Kevin O'Brien - One Last Scream

Karen squinted at her. “Have you talked to anyone about this?”

Amelia sighed. “Just my Aunt Ina. She said I was crazy with grief, and that I shouldn’t repeat it to anyone. It would just upset people even more.”

“You said you were with people from Booze Busters that weekend,” Karen pointed out. “How did you manage to break away from the camp, then drive to Bellingham and back without them noticing? It’s at least a hundred miles and a ferry ride each way. You’d have been gone the entire afternoon.”

Amelia seemed to shrink into the corner of Karen’s sofa. She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know how I got there. But I remember what happened. And a neighbor saw me there, too. The police determined Collin must have died around two or three o’clock that Saturday afternoon. Our neighbor, Mrs. Ormsby, said she saw me hosing down our dock around that time. But because I was supposed to be gone the whole weekend, no one really believed her. She’s an old woman. They figured she was senile or just wanted some attention. Mrs. Ormsby later said she might have been mistaken. But I don’t think she was.”

Karen leaned forward in her seat. “But she must have been wrong, Amelia. Don’t you see? Your friends would have noticed if you’d left the campsite-”

“I know, I know,” she cried. Her whole body was shaking. “But I have these-these pieces of memory that tell me I killed him. When I’m alone in bed at night, I can still hear him making that strange, horrible sound after I hit him with the plank. I still hear Collin dying.”

Karen let her cry it out. “There are a lot of explanations for what you were feeling-for these sensory fragments, ” she said finally. “It doesn’t mean you killed your brother, Amelia. Your sudden rage toward him, that’s not entirely uncommon. I’ve heard many stories from people who suddenly, for no good reason, became irritable or distant with a loved one-only to lose them within a few days of this inexplicable anger. Even when the death is unexpected, our extrasensory perception can sometimes kick in and start to protect us from the impending loss.”

Curled up in the corner of the sofa, Amelia gave her a slightly skeptical look. But at least she’d stopped crying.

“You said that you and Collin were close,” Karen went on. “Often with family members and loved ones, we can sense when something is wrong-even if that loved one is over a hundred miles away. We can still pick up a frequency that there’s trouble. Maybe you just tapped into Collin’s frequency. Maybe you have a bit of ESP.”

“Do you really believe that?” Amelia murmured, still eyeing her dubiously.

“Well, it makes a lot more sense than the notion that you traveled over two hundred miles without ever really leaving your campsite in Port Townsend. Doesn’t it?”

Amelia sighed and then reached for her bottle of water.

“I’ve just met you, Amelia,” she continued. “But you don’t seem like a murderer to me. And what would your motive be, anyway? You loved your brother. As for that neighbor woman who saw you, why do you still believe her even after she recanted what she said? No one else believed her, but you did. Why do you want to take the blame?”

Karen remembered going on like that for a few more minutes, until Amelia had started to calm down. She’d made her promise to go back to Booze Busters, and they’d agreed to meet twice a week.

That had been four months ago. Karen didn’t need to hear bits of a flashback in which Amelia’s biological mother asked if someone had touched her “down there” to presume she’d been abused in some way as a young child. All the classic attributions of child abuse were there in the 19-year-old: her low self-esteem, nightmares, flashbacks, lost time, and her assuming guilt for just about everything.

A perfect example of this was Amelia’s episode with her boyfriend, Shane, and how quickly Amelia had assumed she’d done something wrong when he said he’d seen her in that car with another man. Amelia had gone and gotten herself tested, because she’d automatically figured herself guilty of infidelity. It never seemed to have occurred to her that Shane might have been mistaken.

There were a lot of problems they worked on over the next four months. And in that time, Karen felt a special bond forming with this young woman who depended on her so much. She was more like Amelia’s big sister than her therapist.

Amelia had kept her promise and went back to Booze Busters. And though things still got a little rocky with Shane from time to time, they continued to see each other. Her grades were improving at school. Mark and Jenna Faraday had both e-mailed Karen to tell her what a wonderful job she’d been doing with Amelia. Her whole outlook has improved 100 percent since she started seeing you, Jenna Faraday had written.

Karen e-mailed back and thanked them. She’d been tempted to ask the Faradays to reconsider hiring a private detective to look into what had happened to Amelia’s biological parents. But she’d left that up to Amelia instead. Amelia was nineteen, and old enough to discuss it with her parents herself. Unfortunately, for the last two months, Amelia had been procrastinating. She admitted she was afraid. “It’s not so much I’m worried about having been abused or anything like that,” she’d said. “I’m just scared that I might have done something really, really horrible.”

“Well, you were only four, Amelia,” Karen had replied. “You couldn’t have done anything that awful. Except for Damien in The Omen , how many totally evil four-year-olds do you know? We need to explore this time period in your life.”

Amelia’s problems couldn’t be completely treated until they knew what had happened to her as a child.

Now Karen stared at a framed photo of Jenna and Mark Faraday. They stood on a dock in sporty summer clothes with their arms around each other. The beautiful lake glistened in the background. Karen wondered if it was the same spot where their son had been killed. If so, the photo certainly must have been taken before that tragedy, at a happier time. How could they have known what would occur there? And just a few months later, they would be dead, too.

With a long sigh, Karen started toward the first door on the left. According to George’s directions, it was the guest room. The door was closed. Karen was about to knock, but hesitated. She heard Amelia murmuring something. Karen couldn’t tell if she was awake-or talking in her sleep.

“No,” Amelia said in a hushed tone. “You really don’t want that to happen. You don’t mean it. You mustn’t even think that.”

“Yes, well, thank you,” George said into the cordless phone. He sat at the breakfast table with Stephanie in his lap. “I’ll be here-waiting. Good-bye.”

Dazed, he clicked off the phone. “That was the police,” he said to Jessie.

Hovering over the stove with a fork in her hand, she gave him an expectant look.

“They’re coming over to ask me some questions. Could I ask you or Karen to stick around and keep an eye on the kids until the cops leave? They’ll probably want to talk to Amelia, too. I figure my study’s the best place.” He glanced down at Stephanie and resituated her in his lap.

Jessie nodded. “No sweat. I can stay here as long as you need me.”

He reached back for his wallet. “I’d like to pay you something for all your-”

“Your money’s no good here tonight, no sir,” Jessie said. “If you need someone to cook, clean, and babysit after today, I’ll gladly take your dough. But tonight, you put that wallet away.”

Following her instructions, George worked up a smile. “I don’t know you very well, Jessie. But I have a feeling you’re a gem.”