina Petrova tormented him. Six itching years, when he knew only the need and not the solution. Then, when he was thirteen, he found Carla Braff. Carla was admitted to the asylum with paranoid delusions. Father said her diagnosis was “burdening her family.” Her speech was slurred by a congenital defect that twisted her head to one side, and she was retarded. She had also suffered meningitis as a child, and the resulting septicemia had destroyed her lower legs. Both had been surgically removed at the knee.

  He learned this later, when he stole her file. When he met her the first time, all he saw were the empty footrests on her wheelchair. Without knowing she was coming, he had waited his whole life for her arrival.

  For a week, he lingered in the hallway outside Carla’s room, watching the staff deliver medications, memorizing the rhythms of the hospital wing. Then, when he was sure all the nurses were occupied elsewhere, he stepped into her room and closed the privacy screen over the observation window.

  Carla lay on a narrow bed. He lifted her blanket. Beneath it, she wore baggy pants. He cursed. The pant legs had been stitched closed. He squeezed the stumps. He had to see. He could feel the pulse pounding in his legs. Carla babbled and whimpered. He hooked his fingers under the waistband of her pants and pulled. She was wearing diapers. He didn’t care. The pleasure was so intense, nothing would ever be the same. He had stepped through the portal. He had been born.

  But it could not last. One day, he walked past Carla’s room and she screamed, “Go away! Go. Go. Go.”

  In the hallway outside her door, two doctors conferred over her charts.

  “Something must have triggered a memory of past events,” one of the men said, glancing at his clipboard. “There is nothing in Carla’s current regime that would cause this kind of response.”

  He knew, however. The assaults had begun to register on Carla’s softened mind. At first, she only struggled under his weight. Then she began to scream as he entered her room. She was easily silenced with a hospital–issued towel. When she started to scream at the sight of him—in the garden, and in passing—he grew worried. For a month, the fear of discovery warred with the fear of losing her. Then the doctors glanced at him. Inadvertently. Unconsciously. Wondering.

  He remembered something Father had told him. Before the Kirkbride asylums had been built, there was a time when weekend tourists paid a nickel for the pleasure of watching, taunting, even beating the insane. “We have grown squeamish,” Father had said once, “It is a natural inclination to seek out the aberrant, examine it and destroy it.”

  Then he realized he would have to kill her.

  The night of Carla Braff’s death, the asylum was particularly quiet. A visiting theater troupe had agreed to perform for the patients. Most were in the theater, laughing at the performers as they cavorted around the stage. He took a risk. He sat down next to Carla. Immediately, her screams pierced the air, threatening to send the entire horde into fits. One of the nurses took her back to her room. A half hour later, he slipped out.

  He had chosen his method carefully: an insulin injection into the vein in her inner elbow. He had read about the procedure in the library’s medical books. Insulin coma. It was believed that the coma could clear the mind of delusions. With too much, the patient slipped over the edge. Madness. Coma. Death.

  He brought five syringes in a cigar box. The first needle hit bone, but enough of the insulin entered her blood to slow her movements. Her muffled screaming subsided. He took out the next needle. It was easy to find the vein this time. He waited for the decerebrate rigidity that signaled a dangerous imbalance in insulin and blood sugar levels. Then he injected the last three syringes, remembering what Father had told him.

  ****

  Father relayed his anecdote again, a few days later. One of the hospital orderlies caught him in the hall and told him that Father wanted a conference in the study. He ran, slowing only to catch his breath before walking into the office.

  “Bourbon?” Father held up a decanter.

  This was not what he had expected but better than he could have hoped for. He often drank out of the decanter when Father was not around. Still he shook his head. As soon as he declined, he could tell he’d made the wrong choice.

  “Suit yourself,” Father said, then told the story of the tourists and their nickels. “We’ve become so sentimental,” he concluded. “Have you been following the Braff case?”

  Father was the hospital administrator, and he knew almost everything that took place within its walls.

  He felt his blood chill. “No,” he lied.

  “She died, just drifted away in her sleep.” Father raised the bourbon to the window and examined the golden liquor. “It’s the best result really. There was nothing we could do for her except save her family the burden, and her father was out of money even for that. What a waste. A good horse has more wit and commonsense than that girl.” He chuckled. “For that matter, Peter’s mule has more sense.”

  It was no secret that Father hated the gardener’s mule, a stubborn, useless animal with a threadbare coat and one leg shorter than the rest.

  Father took a sip of the bourbon and stared out the window. “Some lives are worth less than others. I know you’ve heard the nurses talking. Everyone is a gift from God. Everyone brings a light into the world. I would like to see their Christian charity when their sons get meningitis, and they have to care for them at home for no pay. The Carlas of this world are their living. God provides for the lilies of the field, and he provided Carla Braff so those nice Catholic girls could feed their broods. Don’t you ever make that mistake.” A faint smile flickered across Father’s face. “Don’t you forget. Carla Braff’s death was a blessing.”

