Confess to Me, page 23
“Yes.” I considered commenting on his beautiful rose bushes, asking why he wasn’t waiting another month for the weather to cool before he planted them, but Emily was in the car. “Gal Kender said a coyote killed her opossums. She said her son saw it happen. Why would she tell you and me a different story?”
His gaze dropped to his rose bushes. “Huh. That’s weird,” he said. “Maybe her husband told me that.” He looked at me, shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ll have to check my case notes. I dug them out a few days ago after you stopped by,” he said, that aw-shucks smile spreading on his face. He raised an eyebrow. “Her husband’s serving time, you know?”
“You think he was involved with Dawn’s murder?”
He shrugged. “Could be. He molested a few kids.”
I might have winced. My heart ached. It felt torn and pulpy. I pictured Becky, so slender, skin flawless, swimming in the Kenders’ pool while Gary did yard work. All those weeks my mom and I were staying with the Paulsons, and Becky stayed with the Kenders.
“Someone put a dead opossum on my front porch the other day.”
“Well, that’s crummy.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked down at his pile of dirt. “Sounds like someone’s trying to warn you to back off. Threaten you, your family, don’t it?”
Sure did.
I didn’t think the same person would be sending me texts, luring me to Hunther, then dumping a dead carcass on my doorstep. Had to be someone else.
“Thanks for your time,” I said, and headed back to my car. I wasn’t halfway there when he called my name.
“Your husband is Judy Bishop’s son?”
I hesitated, alarm skating up my spine.
“When you stopped by before, you said your mother-in-law was Judy Bishop, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you asked your husband about Dawn?” he said. “He was one of the boys who found her body. Those two, they were a thing.”
* * *
Trevor was calling me. The circus theme ringtone, for the first time, sounded ominous. I let it go to voicemail.
I called Visha on my hands-free. While it rang, I peeked in my rearview mirror at Emily. She ate a breakfast sandwich while staring at the iPad screen in her lap. The car was smoggy with syrupy fast-food odors.
“Well it’s about time,” Visha said.
“I have a huge favor to ask.”
“I’ll do it.”
I laughed even though I was falling apart. “Can I drop Emily with you for the day? And for a sleepover?”
“Of course, oh my God, Aradhya will be out of her mind excited, but why aren’t you staying to visit?”
“I’ll tell you when I get there. I’ve got to go.” I ended the call. I’d tell her I was following some thread on my mom’s death, and I was not ready to talk about it. She knew my family was a tender subject.
* * *
After I’d dropped off Emily, I pulled into a gas station. While the tank filled, I sat in the driver’s seat and searched the Mayo Clinic’s medical staff on my phone.
There she was, looking plain with her hair ash blond and cut close, no smile. Sinclaire Paulson. Pathology. Not psychiatry like dear old dad.
I stared at her photo, searching for something, some vague characteristic, a fleshy mole, an arch of one eyebrow, that I might recognize. There was nothing.
I called and was transferred four times before a tired woman, someone who was borderline too laid back to work at a hospital, told me Claire was on shift till 3 p.m., but sometimes stayed late.
I checked my watch. I should be able to make it there by 3 p.m.
I returned the nozzle and screwed on my gas cap. I breathed in gasoline fumes. I loved the filthy smell. Always brought me back to the day I met Trevor.
Silly, relaxed Trevor, his lips wet and cherry red. A Slurpee in one hand, a jug of gasoline in the other. “Super Bass” blaring on the outdoor gas station speakers, him telling me that no one would beat him up while this song was playing. He’d tossed his Slurpee and written his phone number for me on the inside of his suit jacket.
He was one of the boys who found her body. Those two, they were a thing.
My stomach turned. It couldn’t be true, could it?
Sliding behind the wheel, I was tempted to listen to his voicemail. Instead, I queued up a YouTube playlist and some podcasts about Multiple Personality Disorder to listen to during my drive (Sybil, The Great Hysteric; Is MPD Real?; See My Alter Switch; MPD and Satanic Ritual Abuse).
