M.J. Rodgers - Beauty Vs. The Beast

“At your will, as opposed to Lee’s or Roy’s.”

“Yes. The first time it happened was quite unexpected. I had hypnotized Lee and asked him to tell me about his blackout periods, reasoning that an unconscious part of his mind must know. And it did. That unconscious part was Roy.”

“He popped up and introduced himself?”

Damian smiled. “Not exactly.”

“Then how did you know you were talking to this other personality?”

“Frankly, I didn’t know who I was talking to at first. The experience of finding another personality inside one’s patient is unnerving. It takes some adjusting and reflection on the part of a therapist not used to the phenomenon.”

“Lee was the only multiple case you had seen?”

“At that time, yes. I was eager to get up to speed on proper diagnosis and treatment. After I discovered Roy, I videotaped every subsequent session in order to be certain that I wouldn’t miss anything. That proved very fortunate. If I hadn’t had the tape to replay for Lee, I doubt he would have believed in the reality of Roy. You see, even people with multiple personalities have difficulty accepting the concept.”

Damian smiled at her with warm understanding for her reservations. “I know it must be difficult to take all this in,” he said.

Kay found herself wanting to immediately release her skepticism and accept whatever this man said. She caught herself just in time and shook herself mentally. Damn, but this psychologist was good at getting one’s defenses down. She’d have to be careful. Very careful.

She sat up straighter in her chair, cleared her throat. “How can a person’s mind become separated into these different personalities as you’ve described?”

“Psychological research connects the development of multiple personalities to a traumatic fragmenting of the core personality.”

“And the English version of that translates to...?”

He grinned at her, a very attractive grin.

“Perhaps an analogy would be helpful. If you think of our early-childhood personalities as rough diamonds and life experiences as the diamond cutter, then a multiple-personality individual is the result of life’s diamond cutter clearly missing its mark. The personality ends up shattered into pieces—sometimes two, far more often into many different pieces.”

“And in the case of your patient, the different fragmented personality piece that emerged as a young child was Roy.”

“He was chosen by the mind to exist in the hostile childhood environment.”

“What was the hostile environment that fragmented the personality?”

“Roy’s mother became pregnant as a young teen. Her parents arranged for the baby to be adopted by a childless couple they knew. However, when Roy was two, his teenage mother kidnapped him from his adoptive parents and fled the state with a guy she had just met. The man physically and emotionally abused the child.”

Kay sagged into the back of her chair. She had had to deal firsthand with the emotional devastation of child abuse in her first year as a lawyer in the King County prosecutor’s office. The anger and repulsion she’d felt at hearing such stories, along with her frustrated efforts to gather enough evidence to put away so many of the abusers, had finally driven her out of the prosecutor’s office and into civil law at a private firm.

She knew she was tough. But she no longer kidded herself that she would ever be tough enough to deal with such horrors and inhumanity with the dispassion the profession demanded. She forcibly refocused her attention to the issue at hand.

“Why didn’t the child’s mother protect him?”

“I don’t know for certain. Maybe due to fear for herself. But by turning her back to the abuse, she contributed to it.”

“You say Roy’s mother did this. But wasn’t she also Lee’s mother?”

“Physically, yes. Emotionally, no. Lee remembers little of his childhood. He seems to have nearly total amnesia for his own life events occurring before approximately six years ago.”

“But earlier you said that he views himself as a man in his thirties. How can he sense thirty-plus years of existence when he only remembers six?”

“It’s like Lee was sitting in front of a window opening to the world. He can tell you about the social and cultural changes that have occurred during most of his lifetime, including names of presidents and world events. He just can’t relate them to anything personal that happened to him until about six years ago.”

“Because six years ago was when he began to interact with life and not just watch it.”

“Yes, very well put, Kay. The Lee personality existed in early childhood only as an observer. He lived in a kind of mental attic where he felt protected and safe. Then six years ago, he came down from his mental attic and began to take over from the Roy personality.”

Despite the fact that Kay was still having difficulty getting her mind to accept the bizarre nature of this disorder, she couldn’t help but be fascinated by it. Two people inside one mind—each compartmentalized into separate memories and identities. It was literally mind-boggling.

“You said Lee Nye came to you for help. Did Roy Nye also seek help?”

“No. Roy Nye attributed his memory losses to alcoholic stupors.”

“And when he learned about Lee?”

“When I showed him the videotape of the sessions with Lee in control, he erupted first into denial, then anger.”

“How does he handle the situation now?”

“He doesn’t. Roy Nye is dead.”

Kay blinked in surprise. “Dead?”

“Yes. He died four years ago. Which brings me to why I’m here, Kay. Mrs. Roy Nye has filed a three-million-dollar wrongful-death lawsuit against me.”

“Your patient was married?”

“No, Lee wasn’t married. Roy was.”

“And Roy’s widow blames you for Roy’s death?”

“Yes.”

“Because of your treatment?”

“Yes.”

“Were formal charges ever brought against you in connection with Roy Nye’s death?”

“No.”

“Did the police ever consider you a suspect?”

“The police were never involved.”

“If Roy died of natural causes or an accidental death, how can his wife—”

“Roy died neither by accident nor by natural causes.”

Kay leaned her forearms on her desk, trying to bore past the solid wall of secrecy in those deep green eyes.

“Okay, I confess I’m confused. How did Roy Nye die?”

His eyes never left hers. His deep voice did not alter a decibel as he delivered the news.

“I killed him.”

Damian watched his admission rivet Kay’s spine into stiff attention.

He had intentionally shocked her. He wanted to find out who the woman was inside that delicately petite five-foot two-inch frame.

From the moment he’d walked into her office, he’d sensed that Kay Kellogg was nothing like the image she presented.

Not that the image she presented was at all hard to take. Her long, honey-gold hair strained against its imprisonment beneath a silver barrette at the top of her head. Her eyes floated like plump blueberries in her milk-white face. She moved as gracefully as a slim willow, her soft voice sifting through the office like a gentle breeze rustling leaves.

And when she had taken his hand and his body had registered the strong current passing between them, he knew no woman had ever affected him so immediately or so thoroughly.

No doubt about it. Kay Kellogg possessed that kind of natural, land-mine femininity that instantly and spontaneously detonated deep in a man’s body, forcibly reminding him why he was happy to be a man.

She knew it, too, and the knowledge did not make her happy. That was evident by her lack of makeup and jewelry and the formalness and formidability of her dark blue linen suit and the high collar of her light blue cotton blouse.