A DAUGHTER'S LOVE

CHAPTER SIX - TWIN PEAKS FOR BETTER OR WORSE

If Becky's Saturday had been a day to more or less do as she pleased, then her Sunday was the diametric opposite of it. To start off with, she had an appointment with Dr. Jacoby at noon, which she had to follow up by taking a trip over to the police station. With Cooper having called ahead to let them know that he'd be returning that day, she'd been told by the front desk operator of the Great Northern that he was looking to talk to her, and she had a gut feeling that it would probably take up a great part of the rest of her day.

First of all, on her agenda though, was consuming a hearty and strength-building breakfast in the hotel restaurant, while she pondered some more over the things that "The Older Laura" had told her in her latest prophetic dream. To her positive surprise, she was even offered a ride down to Dr. Jacoby's by Jerry Horne, whom apparently was a patient of his too. Not that it surprised her in any way that the more eccentric of the Horne brothers saw a psychologist (that part made perfect sense to her, if anything did!) as much as it surprised her that Jerry didn't have a personal driver, whom he had on call 24/7. In any case, what she found out was that he had a vintage sports-car that he'd just recently bought and for this reason alone, had decided to take it out for a spin.

"What do you think of my new set of wheels?" Jerry asked her like it actually mattered to him what she thought of it, as they passed through a version of Twin Peaks that she was still getting used to calling her temporary home.

"I can't imagine that it came cheap" she jokingly answered and got a small chuckle out of him.

"You know what, Becky? If I ever have a daughter, I'd want her to be a wise-cracking smart-ass just like you!" he exclaimed, and she couldn't help herself from chuckling along with him. How it's possible that two brothers could be as vastly different from one another as the Horne brothers was something that went beyond her comprehension, although she could also tell herself that they probably had more in common than meets the eye.

"You don't have any kids of your own?" she asked him, just to make small talk.

"Kids come with responsibilities. I like that if I feel like it, I can jump on a plane to France or Mexico or Hong Kong for a day or two and get thousands of miles away from everything here. Have you ever been to Iceland?" Jerry asked her, somewhat out of left field if she had to be honest.

"Not that I can recall. I have amnesia, remember?" she asked him back and could see him facepalm at his own mistake, which in turn almost made them crash right into an oncoming car.

"My apologies. You should see it at least one time before you die, though. It's absolutely gorgeous up there and those hot springs! You haven't truly lived until you've been soaking in one for a couple of hours! Did you know that they're naturally heated by underground volcanoes? Knowledge like that fascinates me to no end!" he said and again, she couldn't help smiling at little to herself at this lovable and life-loving weirdo and how he saw the world like few other people did.

"I'll have to put it on my bucket list" she answered him just to be polite. "Is there anywhere else that I should put on my travel plan?"

"For the best eating experiences, you have to go directly to the source. Think of it this way: If you had to get some sort of surgery, would you want the master of performing that surgery to perform it on you or one of their apprentices, who's nearly as good but will never reach the same level of perfection?"

"The master, any time" she agreed with him.

"The same goes for top-class chefs. Sure, a few of the better ones come over here to work, but most of the best French chefs stay in France, because why would they want to live anywhere else than the culinary capital of the world? Don't get me wrong, I love it here and it'll always be the only place where I'll feel at home, but I can say for a fact that it would have driven me nuts on a daily basis, if I'd had to spend my entire life living here. How some of these poor saps go about it day to day with no end in sight will always and forever be a Bonafide mystery to me!" he mused to himself while at the same time showing the tiniest bit of appreciation for those, who'd made his family stinking rich to put it mildly.

After an all kinds of pleasant ride with Jerry, he'd dropped her off right in front of Dr. Jacoby's office and as she'd expected, the good doctor was excited to see an out of the ordinary case for him like herself. Then again, most of his patients were probably bored housewives, who just wanted someone to pay attention to them, so it wasn't any wonder to her that getting to treat someone like herself made for a nice change of pace for him.

"I want to try something on you. Close your eyes" he asked of her, and she did as she was told.

"How is this supposed to help me?" she asked him back.

"I want to see if I can't trigger a memory of your past by spelling out a situation to you. Imagine that you're a child, who's no more than five years old and you're frolicking in a meadow. It's summer and you're taking in the scents of nature while you don't have a care in the world. Who would you imagine is there with you?"

"My parents, I suppose. I can't picture their faces, though" she lied, although she also had to admit that this was quite a relaxing exercise all in all.

"Are their faces blurry to you?" Dr. Jacoby asked her.

"Yes".

"Describe everything that you can make out on how they look".

"I can kind of make out that my dad has grey hair" she answered, just to give him something.