65
Multiple Personality Disorder had emerged and reemerged a number of times throughout history. First, in 1957, when The Three Faces of Eve hit theaters. Then came Sybil, a late-seventies box office success. In the decade following Sybil, cases of MPD diagnosis skyrocketed, going from barely a hundred cases to over 40,000. The American Psychiatric Association officially recognized Dissociative Disorders in the early 1980s and, within a few years, MPD emerged as the most common of the Dissociative Disorders, though MPD was mostly a US phenomenon.
When a mental health condition only occurs in one country, doctors and scientists should be skeptical. No skeptics emerged.
The doctors who seemed to be most familiar with MPD were selected to head the Advisory Committee for Dissociative Disorders. These men were the authority, the publishers, and the profiteers as they sold out weekend workshops in Chicago and Boston, telling tales of cases and detailing how to diagnose and treat.
Anyone could see the commonalities between MPD and Judeo-Christian possession, just like Alice Paulson had said. The dissociative similarities were blatant, waiting like a dirty Band-Aid, edges peeling away, begging for someone to rip it off.
One of those doctors finally tore it off, publishing an article linking the MPD epidemic to child abuse committed by devil-worshipping cults. He hosted conferences to spread the word. Satanic cults were everywhere, he revealed, internationally organized, with councils and hierarchies. The general public ate it up. No one could explain exactly why organizations were slitting babies’ throats, drinking their blood, and worshipping the devil, but they also couldn’t get enough of it. Individuals were outed and prosecuted, though most cases were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.
I paused the podcast to take a bathroom break at a rest stop and buy a soda from the vending machine. My head hurt, and my skin crawled. Partly because yesterday’s sickness lingered, and partly because this podcast was getting under my skin. How did people buy into these conspiracies? Pulling back onto the highway, I pressed play on my podcast and continued listening.
The expert psychiatrists revealed that satanic ritual abuse was often part of transgenerational family traditions, like quilting and tree-trimming. Some families had been holding meetings, committing child abuse, and sacrificing animals and babies for hundreds of years.
A terrifying and irresistible story, the media rolled with it. Skeptics looked down at their shoes, half-worried they hadn’t realized Satan’s followers had been here all along, brushing past them in the grocery store, and half-worried to speak up for fear of being labeled and witch-hunted by the crazed mob.
A half dozen years later, the FBI Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico put in their two cents. They’d done a multi-year study and found no evidence of the existence of satanic cults engaged in criminal activity or the sacrificing of thousands of American babies.
It was like the emperor parading about in his new robes. At the parade’s start, everyone assumed his robes could only be seen by the intelligent and the good Christians. Once the child had called him out as naked, people couldn’t believe they’d gone along with it.
Psychiatrists distanced themselves from MPD and Satanic Ritual Abuse. They doubted the existence of MPD, claiming most cases were faked or therapist-induced, a by-product of manipulative psychiatrists. They cited MPD patients’ excitement to share their stories, claiming real mental health issues don’t typically seek attention and celebrity.
The Satanic Panic skeptics who’d stayed silent through the ’80s felt safe to come out of the woodwork in the mid-1990s and vilify the psychiatric rock stars of the previous decade. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation sprung up as the legal clearinghouse, countering false claims of “recovered memories” of child abuse, satanic or not.
By 1994, MPD was removed from the manual, renamed and revised to Dissociative Identity Disorder—this new name less freakshow, less scandalous, but still defined as the presence of two or more distinct personality states or identities within one person’s psyche. Some psychiatrists agreed DID indeed existed, but was rare and unsensational. If a person had different identities, you couldn’t see a switch, and it wasn’t a thrilling show; it was just another mundane and frustrating mental health challenge.
As I pulled into the parking garage at Mayo Clinic, I was dumbfounded at the damage these psychiatrists had caused. How had I never heard about this?
