Zero Regrets
(October 7, 2017)
19: Witnesses
Stanford Pines called Dean Canova's number, and when she answered, he said, "I'm walking to the Administration Building now."
"I'll meet you at the main door."
Mabel went on to the Student Center, only a short walk from Administration. Tammi and Aleisha were to meet her there at a table. She waved as Ford turned to approach the glass front door of the Administration Building.
He saw her react as he drew near. She pushed the door open, he pulled it the rest of the way, and with an odd tilt of her head, she asked, "Dr. Pines?"
"Yes. Dr. Canova, I presume?"
She was a handsome woman of sixty or thereabouts, trim and with intelligent eyes behind her spectacles. "I am. I would have thought you were your brother if you hadn't called."
"Oh. Stanley and I are identical twins. Well. Almost identical." He held up a six-fingered hand.
"I've heard so much about you. Stanley is so proud to have a brother like you."
"To tell you the truth, I'm extremely proud to have a brother like Stanley. I understand you two dated back during his last year in high school."
She nodded. "It wasn't serious, not as these things go, but we had so much fun. And then I made the biggest mistake of my life and ran off with a musician. That didn't last long. Thank God, I later fell in love with a quiet academic, and he encouraged me to turn my life around. Well. My office is this way, Dr. Pines."
"I'm sorry I never met you in those days," Ford said. As he followed her. "And my friends call me Ford."
"And I'm Carla. Come in and let's be comfortable in the anteroom. I have some documents to show you."
They sat next to each other on a sofa—a cabriole-style piece, upholstered in wine-colored plush—and Ford spent some time looking through a few photocopies of old letters, thirteen of them, dating back to 1949.
Letters of condolence. Thirteen students who, over the years, had taken their own lives, including the four that Ford was most interested in. "How many of these lived in room 439 of Colby Residence Hall?" he asked.
"Only four."
"So that's why the significance was missed," Ford said. "The trees were lost in the forest."
Carla Canova took her glasses off and wearily rubbed her eyes. "Those four . . . were widely separated in time. The reasons for the violence not clear." She sighed and gazed at Ford, her expression sorrowful. "Ford, among college students, suicide is the second leading cause of death, just behind accidents. With thousands of students, we have to be constantly on the alert for signs of trouble." A fleeting smile touched her lips. "At least we're doing better. The rate has dropped significantly. In fact, there have been no student suicides since Ginevra Norton, nearly nine years ago. Two attempts, or suicide gestures."
"Then earlier—"
"Yes, they came more frequently between 1949 and 2000." Her eyes teared up. "Our counseling services have improved. Students now know to look for signs of disturbance in their friends, to alert Student Services—so we can intervene. Now, these four—all female students, all living in the same room—yes, we should have spotted the pattern, but four of them spread over nearly fifty years, and nine other unrelated suicides in the same time period, well. We should have seen it, but we didn't."
Ford asked about the other students. Carla was right—no pattern emerged. Of the other nine, six had been males, three females. Six of them had either left notes or had told their friends about their intentions, even though often the friends did not warn anyone else. In all the cases but two, the motivations appeared to be clear: A romantic break-up, academic failure, gender anxiety, undiagnosed instability. Two of the cases that had no explanation—possibly because they came early—were the first victim of Room 439, Clarissa Wynant and the next one, Catherine Dearwood.
"There's just no information in the files on Clarissa," Carla said. "We didn't even have a psychologist on staff in Health Services until 1975, so—no medical records. I found a copy of the obituary in her hometown newspaper. This is it, I'm afraid."
She handed Ford a print-out. The newsprint looked oddly antique, not black, but gray.
Clarissa Dean Wynant, 20, died suddenly of a fall last Thursday in Crescent City, where she was a junior in Western California State College. She is survived by her parents, Horace and Hilda Wynant, and her sister Myrtle, all of Rose Grove. Services will be held at 2 pm, Monday, May 5, at Rose Grove First Methodist Church, Reverend Walter Watkins conducting.
"Tragic," Ford said. "A young woman like that—her life reduced to seven lines of print in a small-town newspaper. And no detail."
"No one on our staff was around in 1952," Carla said. "Our institutional memory doesn't stretch that far back. The police report—there was one, and I've seen it—says that Clarissa somehow climbed onto the roof of the dormitory and leaped from there. She broke her neck."
"We're looking into her past," Stanford said. "And those of the others."
To his surprise, Carla reached for his hand. Holding it, she said, "Tell me the truth, Ford. The rumors of noises—sounds coming from the attic—is there something . . . uncanny up there causing these deaths?"
