Dean Koontz - False Memory

Martie said, “One of the students, that five-year-old girl.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Chase’s face seemed to darken as if a cloud had passed between him and the ceiling lights. “She left that good-bye of hers, that colored-pencil drawing, that sad little scribble drawing that changed everything. Her and a man.”

“Anatomically correct,” Martie said.

“Worse, the man had a mustache… like my daddy. In the drawing, he’s wearing a cowboy hat, white with a red band, and a black feather tucked in it. Which is the type of hat my daddy always wore.”

With a violence that drew their attention, Zina Glyson tore off the top sheet from her drawing pad, balled it up, and threw it into the fireplace. “Chase’s father was my godfather, my own father’s best friend. I knew Carl from when I was a toddler. That man… he respected people, no matter who they were, no matter how little they had or what their faults. He respected children, too, and listened to them, and cared. Never once did he ever put his hand on me that way, and I know he didn’t touch Valerie-Marie. If she killed herself, it’s because of the hateful, evil stuff Ahriman put in her head, all the twisted sex and stories about sacrificing animals at the school and being forced to drink their blood. This child was five. What mess do you make of a little child’s mind, what awful depression do you instigate when you ask her about stuff like that under hypnosis, when you help her remember what never happened?”

“Easy, Zee,” her husband said softly. “It’s all over long ago.”

“Not for me, it isn’t.” She went to the ovens. “It won’t be over until he’s dead.” She slipped her right hand into an oven mitt. “And then I won’t believe his obituary.” She drew a pan of finished corn bread from the oven. “I’ll have to look at his corpse myself and stick a finger in its eye to see if he reacts.”

If she was Italian, then she was Sicilian, and if she was part Indian, she was not a peaceful Navajo but an Apache. There was an unusual strength in her, a toughness, and if she’d had the chance to finish Ahriman herself without being caught, she probably would have acted on the opportunity.

Martie liked her a lot.

“I was seventeen at the time,” Chase said, almost to himself. “God knows why they didn’t accuse me, too. How did I escape? When they’re burning witches, why not the whole family?”

Returning to something that Zina had said, Dusty raised a key question: “if she committed suicide? What did you mean by that?”

“Tell him, Chase,” said Zina, moving from the corn bread to the pot of chili. “See if they think it sounds like something a little child would do to herself.”

“Her mother was in the next room,” Chase said. “She heard the gunshot, ran, found Valerie-Marie seconds after it happened. No one else could’ve been there. The girl definitely killed herself with her father’s pistol.”

“She had to get the pistol out of a box in the closet,” Zina said. “And a separate box of ammunition. And load the thing. A child who’d never handled a gun in her life.”

“Even that isn’t the hardest to believe,” Chase said. “What’s hardest is… “He hesitated. “This is awful stuff, Mrs. Rhodes.”

“I’m getting used to it,” Martie grimly assured him.

Chase said, “The way Valerie-Marie killed herself… the news quoted Ahriman as calling it‘an act of self-loathing, of gender denial, an attempt to destroy the sexual aspect of herself that had led to her being molested.’ That little girl, you see, before she pulled the trigger she undressed herself, and then she put the gun… inside…

Martie was on her feet before she realized that she intended to get out of her chair. “Dear God.” She needed to move, to go somewhere, do something, but there was nowhere to go except — as she discovered when she got there — to Zina Glyson, around whom she put her arms as she would have put them around Susan at such a moment as this. “Were you dating Chase then?”

“Yes,” Zina said.

“And stood by him. And married him.”

“Thank God,” Chase murmured.

“What it must have been like,” Martie said, “after the suicide, to defend Carl to other women, and stand by his son.”

Zina had accepted Martie’s embrace as naturally as it had been given. The memory made this Southwest princess tremble after all these years, but both Sicilian and Apache women were loath to cry.

“No one accused Chase,” she said, “but he was suspected. And me. people smiled, but they kept their children at a distance from me. For years.”

Martie brought Zina back to the table, and the four of them sat together.

“Forget all that psychological blather about gender denial and destroying her sexual aspect,” said Zina. “What Valerie-Marie did, no child would think to do. No child. That little girl did what she did because someone put it in her head to do it. Impossible as it seems, crazy as it sounds, Ahriman showed her how to load a gun, and Ahriman told her what to do to herself, and she went home and just did it, because she was… she was, I don’t know, hypnotized or something.”

“It doesn’t sound impossible or crazy to us,” Dusty assured her.

The town was torn apart by Valerie-Marie Padillo’s death, and the possibility that other Little Jackrabbit kids might be suicidally depressed caused a sort of mass hysteria that Zina called the Plague Year. It was during this plague that a jury of seven women and five men returned unanimous guilty verdicts against all five defendants.

“You probably know,” said Chase, “other inmates consider child molesters the lowest of the low. My daddy… he lasted just nineteen months before he was killed at his job in the prison kitchen. Four stab wounds, one through each kidney from behind, two through the gut from in front. Probably, two guys sandwiched him. No one would ever talk, so no one was ever charged.”

“Is your mother still alive?” Dusty asked.

Chase shook his head. “The other three ladies from the school, nice people, all of them — they served four years each. My mom, she was released after five, and when they let her go, she had cancer.”

“Officially, the cancer killed her, but what really killed her was shame,” Zina said. “Tern was a good woman, a kind woman, and a proud woman. She’d done nothing, nothing, but she was eaten up by shame just dwelling on what people thought she’d done. She lived with us, but it wasn’t long. The school had been closed, Carl lost his interest in the car dealership. Legal bills took everything. We were still scraping by ourselves, and we hardly had money to bury her. Thirteen years, she’s dead. Might as well be yesterday to me.”

“What’s it like here for you, these days?” Dusty asked.

Zina and Chase exchanged a look, volumes written in one glance.

He said, “A lot better than it used to be. Some people still believe it all, but not many after the Pastore killings. And some of the Little Jackrabbit kids… they eventually recanted their stories.”

“Not for ten years.” Zina’s eyes in that moment were blacker than anthracite and harder than iron.

Chased sighed. “May be it took ten years for those false memories to start falling apart. I don’t know.”

“In all that time,” Martie wondered, “did you ever think of just picking up and leaving Santa Fe?”

“We love Santa Fe,” Chase said, and his heart seemed to be in his declaration.

“It’s the best place on earth,” Zina agreed. “Besides, if we’d ever left, there are a few out there who would’ve said our leaving proved all of it was true, that we were crawling away in shame.”