"Are we talking dark grey or almost completely white?"

"Almost completely white. He's taller than my mom, too" she added, again to give off the impression that his healing technique was working to some small degree.

"What's her hair color?"

"A darkish blonde, I'm guessing. It's hard to make out" she told the good doctor, who moments later asked her to open her eyes again.

"Becky, even if it might not seem that way, you just took your first major step towards remembering them wholly. Is there anything else that has come back to you since our last session?"

"I was talking with this girl yesterday; who's a late bloomer and I was trying to convince her that it's okay. I guess that in doing so, I remembered that I was one, too" she told Dr. Jacoby, who smiled widely back at her like he was genuinely glad on her behalf.

"That's great!" the aging eccentric exclaimed in such a way that it almost made her laugh out loud. "In my professional estimation, it's critical for your recovery that you have friends and confidants that you can share your innermost feelings with. After all, us humans are social creatures and without your family or old friends in your life, you'll need to find some trustworthy people to act as their replacements for the time being".

After this, they tried the same technique a handful more times, with her shrink giving Becky different scenarios to play out in her head and her giving him small bits and pieces here and there to sink his teeth into. Okay, so it wasn't as if she wanted to lie to him or everyone else that she'd met in this time period, yet if there was one (positive or negative, depending on your point of view) thing that being a multi-year, hardcore drug addict with a double life to match it had taught her, it was how to sell a lie so much to outsiders that even she came close to winding up believing in it.

After she'd settled her affairs for the day with Dr. Jacoby, she'd called the sheriff's station from his phone to ask for a ride over there and luckily for her, it had been Andy who'd been sent to fetch her. She'd always liked Andy, ever since she was a little kid and something in the awkward way that he carried himself had always made it feel to her too, like she was in the company of a guy, who had a heart of the purest gold and would never hurt a fly. Of course, in her former time period, he'd become married to Lucy, the infinitely as lovable as she is quirky secretary down at the station, and if Becky had ever met two people, who were born to be together and completed one another, then it was surely the two of them. The son that they would end up having was a nice guy in the vein of his parents too from what she could tell, although she also had to admit to never getting to know him nearly as closely as she did his parents, in spite of the two of them being relatively near to each other in age.

In another small piece of luck, Becky had arrived at the station only shortly before agent Cooper had, following his short trip down to Seattle to take care of some bureau business. After discussing a bit about what was good on TV with Lucy (who was clearly obsessed with a soap opera called "As the World Turns" and knew everything that there was to know about it!), she'd been called into the investigation room for a one on three talk with him, Hawk and sheriff Truman. Or to be more exact, to be there for a presentation by Cooper, while he explained his theories to them.

"Harry, Becky, Hawk, thank you for being here. I promise that I won't take up more of your time than I have to" Cooper began his presentation before writing the words "Teresa Banks", followed by a large question mark on the room's blackboard using a piece of writing chalk.

"Who's Teresa Banks?" Hawk logically asked Cooper, who responded with a Colgate smile, if she'd ever seen one.

"That's a great question, Hawk, but the correct question would be "Who was Teresa Banks?". From what little that we've managed to track down about her, she was a troubled girl from Tacoma, who lost her parents in a car accident at age twelve whereafter she became a ward of the state and grew up over the following years in a group home, until she ran away from her state facility when she was fifteen. Yes, Harry" Cooper asked sheriff Truman, who'd raised his hand.

"How does this relate to Becky here, Coop?" Truman asked Cooper, who seemed unfazed at this little interruption.

"All of it will soon be revealed, if you'll allow me to finish what I was saying. Becky, if any of this becomes too uncomfortable for you to hear about, don't be ashamed to speak up. The absolute last thing that I'd ever want to do is to set you back on your long road to recovery, if it can be helped" he caringly told Becky, addressing her while looking her directly in the eyes. "Usually, I would never share sensitive information like this with a civilian, but in your particular case and with you being the closest thing that we have to a lead, it's my firm belief that it's the only wise choice of action in this situation. It goes without saying however, that none of what you hear in here can be shared again with anyone, who isn't inside of this room right now, understood?".

"I understand" she assured agent Cooper.

"Why am I here?" Hawk asked Cooper in his usual stoic manner.

"Hawk, I don't mean to sound like a bigot, but it's no secret that your people have always been far better in touch with nature than us white folks are. I hope that doesn't offend you. I also understand that you've lived here for nearly your entire life, which in my book makes you an expert on the forests that surround us up here" Cooper replied.

"It's never bigoted to speak the truth. Go on" Hawk calmly told the FBI agent in reply, before Cooper enthusiastically continued on with his presentation.