Desiree had said Cliff Paulson, my mom’s psychologist, was a rich, know-it-all asshole. Had Cliff Paulson been one of these doctors who sensationalized MPD and Satanic Ritual Abuse? Is that what happened to my mother?
66
I spent thirty minutes being ping-ponged between receptionists and hospital wings that seemed miles apart. No one wanted to tell me where I could find Sinclaire Paulson. I should have worn nicer clothes, put on makeup. People don’t trust middle-aged women that don’t look moderately painted and primed. Our wrinkled, worn faces gave off an unstable vibe.
I quit the receptionists and asked employees in scrubs and lab coats. I finally found a man in a lab coat too young to worry about job security who said, “I know Claire. Follow me.”
“Thank you.” I told him my name, that I knew Claire from when I was a kid, and I followed him like a lost puppy. “Do you work with Claire?” I said only because I didn’t like listening to our shoes click against linoleum.
“No, I’m in clinical path; she’s in anatomic. She works in the tissue lab. I couldn’t stand that. Too much microscope work, my eyes would bleed.” He laughed. “Wait here.” He used the lanyard around his neck to open a door and went inside.
“I will. Thank you,” I called as the door whooshed shut. I felt like I was waiting to meet Oz.
The door opened a few minutes later. She was short with close-cut ash hair, like her photo. Her eyes were green, her face was pale, and she had dark circles under her eyes that she hadn’t bothered lightening with makeup. Her expression was sharp. This was not a woman who smiled to make you feel comfortable. I immediately liked her.
“Heather?” she said, her voice flat, deep.
“Yes. Claire?”
“Wow, this is weird. I remember you. I mean, I don’t recognize you now, we’re really fucking old, but I remember you as a kid.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember much.”
“No offense taken. Besides, I was a year older than you.” She smiled. “I’m joking. Why, well, I mean, it’s nice to see you, but why are you here?”
“You wrote a letter to my mom?”
She sighed. “Right. Yeah, yeah. I was getting over a drug thing, making peace, all that crap. How is your mom?”
“She was murdered. Robbery gone wrong.” There was no point in sharing Holly’s theory and making Claire feel like she shouldered some of the blame.
“Oh, man, that sucks. I’m sorry. That’s awful.” She dug her hands into her pockets, bit her lip, and glanced down the hall.
“I’m not here to, well, I don’t want to stress you out. Your letter, I read it, it was kind.”
She nodded, a worried look on her face, maybe scratching at her brain to connect her letter to my mom’s murder. She’d said so herself in her letter, that her reaching out to my mom was an invitation to trouble.
“You mentioned videos?” I said, my voice rising because even though I drove five hours to get here, I was still questioning this.
“Yeah, yeah. I have copies of my dad’s videotapes on a thumb drive. I stole them actually. I copied them when I was an undergrad, when I finally realized my dad had done bad things. My parents were out at this hospital thing, this black-tie event.” She raised her eyebrows, getting a kick out of this story. “I rigged a setup, copied them to a hard drive. It was kind of hilarious.” She shifted and puffed up her cheeks. “I should have given them to your mom earlier. I meant to, actually, but, I… well, I was unsure of myself, and then college was rough, and I had this on and off drug thing.”
She looked down at her shoes, bit her lip again. “I haven’t talked to my parents for over a decade. I’m not excusing what my dad did, but he would not do well outside his Hunther bubble. I didn’t want him to go to prison, you know?”
Prison. Jesus. What did he do?
“No. I don’t know. I didn’t even know me and my mom lived with you until a few days ago.”
“Oh, oh,” she said, considering all the things she’d said, maybe regretting them. “Oh, God. I don’t know where to even start.”
“What about the videos. Can I see the videos?”
“Right. Why don’t you give me your address, I’ll mail you a drive.”
“I am kind of anxious about this. I don’t mind waiting until you’ve finished work, if that’s OK with you.”
