Jericho's Fall, page 9
The d—
The dog?
No, no, no, Beck, no, your imagination is working overtime—
I dreamed it.
It was real.
She picked up the phone again. Pamela chattered away. She stepped into the hallway, peered around the corner toward the master suite. Dak wanted her to talk to Jericho, she remembered. To reason with him. But whatever part of Jericho’s mind remained was readying for war.
Beck tiptoed down the back stairs to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. She heard a faint rumble, possibly her friends in the helicopter, but when she peered out the window, the night sky was innocent. Still breathing hard, she went to the fridge, got a beer. Pamela strode in the door, still in her jeans, eyeing Rebecca’s nightie with disapproval.
“What are you doing up?” Now eyeing the beer bottle.
“Are you done?”
Pamela looked at the phone in her hand. “With this?”
“Yes. I need it.”
“Why?”
Beck was ready to fight somebody, and Pamela would do fine. “I just do.”
“I’m waiting for a call—”
“I’ll only be a minute,” said Rebecca, and took the handset without waiting to be told she couldn’t. Pamela gave her a foul look, muttered something about letting her know when she was done, and stomped from the room.
Rebecca, relieved, at once tapped out her mother’s number. Busy. At this time of night. She tried again. Busy. She tried Nina’s cell phone. Voice mail. Her mother’s phone again. Still busy.
She was about to give up when the busy signal stopped. A wave of static washed over the line, just like the one she kept hearing on her cell. Then, distant and fuzzy, what might have been laughter. Yes. A man, laughing, on a phone line not at that moment connected to a call.
“Hello?” she said.
More laughter, louder. Then, surrounded by static, a familiar voice. Jericho’s voice, on the line. The Former Everything. Scratchy but intelligible. “Bought us a place in Colorado, Becky-Bear. Lots of privacy. Just for the two of us. You’ll love it.”
“That’s not funny!” she shouted. “You bastard!”
“Eight hundred acres, great views, the middle of nowhere.”
“You fucking—”
“The middle of nowhere,” Jericho repeated. “The middle of nowhere.” The static rose. His voice seemed to fade. “The middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere.”
“What are you—”
“The middle of nowhere. Of nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere.”
The static drowned the words.
Beck slammed down the phone and charged up to the master suite. Audrey, in pajamas and robe, was just about to go in.
“Hey, honey, what’s wrong?”
“He’s a monster,” Beck snarled.
“I know that, but what’s wrong right now?”
Quaking too much to explain, Rebecca smashed the door open and rushed the bed, Audrey on her heels. All the old insults were pouring out of her mouth, some of them not only obscene but tongue-twistingly long, while the nun tried frantically to quiet her.
Beck stopped.
Jericho was fast asleep. The nose tube was in.
“He’s had a rough couple of hours,” said Audrey, brushing past her, lifting the arm to check the pulse. “I gave him an extra pain pill.”
“I just—I just talked to him—”
Audrey’s eyes were gentle. “No, honey. You didn’t.”
There was no telephone in the room. Beck had forgotten. Audrey unplugged it at night, so that her father could rest.
CHAPTER 10
The Nun
(i)
“That’s very”—Audrey searched for the word—“unusual,” she finally said, busying herself with the kettle. Tea seemed to be her solution to everything.
“You don’t believe me,” said Beck, still trembling.
“I didn’t say that,” said Audrey, too quickly, and Rebecca remembered that she used to be a psychologist. The heavy shoulders moved. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“The house phone works fine,” said Pamela, as though this was the point. “I tried it twice. No ghosts.”
“I didn’t say it was a ghost.”
“Excuse me.” Pamela leaned against the aging counter, arms folded, malice in her eyes as she smiled down at her father’s ex-lover. “No inexplicable recordings of Dad’s voice from fifteen years ago.”
“I know it sounds crazy.”
“That’s exactly how it sounds.”