  He relaxed a little. “Maybe I will have a bourbon.”

  “Maybe you will,” Father said. “We are defined by our appetites.” Father leaned over the chair in which he sat, gripping the armrests, trapping him. “I don’t object to what happened, not morally. Carla Braff was a wasted life.”

  He could feel Father’s hot breath on his face. He smelled the bourbon.

  “But I will not have my son be less than a mule.”

  ****

  That night as he lay in bed reading, Father flung open his bedroom door and ripped the blanket off his bed.

  “It smells like the stables in here,” Father said. “Like a mule.”

  Father grabbed him by the arm, pulled him out of bed, and marched him down to the basement. There, Father threw him in the chair. It had seemed like a huge throne when he was a child; now it fit him like a regular chair. Whistling an empty, repetitive tune, Father walked to the chest and took out the belts. One to beat. One to wrap around his arms and torso so he could not ward off the blows. The leather bit into his arms. He couldn’t breathe.

  “Stop,” he choked.

  Father would never stop. Instead, he rotated his class ring so the stone faced inward. Holding his palm up to show the stone, Father said, “There is no place for mules.”

  For a moment, he didn’t even register the pain of Father’s blow. Then Father
hit him such force that the chair crashed over.

  Upstairs, the doorbell rang. It would be the Lanatierres and the Vettals coming over for gin martinis. Mother would be serving in a gray silk dress with a peach–colored scarf, the silver tray balanced perfectly on her palm.

  Father squatted down beside him where he lay with his face pressed to the dirt of the unfinished floor.

  “I know you won’t scream. Scream and they’ll throw you in prison. Or maybe they’ll put you in foster care. Would you like that? To live with one of the nurses and her eighteen mewling brats? You could wash their diapers in a tub out back and get scabies like the rest of them. Do you understand what I’m saying? I am protecting you to protect this family.”

  He couldn’t tell if it was blood or pain that made everything go red. All he knew was that time slowed, and he felt an odd clarity. He saw the picture from the forensic book: Polina Petrova’s. He understood now. She could never hurt him. She could never run from him. She could never tiptoe around the cocktail guests in little silver heels while Father beat him.

  A moment later, he lost consciousness. When he woke up, he could not say how long he had been out. The pain was confounding. One minute it was excruciating. He had to bite his lip not to scream. Then it became so total, his body could not make sense of it. It was like looking at the sun. Upstairs, Mother laughed. His hearing seemed more acute. Father said, “Let me show you “The Whistler.” It’s a small painting of which we’re very proud. How about a little tour?” The guests would see the whole house—or so they thought. Mother and Father were wonderful hosts. They would even take the guests to the attic where they could see the town of Pittock like a model railway set. “Forgive the dust. You just have to see the view.” No one would notice the door behind the ornamental wine barrel in the kitchen. No one could imagine the basement. A family like this had been noble since Jedidiah Pittock first set foot in Berkshire county.

  Chapter Six

  I’d like security to run extra campus shuttles, especially after dark,” Helen said, once the chief had left. “Let’s get facilities to check all the lights and emergency phones on campus. We’ll ask what they’re missing. If there are security measures they’ve wanted that we couldn’t afford—locks, bars, phones, cameras—now is the time. I’ll find the money.”

  Drummond nodded. Helen closed the notebook she had set on the conference table. There were no answers to write down.

  “Have you worked with Hornsby before?”

  “Hornsby is a good man. His father was chief before him,” Drummond said. “I’ve known him for years.”

  Those were two things people confused in small towns, Helen thought. Quality and longevity: they weren’t synonymous.

  “That’s something,” she hedged.

  Drummond paused. “His wife is dying.” He spoke quickly, as though even this small revelation bothered his sense of New England decorum or his desire to keep Helen at arm’s length. “It’s uterine cancer. The doctors want him to call hospice.”

  Drummond was also a widower. His wife had died a year or two earlier. Of what, she didn’t know.

  “I’m sure that’s hard,” she said. “My sister passed away recently. It takes a toll.” She rose from the table and walked over to the window. “Eliza.”

  The name hung in the ether between sound and thought, reverberating like a tuning fork. Eliza. Helen did not want to talk about her, and yet, on some level, she wanted nothing more. She wanted to tell Drummond the whole story. To grab him by the lapels of his ubiquitous sport coat and say, “You see? My being here has nothing to do with you.” Beyond that, she simply longed to be back at the Pittock House or, better yet, in an anonymous hotel room, a room designed, like Teflon, to shed all traces of its occupants. A space devoid of memories.

  Through the window she could see three students, two girls and a boy, tossing a football back and forth in the slanting, yellow light. The boy was very handsome, with an angular, arrogant face. Each time, he threw the ball harder. One of the girls complained with a musical squeal.

  “My son. Ricky,” Drummond said, following Helen’s eyes. “I have always cared about Pittock College, but now that he is here, it means even more.”

