Mark felt a ripple of distaste, the first sense of regret over letting her probe around in his unconscious mind. It was easier to accept the notion that his subconscious believed in ghosts than it was to think he would give his mother any credit for logic.
“The creek name,” he said, waving a hand. “That’s all that was.”
“The creek name?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “My mother had a bullshit persona that connected to the creek name, which would be on maps. I get it. Don’t worry about it. You just said yourself that you’re not trying to interpret for me.”
She gave a slow nod, but he felt like a specimen under a microscope.
“What was the deal with my hand?” He made the circle with his thumb and index finger again.
“That was done while we asked your subconscious mind to close the link between past and present.”
Exactly what he’d understood, even though he hadn’t remembered the moment.
“Well, I’m impressed, I’ll admit that,” he said finally. “Sadly, it didn’t turn up much of value.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. Many times the value of memory — of the unconscious in general — isn’t readily apparent.”
“Melting boards aren’t going to get me far with the sheriff or going forward with Ridley. That seems readily apparent.”
“I asked about going forward.”
“Oh? Did I crack the case?” Mark was smiling until she answered.
“You seemed to take a macro view of the question. You told me that you would have to go to a place called Cassadaga, and then to the mountains.”
She watched his smile fade into something hard and cold and said, “Cassadaga has meaning to you, I take it?”
“A little. But I won’t be going there.”
“What about the mountains?”
“I don’t care for the mountains. If I can avoid them, I will.”
“Why is that?”
“I’ve seen enough of them.” He got to his feet and picked up his phone from where it rested, still recording, on the coffee table beside him. He stopped the recording, put the phone in his pocket, and looked outside. The sky was cloudless today and the sun was gorgeous on the snow.
“You’re willing to go into that cave with Ridley if it can be arranged?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“And you honestly believe that he will say something of value?”
“He wants to show me the place. He’s made that clear.”
“It’s a hell of a risk for you,” Mark said.
“I understand that. Do you think you can get us access?”
He thought of Danielle MacAlister, crying in her basement chair surrounded by Ridley’s hand-drawn maps.
“I think it’s possible.”
46
The sweat didn’t start until he was back in the rental car, and he was out of the driveway before he allowed himself to use his shirtsleeve to mop his face. He had wanted the hypnosis to work, had wanted to see Julianne Grossman provide something that allowed him to believe in her, but a part of him — larger maybe than he’d expected at first — was terrified at the idea that she’d been able to take him to a place in which he’d communicated without awareness or memory of it. Mark had no conscious ranking of his personal values, but one had floated to the surface during his time in Garrison: control. He didn’t just want it, he craved it. Self-control, he would have called it once, but that was a lie. The word was control, pure and simple, and though he’d sacrificed it willingly with Julianne this time, it still hadn’t settled comfortably.
He was still sweating and so he put down the window and let the chill in. When his phone rang and it was Jeff London, he stared at the display with surprise. Only yesterday he would have picked it up eagerly. Now it seemed to confuse his purpose.
“Hey, Jeff.”
“Hey, Jeff? I left two messages. Markus, I’ve got to sit down with the board tomorrow. Do you have anything, and I mean anything, for me to show in your defense? I thought you said that you were making progress!”
“I am.”
“Good.” Jeff’s exhalation was audible. “Tell me something I can use.”
“I’m not quite there yet.”
“I don’t mean full resolution, I mean anything! What happened to the hypnotist? What about the ketamine? What can I tell them?”
The road rolled by for a few seconds before Mark said, “You know I’ve never broken a case?”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Not one case. I never broke one open.”
“Bullshit you didn’t. Your work was critical on so many different—”
“Critical, sure. I made some finds. I passed them off to you. I never got to see one through. That’s the point, isn’t it, Jeff? To come in without the truth and stay until you’ve learned it?”
“The point is generating quality work product for the team.”
“Did you ever solve one? I mean really solve one? Ever go from looking at crime scene photographs of a murder victim to seeing the truth come to the surface thanks to your own work?”
Jeff’s voice softened. “A few times.”
“How’d that feel?”
“Why are you asking this?”
“I need to know,” Mark said. The wind had picked up again and it should have chilled him but the cold felt good, familiar in the ways he’d wanted to deny when he arrived. “I need to know what it feels like. Maybe you were right that it shouldn’t be Lauren’s case.”
“I know I’m right about that. You’ll drown in those waters, Markus. You’ve already come close. Don’t go back in.”
“Sarah Martin isn’t Lauren. But she deserves it just as much.”
“They all do,” Jeff said. “It’s the reason I sent you up there to begin with. I’ve already acknowledged that was a mistake. Don’t double-down on it. Please.”
Mark was now just two miles from Trapdoor, and the open fields came into view and with them the snow-covered, collapsing trailer and beyond those and far on the horizon the high bluffs where the horses had been visible on Mark’s first visit. He hadn’t heard back from the Leonard family. Maybe it was time to go see the old man again. Maybe it was—
“Markus? Mark?”
The urgency in Jeff’s voice made Mark blink back into reality. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m here.” But he’d pulled off the road and was staring at the trailer. “Listen, Jeff, I’ve got to go. I’ll be back in touch fast. With something you can use. I promise.”
He disconnected before Jeff could utter a response.
What had once been the drive to the trailer was so overgrown that small shrubs were visible even beneath the blanket of snow. The trailer still stood, but that was a generous term. The whole structure canted to the left, like a sinking ship listing to port. On the road-facing side, the roof was bowed in almost to its limits. The windows were broken and even the plywood sheets that had been fastened to them from the inside were pocked with holes and splinters. A corrugated metal ramp that had once served as a front porch was disengaged from the main building completely; at least three feet of air separated the top of the ramp from the front door.
Mark killed the engine and stepped out of the car. To the east he could see the bluffs, no horses in sight today, and to the south he could see the tree line where the bluffs began their descent to Maiden Creek and the caverns its water had opened. He turned again, putting his back to the trailer, and looked to the west, his face into the wind.