Audrey was serving the tea. “Leave her alone,” she said tiredly “She’s had a fright.” One of her father’s phrases.
Pamela’s face was hard. She was wearing the same faded jeans. She never seemed to sleep. “Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t.”
Beck’s temper boiled. “I didn’t make it up.”
“I don’t know. You were always the drama queen.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” She looked from one daughter to the other, the spooky phone call forgotten. “Is there something I should know?”
Pamela folded her arms. “You always seem to wind up the center of attention, don’t you, Rebecca? There’s always an emergency with you. You’d fit in nicely in Hollywood.”
“Now, look—”
“I’d love to stay and chat,” Pamela said, “but some of us have actual work to do.” She stalked out.
“You have to understand my sister,” said Audrey, mopping up the counter as Beck stared after her longtime adversary. Nothing had spilled. The granite gleamed. But cleaning was what Audrey did. “She’s not usually this way.”
“Only around me.”
A wan smile. “Pretty much.”
“She blames me because Jericho left your mother. Doesn’t she get that I was a kid?” Rubbing her temples. Sipping the tea. Herbal and calming. “And your father—he was the one who—”
Again she hesitated, the memories rosier than she wanted them to be, the brilliant and overpowering Dr. Ainsley charming the inexperienced sophomore in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study, teasing her, flattering her, one week after another, undressing her with his eyes, and Beck herself drifting out of the room in a fog, passing Mrs. Blumen, who glared as if Rebecca were Hester Prynne. And then, at last, the night he maneuvered her to his house, the party for his graduate students and a few selected undergraduates, lying through his teeth—but, then, she had guessed that he was—
Belatedly, she found her place. “He said the marriage was already over.”
Audrey grew thoughtful. “It was, in a way. My folks were pretty much living separately by then. Still, it was a shock when he actually left. A shock for the kids especially. Not so much for my mother. Dad had been enough trouble to Mom, and, frankly, Mom had been enough trouble to Dad, too.” She was cupping the cross on its chain around her neck. “I’m supposed to believe that marriages are made in heaven. Believe it or not, the official position of the Episcopal Church remains that divorce is not a part of God’s plan. But some marriages, Beck—well, some of them are doomed from the start, despite the best intentions of the parties. And my folks didn’t always have the best intentions.”
“Then why does your sister hate me?”
“She doesn’t hate you. Not really. She hates the same thing I do, that the people who brought us into being weren’t willing to stick it out. You’re a symbol for her, Beck—sorry, this is the psychologist in me coming out—but you are. You’re a symbol for what she hates, the two-facedness of the Ainsley marriage. And of course you’re the only one he ever moved in with. She hates that, too.”
And that Jericho outlived his ex-wife. Beck was willing to bet that her father’s relative longevity was something else Pamela unknowingly hated.
“And what do you think?” she asked after a moment.
“I think life is complicated.”
“Meaning what?”
Scrubbing, scrubbing. “You know what my father says? People are like countries. They never really understand each other. Your enemies have virtues you might have to count on one day. And your best friends can let you down.”
While Beck turned this over in her mind, the cell phone rang.
(ii)
It had been sitting there on the granite countertop, the forgotten exhibit during the conversation. Beck stared at it in mute horror. Before she could force herself to answer, Audrey had swept it up.
“Don’t,” Rebecca said, making a futile grab.
Audrey shushed her, pressed green, listened.
“Is it Nina?”
“No.”
“Who is it?”
The nun made a face and pressed the disconnect button. “I see what you mean,” she said, turning the phone over and over in her hands.
“You heard her, didn’t you?”
“I heard the static. I heard the whine. I didn’t hear any voices.”
“But—”
“Sorry, honey.” She passed the phone back across the table. “It’s random scatter. Electronic noise. It happens up here with mobile phones sometimes.” She was at the sink again, washing cutlery. She picked up a fork, pointed at the window. “Especially in bad weather.”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“It’s a mountain thing. Reflections of distant signals, distortions—”
“What about the static on the house phone?”