"I'm certain there is," Ford said. He patted her hand. "I could tell you stories. The world—he shook his head. "More things in heaven and earth, as Shakespeare said. The people I work with try to keep the mundane world safe. Part of that is protecting it from fear and panic. Part of it is fighting the forces that try to break through the walls of reality."
"I want to help," she said.
"We need your help," Ford told her.
And down in Cedars Center Assisted Living, Myrtle Bordein asked Hazard and Wendy, "Do you think we could go out for lunch? The cafeteria tries, but—it's a cafeteria. I can leave the grounds, you know. I'm not comitted here."
She wanted to go to a family restaurant half a mile from the assisted-living home. As she made her slow way in, leaning on her walker, a waitress in a pink uniform met them and gave them a beaming smile. "Mrs. Myrtie! I'm so glad to see you again."
"I'm glad to be here, Sara Jane. These are my young friends who gave me a ride. Is the small dining room available?"
"It is. This way."
The small dining room must have been intended for family parties. It had only two tables, four chairs each, and both were unoccupied. "I know you want to sit down," Sara Jane said, pulling out a chair for Myrtle. "Go ahead, and I'll have Irene bring in the place settings and menus and take your orders."
A few minutes later, Myrtle slowly began to cut her chicken cutlet up into tiny bites—"This way my dentures won't slip."
Hazard took the knife and fork and helped her. "There you go. My name's Amy, and this is Wendy. We know that something terrible happened to your sister. It's happening again."
"Amy. Wendy. What happens in that room is evil. You have to stop it," Myrtle said. She looked at them, her faded eyes sharp behind their spectacles.
Wendy had noticed that her skin, though wrinkled, was as clear and unblemished as a child's. Now her cheeks glowed with what seemed to be fury. "Tell us about your sister," she said. "We need to know all we can."
They ate as they talked. Myrtle Bordein's mind was clear, and the story she told, though it came out in bits and pieces, showed that her memory was sharp.
My big sister had just turned twenty. She'd been home for her birthday the first weekend in March, and she was fine then. We lived in Rose Grove, a little town not far from Redding. Country town. Farms all around us. Our father was an attorney working for PG&E out of the Redding office. For her twentieth birthday, Daddy gave Clair a car. That was rare back then. It was a new Nash Rambler, blue. Her favorite color. She gave me the first ride in it. She was so happy. That was the last time I saw her.
Then after she went back to college, everything changed. She was looking forward to her senior year at Western California. That was the name of Western Alliance before it consolidated and became a university. She was going to be a teacher. She would have been such a good teacher.
We had money, our family. Our house in Rose Grove had two telephones. That was rare back then. And a private line, not a party line. In the early part of April, maybe four or five weeks after her birthday, she called long-distance and asked to talk to Mama. I was sixteen then. I could tell from Clarissa's voice that she was scared. I called Mama and Daddy to the downstairs telephone. Then I slipped upstairs and sneaked into their bedroom and listened on their extension.
Clair told Daddy that she wanted to come home. Something was scaring her. It came out as she cried and tried to explain. She had a crazy friend. I can't remember her name now, but it was Louise or Lois. This friend was fascinated by stories of ghosts and hauntings. She and two of her friends and Clarissa had what she called a sitting. They attempted some kind of—I don't know. Ritual, I suppose. They were trying to call up a ghost or a spirit. Nothing happened that night.
Then a night or two later, the noises started. Something in the walls, Clair thought. The college looked into it but couldn't find anything. The sounds weren't loud. Scratching. And something like whispering. The sounds began to wake her up every night. Clarissa started having terrible dreams of fire and blood and pain. No one was there to help. She lived alone in that dormitory room. Back then the college had about three thousand students. Only about three hundred were women. The women were put into one dormitory, which was off-limits to all males. Each room was private. A different time.
Daddy was very down to earth. He told Clair to call our minister and admit what she'd done. He said her conscience was bothering her, that was all, and he told her that there were no such things as ghosts. When she insisted that she heard something, something real, he told her to be brave, she'd get over it. He thought that she was just anxious about school. But I could tell she was terrified. After they hung up, I begged him to let my sister come home.
Daddy was a lawyer. He would take a position and argue for it, and the more people questioned or contradicted him, the more stubborn he got. So . . . .
Well. You know what happened. On the first Thursday in May, I think it was actually May first, two policemen came to our house. I heard Mama scream. Somehow, before I could even get to the front door where she had collapsed and the two policemen stood over her, I knew what had happened. She couldn't even call Daddy at his office. I had to do it.
Sometime the night before, yes, now I remember, the last night in April, Clarissa. Let me catch my breath. I'm not crying. All my tears were used up years and years ago. But remembering takes my breath away.