"After she'd run away from the state facility, what happened over the next two years of Teresa's life are somewhat of a mystery, but all signs point to her having been a drifter, living a short while here, then a short while there, before she found work at a place called Hap's diner in Deer Meadow, not far from here. We also have reason to believe that she worked as a prostitute on the side, probably in the hopes that it would eventually lead her to a better and more stable life. Sadly, all of those hopes were crushed when someone took her life from her, by savagely beating her to death with a blunt object in the trailer that she called her home. Now, how does this tie into you, Becky, is probably what you're all asking yourselves. This is where I come back to Chester Desmond, Phillip Jeffries and my dream of the giant, who spoke in short, concise sentences. It is my belief that he was warning me that the same thing that happened to Teresa will happen to another girl, someone here in Twin Peaks, if we don't stop it from happening before then" Cooper finally ended his explanation with, before opening the floor for any additional questions.

"In other words, you think that we have a would-be serial killer on the loose up here, did I get that right?" Truman asked Cooper, after a handful of seconds of everyone taking in the information that they'd just been fed.

"That's if he or she isn't already a full-fledged serial killer. I sincerely hope that my theory isn't correct, but if it is, then agent Desmond got too close to the truth, became their second victim and agent Jeffries could possibly be the third. Harry, I know that you can't know off the top of your head, but how many unsolved murders on teenage girls over the past thirty years do you currently have in this jurisdiction?" Cooper asked Truman, who clearly wasn't prepared to be put on the spot like this.

"Somewhere between five and ten. It could be more or fewer, but we're somewhere in that ballpark" Truman replied in a matter-of-fact way.

"I'll need to see every file that you have on each of those murders. Should my theory be correct, then we won't have much time until there's a good chance that the next victim lands on your table. This brings me to you, Becky. We need you to be our eyes and ears at the high school. As a newcomer there, you're in a unique position to be a fly on the wall and if you find out anything that could help us, I hope that you won't hesitate to come to either me or Harry with it, as soon as you can. Can you do that for us?" Cooper asked Becky, who suddenly found herself being uncomfortably stared at by everyone in there.

"What should I be on the lookout for?" she asked Cooper back, trying to sound as brave as she could and once again, got to see that wide Colgate smile of his.

After the meeting at the sheriff's station, Becky got a ride back to the Great Northern from Lucy, whom she chit-chatted with about this, that and everything on the way there. With no plans for her evening, she went up to Audrey's room and ended up enjoying the pleasure of her new gal-pal's company for the rest of the day. As hard as it was for herself to admit it, she was starting to royally enjoy being just plain old Becky, a senior in high school, who couldn't remember much of anything from her past, much more than she'd liked being Rebecca Briggs, a mid-twenties former drug addict, who through her past actions had already closed many doors for herself and every day had to live with the knowledge of it. "Becky" didn't have a dark and best forgotten past to hold her back and what's more, as her she could be the girl that she should have been and wanted to be back in school, instead of a friendless dopehead, who'd been high as a kite nearly all of the time and was otherwise an outcast among all of the other students there.

Perhaps, this was why she'd immediately seen so much of her own past self in the young heiress to a part of the Horne family fortune, that it literally pained her to her very bones to think of how lonely the poor girl must have felt, without the effects of mind-altering drugs to take her mind off of her misery. In some ways, the adorable and innocent young Audrey almost felt like a little sister to her already, albeit one that believed that they were roughly the same ages. If Becky could do anything to make Audrey's life just a little bit better, then it went without saying that she would, and even a blind man could see that a pair of tortured souls like her and James would be a perfect match for one another. Would it suck for Donna, who clearly had feelings for him too? Probably, but Donna had a perfect family and so much else going for her that compared to Audrey, she didn't need someone like James to be there for her as much as the other girl did. As for Laura, Becky still didn't know how she felt about James yet and if he was just a boy-toy for her to fool around with or she really loved him, but her sixth sense was telling her that it was the former. In any case, what she was doing by cheating on Bobby wasn't acceptable from an ethical standpoint, no matter what your excuses for it are.

How, on the other hand, this paired up with "The Older Laura's" warning to her that she could end up erasing her own existence, was still a question that she was constantly asking herself. After all, hadn't her and Cooper assured her that it wouldn't happen, a handful of days before when this had just begun? If one thing was for sure though, it was that if it was ever going to happen for this period's version of her parents, then Leo had to be out of the way first and preferably locked up in some maximum-security prison for the remainder of his life. Even if she'd instantly hated his guts and how he'd horribly mistreated the teenage version of her mother, she still had never wished anyone dead and wasn't prepared to start now, no matter how few redeeming qualities that they seemingly possessed.

END OF CHAPTER SIX