“Up here? Phone calls that travel over miles and miles of old copper wires? Happens all the time.”
Something in Audrey’s tone bothered her. “Why are you trying so hard?”
“Trying to do what?”
“To persuade me that there’s nothing to worry about.”
The angelic smile, the eyes as always withheld. “Because I don’t want you to worry.”
“Why not?” Tapping the phone. “I’d say I have plenty to worry about.”
Audrey hesitated. “I was a psychologist, Beck. That’s how I was trained. And, well, I think you’re worrying too much.”
“You think I dreamed it. Or I’m making it up.”
“I think you’re worrying too much.”
Exhaustion and frustration fought an inconclusive battle. Beck’s voice was brittle. “Let’s say you’re right about the random scatter. That explains the snippets of voice mail. It doesn’t explain Jericho’s voice.”
“Or what you thought was his voice.”
“I know what I heard.”
Audrey shook her head. “No, Beck. You don’t. You can never know what you heard. You can only know what your mind tells you that you heard.” She waved down the rising objection. “Listen for a minute. Please, honey. When I was a psychologist, my field was cognition. The tricks the mind plays to make sense of the world. One of the classic cognition experiments involves playing static for people but telling them that there are voices hidden in the noise. In fact, there’s nothing but static, but if the subjects think there are words, they’ll find them. They’ll sit and strain and shut their eyes, and then, when the sounds are done, they’ll tell you they heard somebody reading Bible verses, the President giving a speech, their grandmother’s dying advice. It happens all the time. There’s even a name for it—”
“We can skip the details, thanks.”
“It doesn’t mean you’re crazy, honey. That you heard Jericho’s voice. It means you’re normal.”
Another awkward hiatus. Audrey was back at her scrubbing. Rebecca sipped the tea, then tried the phone again, but there was no service. She cocked an ear toward the window. “Listen,” she said.
“It’s raining.”
“No. Not just the rain. Hear that? It’s a helicopter.”
The nun dutifully shut off the water. She shook her head. “I don’t hear it.”
“It’s very faint. But, Aud, the thing is, Dak said people might be watching me. Let’s say you’re right. I’m making things up based on the static. Well, every time I get the static, the helicopter is around. I don’t know how they do it, but whoever’s up there has been sending static to my phone. Messages, too. Even Nina’s voice mail—”
Rebecca stopped. Audrey’s eyes had that kindly look again. Beck realized how she must sound.
“Forget it,” she said, not wanting to hear another lecture from the former psychologist about how the mind plays tricks. Beck tried to remember exactly how many beers it had actually been. Angry, bitter, exhausted, a little tipsy: oh, Audrey could cite a million symptoms if she tried.
But the nun was washing dishes again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Whatever you heard, I’m sorry you have to go through it.”
“Thank you,” said Beck, and meant it. A beat. She listened, but could no longer hear the helicopter. You’re about to become very popular. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Sure, honey.”
“Jericho said—well, he seemed pretty adamant that I should ask you why you quit your job. Why you left your husband. Why you became a nun.”
Audrey smiled. “I bet he told you I like girls, too.”
“That’s not my business.”
“It’s not even true. Well, maybe it is a little. But that’s not why I left my husband. Dad just likes to get under people’s skin. He’s desperate to get under mine.” She had moved on to the pots now. “My husband was a very sweet man named Teddy Gould. I left Teddy because he wanted children and I didn’t. He was a nice guy, ergo, in Jericho’s mind, I was gay. But, the truth is the reason I didn’t want children had nothing to do with sex. It had to do with children.”
“You don’t like children?”
“I love children, Beck.” Scrubbing harder. “I just didn’t particularly want to bring any into the world my father made. The world I helped him make.”
“You?”
“Didn’t he tell you? We used to work together.”