“Oh, OK. I have something to wrap up. If you can wait thirty minutes, you can follow me to my place. Or, well, it might take an hour.” A switch had flipped. She went from helpful and nostalgic to suspicious. She did not want to deal with this right now.
“I can wait. I’m gonna get a coffee while you finish up. Give me your number so we don’t lose each other.”
“Huh?”
“What’s your number?”
She hesitated, then gave me her number. I called it right away. In her pocket, a bird tweeted.
I smiled. “Now you have my number, in case we lose each other.”
“Great,” she said flatly, doubting all her choices. Copying her dad’s videos, cutting ties with her parents, writing a letter as part of her 12-Step therapy. “See you in a bit,” she said and disappeared behind the employees-only door.
No way was I leaving for coffee. I sat on the cold, shiny hospital floor, my back against the wall.
67
Claire’s apartment was small, ugly, and dated. Cheap carpet, cheap blinds, laminate. Her parents were filthy rich, and here was Claire, living in a crummy apartment.
Maybe she was frugal, lived cheaply, had a million dollars socked away, and was planning an early retirement in the Keys.
“So, you’re a doctor?”
“Yeah. I’m a doctor and I drive a junky car and live here.” At the sink, she poured two glasses of water and handed one to me. “Cheers to student debt.” She clinked my glass. I wasn’t ready for it, so I splashed a little. She sipped. “There’s more to it than that, but there is serious student debt.” She opened her mouth, closed it, and said, unable to contain her smile, “Do you remember our backyard circus?”
“No.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s such a shame. This one time we built a ramp from plywood. We built it right in the grass and I rode my bike up it and you were supposed to toss a ball in the air for me to catch mid-flight, I have no idea what we were thinking, and you beamed me in the head with the ball and I went tumbling and was crying and you came running to help me but you tripped on the hose that was filling Donnie’s baby pool, and we were both lying on the ground, and Donnie stood from sitting in the pool and said, ‘Good job. Good job.’ He was only wearing a diaper and it sagged down to his knees. Oh my God, we laughed so hard.”
Her smile hung in reverie, and she sighed. She unclasped her bracelet, dropped it into a shallow dish holding jewelry. “I was so confused how I had this best friend sister living with me one day and the next day you were gone. You don’t remember living with us? Like, at all?”
“No. Shortly after living with you, my sister died. I think I have a bit of PTSD-memory loss.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It was a long time ago.” I shrugged, trying to lighten things. “Anyway, the suspense is killing me here.”
She grabbed her laptop and brought it to the couch. “Listen, my parents, they—my dad—he stole drugs from the hospital where they’re benefactors. He shouldn’t be a doctor. I mean, I should have written a letter to APA or the FBI—”
“You obviously feel awful about what happened,” I said. “I get it. Can you just show me?”
She set her laptop on the coffee table, and I sat on the couch in front of it. She said, “I’m going to change, and, well, you probably want to watch this alone.”
“This is widespread, folks. It is systemic and organized. The brainwashing, the programming, the murders, it’s no joke.”
Doctor Clifford Paulson, PhD Psychology
Transcripts from the Sixth Annual Conference on
Adult Manifestations of Childhood Trauma
THE RADISSON PLAZA HOTEL, CINCINNATI, OHIO
68
The video was playing, the seconds scrolled by on the bottom right, but the camera was recording an empty room. A white faded line moved vertically into frame, then disappeared. She’d digitized the recording, but the deterioration of the original film had been preserved.
In the room, a white cloth bag, cinched closed, sat upon a floral rug. In the background, a low corner table, old fashioned with wire latticework.
My armpits were sweaty, and I was chilled from the inside out.
How bad could this be?
A slender black cat with brownish-yellow eyes, a witch’s cat, walked out from Claire’s kitchen, meowed, and jumped onto the opposite end of the couch. Curled up on the top ledge.
A male voice, off-camera, said, “Why don’t you sit over there by that bag. Right there on the floor.”
A little girl in blue jeans and a red and white gingham shirt came into view, sat on the floor, crisscross.
