Gurney smiled. “You must have put a lot of thought and effort into engineering that view of the experience.”
“That’s part of my job.”
“You give them a framework for understanding what’s happening?”
“You could put it like that.”
“Like what a magician does,” said Gurney. “Or a politician.”
“Or any competent preacher or teacher or doctor,” said Ashton mildly.
“Incidentally,” said Gurney, deciding to test the effect of a hairpin turn in the conversation, “was Jillian injured in any way in the days leading up to the wedding-anything that would have caused bleeding?”
“Bleeding? Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
“There’s a question about how the blood got on the bloody machete.”
“Question? How could that be a question? What do you mean?”
“I mean the machete might not have been the murder weapon after all.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It might have been placed in the woods prior to your wife’s murder, not after it.”
“But… I was told… her blood…”
“Some conclusions could have been premature. But here’s the thing: If the machete was put in the woods before the murder, then the blood on it must have come from Jillian before the murder. The question is, do you have any idea how that could have happened?”
Ashton looked stunned. His mouth opened. He seemed about to speak, didn’t, then finally did. “Well… yes, I do… at least theoretically. As you may know, Jillian was being treated for a bipolar disorder. She took a medication that required periodic blood tests to assure that it remained within the therapeutic range. Her blood was drawn once a month.”
“Who drew the blood?”
“A local phlebotomist. I believe she worked for a medical-services provider out of Cooperstown.”
“And what did she do with the blood sample?”
“She transported it to the lab where the lithium-level test was performed and the report was generated.”
“She transported it immediately?”
“I imagine she made a number of stops, her assigned client route, whatever that might be, and at the end of each day she’d deliver her samples to the lab.”
“You have her name and the names of the provider and the lab?”
“Yes, I do. I review-reviewed, I should say-a copy of the lab report every month.”
“Would you have a record of when the last blood sample was drawn?”
“No specific record, but it was always the second Friday of the month.”
Gurney thought for a moment. “That would have been two days before Jillian was killed.”
“You’re thinking that Flores somehow intervened at some point in that process and got hold of her blood? But why? I’m afraid I’m not really understanding what you’re saying about the machete. What would be the point of it?”
“I’m not sure, Doctor. But I have a feeling that the answer to that question is the missing piece at the center of the case.”
Ashton raised his eyebrows in a way that looked more baffled than skeptical. His eyes seemed to be moving across the disturbing points of some inner landscape. Eventually he closed them and sat back in his tall chair, his hands clasped over the ends of the elaborately carved armrests, his breathing deep and deliberate, as though he might be engaged in some tranquilizing mental exercise. But when he opened them again, he only looked worse.
“What a nightmare,” he said. He cleared his throat, but it sounded more like a whimper than a cough. “Tell me something, gentlemen. Have you ever felt like a complete failure? That’s how I feel right now. Every new horror… every death… every discovery about Flores or Skard or whatever his name is… every bizarre revelation about what’s really been happening here at the school-everything proves my total failure. What a brainless idiot I’ve been!” He shook his head-or rather moved it back and forth in slow motion, as if it were caught in some oscillating underwater current. “Such foolish, fatal pride. To think that I could cure a plague of such incredible, primitive power.”
“Plague?”
“Not the term my profession commonly applies to incest and the damage it does, but I think it’s quite accurate. The longer I’ve worked in this field, the more I’ve come to believe that of all the crimes human beings commit against one another, the most destructive by far is the sexual abuse of a child by an adult-especially a parent.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why? It’s simple. The two primal human relationship modes are parenting and mating. Incest destroys the distinct patterns of these two relationships by smashing them together, essentially polluting them both. I believe that there is traumatic damage to the neural structures that support the behaviors natural to each of these relationship modes and that keep them separate. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so,” said Gurney.
“A bit over my head,” said Hardwick, who’d been quietly observing the exchange between Ashton and Gurney.
Ashton shot him a glance of disbelief. “An effective therapy for that kind of trauma needs to rebuild boundaries between the parent-child repertoire of responses and the mating repertoire of responses. The tragedy is that no therapy can match in force-in sheer megatonnage of impact-the violation it seeks to repair. It’s like rebuilding with a teaspoon a wall smashed by a bulldozer.”
“But… wasn’t that the problem you chose to focus your career on?” asked Gurney.
“Yes. And now it’s perfectly clear that I’ve failed. Totally, miserably failed.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You mean not every graduate of Mapleshade has chosen to disappear into some sick sexual underworld? Not every one has been slaughtered for pleasure? Not every one has gone on to have children and rape them? Not every one has emerged as sick and deranged as when she entered? How can I know that? All I know at this point is that Mapleshade under my control, guided by my instincts and decisions, has turned into a magnet for horror and murder, a hunting preserve for a monster. Under my leadership Mapleshade has been utterly destroyed. That much I know.”
“So… what now?” asked Hardwick sharply.
“What now? Ah. The voice of a practical mind.” Ashton closed his eyes and said nothing for at least a full minute. When he spoke again, it was with a strained ordinariness. “What now? The next step? The next step for me is to go downstairs to the chapel, show my face, do what I can to calm their nerves. What your next step is… I have no idea. You say you came here because of a gut feeling. You’d better ask your gut what to do next.”
He got up from his massive velvet chair, taking something resembling a remote garage-door opener from the desk drawer. “The downstairs lights and locks are operated electronically,” he said, explaining the device. He started to leave, got as far as the door, came back, and switched on the large computer monitor behind his desk. A picture appeared: the main interior chapel space, with a stone floor and high stone walls whose colorless austerity was broken by intermittent burgundy drapes and indecipherable tapestries. The dark wood pews were not set in the rows typical of churches but had been rearranged into half a dozen seating areas, each made up of three pews formed into a loose triangle, evidently to facilitate discussion. These areas were filled with teenage girls. From the monitor speakers came a hubbub of female voices.
“There’s a high-definition camera and a mike down there, transmitting to this computer,” said Ashton. “Watch and listen, and you’ll get some sense of the situation.” Then he turned and left the room.
Chapter 75
The computer screen showed Scott Ashton coming in through the chapel’s rear door behind the groupings of pews and closing it behind him with a heavy thump, the small remote unit still in one hand. The girls filled most of the space in the pews-some sitting normally, some sideways, some in cross-legged yoga positions, some kneeling. Some seemed lost in their own thoughts, but most were engaged in conversations, some more audible than others.