John Manning - The Killing Room

He sat back down on the hassock and took her hand again.

Carolyn looked over at Douglas. “I think he’s right. Asking her any questions is pointless.”

Douglas sighed, clearly disappointed. “Look, Mr. O’Toole. We came here because we want to help Jeanette…”

“What is it that your family is hiding?” Behind the thick glasses, Michael O’Toole’s blue eyes were blazing. “Why is that, in regular intervals, someone comes around trying to find out what caused Jeanette to be this way? Is the story I was always told not true? According to Mr. Young, Jeanette was found one morning during the family reunion simply wandering by the cliffs. She had left the house sometime in the night, and in the morning, no one had been able to find her. Then they spotted her out by the cliffs. When they caught up with her, she didn’t know them. She didn’t know herself. She didn’t speak. This is what was told to me.” He glared at Douglas. “Is there more to the story? Is there more that I should know?”

Douglas just looked away.

“That’s what they always do when I ask that,” Michael said, his anger boiling just under the surface. “They look away.”

“Mr. O’Toole,” Carolyn said, “what if we spoke with you in private? So that Jeanette couldn’t hear, and nothing might upset her?”

He stood. “You can come into the kitchen if you like.” He bent and kissed Jeanette’s cheek. “I’m just going to show our guests around the place, my dear. We will be right back.”

Jeanette remained motionless in her chair. When Carolyn stood, the eyes that had been looking at her did not follow. They simply fell upon the wall behind the sofa. Maybe, Carolyn thought, she had been wrong about Jeanette seeing her.

Once inside the kitchen, Carolyn cut straight to the point. “Mr. O’Toole, I think if we know what the names were that upset Jeanette, it could help us.”

“Help you with what?”

“I don’t know,” Carolyn admitted. “But we would like to help Jeanette.”

He frowned. “I can’t see where you can help her where so many doctors have failed.”

“Please,” Douglas added. “Can you just tell us the names?”

“Beatrice.” He said the word as if it were bitter on his tongue. “And Malcolm.”

Carolyn blinked. She had expected Beatrice. But Malcolm…this was a name she had never heard before.

“Malcolm?” she repeated.

“Yes. I don’t know if those names were the ones the man and the black woman were prepared to say, because I never allowed them to utter any. But the first man, the one who came here about twenty-five years ago, he used those names. I’ll never forget them.”

“And what was this man’s name?”

“He only identified himself as Dr. Fifer. I’m not sure how it was spelled. With an ‘F’ or a ‘Ph.’ But I’ll never forget him either, or how he upset Jeanette.”

Carolyn figured this Dr. Fifer must have been one of the many investigators Mr. Young had hired over the years to try to find an end to the curse of that room. She would have to go through the papers again to see if there were any files with such a name.

“I think,” she said to Douglas with a sense of heavy disappointment, “we’ve learned as much as we can here today.”

“Well, at least come say good-bye to Jeanette,” Michael said. “She may not seem it, but I am convinced she is more aware of her surroundings than any of us know. The nurses here tell me there is a certain brightening to her eyes on days she knows I will be here. Her skin is a little more sallow on days when, for whatever reason, I’ve been unable to make it in. After four decades, you learn to see these things.”

Carolyn smiled. “It’s really quite touching that you’ve made such a commitment to her.”

He smiled, some of his earlier friendliness returning to his expression. “There was no other way. I love her. She loves me.”

Carolyn instinctively reached out and cupped his hand.

Suddenly it seemed as if Michael O’Toole was about to cry. His cheeks flushed even redder, and his lips trembled. “Once, many, many years ago, maybe a year or so after Jeanette was first brought to Windcliffe, I considered maybe…” His voice broke. “I considered maybe if I should just move on. You know, my friends and my family, they were saying, ‘Michael, you need to pursue your own career, your own life.’” A couple of tears squeezed out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks, collecting into little pools behind his heavy glasses. “I thought I’d never have a real love, you know, if I stayed here with Jeanette. And I was really thinking that way…”

He turned, ashamed of himself.

“But then I had a dream,” he continued. “I had a dream of a woman. And the woman told me that if I loved Jeanette, I couldn’t leave her. I woke up knowing that I would always stay right by Jeanette’s side.”

Carolyn was near tears herself. She shook Michael’s hand, then Douglas did, too. Back in the living room, they bid good-bye to Jeanette. Douglas leaned in and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “That’s from my father,” he said.

Jeanette remained still in her chair.

Michael walked them to the door. “I’m sorry if I seemed overprotective. But I guess that’s what I am.”

Carolyn smiled. “I understand.”

She had opened the door to leave when she turned back to him.

“Mr. O’Toole,” she asked. “You said you had a dream of a woman…”

He nodded.

“Who was the woman in your dream?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve talked about it with my analyst. He thinks it was a manifestation of Jeanette. It was not the face of any woman I know. Just a female manifestation, my analyst said. A representation of my love for Jeanette.”

“Interesting,” Carolyn said, her hand still on the doorknob. But she didn’t leave. Douglas seemed curious as to why she was delaying. “But could you describe what she looked like, Mr. O’Toole?” Carolyn asked. “The woman in your dream? Do you remember?”

“I’ll never forget,” he said. “She had long dark hair and dark eyes, and she was wearing a long white dress.”

Chelsea pulled her BMW to a stop outside her Uncle Howard’s mansion. “We’re here,” she barked at her brother, who was asleep in the seat beside her.

Ryan just groaned.

Chelsea rolled her eyes. For the last two days Ryan had been a complete and utter mess. “Tragic,” she muttered under her breath, getting out of the car and walking around to the passenger’s side. She opened the door. “Come on! Get out!”

Slowly Ryan unbent his legs and rose out of the car.

“If Uncle Howard suspects how much blow you’ve been doing these last couple of days, he’ll disinherit you on the spot,” Chelsea told him. “You’d better straighten up fast, dear brother.”

“I’ll be fine,” he mumbled.

Chelsea had her doubts about that. Ever since she’d found him quivering in their father’s study a couple of days ago, Ryan had been a major train wreck. He went on a bender that night, snorting prodigious amounts of coke and drinking all the vodka they had in the house. So wasted did he become that their trip up to Maine had had to be postponed a day. Chelsea was beyond pissed. Ryan kept babbling about being terrified of “the man with the pitchfork.” He insisted such a creature had actually been in their house and had tried to kill him. He even tried to show Chelsea holes in the wall supposedly made by said pitchfork. But of course there were no holes that Chelsea could see.

“You are tragic,” she told her brother.

Now she hauled her bag out of the backseat, with Ryan barely having the strength to lift his own. His eyes were glassy and his movements awkward. A man had appeared wearing a valet uniform and a broad ingratiating smile. Chelsea tossed him the keys to the Beemer.