I called Daddy at his office and told him to come home. There was an emergency. He wouldn't agree. He was doing business. I begged him, told him Mama and I needed him. He asked me what the emergency was. I told him we just got word that Clarissa was dead.
He was quiet. Then he said, "You're a liar."
I let him hear Mama. The two policeman had put her on the couch, and she thrashed like a dying fish, screaming and crying and praying and shrieking. One of the policemen spoke to Daddy. He came home then. First thing, he looked for someone to sue. His partners persuaded him that was hopeless, pointless. Clarissa had done it to herself. There was no question of—of foul play. We couldn't even bring her home right away. There had to be an autopsy because of—the way it happened.
Her body came back on Saturday. We buried her the next Monday. And after a few days, Daddy forbade me even to talk about her. He loved Clarissa, but—I think he felt so guilty because he hadn't let her come home.
Maybe a week later, the college sent Mama and Daddy a box with Clarissa's papers in it—notebooks, things like that. Without even opening the cardboard box, Daddy took it to the back yard and put it in the incinerator. He didn't want to be reminded. He piled newspapers under it and struck a match and turned around and marched back into the house. I was watching from around the corner, and I ran over and dragged the box from the incinerator. It was already on fire, but I put it out and found Clarissa's diary and a few other things.
She wasn't much of a writer. Most of the days were just notes about classes. "Remember essay is due on Monday." Now and then some quick mention of feelings or friends. "Diane is going out with Brett again. She'll never learn." Things like that. But I found the page where she wrote about the ritual. I remember the date. It was a Saturday midnight when they did it, April 12. "We sneaked into the attic and drew the magic circle and lit candles. Then we did the Templar rite the way it was described in L's book. Nothing happened. I couldn't stop giggling. L. got mad."
Then a few days later, "I think there's a rat or a raccoon in the attic."
And from then on, the writing gradually becomes incoherent, the handwriting getting worse. "Nobody believes me." And "I hear whispers." And "It wants me." And "No escape."
Hazard interrupted: "Do you still have the diary?"
Myrtle, who had finished her lunch, shook her head. "Daddy found it. He destroyed it. But by then I'd read it so many times I nearly had it by heart. I did save something else from the box that Daddy never knew about. Now I want you to have it."
She rummaged in her bag and produced a round silver medallion, hanging on a rawhide thong that had petrified with age. "I think they used this in the ritual. When I married, I married a good man, a Catholic. I converted. And I had our priest bless this. I hope that took some of the curse off."
Wendy said, "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Bordein."
"Thank you, child. Back then, our priest wasn't much help, really. The Church had a doctrine that suicide was a moral sin. Later, it softened this. People who aren't in their right mind, who are disturbed or driven mad by terror, surely God has mercy for them. Now it's rare to find a priest who will insist that all suicides are bound for hell. And like Daddy, our priest kept telling me that ghosts are an illusion. But I never took that to heart. For all these years I've wanted someone to take this seriously. To discover what attacked my sister. What murdered her."
Hazard said, "You've found someone now. My Agency has dealt with this kind of thing before. We know it's real, Mrs. Bordein."
Myrtle nodded and looked directly into Hazard's eyes. "Thank you, Amy. You and your friends who know about things like this—you intend to destroy this evil thing that took my sister's mind and drove her to end her life, aren't you?"
"Gonna do our best," Wendy said.
Myrtle's hard gaze swiveled to meet Wendy's. "Then both of you, make me this promise. I want one of you to call me and tell me when it's finished. When this thing is exterminated."
"I swear," Wendy said.
"I do, too," Hazard added.
"Thank you." Myrtle sighed. "I've outlived my sister and my husband and my son. I'm at the end. But I intend to hang on until I hear that the evil is destroyed. Then I can go."
"I think you may still have more to do on Earth," Hazard said kindly.
"No, I have business elsewhere. I want to meet my sister face to face. I want to tell her—'Clair,' I'll say, 'you have friends you never even met. And they put an end to the devilish spirit that drove you to what you did.'"
There didn't seem to be anything to add. Wendy looked at the medallion. It struck her as old, ancient, even. The bas-relief being it pictured was a seated figure with an evil-looking goat's head, the bare breasts of a woman, crossed crooked goat's legs, male genitals. The left arm was stretched to the side, hand open, palm up. The right arm was crooked at the elbow, the hand raised, first and second fingers together. The reverse of the medal bore the image of a cross, its vertical bar longer than the horizontal one. All four ends of the bars were forked, like a fish tail.
"Don't look at that thing too close, child," Myrtle warned. "It's been blessed, but that thing—that damned thing is pure evil."
