Jonathan Kellerman - When The Bough Breaks

"Your tie to McCaffrey," I said sharply.

"My tie? Oh nothing more serious than life and death."

He laughed. It was the first time I'd heard his laugh and I hoped it would be the last. It was a vacant discordant note, a blatant musical error screaming out in the middle of a symphony.

"I lived with Lilah and Willie Junior on the third floor of the Jedson dormitory. Stuart and Eddy shared a room on the first. As a married student I was given larger quarters - really a nice little apartment, when you got down to it. Two bedrooms, bath, living room, small kitchen. But no library, no study, so I did my reading at the kitchen table. Lilah had made it a cheerful place - bunting, trim, curtains, womanly types of things. Willie Junior was a little over two at the time, I remember. It was my senior year. I'd been having trouble with some of the premedical courses - physics, organic chemistry. I've never been a brilliant person. However, if I apply myself and keep my attention span steady I can do quite well. I desperately wanted to get into medical school on my own merits. My father and his father before him were doctors, all had been brilliant students. The joke, behind my back, was that I'd inherited my mother's brains as well as her looks - they didn't think I heard but I did. I wanted so much to show them that I could succeed on my own merits, not because I was Adolf Towle's son.

"The night it happened Willie Junior had been feeling poorly, unable to sleep. He'd been screaming and crying out, Lilah was frazzled. I ignored her requests for help, plunging myself into my studies, trying to shut out everything else. I had to bring my science grades up. It was imperative. The more anxious I got, the less able I was to pay attention. I tried to deal with it by embracing a kind of tunnel vision.

"Lilah had always been patient with me, but that night she became furious, started to come unglued. I looked up, saw her coming at me, her hands - she had tiny hands, a delicate woman - rolled up into fists, mouth open - I suppose she was screaming - eyes full of hatred. She seemed to me a bird of prey, about to swoop down and pick at my bones. I pushed her away with my arm. She fell, tumbling back, hit her head on the corner of a bureau - a hideous piece, an antique her mother had given her - and lay there, simply lay there.

"I can see the whole thing clearly now, as if it had just happened yesterday. Lilah lies there, motionless. I rise out of my chair, dreamlike, everything is swaying, everything is confusing. A small shape coming at me from the right, like a mouse, a rat. I swat it away. But it's not a rat, no, no. It's Willie Junior, coming back at me, crying for his mother, hitting me. Only dimly aware of his presence I strike out at him again, catch him on the side of his head. Too hard. He falls, lands, lies still. Unmoving. A large bruise masks the side of his face… My wife, my child, dead at my hands. I prepare to find my razor, cut my wrists, be done with it.

"Then Gus's voice is at my back. He stands in the doorway, huge, obese, sweaty, in work clothes, broom in hand. The janitor, cleaning the dormitories at night. I smell him - ammonia, body odor, cleaning fluids. He's heard the noise and has come to check. He looks at me, a long hard look, then at the bodies. He kneels over them, feels for a pulse. "They're dead," he tells me in a flat voice. For a second I think he's smiling and

I'm ready to pounce on him, to attempt a third murder. Then the smile becomes a frown. He's thinking. "Sit down," he commands me. I'm not used to being or dAred around by one of his class but I'm weak and sick with grief, my knees are buckling, everything's unraveling I turn away from Lilah and Willie Junior, sit, put my face in my hands. Start to cry. I begin to grow more confused… A spell is coming on. Everything is starting to hurt. I have no pills, not like I'll have years later, when I'm a doctor. Now I'm merely a premedical student, powerless, hurting.

"Gus makes a telephone call. Minutes later my friends Stuart and Eddy appear in the room, like characters walking onstage in the midst of a dreadful play… The three of them talk among themselves, sometimes looking at me, muttering. Stuart comes to me first. He places a hand on my shoulder. "We know it was an accident, Will," he says. "We know it wasn't your fault." I start to argue with him but the words stick in my throat… The spells make it so hard to talk, so painful… I shake my head. Stuart comforts me, tells me everything will be all right. They will take care of everything. He rejoins Gus and Eddy.

"They wrap the bodies in a blanket, tell me not to leave the room. At the last moment they decide Stuart should stay with me. Gus and Eddy leave with the bodies. Stuart gives me coffee. I cry. I cry myself to sleep. Later that evening they return and tell me the story I'm to report to the police. They rehearse me, such good friends. I do a fine job. They tell me so. I feel some sense of relief at that. At least there is something I'm good at. Play - acting. That's what a bedside manner is, after all. Give the audience what it clamors for… My first audience is made up of the police. Then an officer of the Coast Guard - a family friend. They've found Lilah's car. Her body is macerated and bloated, I needn't identify it if it's too much of an ordeal. Scraps of Willie Junior's clothing have been found clinging to her hands. His body has drifted away. The tides, explains the officer. They'll continue to search… I break down and ready myself for the next show, the well - wishers, the press…"

The tides, I thought, the Coast Guard. Something there… "Several months later I'm accepted at the medical school," Towle was saying. "I move to Los Angeles. Stuart comes with me, though we both know he'll never be able to finish. Eddy goes to law school in Los Angeles. The Heads are reunited - that's what they called us. The Three Heads of State.

"We go about our new lives, there is never a mention of the favor they've done for me. Of that night. However, they are far more open than ever before about their sexual perversions, leaving nasty photographs where I can see them, not bothering to hide or conceal anything. They know I'm powerless to say a thing, even should I find a ten - year - old in my bed. A rotten mutual interdependence now binds us.

"Gus has disappeared. Years later, when I'm a doctor, on my way to prominence, the bedside manner fully developed, he appears at my office after the patients have all gone home. Further fattened, welldressed, no longer a janitor. Now, he jokes, he's a man of God. He shows me the mail - order divinity degree. And he's come to ask a few favors from me. To cash in some old lOUs is the way he puts it. I paid him that evening and I've been paying him, in one way or another, ever since."

"It's time to stop paying," I said. "Let's not sacrifice Melody Quinn to him."

"The child is doomed, as things stand. I urged Gus to put it off. Her accident. Told him it was by no means evident that she'd seen or heard anything. But he won't be delayed much longer. What's one more life to a man like that?" He paused. "Does she really pose a danger to him?"

"Not really. She sat at the window and saw shadows of men." One of whom she'd recognized as her father - she didn't know him but she had a picture. On the day I hypnotized her, right after the session, she went into a spontaneous discussion of him. She showed me the picture and a trinket he'd given her. When she had the night terrors I should have figured it out. I thought the hypnosis hadn't evoked anything in her. It had. It had brought back memories of her father, of seeing him lurking outside her window, entering Handler's place. She knew something bad had happened in the apartment. She knew her daddy had done something terrible. She suppressed it. And it came back in her sleep.