  Helen watched the students dart in and out of the sunlight. The days were getting shorter. Soon the rest of the students would arrive for fall term with their Pittock sweatshirts, their suitcases, and their dreams.

  “You have done a lot for Pittock.”

  Two months at Pittock and a drive past the provost’s Georgian mansion, had given her insight into his worldview. He was a man to whom birth had given everything, who simultaneously believed in a meritocracy as well as a natural progression of founding fathers. For twenty years, he had served Pittock College, waiting for the proceeding patriarchs to die or retire. Then, as he prepared to take his rightful place, the college board caved under pressure from alumni and hired Helen, a forty–five–year–old upstart. During Helen’s eight year stint at Vandusen, the school rose from bankruptcy into the top fifty private liberal arts colleges. The alumni who wanted her knew this, and knew that she came cheap. In Drummond’s mind, she had jumped the line. She had taken what was rightfully his.

  Drummond stood and joined Helen at the window.

  “I have loved this school since I was his age, since I was a boy.” He spoke without looking at her.

  He had been acting president for two years before Helen’s hire.

  “You kept this school together.” She resisted the urge to add barely.

  She did not mention the shrinking endowment and diminished enrollment. Drummond had been doing the job of provost, president, and countless other duties that, at another school, would be delegated to separate individuals if not whole departments. Under those circumstances he was bound to fail at some things. He had stewarded, and tended, and taken on until every one of the college’s problems could be traced back to him, although he was the root cause of none. She did not have to like him to see that it was unfair.

  “I trust what you say about Hornsby,” she said. “But if I have reason to believe he doesn’t pursue this with due diligence, I will call in other authorities. I will not rest until this is resolved.”

  ****

  Walking into the Pittock House that evening, Helen wondered how past presidents had stomached living there even without the taint of a murder investigation. The house was a saltbox built in 1890. In the intervening years, it had become a dumping ground for antique furnishings. An enormous painting of Jedidiah Pittock dominated the parlor. Beneath him sat three horsehair sofas and several armchairs. In the far corner, someone had parked a wicker pram complete with an antique baby doll.

  Helen had decided to wait a polite six months before shipping it all to cold storage. Then she would buy the ecru, microfiber sectional from the Pottery Barn catalogue. She would buy the White Lilies giclée and bowls of the ersatz white seashells the catalogue was touting at a ridiculous $189.99 for three. It would look just like a hotel. Hell, she thought as she dropped her keys on the hallway table. She would be satisfied with a card table from IKEA if it meant she could dump the pram with its cadaverous baby doll.

  She walked into the kitchen, poured herself a shot of vodka, and dropped into a chair. She downed the shot in two sips, then picked up her phone to find out if, by some miracle, her friend Terri had not learned of her situation.

  “Of course I have,” he replied. “Disembodied legs discovered on an isolated college campus. That is prime real estate. Too bad they didn’t find some politicians philandering at the scene.”

  Terri was a shrewd, old–timer who claimed to loathe all young professionals except Helen. They had met at Vandusen, when Helen was a dean and Terri was lead counsel for the college. One day, the old lawyer had sidled up to her after a particularly contentious faculty union meeting.

  “The rest of us are stuck, aren’t we?” he had said.

  Helen had shrugged. “You mean the negotiation? We’ll work it out.”


  “No,” Terri had said. “I mean us. The rest of us are who we are, but you are whoever you need to be.”

  The remark had hit close to home. Helen had just received a call from her father. He had visited Eliza at the University of Nebraska, where she was supposedly getting a Masters in psychology. When he arrived in Lincoln, he found Eliza’s apartment knee–deep in garbage and Eliza ranting about her thesis advisor stealing her thoughts while she was sleeping.

  “I’ll come home,” Helen had told her father. Then she had turned off her phone, smoothed her hair, and presided over the union negotiation with the poise of an orator.

  “I like you,” Terri had said. “You suffer gracefully.”

  Not gracefully enough it turned out. Helen could still hear the Vandusen board president. “We admire your commitment to your sister. Family. But in your absence, we realize the position of vice provost is, to a great degree, redundant.”

  “I’m not absent,” Helen had pleaded. “Give me a month.”

  In one month, she could stabilize Eliza’s medications. She would put her in a home this time. She would do whatever it took. The board president had just smiled.

  Now Helen was at Pittock and Terri—her best and only friend—was a voice on the other end of the phone.

  “I’m glad you called.” He grew serious. “How are you holding up?”

  “I think we have the media under control, at least for now. Thank God for the hurricane. The police conducted a search this afternoon. They covered the campus, the area around the asylum. That’s just a mile from here. They’re going to go back out tomorrow to do a wider sweep. There’s no evidence to say it’s one of our students except that she’s young.”

  “She?”

  “It was a girl. Seventeen to twenty–some.”

  “That’s sad,” Terri said.