Beck shook her head, but already the pieces were falling into place. Jericho was angry at his elder daughter for quitting the family business. And what was the family business? Beck had assumed he meant the academy, but Jericho was a professor for all of two years. Dak had told her that the Agency sometimes employed psychologists. Her father had specialized in—
“Interrogation. You worked with him on interrogation techniques.”
“Only the painless ones,” she said, then laughed at her own glib self-justification. “Yes, Beck. That’s what I did. This was the nineties, the early days of what everybody wound up calling the War on Terror. I don’t want to go into details.” She put one pot on the drying rack, took up the other. “This was when I was a professor. My dissertation was about containing certain cognitive deficits by controlling the environment in which the patient functioned—never mind. The point is, when my father saw it, he realized there were applications to—well, to his work.”
“Brainwashing. You’re talking about brainwashing.”
“Not exactly. No. But interrogation, yes. Getting the subject to the point where he wants to cooperate. Oh, no, not like you’re thinking. Not like in the movies. Drugs. Torture. Not like that. Just slowly breaking down the world your subject knows, and replacing it with a world of your own devising. You never touch him physically. You control his environment. You keep him guessing, keep him off balance, keep changing the rules, until, after a while, he doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t. That’s when he’ll cling to any anchor. And you give him a new reality. A better one.”
“Sounds awful.”
The nun was unfazed. “You’re right. It was awful. Only I didn’t know it. I had consulting contracts with the Agency. I made a good living, dispensing advice. And sometimes I got to help put my own theories into practice. Pretty exciting for a social scientist.”
Rebecca felt slightly ill. “Are you saying you actually participated in—”
Audrey held up a hand. “Yes.” She dropped her eyes.
“But you stopped.”
“Let’s just say I got disgusted with myself. I became a psychologist to help people, not to—”
A roll of thunder, loud as a car bomb, distracted them both.
“I stayed at the Agency after Dad left,” Audrey resumed. “I was there until shortly after 9/11. I had charge of an interrogation of one of the suspects in—well, never mind what he was a suspect in. We always did these interrogations abroad. No lawyers, no courts, no journalists. We were the Morlocks. That’s what we told ourselves. The Morlocks, protecting the country in ways you could never explain in the sunshine.” She saw Beck’s face. “Yes. I see he’s told you that line. Pretty pitiful, isn’t it? But that’s what we were. The Morlocks. Anyway, this particular interrogation—well, things got a little out of hand. We followed the rules, we applied my theories, we didn’t do any physical harm, but the results—oh, Beck. We had a man who had done—well, something really terrible—and we used my techniques, and they all worked perfectly, and he wound up regressing so far that he—he just couldn’t—” She stopped. The broad shoulders slumped. “Anyway, when I got back to the States, I realized things were getting out of hand more and more often. I won’t say extreme measures are never necessary. I will say, well—once you admit they’re necessary in certain rare cases?—you wind up deciding that all the cases are rare ones.” She returned to her scrubbing, although everything glistened. “Anyway, my marriage was going to pieces. I was traveling all the time, Teddy was getting adamant about kids, and—well, I came up here to see my dad, and he was his usual crazy self. ‘You can be a torturer and a mother,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty much the same job.’”
“He could be nasty,” Beck breathed, but her mind was on something else.
“Still can. Anyway, we argued for a couple of days, Dad and I, and then I just left. I had no idea where I was going. I just got in the car and drove around. For two, three days, staying in motels. I was near Colorado Springs when I saw the sign. A convent. An Episcopal convent. The nuttiest thing—but I was curious. I’ve never been a shrinking violet. I rang the bell and had a bite to eat. Had a little tour, saw the work they did, and”—she looked up, an unexpected defiance in her glare— “and it was like God had hit me over the head. I knew what I had to do. I left my job, I left my husband, and I gave away what money I had. The rest—I wrote instructions for the lawyers to get rid of that, too, once I inherited it.” The anger melted into peace. “We’re not like the Catholics, Beck. We don’t require a vow of poverty. Celibacy, either. But I took both. It made things—better.”
